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

by Mark Radcliffe

  She will never speak a truer word, even if she says that Hale and Pace are not very funny. It’s impassioned, informed and ultimately pocket-lining reviews like this that restore your faith in the free music press. With such united acclaim, seduction of the general public was inevitable, and sales around the fifty thousand mark saw us topping the prestigious mid-price album charts for over two months. Overseas, the story was much the same. On its day of release, The Worst Album was rumoured to be outselling the aforementioned Spice World on the Isle of Man.

  With such healthy record sales, the pressure began to grow for us to play live and accordingly we made plans to recruit the finest hand-picked team of crack session musicians money could buy. In the end, though, we couldn’t be arsed and settled on two blokes who worked with us. Firstly, there was Chunky. Ostensibly employed as our producer, Chunky was a Leeds United fan of ample girth with a style of goatee beard first popularised during the Spanish Inquisition. He was nothing if not encouraging, urging us to ‘rock a fat one’ at the start of each historic radio broadcast before retiring behind the glass to smoke Marlboro Lights, break wind and execute feverish throat-slitting signals when the links threatened to go on longer than the records. When not kicking filing cabinets in fits of temper, he was a man of limitless good humour who would often cry with laughter, lending him the look of a big bearded baby. He was recruited as the bass player, despite the fact that he’d never played bass before. He’d played guitar, though, and we figured the longer stretches required to play bass would present no problems for his strong yet nimble fingers on account of the extensive exercise those digits had received during their regular work-outs picking his nose. During rehearsals it became apparent that here was a man born to be on stage. He could strut, thrust, pout and scissor-kick like AC/DC’s Angus Young, despite an Aberdeen Angus build that would come to test the structural limitations of all but the sturdiest stages. After each song had been practised several times, we’d eventually reach the end at approximately the same time, at which point I’d enquire, ‘Are you happy with that, Chunky?’

  His response would always be the same. With a knowing wink, he’d tap his forehead with his index finger and say, ‘It’s all up here, mate.’ Whether he was referring to music committed to memory or hair committed to his head was unclear, although, in truth, there wasn’t much of either.

  With me on drums and Chunky on board, the rhythm section began to exhibit all the solidity of a firmly set blancmange. Up front, meanwhile, the unique full-frontal approach to the guitar employed by the boy Lard was desperately in need of a second instrument with which to deftly intertwine. In other words, someone needed to play the right notes while he played the wrong ones. This was a job tailor-made for our long-suffering engineer, Chris. Chris could play more or less anything. A veteran of the Chester folk scene, he was equally adept on mandolin, banjo, guitar, bass, hammer dulcimer and hammer drill. He was also a much-admired Morris dancer and could often be seen in clogs garlanded with ribbons and bells moving in a succession of intricate steps and spirited hops, which is no mean feat when you’re carrying a tray of fish, chips and mushy peas in the staff canteen. On top of being able to play several different musical instruments, he also owned enough of them to stock a modestly proportioned retail outlet, and thanks to years of training by the BBC in seminars called things like ‘Jack Field Normalling’ and ‘Azimuth Dissemination’, run by bespectacled halitosis specialists in shapeless brown cardigans, he knew all about sound as well. As if that wasn’t enough, he could fix things, too. Any small running repairs would swiftly be undertaken by Chris with the Swiss Army knife he kept clipped to his money-belt, on the opposite side from where he hung his pewter tankard. In rehearsal he presented something of a contrast to Chunky in that he not only stood still, although if you watched closely there was the faintest suggestion of a minuscule metronomic swaying from side to side, but he also played the notes in the right order. We christened him the Dark Prince.

  Nicknames are a very important part of band life and can be bestowed for any number of reasons. John Bonham’s tendency to grimace like a chimp on stage with Led Zeppelin earned him the pet name Bonzo, while the Who’s John Entwhistle was known as the Ox because he always wore a yoke with which he pulled a little plough. Other famous examples include the big-boned vocalist with Canned Heat, Bob Hite, who was known the world over as the Bear because he often went for a shit in the woods, in contrast to the intoxicating Cat, who moved with a feline grace en route to the litter tray that Prince kept by the back door. Sting, on the other hand, just wanted to hide the fact that he was called Gordon.

  The dark Prince was so named because he was the only member of the band with anything like a full head of hair. He had luxuriant dark Byronesque curls about which he was quite fastidious, washing them twice a year whether they needed it or not. The rest of us were envious of the amount of hair he’d retained, but wondered why he chose to dip it in the chip pan before leaving home. I’ll never forget the look on his face when, backstage in make-up before our sole television appearance on The Sunday Show, the girl who’d been patiently filling the cracks in our faces with Poly Filla looked at Chris and said, ‘Is that your hair done, then?’

  With Chunky and the Dark Prince in harness, we soon put together a set variously described as meticulously observed, mercurially paced and mercifully brief. All we needed was a small club gig to get us started, which is how we came to play the Glastonbury Festival.

  I’ve never been much of a fan of pop festivals. My great-grandad fought in sludge-filled trenches and shat in hastily dug latrines alongside thousands of unwashed, brainwashed zombies in order to preserve freedom for future generations. It seems to me he’d be ever so slightly disappointed to discover that his descendants’ expression of that freedom was to spend several days in sludge-filled trenches shitting in hastily dug latrines alongside thousands of unwashed, brainwashed zombies in order to watch the Levellers. Glastonbury, however, is something different. Even though it is regularly accused of being a corporate event intent primarily on profiteering, it is the only festival that retains any essence of that founding hippy spirituality. If you’ve never been, and it’s my opinion that everyone should go at least once, it’s hard to convey just how seductive the atmosphere can be. Set in breathtakingly beautiful Somerset countryside, you enter a suspended reality when you step on to the festival site.

  Laid out in the mystical vale of Avalon, it has an unmistakable air of magic which the unmistakable air of dope, frying burgers and raw sewage does little to mask. Standing sentinel-like surveying the scene is the tower of Glastonbury Tor. A small, pale stone structure, it sits on top of a conical hill around which a footpath runs in a lazy concentric coil. Steeped in Arthurian legend, the hill is said to conceal a door to the underworld. Day and night the path is trodden by festival pilgrims hoping to discover the gateway to enlightenment, although they’re often in such a state that it would make the discovery of the secret portal unlikely even if its location was indicated with several large, neon arrow-shaped signs bearing the words: ‘This way to the underworld.’

  Going to Glastonbury is like simultaneously being thrust into the world’s biggest rave yet suffused with a harmony and idealism descended from the pioneers of the alternative lifestyle, all captured in a picture of a bustling rural fair by Brueghel. The only things you ever hear in the news about Glastonbury are the drugs, the mud, the toilets and the very occasional flare-up of violence. Considering the liberal supply of all manner of stimulants, and the sheer numbers of people involved, it’s remarkable that violent incidents should continue to be as few and far between as usable lavatories. The fact is that the English summer just doesn’t seem complete without this epic solstice gathering of the clans. It’s not just the music, even though they regularly have the bands you most want to see, with the exception of the Shirehorses. It’s not even the circus field, or the theatre tent, or the green fields complete with stone circle and tepee enclosure, or th
e healing field, or the wandering performance artists, or the monuments of scrap cars, or the availability of food from every nationality, or the provision of all manner of recreational possibilities twenty-four hours a day. It’s the people. The great British press are keen to perpetuate the myth that Glastonbury represents a coming together of all the undesirables in our society: the spongers, the anarchists, the dreadlocked Eco-terrorists, the Great Unwashed. What they fail to realise is that for every twig-haired, drug-addled didgeridoo carver called Wurzel you come across, you’ll meet ten slightly dishevelled, scrumpy-sozzled trainee quantity surveyors called Colin. For the most part, the Glastonbury Festival attracts not those with a tenuous grasp on reality but those with such a firm grasp on it that they understand the need to leave it behind once in a while.

  With a pop festival, your main concern is always going to be the weather. If the sun is shining you can put up with anything. With your closest friends in attendance, a reliable supply of your chosen poison and the rays pouring down on your selected grassy knoll, it may even be possible, and I realise I’m being optimistic here, to sit through Counting Crows without suffering any discernible side-effects. Out of your brains on a really hot day, you might even tolerate Runrig. If, however, the heavens have opened and you find yourself unable to halt the slide from your chosen patch of hillside to the mud-bath at the front of the stage, then even Beck, Supergrass and the Prodigy can seem like a pretty uninspiring prospect.

  As we entered the festival grounds that Thursday night in the pristine camper van that we’d borrowed for the occasion, it became clear that even though the previous few days of more or less continuous rain had dampened our spirits somewhat, nothing could have prepared us for the conditions that we encountered. It wasn’t actually raining, but darkness had fallen and, despite being the middle of June, it was freezing cold. Technically the festival hadn’t even started, but that hadn’t stopped the whole site becoming a quagmire. A combination of inaccurate directions and Chunky at the wheel soon necessitated an ambitious twenty-seven-point turn in an attempt to get our vehicle back on to the corrugated steel roadway. We knew it would end in tears and voiced our concerns to the driver:

  ‘You’ll never make it, Chunky.’

  ‘You chuffin’ idiot, what was that crunching sound?’

  ‘I think we’ve run over a crusty.’

  We hadn’t, but we had got one wheel in a ditch. We were stuck. Eventually we had to go and beg a bloke with a Land Rover to pull us out, but not before we’d spent the best part of an hour with our shoulders against the back of the van in an attempt at getting back on our way. Standing there, ankle-deep in slurry with each abortive wheel spin depositing further sprays of mud on to my new navy-blue and maroon anorak (Millets, £35.99), I pondered my first moments as a festival rock star. Lard shook his head.

  ‘Bloody awful, this, isn’t it? The festival life.’

  ‘Dead right,’ I agreed, ‘I don’t know how Neil Young puts up with it.’

  The following morning we rose early to perform a couple of hours of contractually obligatory nationwide breakfast broadcasting before making final preparations for our much-anticipated appearance on stage. First and foremost we were in urgent need of an extended visit to the lavatory to jettison the considerable quantities of cider and bacon butties that were threatening to turn to compacted clay in our innards. Our camper van was thoroughly well equipped and was, crucially, a good foot off the ground, and, believe you me, in that situation those twelve inches can make all the difference between a relatively comfortable night’s sleep and waking up in the company of a lugworm. On board was a chemical toilet, a Tupperware en suite facility of bijou proportions, which you might think would have rendered such visits to the communal water-closets unnecessary. You’d be wrong, though. There’s an unbreakable rock’n’roll rule relating to the toilet on the tour bus, and that rule is ‘no solids’.

  Suitably relieved, and half a stone lighter, we made our way to the windswept backstage compound behind the NME stage. Magnanimously, we agreed to play at ten o’clock on Friday morning. Presumably the organisers wanted to make sure the festival got off with a bang, and even though it’s not the most coveted slot, it’s by no means the worst. Poor old Radiohead had to go on late on Saturday night, after it had gone dark, for goodness’ sake. As we waited patiently for our time to come, we began to contemplate the reception that awaited us.

  ‘I hope I don’t lose my bottle when I hear the cheering,’ said a noticeably nervous Chunky.

  ‘No, you’ll be all right,’ I reassured him, ‘the roar of the crowd will inspire you.’

  ‘Shall I say “Hello, Glastonbury” or just “Hiya”?’ said Lard, ever attentive to detail.

  ‘What if no one’s turned up?’ muttered the Dark Prince.

  Christ, that was worth thinking about. When you imagine playing at a festival, you envisage a sea of people stretching almost to the horizon with banners held aloft and the most enthusiastic fans clambering on to each others’ shoulders or stage-diving into the seething fray. What would we feel like if we walked out there, arms outspread to receive the adulation, to be confronted with two stewards in luminous jerkins, a juggler in a jester’s costume who’d got lost on his way to the circus tent, three bladdered shelf stackers from Bridlington and Colin the trainee quantity surveyor? For the first time we had to accept that it was a possibility. We’d never played live before, and while we’d plugged it on the radio the powers that be had left our name off the posters, probably because they were worried about hordes of Horse fans descending without tickets. We pulled on the zipper-jerkins and matching plant-pot hats we’d bought at cost from Paul Smith, and the new Manchester City shirts we’d blagged for free, and waited.

  The weather was worsening. The wind was by now so strong that the hats would only stay on with the aid of a length of gaffer tape wrapped over the head and under the chin. The Seahorses turned up to pose for matey photographs and pick up a few tips on live performance, the stage crew interminably intoned ‘one, two’ into the microphones, the bass player, visibly agitated, squeezed his scrotum for comfort and, almost without our noticing, they began to arrive. From all corners of the field they came, a trickle at first, developing into a steady stream, which in turn gave way to a torrent. Hundreds, no, thousands of people striding towards a silent stage to see an unbilled, untested, untalented band of misshapen radio hacks. There was even a banner fluttering in the morning mist proclaiming the legend ‘Ride On Shirehorses’. When we arrived on stage with maximum pomposity to the strains of Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ twenty minutes later, there must have been five thousand misguided souls with nothing better to do in attendance. I’ve got a tape of the whole event, and when Lard walks up to the microphone and shouts ‘Hiya’ the massed response still sends a shiver down my spine and into the crack of my bottom.

  By and large we acquitted ourselves fairly honourably, in that none of the songs ground to a halt and nobody, not even Chunky, made a blunderingly obvious mistake, or, in bandspeak, dropped a major bollock. We didn’t talk much, to the crowd or to each other. I don’t think any of us could quite believe that we were actually there. It was over in just under half an hour, yet so great was the number of people there to witness this historic event that the already soggy underfoot conditions at the front of the arena had deteriorated to such an extent that the stage itself had begun to sink. A hazardous situation exacerbated by the relentlessly pogoing Chunkster. As we took leave of our audience, neither we nor they had any way of knowing that there would be a six-hour hiatus while the authorities made the area safe enough for proceedings to continue. A truckload of shale and a hundred bales of hay had to be deposited into the murky pool that had been created by the stampeding herds of Shirehorse fanatics. The last thing the organisers wanted was for those muddied waters to swallow whole a person of smaller stature, for example Brian Molko out of Placebo, Sean Moore out of the Manic Street Preachers or Ronnie Corbett out of The Two Ronn
ies. With the cheers of the throng still ringing in our ears, we retired to the beer tent, where Echo and the Bunnymen came to pay their respects and our record company treated us to a bottle of Pomagne and a horse brass.