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

by Mark Radcliffe

  Happy Mondays were a bunch of Dickensian ne’er-do-wells from Little Hulton. Their Fagin figure was Shaun Ryder, a front man who even now you would hesitate to call a singer. Here again, though, was someone who both symbolised something new while simultaneously reactivating the past. Every time he opened his mouth to perform, you could guarantee that someone would say, ‘That’s not singing. He can’t hold a tune to save his life,’ which is exactly what they’d said about Johnny Rotten just over a decade earlier. The Mondays had the standard bass, drums, guitar and keyboards behind their hook-nosed leader, but crucially, at his side, they had the talismanic Bez. If one of the tenets of punk was being allowed to be up on stage without any discernible musical ability, then it was alive and well in Bez, despite the fact that Bez himself looked anything but alive and well. With his cropped hair, baggy shorts and unamplified maracas, he prowled the stage, fixing the audience with a bug-eyed stare, performing his signature dance, which, with all the grace of a spider who’s recently escaped from a beer glass, sent all his limbs in different directions at the same time. Unlike Chas Smash of Madness, Bez made no attempt to sing, he was just a presence, and without him it wouldn’t have been the same. Like the bare-breasted Stacia of Hawkwind, he became an icon for just being there, and if you read the credits for the band’s pièce de résistance, Pills Thrills ’n’ Bellyaches, it’s there in print for all to see:

  Shaun Ryder – lyrics and vocals

  Paul Ryder – bass guitar

  Mark Day – lead and rhythm guitar

  Paul Davis – keyboards and programs

  Gary Whelan – drums

  Bez – Bez

  Musically, they seemed to have absorbed every vital influence of the last thirty years from house and punk to funk and folk, and yet there was nothing studied about it. They weren’t musos, they were mates on the make. Like all great bands, they were far more than the sum total of their parts and had that knack of making things that shouldn’t fit together fit perfectly. Like Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, there was a sense that everybody was playing a different song at a different speed at the same time, and yet somehow creating something effortlessly glorious.

  In the early days the Stone Roses were a more conventional rock band with, never a smart move, an undeniable essence of Goth. Musically, they had two aces in their pack. With apologies to the great Bill Nelson, in John Squire they had the man described by journalist John Robb as the world’s first non-macho guitar hero, and there’s something in that to be sure. John Squire appeared to be able to play anything he wanted, and you can’t help thinking that if he’d been in Led Zeppelin he wouldn’t have been out of his depth. He’d have had to fight John Paul Jones for ‘the quiet one’ tag, but musically he’d have more than held his own, although in groups as big as the Zep there would always be someone to hold your own for you if you couldn’t be bothered holding it yourself. The Roses’ other world-class player was Reni, the drummer. If one man combined rock bluster with dance beats, it was Reni. The first time I saw the Stone Roses they were appearing with a comedian from Oldham called Bob Dillinger, who was, to use showbiz parlance, dying on his arse. Obviously fed up with waiting to get on, Reni walked on stage, plonked himself down behind his kit and started playing on his own. It wasn’t the most sensitive way of informing the unfortunate Dillinger that his spot was over, but it was no less impressive for that. Up front, the Roses’ formation relied on a lone striker in Ian Brown. For a while this pouting loose-limbed gargoyle with the epoch-defining fringe was what Mods would have referred to as ‘the face’. Song titles like ‘I Am the Resurrection’ and ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ demonstrated how the Roses had a self-belief that bordered on arrogance, and it was Brown’s unruffled swagger that enabled them to carry it off. He couldn’t sing, of course, which, as we’ve seen, hardly makes him unique among front men, but whereas Rotten or Ryder had replaced singing with a distinctive primordial yowl, Brown just sang in a weak, flat drone. Strangely, this seemed to fit perfectly on the early recordings, which sound wonderful to this day, but as time went on and the Squire-marshalled musicians began to assemble a noise of Zeppelinesque proportions, the Brown larynx became wholly inadequate. However, the Roses will for ever have their place in history as an explosive live act and creators not only of a fine début album but also of a true classic in the single ‘Fool’s Gold’. Like a lot of the Mondays’ material, on paper this song just doesn’t work. Brown’s introverted vocal wends its way through Reni’s reworking of James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’, accompanied by rumbling dub bass interspersed with Squire’s crackling guitar bursts owing more than a nod to Jimi Hendrix. Three decades of influences are distilled into a few minutes, and yet the end result is absolutely of its time and anything but retro. If you don’t know anything about British psychedelia of the late sixties, you should listen to Traffic’s 1967 single ‘Hole in My Shoe’ and it will tell you all you need to know. If you don’t know anything about punk, you only need to hear the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’. In a similar way, you can read endless articles and books in an attempt to understand the so-called ‘baggy scene’ of the late eighties, but listen to the Stone Roses’ ‘Fool’s Gold’ and you’ll understand it perfectly.

  Inspired by this burgeoning rock-dance crossover, I set about recruiting a crack team of hungry young baggies to create an enthrallingly contemporaneous collective who could absorb all the necessary influences and blend them into an electrifying synthesis. I didn’t really. I phoned up Wammo to discuss forming another band that sounded like Dr Feelgood. In many ways I think this was to our credit. There’s nothing sadder than seeing a bunch of old men attempting to be part of the latest wave of youth culture, and if there was one thing that convinced us we were too old to be a baggy band it was the trousers. When Wammo and I had ceremoniously burnt our youth’s western-style bell-bottom jeans as a sacrificial offering to the great god Punk, we assumed the much-derided flares were gone for ever, consigned to the past along with chopper bikes, Goblin Teasmades and journeys on the M6 without sitting in standing traffic around Wednesbury. Gradually, though, we became aware of the hundreds of kids trudging through Manchester in twenty-six-inch flares, the like of which we hadn’t seen for over ten years. At first we assumed these were just poor people who’d been forced out of financial necessity to buy unfashionable strides from hastily established bargain outlets following a major find by archaeologists excavating an ancient Brutus warehouse. At the back of the trouser legs the material had become ripped and filthy from the constant trailing on the rain-soaked pavements, so that each crumpled character seemed to be trailing fronds of rotting seaweed behind them. It was all so quaint and nostalgic. On every street corner stood packs of urchins in hooded sweatshirts who, from the knee down, resembled an Apache reservation. As these were obviously coolsters at the forefront of fashion, they’d most likely bought their jeans for £15 from a wire basket outside Famous Army & Navy Stores, who would discover some weeks later, as style history repeated itself, that the high-street shops were charging forty quid a pair. Of course, impressive as these tepee trousers were, they weren’t quite as spectacular as the customised specimens I remembered from my youth. In those days the only flares you could buy had a circumference of fourteen or, at most, sixteen inches. This necessitated a certain amount of improvisation, for which you needed a second pair of jeans and a patient and understanding mum. From the second well-worn trouser a V-shaped piece of faded denim roughly the size of a windsurfer sail would be meticulously hewn. Splitting the seam of the pair to be worn, the additional panel could then be sewn in to create the required lower-leg A-line skirt contour. If antique denim was in short supply, the additional panels could acceptably be fashioned from psychedelic paisley corduroy, beer-soaked bar towels or, in the case of an old Bolton acquaintance known as Bij, Kellogg’s cornflakes packets. In many ways we were pioneering recycling culture, as no one ever threw away an old pair of jeans, they were simply reworked into ever more elaborate trouser construc
tions in pursuit of the ultimate flare.

  For Phil and I in our sedate straight-legs, the clown-pant comeback was as unexpected as it was hilarious, but it made me realise that, be it the platform shoe, the tank top, the hot pant or the flared jean, if you’d worn it the first time around you were too old to wear it the second. Not that we’d ever worn hot pants. Well, not in public anyway.

  During my southern sojourn, Wammo had formed a band called House on Fire with an affable rockabilly called Vic and a monosyllabic computer boffin called Daryl. Daryl spoke so rarely that when he did summon all his orational skills to mount an uncharacteristic ejaculation, you would have to stop what you were doing and work out where the sound was coming from. In all the time I spent with him, I don’t think we had a single conversation, although this could of course have had less to do with his economy with speech than his belief that I was a complete divot. Unlikely, I know, but feasible. He wasn’t at all threatening or unpleasant. On the contrary, he exuded a relaxed geniality which he communicated entirely without the need to resort to speaking. He may well have been allergic to words. He was the bass player, naturally.

  Vic was the lead vocalist and had many things to recommend him in that department. He had an immaculate quiff, a broad and easy smile, his own PA system and a trailer to carry it round in when he wasn’t delivering sunbeds. He wasn’t a great singer in those days, but he was wildly enthusiastic and that counted for everything.

  They also had a drummer who was unceremoniously booted out when I showed up. That might sound harsh, but when you’re planning to play prestige venues like the Rosebud in Preston there’s no room for sentiment. In the interests of saving his public humiliation, his name will not be mentioned, which is just as well because I’ve forgotten it. Looking back, he must have been consumed by bitterness. Lord knows how Pete Best felt when the Beatles ran out to the stage at Shea Stadium; who can begin to imagine what, if anything, went through Tony McCarroll’s head on the days Oasis played Knebworth, and can any of us begin to understand the mental strain on that bloke the night House on Fire rocked Whittle-le-Woods Labour Club?

  We began to rehearse weekly and, at first, weakly in the architect’s offices in Preston where Phil had managed to secure gainful and well-paid employment after a triumph of the interviewee’s art of deception. The words ‘eyes’, ‘wool’ and ‘pulling’ spring to mind, as do ‘bastard’ and ‘jammy’. He could turn on the charm, could Phil, I’ll say that for him. He was also a gifted mimic who had evidently delighted his interrogators with a brilliant impersonation of a sober young gentleman who would make a punctual and diligent employee.

  We sat down to select a set list on strictly democratic lines, which meant that Phil and I wrote down all the Dr Feelgood songs we could think of, while Vic, cheeriness incarnate, interjected with the odd ‘sounds great’ and the occasional ‘nice one’, and Dave endorsed proceedings in his silence.

  We launched ourselves on to the pub circuit around Preston, performing principally in dingy back bars lit by fluorescent strip lights. These were the kind of places where your shoes would have stuck to the carpet, had not the landlord had the foresight to cover the floors in linoleum designed to recreate the patterns made in murky puddles by spillages of motor oil. Half the audience, on a good night twenty people, were predominantly male blues enthusiasts with a genuine love of live music. The other half, predominantly male as far as you could tell, were cantankerous old soaks in nicotine-stained raincoats and battered brown trilby hats whose principal reason for being there was that a pint of mild was a penny cheaper than in the luxuriously appointed, hallucinogenic flock-paper-clad lounge facility on the other side of the bar.

  To label them a sector of ‘the audience’ is perhaps less than accurate in that it implies that they paid any attention to what we were doing. In fact, they would spend the complete duration of our performance hunched over the bar with a bloodshot gaze fixed on the shimmering optics, dreaming of scarcely affordable chasers or hoping for brisk sales from the card of Big D peanuts, each bag sold revealing further cleavage of the pneumatic starlet’s photograph beneath. Their lack of discernible movement and leathery skin made you wonder whether they were the result of some abortive genetic cross-breeding programme involving OAPs in council care and iguanas. I suppose it’s more likely that they were too slaughtered to stand up without something to lean on, and I can only assume, from the length of time they stood there, that answering a call of nature in their shapeless grey slacks was deemed less of an indignity than attempting to negotiate a passage to the gents’ and collapsing in a heap of spittle-spattered gaberdine and rancid rayon in the middle of an empty dance floor. The only energy they expended was in the lifting of successive pints, the saved penny total rising by a factor of five an hour, and the automaton-like insertion of unfiltered cigarettes into mouths where gaps were interrupted with the occasional tooth. As a circuit it was hardly the most rewarding, but with the incurable optimism of rock’n’roll journeymen we knew that something better was just around the corner.

  The big break came one Saturday afternoon when Wammo received a breathlessly excited phone call from the irrepressibly excitable and occasionally asthmatic Vic. Obviously, it being his house, Phil answered the phone, so I couldn’t hear exactly what Vic was saying, but I could ascertain from his animated tone that it was thrilling news.

  ‘Yibbee yabba yobba yabba yibbee yey.’

  ‘Oh, hi, Vic, what’s up?’

  ‘Yobba wobba wibba wobble wee.’

  ‘Really? In Blackpool?’

  ‘Hibba hobba hubba hubba hebba hooo.’

  ‘On the promenade? Big cash prizes?’

  ‘Bibble babble blah blah bobble bubble bee.’

  ‘Right, then. Tuesday night, seven-thirty it is. See you there.’ Phil replaced the receiver and turned to me: ‘Right, this is it. Vic’s got us a gig at this big pub in Blackpool on Tuesday. Six bands are playing and the best gets a load of good gigs, including the chance to play at King George’s Hall in Blackburn. Good, eh?’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell, Wammo.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s a frigging talent contest, that’s what’s wrong. A sad, crappy Battle of the Bands where all the local heavy-metal underachievers compete for the chance to support the Tygers of Pan Tang in a municipal auditorium with all the atmosphere of a planet in the solar system with little or no atmosphere – for example, Pluto – or a day’s recording at a seven-track studio in a converted tool-shed in Fleetwood.’

  ‘Well, there’s no need to be so negative, it might be just the break we need. Anyway, I want to do it and Vic’s well up for it.’

  ‘What does Daryl say?’

  ‘Bugger all, as well you know.’

  Unloading the gear on to the south promenade at Blackpool that Tuesday night, the signs were not promising. It was pouring with rain and bitterly cold with a wind that cut through you like a dead, dead sharp thing. The pub was called the Star and was located near the gates of the celebrated funfair known as the Pleasure Beach, these days nestling in the shadow of the Pepsi Max Big One. Vic was already in discussion with the organiser about the order in which the bands were going to appear. There were five other acts: a lame jazz funk trio called Colourblind, a contemptible sub-Foreigner AOR (arsehole-oriented rock) band called Cold as Ice, an identikit four-piece indie-guitar outfit known as the Fractions, another equally contemptible AOR combo going by the name of Tanglewood and, favourites due to this being a home tie for them, local heavy-metal underachievers the Cannibals. The running order having been settled by the drawing of numbered tickets, we found ourselves appearing fourth and discovered, with no great surprise, that the Cannibals were going on last.

  Vic was in a state of high agitation and chattered twenty to the dozen, making it impossible for anyone else to get a word in edgeways, which didn’t really matter because he was talking to Daryl. Wammo and I had retired to the snug bar, partially to avoid listening to the opposition and par
tially because we’d discovered that the beer was a penny a pint cheaper.

  Eventually, after Phil and I had saved at least eight pence each, it was time for us to go on. In the interests of saving time in the change-overs, every band was using the same drum-kit, a kit provided for all of us in a spirit of true brotherhood by the bouffant-haired percussionist out of the Cannibals. The fact that this kit was set up centre stage before any of the other bands arrived in the venue didn’t strike me as suspicious until much later. At the time my main concern was how to tackle this unfamiliar equipment. As a drummer, I’ve always been of the Charlie Watts school: anything more than four drums, a hi-hat and three cymbals is for posers. I always loved the fact that Charlie Watts was in the Rolling Stones, for years the biggest band in the world, with access to unlimited cash and equipment and yet he always played his trademark Gretsch maple jazz kit. It’s one of the reasons Charlie has become the coolest Stone. The other is that he’s aged gracefully with his meticulously barbered white hair and sharply cut Savile Row suits, while the others have persisted with archaic haircuts and the sort of leggings, velvet jerkins and pixie boots you’d more expect to find on assorted Merry Men in an over-fifties amateur dramatic production of Robin Hood.

  The Cannibals’ kit was rumoured to have once belonged to Bill Ward out of Black Sabbath, and I strongly suspect the rumour was true. It certainly sounded bad enough. It wasn’t the sound that bothered me, however. What really worried me was the sheer size of the thing. There must have been fifteen drums in this set-up, topped by a veritable forest of stands crowned with at least a dozen cymbals. The stage looked like it had been set for a plate-spinning act. Personally, huge racks of tom-toms have always made me nervous in case an elaborate fill should leave me stranded at the floor tom, many drums away from the hi-hat and snare, with no obvious means of getting back. And yet it takes a man with greater will-power than me not to try hitting everything that’s available. This in itself presented a further problem in that, being of limited stature, and in the absence of telescopic drumsticks, there were several pieces of equipment I couldn’t physically reach. This meant that key cues and accents failed to receive the requisite percussive reinforcement as a flourishing stick failed to connect with anything save the smoke-laden air. The preposterous pomposity of this kit was completed by the ultimate accessory for the dickhead drummer: a gong, and not the sort of plate-sized device used to summon purple-rinsed dowagers to dinner in discreet seaside boarding-houses, but the full-scale J. Arthur Rank-er. It’s often been suggested that the striking of an orchestral gong by the steroid-enriched goon with the glistening loincloth-clad torso is the most macho expression in music. Indeed, some psychologists suggest that the gong is itself a phallic symbol with which the drummer boy invites the females in the audience to consider his sexual organs in the climax to the performance. I’m not convinced myself. I’m a drummer and I have a penis, but I’ve never felt the urge to hit it with a mallet at the end of ‘Johnny B. Goode’.