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

by Mark Radcliffe

  The size of the drum-kit actually prevented me from having any visual or aural contact with anybody, which is not ideal when the basic intention is to play together. We appeared to be starting and finishing songs at around the same time, which had to mean that the others were doing their best to follow me as I clubbed my way around this Aladdin’s cave of drums, finding new things to hit at every turn. In what seemed a peculiarly short time, we reached the end of our set and left the stage with what was quite possibly the only version of ‘Route 66’ ever to feature the symphonic gong. To ask me why I hit it is like asking mountaineers why they climb Everest. It was just there.

  We adjourned to the back bar to the distant sound of Cold as Ice, followed by the all-conquering Cannibals, who thrust their crotches at the audience in cocksure fashion beneath a battery of flashing lights which had noticeably failed to even flicker while anyone else was on.

  ‘Well, that was bloody awful,’ said Wammo. ‘I was out of tune, Vic sang all the wrong words, Daryl was well distorted and, Sparky, you were on a different planet.’

  ‘Oh, come on, it wasn’t all that bad,’ offered Vic, ‘was it, Mark?’

  ‘Well, it sounded fine from where I was. What do you say, Daryl?’

  ‘. . .’

  We settled back to wait for the results, a tense time as no one knew who would be runners-up to the Cannibals, although we strongly suspected it wasn’t going to be us. Mein host eventually clambered on to the stage and blew into the lead vocal mike, which had probably once belonged to Burke Shelley out of Budgie, and commenced the all-important announcements.

  ‘Right, here are the results of the Star Hotel North-Western Battle of the Bands heat. In sixth place, and a prize of five pounds––’

  Oh God, no, not last, please not last.

  ‘––from Preston . . . House on Fire.’

  Cobblers.

  To see Vic going up there to shake hands with the pustulous and portly publican would have broken my heart if I’d been remotely sober. Here was a thoroughly decent young chap, starting out in showbiz, coming last in a seaside talent show after an extremely poor performance from his ageing, bladdered and uncommunicative accomplices. I suppose winning five pounds would have been something, had it not cost £10 to enter.

  I lost interest in House on Fire after that, but not before a twist of fate gave me an opportunity for revenge. By this time I was a DJ on commercial radio and was invited to join several other D-list local celebrities on the judging panel of a Battle of the Bands final at King George’s Hall in Blackburn where the much-fancied Cannibals found themselves finishing in bronze medal position after surprisingly low scoring from the Manchester jury.

  In a sense, being a DJ began to present something of a dilemma. As an arbiter of public taste, I was free to slag off the work of others at the same time as climbing on to stages to let punters judge my own feeble efforts. Anyone who heard me laying into Spandau Ballet on Piccadilly Radio, and I can’t imagine there were many, would, on the huge assumption that they’d given a toss, have been struck with the feeling that a double standard was being applied: ‘Who the bloody heck does he think he is, dissing the Ballet when his own band are a bag of shite?’ It was a view with which I had considerable sympathy, and as the radio career was beginning to look a good deal more lucrative than the musical one, I considered quitting bands altogether to save myself from ridicule.

  Then I realised that, being a DJ, I was going to be a target for ridicule whatever I did, so I carried on playing a bit longer.

  9

  Various Artists

  I don’t know who was responsible for coining the phrase ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’, but whoever it was they were, to use another well-known phrase, ‘talking through their arse’. I daresay it was some posh git who thinks soup is a dish best taken cold as well. If only these trainee bons viveurs would face historical fact and acknowledge that gazpacho was born of necessity during a prolonged power cut. As if that wasn’t bad enough, these cold broth imbibers will often follow their unheated gruel starter with a warm salad. What’s that all about, then? They’ll be suggesting iced tea next. The point is that not all of us are in a position to be fussy about the temperature of revenge. For the vast majority of vindictive bastards, revenge is a dish taken any way you can get it, even if it is served in a grime-infested cracked mug at the soup kitchen of retribution.

  My wilful act of sabotage on the career of the Cannibals kept me in good spirits for weeks, and if any member of the band is reading this, then rest assured I did you a favour in the long run. You may have thought that winning that talent contest was the big break you’d been waiting for, but you’d never have made it to the top, because there was one thing that would always have held you back: you were bloody awful. Admittedly, you were better than us, but then there were primary-school chime-bar orchestras who were better than us that night. Look at it this way, if it hadn’t been me who ruined your dreams, then it would have been some unscrupulous agent or manager who would have run off with the money sometime in the future. It’s every man for himself and dog eat dog out there, as any self-respecting cannibal should be well aware. (Do vegetarian cannibals live entirely on nuts, do you suppose?)

  In a rather grand way we retired from live performance after the indignities heaped upon us that night at the Star. We felt that our musical vision was outpacing the limited imagination of the audience, or, to put it another way, we were fed up of being greeted with disinterest on a good night and a shower of Newcastle Brown bottles on a bad one. Of course, the idea of not having a band at all never crossed our minds. By this time we knew that being in one was never going to provide a passport to untold riches, mass adulation and all the Filipino handmaidens you could eat, but it was just something we’d got used to. I suppose there are people who can’t imagine life without vigorous physical exercise, or the fanatical following of a football team, or the careful cultivation of herbaceous borders, and we just couldn’t live without being in a band. If you didn’t have a band, you had nothing to talk about when you went to the pub, and if you didn’t have a gig or recording session in the diary, then what adrenalin-pumping experiences did you have to look forward to? A life without beat groups was as horrifying a prospect as a life without beer, and what a nightmare being teetotal must be. How dreadful to wake up in the morning and think, ‘This is as good as I’m going to feel all day.’

  We decided to embark on a studio project under the name of the County Fathers. In the absence of sufficient finance to fund anything more than the odd day in a four-track coal-cellar with egg-boxes on the walls, this was a pretty illogical course of action, but at least it avoided carrying drum-kits and Marshall cabinets up the backstairs of pubs where our arrival was greeted with all the enthusiasm afforded a team of thickset navvies undertaking structural alterations. The management may well have apologised for any inconvenience caused to patrons during refurbishment, but there were regulars who felt that management should have been equally contrite during our set.

  The County Fathers consisted of Wammo, me and former Cresta Jack ‘Mad Axe’ Carlton, who’d been spending his time cultivating impressively sturdy offspring, a solid career in radio production and a bald patch of considerable proportions. With only the vaguest idea what we were doing, we went into the studio to record three songs and the unthinkable happened. Somebody actually liked it.

  Guy Lovelady was a local advertising executive who’d founded Ugly Man Records with his brother just because they liked the idea of running a record label. We soon changed that. ‘It’s fantastic, it sounds just like Peter Gabriel,’ enthused the amateur record-company mogul. It was probably closer to Walter Gabriel, but as other labels weren’t exactly fighting a bidding war over us, we were in no position to question his judgement. Ugly Man were a tiny independent operation, but they had some cachet at that point as they had stumbled across Liverpool’s Colin Vearncombe, writing and recording under the nom de plume Black, who would eventuall
y have several hits, including the celebrated ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. Having made a few quid on their first signing, the brothers Lovelady should have undoubtedly closed down the label, banked the cash and looked back on the whole enterprise with smug satisfaction. Instead the silly buggers chose the route of admirable but ultimately misguided philanthropy in aiding and abetting bunches of no-hopers like us. No matter what we did, we couldn’t shake his belief in us.

  ‘We’re not really very fashionable,’ said Mad Axe, stating the obvious from within an extra-large Fair Isle pullover, evidently bought for him by his wife to make sure that no one else would fancy him.

  ‘That’s OK, the music speaks for itself,’ Guy reassured us.

  ‘We’ll need some money for mixing,’ said Wammo, which caused Jack and I to raise an eyebrow to each other as we knew all too well that the only thing Phil knew how to mix was quick-set cement.

  ‘I’ll sort something out with the boss of the studio in return for sleeve credits and a percentage,’ responded the unflappable Lovelady.

  ‘We don’t play live, you know,’ I threw in for good measure, although those who’d viewed our previous incarnations may well have considered this a positive advantage.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Guy, ‘I don’t think our strategy hinges on charisma and sex appeal with this one.’

  Cheeky sod. He had a point, though. The photographs for the record cover involved being doused with buckets of cold water while stripped to the waist, and the session provided ample proof that, if our popularity had failed to expand, you certainly couldn’t say the same for our stomachs. We had all entered that stage in life where your inside-leg measurement gets overtaken by the size of your waistband. One minute your waistline is a flicker in the rear-view mirror, the next it roars past you in the outside lane and disappears over the horizon. For years I was thirty waist and thirty leg, and it’s pretty depressing when you realise you’re not even square any more.

  The County Fathers’ Lightheaded EP was released to a tidal wave of media and public indifference. This despite an in-depth three-minute local radio interview with Jack and I – Phil being unable to make it on account of having to collect his daughter from ballet class. I bet that happens to Bono all the time. The interviewer was one Chris Evans, and you don’t have to be the brain of Britain to work out that it was just this sort of live experience that allowed him to hone his skills in preparation for being the multi-media wunderkind he is today. The band may not have amounted to much, but at least we made young Chris Evans a star. There were those cynics who suggested we would not have been on his programme at all, had we not only worked at the same radio station but also controlled its musical output. This is a thorny question and one I have found the most effective way of dealing with is to tell inquisitors who raise it to ‘mind their own frigging business’ and, furthermore, to ‘keep their effing noses out’.

  With any record it is notoriously difficult to pinpoint the exact number sold. Estimates of total sales of the County Fathers’ Lightheaded vary enormously from twenty-two on the one hand, right up to twenty-four on the other. Twenty-three would be a safe bet. The eagle-eyed vinyl junkie may occasionally stumble on one of these discarded gems at a record fair, car-boot sale or refuse-incineration plant open day. The eagle-eyed housebreaker may stumble on one of several thousand in the bottom of Phil’s wardrobe.

  World domination of the record charts having proved curiously elusive, Phil and I decided to have a cooling-off period where each party was free to pursue solo projects, like fitting a gas central-heating boiler or applying filler to the corroding wheel arches of a Talbot Samba. When you think about it, most legendary partnerships need to split up from time to time to reassess their commitment to each other: Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richard, Liam and Noel, George Michael and Andrew Ridgley, Torville and Dean, Ray Allen and Lord Charles, Hale and Pace. Well, all right, Hale and Pace haven’t as yet, but there’s no harm in hoping. Sometimes these splits can be as unpleasant as the most acrimonious divorce, but you see things a lot more clearly once the dust has settled, which for Wammo took a considerable length of time as the old boiler hadn’t been touched for years.

  In much the same grand manner in which the County Fathers had been a withdrawal from the stage into the cocoon of the studio, that having failed, I left the sterility of recording to return to the concert platform. This time things were different.

  The band was formed for the best of all reasons: we were all mates who’d been asked to play at a Christmas party, and what’s more, a Christmas party we were all going to attend anyway. This meant that we could still go to the bash, but could get snot-flying drunk for free and a taxi on the company’s account into which you’d be poured in the early hours of the morning. Result.

  In addition to myself, there were two linchpins in the line-up, both of whom I was sharing office space with at the time. One was an old folkie called Cheese, who had for several decades been trawling the folk-club circuit in a succession of sensible jumpers sporting the kind of bushy beard you never see outside the folk fraternity unless it’s on the face of Brian Blessed. He knew literally hundreds of songs, some of them composed as recently as the late eighteenth century, but was keen to get involved in a bit of kick-botty rock’n’roll.

  I think he’d begun to tire of the puritanism he’d encountered in all those years playing venues with names like the Luddite’s Retreat or the Clog and Copper Kettle. Folk is a traditional and ever-evolving music that is very much alive, but there are those who would have you believe it has no credibility unless it’s at least a hundred years old. It’s hard to shake the impression that these deluded souls would really rather be living in the Industrial Revolution in back-to-back housing suffering from rickets. They are the kind of imbeciles who will walk out in disgust if you have the audacity to miss out verse sixteen of ‘Sir John a’Gaunt’s Lament’. No wonder Sir John was lamenting, he had twenty-four verses to get through. Cheese had evidently had enough of performing at clubs where, despite being ‘the turn’, he was expected to queue up and dip a pewter tankard in a cask of Dollop’s Old Inscrutable Gravedigger’s Ale with a dead rat fermenting at the bottom of it: ‘What’s up with you, lad? It improves the flavour.’ He’d had a bellyful of sweating buckets over his Martin acoustic only for some grizzly, bespectacled barmpot in corduroy plus-fours to come over and say, ‘Not bad, but I think you’ll find that “The Merry Milkmaid of Wessex, she did meet a ewe inseminator, oh” should be performed unaccompanied.’ It was impossible to sate their appetite for historical accuracy. You weren’t taken seriously at all unless you put your finger in your ear, something even the biggest folk artists have a habit of doing. You’d have thought that once you’ve got a few quid, you’d pay a roadie to do that.

  So Cheese was on board, bringing with him Squigsy, a Cajun fiddler of some repute in the Burton upon Trent area. The other colossus of the band was Wobbly Bob Dickinson. Wobbly Bob was a veteran of the Manchester scene and, apart from knowing a truckload about music, was genuinely the nicest bloke you could ever wish to meet. Signed on loan from the Ragin’ Cajuns, he was not only a hugely gifted exponent of the washboard vest but also one hell of a triangle player. What audiences loved was the gusto with which he attacked his chosen instruments. Watching him fling his head about as he laid into that triangle was like watching Pete Townshend trashing a Rickenbacker, only it was a lot cheaper because it’s pretty hard to inflict lasting damage on a triangle unless you are a keen spot welder. In the history of rock there have been many on whom has been bestowed the title of guitar hero, but I can’t for the life of me think of another triangle hero to compete with Wobbly Bob. Over the next few months we’d play at quite a few parties with the line-up fleshed out with various drinking mates, work colleagues, itinerant tinkers, bog-trotting playboys and blond-haired old pals of the drummer working in the building trade in Preston. No show without Punch. So much for the trial separation.

  Musically, we played a
selection of Cajun, folk, rockabilly and country tunes. Despite coming from wildly different backgrounds, we shared a love of Hank Williams, Dr John, Ry Cooder, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Van Morrison. Mostly, though, we were huge fans of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues. It wasn’t just that MacGowan had written dozens of songs in the traditional idiom with lyrics that read like poetry and tunes that seemed to have existed for hundreds of years, it was also that it seemed to go down a storm with audiences who were riotously pissed, which, for a party band, is exactly what’s required.

  Choosing a name for this raggle-taggle gaggle proved difficult. Not because we couldn’t think of one. Quite the contrary. We’d been compiling a list of prospective names for just such an opportunity for several months. It had become a familiar game during endless, empty summer afternoons in the halcyon days of working for a large overstaffed corporation untroubled by modern management thinking, the essence of that thinking being that to save money you should undertake wholesale sackings of staff, but should recruit huge numbers of highly paid bureaucrats to do it. Substantial amounts of time had been spent christening fictitious bands in an attempt to constructively fill that irritating gap between lunch and the pub known as the afternoon. There was the stadium rock band fronted by Ken Dodd called By Jovi, or their equally popular folk-tinged brethren Ban Jovi. There was hillbilly music for generation X-ers courtesy of Smashing Bumpkins, or close harmony pop from the golden beaches of the north-west from the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Boys. Crooning formed a ground-breaking crossover with progressive rock in Nat King Crimson, while heavy blues was topped with the pure voice of the chorister for Aled Zeppelin. From a meeting of ornithologists of a glam-rock persuasion came Guillimot the Hoople, closely followed by the suburban folk-rock experience of Carport Convention. Curing insomnia wherever they played their flutes came Jethro Dull, long before we heard the heady mix of beats, guitars and samples from car maintenance videos that was the domain of Big Audio Dolomite. Five ageing vocalists in matching outfits performed insipid dance routines as Dadzone, while from Holland came the throbbing disco sounds of 2 Untalented (‘No no, no no no no no no, no no, no no, there’s no lyrics’). Finally came the triumvirate of bands who were a good deal more portly than their more successful counterparts. There were the purveyors of pristine pop for plumpish people known as Beer Gut 100, along with slobbish synth duo the Chip Shop Boys. In the end we settled for emulating those gluttonous sixties siblings with the Everly Built Brothers.