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

by Mark Radcliffe

  ‘Thanks for dinner, Jimmy,’ said Wammo, wiping the mustard from his cheeks. ‘Tell me, did you look after Hendrix as well as you’re looking after us?’

  Quimby was not amused. ‘Look, son, if you’re not happy, you can piss off back to England right now. I’ve got plenty of top acts I could be seeing to, you know.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry,’ Phil mumbled, ‘and how are the Krankies?’

  By the time we reached Groningen we were ready for bed, especially Wammo, who’d completed the journey crushed between two Marshall cabinets in the back of the equipment truck. He said this was because he wanted to travel with the crew and really experience life on the road, although it may also have had something to do with Jimmy Quimby’s insistence that no little smart-arse was going to travel in his Cortina Ghia.

  Astonishingly, the hotel was an enchantingly bijou family-run pensione on a picturesque cobbled square. We would later learn that we owed this unexpected luxury to the promoter of the festival, who had made the bookings himself, but that didn’t stop the slime-ball Quimby from standing in the lobby, palms outstretched, proclaiming, ‘See, boys, don’t I look after you? Now, who fancies a drink? There’s a little bar round the corner where I recall me and Herman’s Hermits . . . ’ The rest of this spurious anecdote was lost as Wammo and I bolted for the stairs in search of the twin room that would be our haven from Fleetwood’s answer to Lew Grade.

  The room was simply furnished with a small sash window commanding a charming vista of the tree-lined piazza without. Two single beds were made up with those starched white cotton sheets you only ever get in nice guest-houses and private hospitals, and they never felt as good as they did that night. It was while lying there contemplating our uncharacteristic good fortune that I noticed the smell. It was as if a bulimic rat had gorged itself on rancid Gorgonzola before vomiting behind the radiator. Eventually I traced the origin of this most obnoxious aroma and was able to say with some certainty that the source was Phil’s baseball boots.

  ‘Blimey charlie, Wammo, your feet reek – get those boots off and give them a good seeing to with the deodorant or something.’

  ‘I haven’t brought a deodorant,’ countered Phil indignantly, ‘you can’t pack everything, you know.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sleeping in the same room as those stinking boots.’

  To be fair, my feet were no less fragrant than his. We’d both left England in the clothes we stood up in, which meant that for the duration of our world tour our feet would be encased in matching pairs of rubber-soled Adidas baseball boots. At the time, these were considered the height of footwear fashion, but they didn’t half create a pong.

  ‘I know. It’s a warm night. Let’s stick our boots on the window-sill to air off till morning.’

  ‘Nice one, Phil. I knew you’d think of something.’

  As the offending boots went into meltdown on the window-ledge, sending clouds of toxic fumes into the balmy night air, I settled back into my freshly laundered linen and dreamt of the triumphant gig that would come the next day. ‘Hello, Holland. Let’s make some noise.’

  Expecting to be awoken next morning by shafts of radiant sunlight and the gentle twittering of birds, it was a bit of a shock to be jolted out of our slumbers by the hammering rain. As any festival-goer knows, this is not exactly the best possible news on the morning of an open-air gig. Immediately, my heart went out to the poor unfortunates camped out at the festival site, who had a much grimmer day in store than they could possibly have known. The weather was an unfortunate act of God which just had to be borne with as much good humour as possible, but it was adding insult to injury making them stand there and listen to us.

  ‘Hey, Phil, are you awake?’

  He replied in the affirmative with a whipcrack of flatulence.

  ‘It’s pouring down. It’s going to be a mud-bath out there.’

  The ever-charitable Wammo snuggled further down into his once pristine sheets and mumbled, ‘Ah well, at least we’re warm and dry.’

  There followed a blissful few minutes in which we luxuriated in our good fortune before an agonised shriek from the bed to my right shattered the drizzly calm.

  ‘Bloody hell, Sparky, the boots!’

  Charging to the window and throwing up the sash, our worst fears were confirmed. Perhaps in an act of retribution for our systematic defrauding of the motorway catering establishments, the Dutch deity of the downpour had evidently waited for the onset of our slumbers before aiming the celestial hose-pipe at our footwear. They were absolutely drenched, especially Phil’s right boot, which had inadvertently been placed under a crack in the guttering and was acting as a receptacle for the diluted green slime that dripped steadily through.

  Descending the stairs to breakfast, we filled the hotel with a variety of loud squelching noises as if, in a double dose of Kafkaesque metamorphosis, two giant bullfrogs were making their way to the muesli. There is something particularly depressing about having wet feet, but at least we knew we could look forward to returning home in only two or three days’ time to the familiar warmth of our tartan Dunlop slippers, which in Phil’s case smelt even worse than the baseball boots.

  Curiously, although we were starving and could savour the rare experience of dining on food which had actually been paid for, Phil and I were reticent about entering the refectory. It was full of pinched-faced pensioners who were on coach tours to places which had very little going for them. I mean, rather like, say, Huddersfield, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Groningen, but you wouldn’t go there for your holidays. Maybe this was the point. If the vast majority in the party were in the process of losing their mental faculties, their ability to absorb information would be vastly reduced, so perhaps a considerate tour operator had drawn up an itinerary taking in places of no interest whatsoever. Pathetic as it sounds, Phil and I just looked at each other blankly, trying to summon up the confidence to paddle over to the cold meats and crispbreads. Why we experienced this fear, I really couldn’t say. In retrospect, I’m reminded of being a child trying to overcome arachnophobia by catching a household spider, when your mum would say, ‘Don’t be a wimp. That little spider is much more frightened of you than you are of it,’ and those little old people must indeed have been nervous about the presence of two hedgehog-headed hucksters standing in a suspicious-looking pool in the lobby.

  Thankfully, help was at hand. A loud clomping sound came to our attention, followed by the sight of a large, plaster-peppered, reinforced-steel toecap appearing inside the doorway, followed some seconds later by Les Bartlett with a gob full of Emmental.

  ‘All right, lads, come and get stuck in, there’s a top trough on here. I’m on me thirds already.’

  Shamefaced, we trudged damply in, leaving our slug trails behind us, and meekly made for the fruit compote. Amazing, really, that at the time the European press was carrying story after story about the hooligan hordes of punk rockers who were fearless in their thirst for confrontation, and here were we needing safety in numbers to get a hard-boiled egg from the breakfast buffet.

  The festival site was in a tree-lined park just outside the town, and by the time we arrived the rains had abated, making me even more convinced that it had all been the act of sadistic spirits determined to douse our boots. Looking through the festival programme, the mild alarm we experienced at discovering we were the headline act turned to blind terror when we looked at the band who had topped the bill on the previous day.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Generation X!’

  Generation X was the band fronted by Billy Idol, general pretty punk pin-up and darling of the music press. We had certain things in common with Generation X: we were British, there were four of us and we were committed to the punk cause. Where we differed was that they could play pretty well. Quite how Jimmy Quimby had managed to secure us a booking as a headline act I never discovered, but I imagine lying through his teeth had something to do with it: ‘Oh yes, Skrewdriver are massive in England, much bigger than the
Pistols, who’ll never get anywhere, bunch of little pillocks.’

  The realisation dawned that we were out of our depth, which wasn’t difficult, as we’d have been out of our depth in a bird-bath. To make matters worse, something he was supremely adept at, Jimmy had made sure all the publicity described us as ‘the most blistering live band in Britain’. A literal European translation could have taken this to mean that seeing us perform resulted in an outbreak of pustulous skin complaints, and that was a lot more likely than us being able to live up to expectations musically.

  As we retired to our backstage caravan, we took the only course of action open to bands in these circumstances, that of drinking all the free lager available in the shortest possible time. Systematically working through the Tuborg mountain, our spirits began to lift. Obviously the beer had a lot to do with it, but closer inspection of the other groups booked to appear that day confirmed that punk rock had yet to permeate this far-flung outpost. The home-grown acts appeared to be either ageing blues combos or the type of third-rate progressive nonsense we hadn’t had the misfortune to experience since the heady days of BIT.

  Des read the poster aloud, his voice a rising pitch of indignation: ‘Leviathan. Smokey Sam’s Blues Band. Apocalyptic Intervention. Big Bill’s Blues Band. Smegma. Commander Olaf’s Cat-Flap. Freddy and the Fire Balls. Skrewdriver – the most blistering live band in Britain!’ He put the poster down and bared his teeth in a gnarled, beer-froth-infested grin. ‘All this lot’ll be a crock of shit. We’ll just go on and play faster and louder than anyone else and we’ll pull it off.’

  Apart from the fact that we had no control of the overall volume, and if we played any quicker we’d be on and off inside fifteen minutes, this was just the rallying cry we needed, and for a time it seemed like his prophecy would turn out to be well judged. The succession of local bands, frozen somewhere in the late sixties, were indeed as he had so poignantly predicted, ‘a crock of shit’, and accordingly our new-found confidence increased in equal measure with our state of inebriation. We began to feel good, to feel cocky, to feel sure that we could show these idiots what rock’n’roll was all about. Then Freddy and the Fire Balls went on.

  Freddy and the Fire Balls were a bunch of stick-thin rockabillies from Tyne and Wear. Evidently they, like us, were innocents abroad in the clutches of an agent who was about as trustworthy as the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but nowhere near as handsome. Their particular sleazeball Svengali had failed to secure the necessary documentation before leaving England, which had resulted in the band’s gear being impounded on arrival in the Low Countries. Prolonged and fruitless negotiations for the return of the equipment had made them hideously late, and they arrived backstage looking snotty, bereft and bedraggled, although for all we knew they looked like this all the time, and in need of a good cuddle off their mums. After disappearing with the promoter into the beer tent, they emerged several minutes later and tapped gingerly on the door of our luxuriously appointed and Oranjeboom-anointed Winnebago. Opening the door, I was confronted with these four bequiffed urchins shuffling nervously, squeezing their testicles and sucking snot up their noses. One of them opened his mouth to speak and I fully expected him to say, ‘Hello, Mr Radcliffe, is your Wammo playing out?’ However, what he actually said was, ‘All right mate, I’m Freddy and we need to ask you a favour.’

  ‘Yeah, all our stuff’s stuck at customs ’cos of this dickhead agent,’ piped Fire.

  ‘So we were wondering if we could use your rig,’ added Ball with more than a hint of desperation.

  The bass player didn’t say anything, but then, they never do.

  Under the circumstances, we didn’t have much choice. We knew how it felt to have fallen in with the Bill Sykes of rock’n’roll, and we just didn’t have the heart to see them traipse all the way back to Newton Aycliffe without having played a note. Perhaps we should have done. Like a lot of cracking bands, Freddy and the Fire Balls underwent a complete transformation the moment they stepped out on stage. The four nasally challenged brats who’d called at the caravan door to ask if they could have their ball back instantly became lean, leather-clad renegades dispatching supercharged punked-up rock’n’roll classic after classic while pulling poses Gene Vincent would have died for. (Actually, Gene Vincent died in 1971 of a burst stomach ulcer, but you know what I’m saying.) The crowd, already loving it, practically orgasmed as one when, in the closing stages of their last number, Ball played my (Chinny’s) Slingerland standing on the drum stool, while Fire tossed Les’s guitar high into the air and Freddy scaled the lighting scaffold and crossed over the band thirty feet above the stage. The bass player didn’t move much, but then, much to the relief of Wammo, who’d lent him his brand-new bass, they never do.

  The cheers of the audience as the band left the stage were deafening, and the same collective thought must have been circulating the arena: ‘If Freddy and the Fire Balls were as good as that, then how good must “the most blistering live band in Britain” be?’

  Backstage, the most blistering live band in Britain were doing a passable impression of the most shit-scared live band in Holland.

  ‘Little Geordie bastards.’

  ‘Did you see what he did with my guitar?’

  ‘Christ, we’re in it up to our necks here, lads,’ I mused helpfully.

  Wammo didn’t say much, which meant he was either smashed out of his brains or, in an admirable example of method acting, was taking this bass player lark very seriously indeed.

  Des decided to stall for time, working on the reasonable assumption that we wouldn’t compare so unfavourably if the memory of Freddy and the Fire Balls wasn’t quite so fresh. There was always the risk, of course, that the crowd would grow increasingly restless with each passing minute and would accordingly expect the most blistering live band in Britain to be even more blistering than usual. Normally, an impatient audience can be calmed for a while by the sight of pot-bellied roadies in Blue Oyster Cult T-shirts trudging across the stage with torches, gaffer–taping cables to the floor. As our equipment was already set up on stage, we didn’t have this option open to us, although we did bribe a stage-hand to fanny about with towels and bottles of water in full view of the crowd to buy Phil a few precious extra minutes of lavatory time. Eventually, we ran out of fictitious excuses and accepted that the time had come to put our heads above the parapet. As we sloped across the backstage enclosure towards the platform on which the public execution was to take place, and as the compe`re’s rabid introduction repeated our ‘blistering’ boast, the vindictive precipitation divinity decided to wreak his last act of vengeance and dispatched a light but steady drizzle over the Groningen area. You would have to say that the omens were not good.

  As we strode out on to the stage attempting to look like we meant business, I had cause once again to be grateful that I was the drummer. Stuck away at the back, I was not only far enough from the front rows to avoid eye contact, but safely out of the rain under the protection of the overhead canopy. In his dual role as bassist and babysitter for the drummer, Phil nestled gratefully in the gathering shadows at the rear of the stage and, nodding towards Des and Les, said, ‘Bloody hell, I wish we weren’t here, but at least we’re not on the front line with those two.’

  Des, recognising that there is no hiding-place for lead singers on occasions like these, grabbed the microphone and, thrusting his chiselled, grizzled features into the squall, shouted, ‘Right then, Groningen, do you feel good?’

  As a question, it was better left rhetorical, because with the rain falling steadily and Freddy and the Fire Balls but a distant memory, the response was less than enthusiastic. Evidently, Groningen did not feel good at all, thank you very much. However, they were about to feel a good deal worse. Des turned to face Wammo and, with a look of blind terror, hissed, ‘Hell’s teeth – let’s get this over with.’

  I consoled myself in the knowledge that at least the first song, whatever it was called, wasn’t half bad and perh
aps, just perhaps, it would put the crowd in a good enough mood to accept the rest of the set. Les Bartlett gave his false front teeth a last securing push and, with four sound stomps of his bricklayer’s jackboot, launched into his opening riff.

  If he’d been loud in rehearsal, he was absolutely deafening now, and to say it took the audience by surprise would be an understatement. Some of them were almost as gobsmacked as the rest of the band. I’ve heard quieter anti-aircraft guns. The massive distortion that accompanied this cacophony rendered all notes and chords unrecognisable, and whatever it was he was playing, it sounded nothing like what we’d rehearsed for all of half an hour in a leaky Nissen hut back in Poulton. The only conclusion I could draw from the searing white noise attacking my ear-drums was that they’d changed the order of the songs and not bothered to tell me. In fairness, it’s often not worth telling the drummer what songs you’re playing, because the titles won’t mean anything to him anyway, but the opening song was the only one I knew, the only one where I could demonstrate to the sidestage conglomeration of the drummers out of Smokey Sam and Big Bill’s respective blues bands and Ball out of Freddy and the Fire Balls that I really could leather that Slingerland with the best of them. As it was, I was reduced to lip-reading Wammo, who, back to the audience and positioned directly in front of the drums, attempted to impose some sort of loose structure on proceedings. How Des was coping, I really couldn’t say, due on the one hand to the inferior sound mix and on the other to Les, who couldn’t have been making more noise if he’d strapped on a small jet engine. Throughout the gig I never heard any vocals at all, which at least was consistent with the rehearsal. I was pretty shaky as it was, and suddenly hearing the vocals would have cast me hopelessly adrift. Between songs, though, I was able to experience the full effect of Des’s charismatic announcements, which were: ‘Holland, let’s rip it up.’ (Holland preferred ‘it’ untorn.) ‘All right, let’s shake this place to its foundations.’ (Hardly appropriate in a field, where foundations are rarely to be found.) ‘This is our new single.’ (We did not have a single, new or otherwise.) And ‘Come on, you bastards, clap.’ (The ‘bastards’ had developed applause fatigue.)