Showbusiness - The Diary of a Rock 'n' Roll Nobody

by Mark Radcliffe

  I moved to a hall of residence called Woolton, which had an all-male population in order that further education should not undermine the excellent grounding in being awkward in the company of women that I’d been given at grammar school. Arriving there on a blustery autumn afternoon, the accommodation did not look promising. Four rooming blocks surrounded a central building consisting of several dual-purpose facilities. There was a bar that doubled as a television lounge, a dining-hall that doubled as a throbbing discothe`que on Saturday nights, and a table-tennis room that doubled as an opium den. All the buildings in the complex were constructed from bricks that resembled Keith Richard’s skin in that they had a charmless pasty hue and looked as though they could give way at any moment. The roofs were fashioned from some unpleasant-looking metallic substance in a particularly offensive shade of green, which over time had become peppered with patches of comparatively attractive rust where water had run down from the ridge tiles. It looked like people had been standing up there urinating, which, it later transpired, was an eminently feasible explanation.

  On arrival, I was instructed to go to the porter’s lodge, which proved to be a facility doubling as a cupboard where mops and buckets were kept, but which, on closer examination, also contained a septuagenarian liver-spot collector who’d obviously been exhumed to help with the new influx. Scraping the rheum from his bloodshot eyes, he checked my name on the list before a creaking sound heralded his rising from the chair. Whether this creaking emanated from the antiquated chair or its occupant’s ancient bones was difficult to tell. He began to move towards the opposite wall at a speed roughly equivalent to a slow-motion replay at a televised crown-green bowling tournament, before summoning what meagre strength was left in his wasted muscles to lift my allotted key from its hook. He also, much to my astonishment, issued me with a black gown of the type worn only by school masters in posh public schools or Carry On films. He informed me, in the course of a sentence punctuated by a spectacular variety of bronchial expostulations, that I would be required to wear this archaic garment each evening at dinner. By which he meant tea. Evidently the linguistic quirks of southern England applied to all universities, even those in the north. In the course of time we came to appreciate those gowns, which proved, like everything else at Woolton, to have a dual purpose. Not only did they protect your clothes from dollops of mashed potato catapulted from other tables during tea, by which, southern readers, I mean dinner, but they could also be worn to Damned concerts in vampiric homage to lead singer Dave Vanian.

  My allocated cell was on the ground floor of a low-security wing at the end of a long corridor, the floor of which was elegantly upholstered in battleship-grey lino embellished with occasional cigarette burns. The room itself contained a single bed that appeared to be struggling to bear the weight of the candlewick bedspread, a desk and chair rescued from a skip outside a refurbished hostel for the homeless, a bookcase constructed from prime balsa, a lamp that had only recently been converted from running on gas and a bemused schoolboy from Bolton feeling distinctly lonely.

  Looking back on it, I think these feelings of loneliness stemmed mainly from the fact that there was no one else there. Trudging up and down the corridor to make unwanted cups of tea in the limescale-riddled kettle in the communal galley kitchen, it was a good two hours before I saw another living soul. And then it was a Christian. He was a third-year called Don Ludlow who conned his way into my room by pretending to be an average friendly chap before producing some pamphlets entitled ‘Jesus Loves You’ and ‘Mother Mary Cares for You’ and ‘John the Baptist Thinks You’re a Top Bloke’. He then invited me to a social get-together that evening at the chaplaincy, where there would be nibbles and fortifying beverages. At this point I had no idea what unexplored avenues of bad behaviour lay before me, but I was pretty certain the shining path of misdemeanours was not going to open unto me at the Christian Fellowship cheese and wine shindig.

  It was while I was escorting this religious zealot from the premises that I ran into another human being, whom I seized upon with what must have seemed unnatural relish.

  ‘Hi, Mark Radcliffe from Bolton. English, American studies, classical civilisation,’ I blurted with outstretched sweaty palm.

  ‘Erm, yes, hmm, Nigel Douglas from Doncaster. Geography,’ responded my agitated victim. It was as if we were auditioning for University Challenge, but I’ve never been so grateful for conversation in my whole life. Throughout the remainder of the afternoon we sat in my room watching other wide-eyed innocents arrive with parents in car coats carrying scatter cushions, cheese plants and rolled-up posters of that girl in tennis gear scratching her bottom. The only exception was the rotund American Joe Devaney, who moved into the room next to mine with a stereo system that the Grateful Dead would gladly have performed open-air concerts through, and pennants brandishing the names of obscure teams like the Dallas Cowboys, the Miami Dolphins, the Cincinatti Wildebeests and the Tallahassee Arsewipes.

  Nigel Douglas passed the time by browsing through my records and seemed suitably impressed with my eclectic and often deliberately obscure selection. He enthused particularly over the Stackridge section, while revealing that his personal preference was for Greenslade. It was probably at this point that the alarm bells started ringing, but for now he was the only friend I had and his musical proclivities would just have to be tolerated. While Nigel Douglas was admiring my gatefold Edgar Broughton Band sleeves, I occupied myself with admiring Nigel Douglas’s bushy beard. At the age of eighteen, being able to grow a beard was just about the most virile thing a spotty undergraduate could do. Not only did it conceal whole ranges of pustulant peaks, but it had to be a sure-fire winner with female freshers, who could easily be convinced that you were a hirsute second year who’d really seen a thing or two. I myself had only managed a few wisps of gibbon’s pube on my chin by this stage, and it would be well into the third year with finals fast approaching before I could attempt a respectable Zapata moustache. Nige and I never became good mates, but for that first afternoon he consoled himself in my records while I curled up for comfort in his Captain Birdseye beard.

  As we went in for dinner (tea) that night, there was one room still unoccupied on our corridor. Returning two hours later and scraping the impacted peas from my gown, I noticed the lights were on in the last remaining isolation unit and decided to walk in and introduce myself in the manner that had proved so successful with Nige ‘ZZ Top’ Douglas. I knocked on the chipboard door and walked in proffering a ketchup-stained paw.

  ‘Hi, Mark Radcliffe from Bolton. English, American studies, classical civilisation.’

  From behind the wardrobe door came the sound of an expertly delivered fart followed by a deeply resonant belch, after which a mop of blond hair appeared and the face under it said, ‘Phil Walmsley from Poulton. Building science and stuff. Fancy a tab?’

  Well, this was more like it. A fellow Lancastrian who broke wind as a greeting and offered you cigarettes. Sliding a filter from the outstretched packet of ten Bensons, I quickly took in the contents of the room, not least the cloud of noxious gas that had recently escaped from my new acquaintance’s anus. On the wall was a picture of the Rolling Stones, on the floor was a Dansette record player, in the open wardrobe was a particularly nasty selection of paisley Y-fronts and leaning against the bed, oh joy of joys, was an electric guitar.

  ‘You’re a guitarist, then?’

  ‘Yeah, I can play a bit.’

  ‘And you like the Stones, eh?’

  ‘Best rock’n’roll band ever, mate.’

  ‘And you still play their records on the old-fashioned gramophone?’

  ‘They sound more authentic that way.’

  ‘And you’ve got really poor taste in underpants, I see.’

  Well, we were getting on, if not like a house on fire then certainly like a small dormer bungalow that was smouldering a bit. It turned out that Phil had been in a group, too, the much-vaunted cabaret combo Warlock, who’d gigged all
along the Fylde coast. Like my fellow Zeroids who’d been dubious about my commitment, so Phil’s erstwhile colleagues had cast him out of the coven after he was unable to make a prestigious booking at the Flagship Showbar.

  Outwardly Phil and I were quite different. Despite my registration at the practice of the good Dr Feelgood, I was still something of a trainee hippy in appearance. I wore suede desert boots, brushed-denim flares and cheesecloth shirts. I was also desperately trying to grow my hair, although the top layer seemed to mutate considerably faster that the rest, lending my barnet a more than passing resemblance to a large mushroom. It was as if a hard-up Third World republic had undertaken secret nuclear testing on my head. If Inspiral Carpets had been in existence I’d have been in good company, but at that time I just looked like a dork. Phil, on the other hand, was a bit of a northern soul boy. His blond hair appeared to have been parted down the middle with a hatchet, and his tight cap-sleeved T-shirt and multi-belted Oxford bags gave way to highly polished shoes, the exceptional width of which would have ensured a safe passage across the polar ice-cap. He also had a car, which in the coming months he would park near the main gates and tinker with incessantly. He knew absolutely nothing about basic auto maintenance, but this wasn’t the object of the exercise. Phil reckoned that if he hung about the gates with the bonnet open he’d catch the eye of any female students walking past. If everything went according to plan, these impoverished girls armed only with bus passes would be so impressed that he owned a car that they would offer him small sexual favours in return for a lift to the student’s union. Like an angler waiting patiently for a bite, he spent many hours in his large square driving glasses, getting his hair full of sump oil, performing unnecessary adjustments with a socket spanner. That attractive, intelligent, cultured young women should pay any attention to a red-faced, bog-brush-haired grease monkey in National Health spectacles rummaging under the engine of an Austin 1100 always seemed like a bit of a long shot to me, but hell, it was worth a shot.

  Phil and I started to spend a lot of time together, sharing our deep love of rock’n’roll, playing each other records that expressed something deeply personal to us in between downing pints in one and orchestrating synchronised guffs. You know, just normal matey stuff. What really began to absorb us, though, were the reports in the music press about a new breed of snotty young bands who were being swept to power on a manifesto of spitting, making a very loud noise and introducing compulsory euthanasia for Rod Stewart. We’d been absolutely entranced by a group we’d heard John Peel play on the radio called the Ramones, four teenage lobotomies from New York who played up to seventeen songs in a half-hour set. We started to hear about the Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Adverts in London, and Buzzcocks, Slaughter and the Dogs and the Fall in Manchester. What we needed was to experience some of this music first-hand, but all we seemed to get at the student’s union was Renaissance, Dire Straits or Roy Harper.

  Eventually, word got round that a bona fide punk band from down south was coming to play at a well-known public lavatory known as the Squat, located a stone’s throw from the union, most of the stones having been thrown through the windows. The venue got its name after a group of students occupied it to save it from demolition, although once inside you’d have come to the conclusion that resistance had ultimately proved futile and the wrecking gangs had moved in. Queuing up to pay our entrance fee of thirty pence, we read for the first time, on a handwritten poster, that the band were called the Stranglers. We later found out that they’d originally been the Guildford Stranglers, formed, as they were, in Chiddington.

  In contrast to the speed of service I’d been used to at BIT, the bar staff at the Squat were the very model of efficiency. They moved in a blur to create a production line of warm, watery pints of bitter in plastic glasses driven either by an extraordinary desire to serve or large amounts of amphetamine sulphate, and quite conceivably both. Having purchased two pints each, personal expenditure on the evening rapidly approaching a pound, we drank one, spilt the other and returned to the bar to buy four more before settling down in front of the stage to await the arrival of the band. We could hardly contain our excitement, for here at last in the flesh we were about to see four stick-thin snotty young oiks play ferocious music at a hundred miles an hour while flinging themselves around the stage with little or no regard for their own safety.

  Sadly, we got the Stranglers. In the course of my top showbusiness career I’ve since met Jet Black, the drummer, and he is enormously personable as well as personally enormous. I bear him no malice at all, a sentiment I hope he’ll reciprocate as he’s built like a brick shithouse. However, that night in the Squat I wanted, I needed, to see a scrawny little psycho leathering the kit, not a bulbous, grumpy-looking middle-aged bloke with a grey beard. For a minute I thought it was Dave Lee Travis up there. The organist Dave Greenfield looked even worse. Never mind spring chickens, this geezer was no autumn rooster. Perched behind a battered Hammond with his Fu Manchu beard, flaccid plait and miserable countenance, he looked like a washed-up luvvie who’d just failed an audition for Aladdin. The two blokes up front at least had the decency to be thin, but they didn’t strike us as having any great relevance to the Zeitgeist, which was a pretty telling observation as we had no idea what the Zeitgeist was, unless it was a Kraut rock band we’d yet to come across. The singer Hugh Cornwell looked like an undertaker who had a bit of a meths habit, while bass player Jean-Jacques Burnel, the youngest of the bunch by a decade or two, had a rip across the chest of an otherwise pristine black T-shirt and the sort of pudding-basin haircut barbers give small boys while their fathers are engrossed in Amateur Photographer’s ‘How to Shoot Better Bare Breasts’ section. The sense of disappointment was palpable; we’d seen bands on The Old Grey Whistle Test who looked younger than this. The music, too, seemed strangely sluggish, although in fairness it was difficult to tell amid the sound of plastic glasses raining on to the stage. At one point Jean-Jacques Burnel picked up one of the offending receptacles and held it aloft while proclaiming ‘Yeah – plastic glasses, thrown by plastic people in a plastic world.’ If we’d have been to the launderette to do our washing, we’d have had clean socks. If we’d had clean socks, we’d no doubt have gone out wearing some that night. Had we been wearing socks, we’d have laughed them off.

  It’s not often you can say you’ve paid thirty pence for a gig and considered yourself soundly robbed, but that was how we felt. It might not sound a lot now, but you have to remember that in those frugal student days thirty pence would buy you a bag of chips, a raffia shoulder purse and a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was a set text for English scholars and not a concept album by Gentle Giant.

  ‘Well, that was a waste of time, eh, Sparky,’ said Phil, who’d bestowed upon me his personal pet name, ‘and we’ve missed Opportunity Knocks on the telly.’

  ‘Dead right, Wammo,’ I responded, carefully inserting his hand-crafted nickname, ‘we’ll never hear anything from them again.’

  Towards the end of that year, a record called ‘Grip’ began to turn up with some regularity on the radio. It had aggression, it had a great tune and it had a keyboardist who appeared to be attempting to play every single note on the piano during the course of the song. We thought it was a corker and were absolutely astounded to hear that it was by the very same Stranglers. In a way, they were an inspiration in that we thought, ‘Well, if they can do it, anyone can.’ In a sense, that crystallised the punk ethic. It didn’t matter how old you were, what you looked like or how well you could play. If you had something to say, you got up and said it. A bit like a Quaker meeting. At the time of writing, fully twenty years on, the Stranglers are still a going concern, albeit one that has ceased to trouble the compilers of the hit parade. You’d also have to say that they look all right, but then it’s much easier to age gracefully in pop if you looked ancient to begin with.

  The Stranglers de´baˆcle served only to steel our resolve. We had to see a top-flight pu
nk band in action to understand what it was all about, and the cavalry arrived when Johnny Thunders came to town. Johnny Thunders was lead guitarist with the New York Dolls, a glam Stones managed by Malcolm McLaren who released two electrifying albums in the early seventies. Of these, the first is particularly worth buying, not least for the photo on the back in which Johnny appears to have a cucumber and two pomegranates down the front of his Spandex trousers. Following the demise of the Dolls, Thunders had formed the Heartbreakers with his old drummer Jerry Nolan and Richard Hell, formerly of Television. By the time they reached England to play the Sex Pistols’ aborted Anarchy tour of 1976, Hell had left and been replaced on bass by Billy Rath with another guitarist, Walter Lure, completing the line-up. They were booked to play in Liverpool at a club called Eric’s, which would later become immortalised as the birthplace of Echo and the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes and Wah! Heat, and we decided to go over and meet up with some mates of Wammo’s who were travelling down from Blackpool.

  Come the big night, we put on our least-flared jeans, our grubbiest T-shirts, and, using a mixture of sugar and water, coaxed our hair into a series of gravity-defying spikes which looked as though they might well have been the result of prolongued electric-shock therapy. Having spent several hours making it look like we’d just fallen out of bed, we climbed into the Austin 1100 and set off for Liverpool. As we travelled along Wilbraham Road in that little racing-green beauty, I listened to Wammo rolling on and on about what a great piece of babe bait his car was and, being a good mate, I happily concurred that the rapidly failing light was the only reason young women weren’t flinging themselves across the windscreen as we passed through Stretford.

  ‘Drive through here in broad daylight, Wammo, and you’ll be beating ’em off with a stick.’

  Eric’s was a club with some heritage. Visionary impresario and very tall bonkers person Roger Eagle had been putting bands on there since the legendary Cavern, located directly opposite down a dimly lit back alley, had closed down. In those days Liverpool seemed the perfect setting for new musical revolution, because no self-respecting punk band would be photographed anywhere except amid a pile of rubble on a demolition site. Obligingly, Liverpool provided a pile of rubble on every street corner. Even the site of the world-famous Cavern resembled a bomb crater, and I remember thinking that this was a particularly British phenomenon. In the States the old Cavern would have been the centre-piece of a thirty-acre theme park, but being England, bus-loads of Japanese tourists were travelling halfway across the world to photograph some heaps of bricks through a fence of chicken wire. It was all very touching somehow, although don’t travel down to see the rubble now because it’s all been tarted up in a big way.