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

by Mark Radcliffe

  Inside Eric’s you could barely move, but we managed to locate Wammo’s mates, whose hairstyles also owed a debt to Tate & Lyle. One of them, Ken, had such a bad complexion that it looked like he had scales, and with his hair spiked up as well I initially suspected a bizarre genetic experiment which had involved his head being replaced with a pineapple.

  When the Heartbreakers hit the stage, we could only see the heads and shoulders of Johnny Thunders and Walter Lure as they bombarded backwards and forwards across the tiny stage in a series of perfectly executed jerks. If we thought our hairstyles were remotely cool, we were soon disarmed of this opinion when we saw the great god Thunders, who appeared to have a well-groomed porcupine sitting on his head. From where we were standing we couldn’t see the other two members of the band, because Nolan the drummer was sitting down and Rath the bass player was a right short-arse.

  As they exploded into ‘Chinese Rocks’, quickly followed by ‘Born to Lose’, it became quite clear that this was what we’d been waiting for. To be fair to the Stranglers, the Heartbreakers were knocking on a bit as well, but their energy belied their advancing years. They’d also managed to stay thin, although in the case of their leader, I imagine the heroin helped. Ultimately, Johnny Thunders became another rock’n’roll casualty when he died in ‘drug-related circumstances’ in New Orleans in 1991. I’m not going to mythologise him, but when we next saw him playing at Rafters in Manchester he strode out on to the stage with his black leathers, cool haircut and low-slung guitar and, pausing by his amplifier only to put down the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and turn every knob up to ten, he was, to us, the personification of all things rock’n’roll.

  At the risk of gratuitous name-dropping, I’d like to say here that I was proud to call him a friend. Well, not a friend exactly, more a kindred spirit who I’d chat with from time to time. Well, all right then, once. It was in the toilets at Rafters when I suddenly found myself at the next urinal to the man himself, and we fell into easy conversation, as soul brothers often do. The boy looked at Johnny and said, ‘What time are you on, then, Johnny?’

  Johnny looked straight ahead and said, ‘About eleven, I guess.’

  Well, it wasn’t much in the way of words, but somehow we developed an unspoken bond there which I’m sure he’d be happy to confirm if he wasn’t, unfortunately, dead.

  Back at Woolton Hall, Wammo and I began to lay plans to jump on the punk bandwagon. Firstly, we were going to have to undergo a radical change of image. Flared trousers just weren’t acceptable any more, as Mark Sayers found to his cost when I took him to see the Jam at another legendary northern punk mecca, the Electric Circus. Untutored in the new dress code, Stocky turned up in a pristine white hooded sweatshirt, jeans containing enough material to propel two small sailing dinghies and the sort of unforgivable gleaming white clogs favoured only by dental receptionists and Brian May out of Queen. With the looks he got that night, I thought he was going to get battered before the band even appeared. As it was, he managed to avoid physical assault until the journey home on the night bus when I smacked him one. White clogs indeed.

  The search for drain-pipe jeans proved initially fruitless as we trawled round every chain store in Manchester looking at endless pairs of denims which turned into wigwams below the knee. It was only while trudging the back streets to catch the bus home that we stumbled on a grubby, practically subterranean emporium known as Famous Army & Navy Stores. I can only assume that the original proprietors had been Terry and Doris Famous, because there seemed to be no other logical explanation for the name. In a basket outside they had pairs of denims that had obviously been in stock since the First World War and which they’d now stuck on the pavement in the hope of attracting those whose jobs required sturdy rather than stylish clothing. People like garage mechanics, road labourers and sociology lecturers at colleges of further education. Rummaging under the sign that tantalisingly, in its direct simplicity, stated ‘Men’s Jeans, £2’, we hit gold. The youngish assistant, presumably Terry and Doris’s eldest, Darren Famous, seemed amazed and delighted to have shifted what he’d obviously considered to be unshiftable stock. If he’d waited another six weeks, when the high-street shops filled up with straight-legs, he’d have sold them for £20 a pair. Tough luck, buster.

  The shirts proved easy (Oxfam), as did the plastic toe-capped plimsolls (Woolworths). What proved less easy was facing the marauding hordes of potato-flinging, flare-wearing dingbats at dinner (tea). Wrapping our gowns tightly around us, we strode confidently into the dining-hall and walked a full yard and a half before the laughter started. You probably think I’m making this up, but you will just have to take my word for it when I tell you that wearing drain-pipe jeans that night caused as much of a rumpus as if we had been stark naked.

  ‘Oi! Dickheads! Fancy dress ball’s not till March.’

  ‘Hey, nice strides – where’d you get them? Woolworths?’

  This brought forth a prompt denial. If the accusation had been directed at the footwear, they’d have got us. Joe Devaney, being American, hurled in a series of insults that he seemed to find wholly satisfying but which no one else understood at all: ‘Yo, you pinko blueberry-muffin munchers, you couldn’t do a sunny-side up for the Minnesota Moose Maulers,’ or something equally mystifying along similar lines.

  Still, no one said being a leader of fashion was easy. People used to laugh at John Galliano. In fact, they still do, but you get the drift. To complete the transformation, Wammo and I cut each other’s hair with a pair of nail scissors and a rusty Bic razor. He actually emerged reasonably intact with a tousled, tangled affair that was only lop-sided if you looked at him head-on. I came off considerably worse with a style that was somewhere between Dave Hill out of Slade and Rowan Atkinson in the first series of Blackadder. To this day I have no idea how Wammo managed to cut a perfectly semicircular fringe like that without following the outline of a dinner plate. Still, I eventually took it all in good humour and helped him put the wardrobe back the right way up, it having been inadvertently thrown over during the accidental tantrum that ensued in the immediate aftermath of the haircut from hell. Wammo and I have remained close friends ever since, but I’ve never forgiven him for that fringe. Despite the fact that these days I’d be grateful for any fringe at all.

  Suitably transformed, we set about recruiting other musicians for the band. We knew that somewhere on those barren corridors like-minded souls would be lurking, ready to burst out in a yelp of teenage discontentment. Accordingly we put a notice outside the dining-hall reading: ‘Wanted. Thrusting young bucks for brat punk band. Attitude essential. Uncompromising hairstyle obligatory. Musical ability optional. No fat Americans. Contact Mark or Phil.’ The response to this appeal was reasonably encouraging in that three people came forward. In the absence of my drum-kit I’d decided to be the lead singer with Wammo at my shoulder with his trusty sunburst CMI Les Paul copy. What we were looking for was a bass player and a drummer with spiky hairdos and prominent cheek-bones. What we got was a chubby trombonist called Nev who later went on to play with English National Opera, a pudding-basin-haired cellist called Piers and a smoothie from Bradford named Malik who showed a keen interest in Latin American percussion. If we’d been recruiting for the new Hawkwind, we’d have been in business. As it was, we were quite clearly, for the time being at least, going to have to do it on our own, and accordingly, Ridiculous and Jones were born.

  5

  She Cracked

  Ridiculous and Jones was an act inspired by, and infused with, the punk ethic, combining a stripped-down, energetic sound with confrontational presentation. The inclusion of inept conjuring tricks served to provide an allegorical comment on the deceptions perpetrated against the contemporary populace by governmental illusionists and to pad out a set which would otherwise have lasted about twelve minutes. Which would have been around ten minutes too long for most people.

  For some weeks Phil and I had been composing songs in his room after dinner. He’d
sit on the bed and strum his unamplified guitar and I’d improvise the words while scraping impacted carrot and swede purée from the back of his neck. For some reason he became a particular target for expressly couriered food parcels, which may have been a result of the night he emptied his nostrils into the soup. He didn’t mean to, it was just that, laughing hysterically while suffering from a heavy cold, he inadvertently dispatched two torrents of nasal guacamole into the communal tureen. Everyone present developed an instant lack of appetite, but I don’t really understand what their problem was. The soup was pea and ham, so it was thick and green with bits floating in it to begin with.

  So far we’d completed five songs, the titles of which will be all too familiar to proud owners who cherish their Ridiculous and Jones Big Beat – The Burnage Wall of Bricks bootleg cassettes. The most direct, primal punk moment was ‘Breakfast in Bondage’ with its opening lyrical salvo that still sounds like a rallying call to this day:

  I’ve got nothing to do tonight,

  I’m gonna give my granny a fright,

  I’m gonna hit her on the head with a frying pan with an egg in it.

  Well, it’s got everything, hasn’t it? From the ‘nothing to do’ expression of disenfranchised adolescent boredom, to the subversive ‘give my granny a fright’ reference to distorting the mores of polite society, right through to the solitary egg of individualism imprisoned by the iron frying pan of capitalism. When he heard lyrics displaying such clarity of thought and acute political awareness, Mr Voice-of-a-generation’s-angst Joe Strummer must have been shitting himself.

  In truth, our other rudimentary classics were less true to the prevailing punk philosophy. ‘Nashville, Tennessee’ was an ingenious barbed attack on the repetitive subject-matter of country and western music:

  Well, I went to see my auntie in Nashville, Tennessee,

  She said your uncle’s here in Nashville, Tennessee,

  And when I walk down the main street in Nashville, Tennessee,

  All the signs say Nashville, Tennessee.

  I’ve been trying to get Garth Brooks to cover it for years now.

  On top of this we had the ill-advised cod-funk work-out of ‘Make Love, Not Food’ and two heart-stoppingly beautiful ballads in ‘Lagoon Romance’ and ‘Alpine Woman, Mountain Bullock’. These two defining moments in twentieth-century popular music were written with the Woolton Hall audience in mind. Most of this select company were colossal rugby-playing psychopaths with no discernible necks, whose idea of a good night out was drinking seventeen pints through each other’s jock-straps. The narrative thrust of these songs was therefore rich in explicit sexual detail, which good taste, making a late but welcome appearance, prevents me from repeating here. To give you a flavour, I can let you see a verse of ‘Lagoon Romance’, but in much the same way as competitions on the backs of cereal packets ask you to ‘complete the following phrase in no more than ten words’, I’ll leave you to complete the last line in no more than four.

  I never thought to ask of your sweet name

  So we could meet ’neath that lonely palm again,

  The soothing sound of the lapping sea,

  You spread your buttocks and––

  Well, move over, Noël Coward.

  Suitably armed with such a wealth of quality material, we arranged our first performance in the junior common room at Woolton Hall. Technically, our first public outing as our alter egos Billy Ridiculous and Bonneville Jones came when we shredded the red plastic innards of a road cone and visited flats occupied by girls in neighbouring Oak House attempting to sell, door to door, the small scraps of Ministry of Transport property as joke scabs. There are times when I’ve tried to justify this as an elaborate work of situationist performance art, but it’s more easily explained as the embarrassing actions of two pillocks who couldn’t hold their ale.

  Our first gig proper was going to take place on a Sunday night in the bar on a stage built from trestle dining-tables. We’d managed to convince the social secretary, a pot-bellied zoologist known as Catweazle, that we should go on last, which meant that our dubious services would not be required until around ten o’clock. However, with the bar being open from five, we thought we’d nip in for a bit of a ‘livener’ to give ourselves some much-needed Dutch courage. By nine-thirty we’d had so many pints of Holstein livener that we were as Dutch courageous as newts, and the succession of support acts, including Piers on the cello accompanied by Malik on maracas, and numerous third-year dullards in woolly jumpers droning interminable Cat Stevens songs, slipped by in a haze. By the time we took the rickety stage, the idea of having a drink to eradicate our nerves had proved to be a masterstroke of planning as we were as incapable of feeling nerves as we were of standing up straight.

  Sartorially we set trends that night which have yet to catch on, even now. I wore a crimson quilted smoking-jacket with embroidered dragons on the lapels that I’d picked up from the Cancer Research charity shop around the corner. I can only assume that one of the Wilde family had been clearing out the attic and had dropped off some of their Oscar’s old clobber. With my hair suitably teased into improbable spikes with the aid of the usual sugar and water, I completed the outfit with an oversized pair of wellingtons and my striped, winceyette pyjama bottoms. Phil wasn’t as cool as me. He wore a yellow chequered hunting waistcoat with a pair of cavalry twill trousers from which he’d amputated one leg. On his head he had placed an indoor television aerial, which was secured with an old school tie knotted under his chin. With this unlikely cranial appendage, his perky pink complexion and lager-distended belly, he looked like an early prototype of the Teletubbies.

  Bounding on to the stage to our chosen introduction music, the theme tune to Steptoe and Son, we blazed into ‘Breakfast in Bondage’ with a ferocity that frankly surprised even us. Even more surprising, the assembled throng of fellow inmates and their girlfriends greeted the spectacle before them with generous applause and alcohol-induced guffaws. Barely pausing for breath, although managing to throw down another free pint of Holstein Export, we careered through ‘Make Love, Not Food’ and ‘Nashville, Tennessee’ with the audience reaction growing, if anything, even stronger. In truth, their unquestioning support was probably too vociferous. If there had been a few dissenting voices in the crowd, we may not have attempted the climax to the conjuring part of the show. The amazing appearing-shoe trick and the toilet roll of mystery went pretty well, as did the borrowing, from a member of the audience, of a pristine white handkerchief, which was returned to its owner only after having been magically expectorated on to. After yet more rampant cheering and rancid Holstein, Wammo turned to me and whispered, ‘Let’s do the disappearing male genitalia.’

  The disappearing male genitalia was a masterful illusion we’d been working on for some time, and I’m amazed that David Copperfield is yet to include it in his act. This masterpiece of the prestidigitator’s art consisted of removing one’s trousers and underpants, showing the old block and tackle to the members of the audience and inviting them to have a good feel to check that all the props were genuine, an invitation rarely accepted. The grand wizard’s nether regions were then covered with a piece of material, in this case a tea-towel displaying poor likenesses of the Bronte¨ sisters and a view of the village of Haworth employing dubious perspective. While the shroud of intrigue was so placed the perpetrator’s genitals were thrust backwards between his legs, leaving only a pubis mundus at the front elevation. Removing the loincloth with a theatrical flourish, the rapt onlookers were then invited to show their amazement at the disappearance into the ether of the offending meat and two veg. However, with a knowing wink and a wily wag of the finger, the toast of the Magic Circle then turned around and illustrated in graphic detail the actual location of the family jewels. The whole heady display then climaxed with an energetic star jump, during which all the pertinent parts were restored to their rightful place.

  Well, we’d never have done it if we hadn’t been carried along on a wave of
euphoria and free beer, but do it we did. The reaction to this pageant was one of stunned disbelief followed by riotous applause, during which Piers the cellist ushered his fresh-faced girlfriend from the room. To be honest, we were so well oiled we didn’t regret this element of our performance until the next morning. Travelling on the bus up to college, we sat opposite two willowy honeys who established immediate eye contact and emitted the occasional demure giggle.

  ‘Blimey, we’re in here,’ said Phil, ever the optimist.

  It wasn’t until we were getting off and plucking up the courage to ask them out that they turned to us and said, ‘Good gig last night, boys. Yes. Very brave to show all you’ve got when it’s as little as that.’

  Talk about feeling small. Well, that’s what they were doing.

  Nevertheless, on stage things were going from strength to strength and people were already beginning to compare us to John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett, and there can be few greater compliments than that. Our medley from Grease was a triumph as Wammo donned a floral-print skirt to play Sandy opposite my Travolta-eclipsing portrayal of Danny, for which I donned a leather jacket into the shoulders of which, for reasons I find hard to pinpoint now, a cushion had been inserted to give me the gait of a hunchback. No sooner had we sprinted through ‘Greased Lightning’, and removed our mate Rhys Davies and his moped from the stage, than we rounded proceedings off with the elegiac ‘Lagoon Romance’. Calling for two stools from the bar, along with four more pints, we sat down to lend the end of the evening a poignant air. Unfortunately, one leg of my stool disappeared down a crack between two of the trestle tables constituting the stage and I tumbled backwards, landing what would have been heavily had the impact not been cushioned by the back of my head.