‘Bloody brilliant, this, isn’t it?’ beamed Lard, ‘the festival life.’
‘Dead right,’ I agreed. ‘That Neil Young’s not so daft after all.’
The villainous music press, riddled with corruption from top to bottom including the bit in the middle, colluded in withholding the facts about Glastonbury from a hoodwinked populace. No one denies that Radiohead displayed a grace and poise all too rare on the festival stage, or that the Prodigy stomped around with an infectious abandon like a bunch of painted gnomes with bolts through their noses who’d just discovered the joys of amphetamines. Nowhere, though, did the scurrilous so-called journalists get their story straight. Anyone who was there will tell you that Glasto 97 was the year of the Horse, or, to put it another way, we came, we saw, we cantered.
Despite the absence of the printed truth, however, word began to spread. Stories began to circulate based on eyewitness accounts of the single most important event in terms of redefining rock’n’roll since Bob Dylan went electric and Half Man Half Biscuit released ‘The Trumpton Riots’. Fables of guitars exploring revolutionary new tunings became the stuff of awed whisper the length and breadth of the nation, as did myths of the deconstruction of rhythm with post-modernist dropped beats, legends of one-note bass solos played by a drop-kicking egghead, and tales, quite literally, from topographic oceans. Public demand was growing at a rate which alarmed the authorities, and fearing scenes of civil disobedience last seen on the streets during the poll tax débâcle, a nationwide tour was hastily arranged. The people had spoken. They wanted the four horsemen of the a-clop-alypse to ride into their towns and villages like a latter-day Robin Hood and his Merry Men. In many ways the stout brotherhood of Sherwood proved an uncanny parallel for the Shirehorses. They robbed from the rich to give to the poor, we stole from the rock aristocracy to take the tunes back to the peasants. They dressed in green to blend in with the forest, we dressed in football shirts to move unhindered among the oiks. They lived hard in tree houses, we roughed it in various Moat Houses. They had Friar Tuck, we had Chunky. Of course, we didn’t have the same sexual charisma that comes from being romantic renegades in tightly packed tights. Historical rumour suggests that, in addition to his good works, old Robin Hood was a right fanny magnet, with women throwing themselves at him at every turn. No, hang on, I’m getting confused with Robin Cook here, aren’t I?
The ‘We Came, We Saw, We Cantered’ tour left Manchester on Monday, 22 September 1997. Our fleet of vehicles included a people carrier for the band, a sleeper coach for the crew, a van for the gear and a double-decker London bus for the purpose of slowing the whole motorcade down to about thirty-five miles an hour. To give us a fitting send-off, the fine people of Boddington’s brewery sent their team of shire horses with dray. If the press had hitherto held back on reporting the wave of Shiremania, then this proved a photo opportunity even the most cynical editor couldn’t resist, and reports of that event appeared not only in the Withington Reporter but also displaced several inches usually devoted to the angling column in the Levenshulme Bugle.
The itinerary had been carefully planned to afford everyone in the UK the chance to see the greatest rock’n’roll band ever. Accordingly the Scottish leg of the tour took place that night in Newcastle upon Tyne just outside Edinburgh. The hardy souls of the red and white rose came to pay homage in Leeds, and those unfortunate enough to be living in the Midlands had a rare beacon of radiance illuminating their dismal lives when we hit Birmingham on the Wednesday. On Thursday we would advance fearlessly into the southern hillbilly country that lay beyond even Coventry, as our mission as ambassadors of good rocking and goodwill took us to a place called London, the capital of Essex. For a final flourish we would venture into the real deep south, Portsmouth.
Here we expected to encounter uncivilised savages running amok in the narrow streets, even if the fleet was out. We were not to be disappointed, thanks to a scrum of inebriated rednecks from the university rugby club.
As the people’s band, it was important to keep ticket prices low so as not to put the concerts beyond the means of the poorest members of society like nurses, cleaners and night-time disc jockeys on local radio. On the safe assumption that no one would look a Shirehorse in the mouth, or indeed in any other orifice unless it was absolutely essential, some gigs were as cheap as it’s possible to be, which is to say free. Other venues charged around the £3 mark, which may not sound a lot to you, but if you were a single parent with a fiver to spend on feeding two children and you’d already spent £2.75 on fish fingers, beans and instant mash, then it’s seventy-five new pence less than you’ve got, and I think it’s worth remembering that. If you’d had to get the bus back from the mini-mart, quite possibly a Spar, then you could be a further sixty or seventy pence down, depending on how far away from the shops you live. You could also have found that the economy fish fingers were sold out, necessitating the purchase of slightly more expensive foodstuffs, for example, smoked salmon, Parma ham, pâté de fois gras and sun-dried tomatoes washed down with a choice Pouilly-Fumé, leaving you with a debt of around £35, from which begins a downward spiral of despair. In those circumstances, a ticket to see the Shirehorses might be just the tonic you need, and yet it would plunge you £3 deeper into the red. This would be a perplexing dilemma even without the vulturous touts who were out in force in Leeds charging, for a ticket with a face value of three quid, upwards of £3.25. Poor punters are exploited in this way every day, and how do you decide between seeing the Shirehorses and putting food in your children’s mouths? Well, kids are resilient and there’s always school dinners to look forward to. The point is, though, that the moral responsibility for the nation should not have fallen on our shoulders. We kept entrance charges low as an act of philanthropy, and those who suggest that pricing policy was driven by a fear that no one would turn up if it cost much more than a pint are barking up the wrong forest. We cared for those people like a shepherd cares for his flock, although without the help of a dog obviously, and if we hadn’t been there for them, who knows what might have happened? So much for the welfare state.
The impact of those performances on the wide-eyed innocents lucky enough to gain admission cannot, I think, be underestimated. It wasn’t just the music and the stage presence, it was the whole multi-media sensory overload and dramatic innovation that captured the imagination. Either side of the auditorium were giant video screens on to which appeared, not the images of the band a self-aggrandising Aerosmith might favour, but footage of shire horses ploughing rutted furrows. Apart from being as potent a symbol for rock’n’roll rebellion as it’s possible to conceive, it communicated that we were earthy men of the soil, free from ego and arrogance, and at one with the audience. We were telling them that, even though we were glamorous showbiz potentates from the great court of cult, we perceived no barrier between us and them, although I doubt if many of them understood, because they were not only pissed but thick as one short plank, which is half as thick as two and therefore twice as stupid.
Adding to the visual spectacle were the two on-stage sheds. A feast for the eye in themselves, the audience watched open-mouthed as, during the first song, the top half of the stable doors flew open to reveal a pair of perfect reproduction horses’ arses lovingly fashioned from top-of-the-range plywood. As if this wasn’t almost too much to absorb with the limitations of the human eye, the observant would quickly notice that the luxuriant tails, created from jet-black nylon fibre costing nearly six quid, were flicking gaily in time to the music, an achievement apparently beyond the capabilities of the drummer. The tails were operated behind the drum riser via two invisible threads by a chap called Mark. A skilled audio-visual technician and veteran of many major tours, he can have had few prouder moments than this. There were even more aspects to the spectacle. There was the euphoric opening charge of ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, during which a ceramic cart-horse purchased for £3.50 at a car-boot sale descended majestically from the lighting rig through the swirl
ing dry ice, a sight which became even more impressive when we removed the price tag from the horse’s neck. There were bales of hay and horseshoes on the drum-kit and the sheer ambition of the piece revived the concept of rock as theatre. In fact, we can lay claim to having, in many ways, invented that particular idiom. There are those who will raise a quizzical eyebrow and point towards Rick Wakeman’s ‘King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table on Ice’, but that was just a bloke playing the organ while people skated, which is really not that unusual when you think about it.
The tour was a success whichever way you look at it. All right, I’m prepared to concede that I may have made outlandish claims for what was, in effect, a dodgy covers band performing at five student unions, but everybody got something out of it. The audience had a good night out and we finally got to play at being rock stars for a week, and who would begrudge us that? Make no mistake, we knew we were rubbish, and as for the audience, they knew we knew we were rubbish. What’s more, we knew that they knew that we knew we were rubbish. It was a joke shared between us all, band and audience alike, and it was all the more enjoyable for that.
We flew home to Manchester on the Saturday morning with wonderful memories and crippling hangovers, and the Shirehorses story may well have ended there, were it not for the fact that it went on a bit longer.
Enter stage left Damon Albarn.
It was Lard’s idea.
‘Let’s play a stadium gig,’ he announced cheerfully one morning, during one of the daily sessions in which we scripted ad libs for our thrillingly off-the-cuff radio show.
‘Well, yes, great idea,’ I said, ‘but who’s going to put us on in a stadium, and isn’t there just the faintest chance that we might fail to fill a venue with a capacity of sixteen thousand?’
‘No, pillock features,’ countered the silver-tongued charmer, ‘we’ll support someone else. Look here, Blur are touring and they’re playing Nynex. Damon’ll let us play. He’s a good lad, is D.’
Well, there was no arguing with that. On the brief and infrequent occasions that we’d met Damon and the rest of Blur, they did appear to be thoroughly decent chaps refreshingly unaffected by their considerable success. Even so, it seemed wildly optimistic to think that their general good nature would so cloud their sense of logic that they would let four paunchy plonkers ply their tawdry cabaret act in front of several thousand avid Blur-ites. Undeterred, Lard contacted the band through their record company and we sat back and waited for the expected rebuttal. It never came.
The office door practically splintered as Lard booted it open with his size-eleven pimp shoe.
‘Jesus Christ, you’re not going to believe this. Damon said yes.’
‘You what?’
‘He says we can play Manchester.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘I’m not, and he says we can play Birmingham and Sheffield as well.’
‘Let me get this right. The Shirehorses are going to play the Nynex in Manchester, the NEC in Birmingham and Sheffield Arena?’
‘Yup.’
‘Well, flip my hat.’
I’d only been to Nynex once, and that was because we’d got free tickets to see Kiss, the grand-daddies of comedy rock. They were on fine form in full make-up, flying on winches above the stage, spitting blood and making ludicrous gestures and announcements. At one point, during the credulity-stretching rhythm guitar solo, Paul Stanley screamed, ‘Whoaagh, do you feel all right? I’ve got my love gun loaded tonight.’ Tottering around on platforms that would not have been out of place in the North Sea, stripped to the waist to display chest hair you could plait, he regaled the packed arena to the thrilling aural experience of a straight A chord before imparting the further information that ‘all the ladies dig my love gun’.
At this point, wiping the tears from my eyes and with my tongue loosened by several pints of Scrumpy at a nearby spit and sawdust hostelry, I sought to break the Stanley code for any fans who were unclear as to his real meaning. Leaning conspiratorially towards the two gnarled behemoths in Megadeth T-shirts shoehorned into the plastic seats in front of us, I let them into the secret: ‘He’s talking about his penis, you know.’
From the stage the prophet Paul preached on: ‘Yeah, let me hear you say wuuuuuurgh if you wanna see my love gun, Manchestaaaah!’
‘There he goes again, lads. He wants to know if you’d like to see his penis.’
Lard joined in, gleefully springing to his feet like an unbeliever converted at a Billy Graham rally, and shouted, ‘Paul Stanley has a penis, everybody!’
We left before the gig finished, partially to get back to the pub before last orders and partially to avoid being beaten to a pulp. My memories of that night are otherwise hazy, but one thing was as clear as a long-term scientologist: Nynex was absolutely massive.
On the great day itself, we arrived backstage in true rock star tradition. Initially we’d considered hiring a white limousine, but finding the cost prohibitive settled instead on our mate Patrick’s white Ford Fiesta with the rear windows blacked out with bin-liners. Chunky and the rest of the entourage took a minicab from the BBC, yet despite both cars leaving in a convoy to undertake the ten-minute journey across town, we still managed to lose the Prince of Darkness en route. He eventually turned up half an hour later, guitar in hand, having arrived on foot, and entered the stadium through the turnstiles. Here he was, about to play the biggest gig of his life, and he’d had to walk there. Somehow there was something apposite and wonderful in that.
We were shown to our dressing-room, which was in itself bigger than most of the venues any of us had previously played. As we trooped on to the stage for the sound check, the size of the place really overwhelmed us. Often used for ice hockey, the arena floor went back so far you’d swear you could detect the curvature of the earth. On all sides thousands of plastic seats ascended in tiers that seemed almost vertical.
Sickly Rob the soundman’s voice crackled through the monitors: ‘Right, kick drum, please, Mark.’
I pressed the pedal with my right foot, creating the familiar dull thud, which was followed a second later by a reverberation from the back of the hall like a military salute. It was like playing in the Grand Canyon.
Back in the dressing-room, friends and colleagues dropped by to offer warm encouragement:
‘A bunch of chancers like you at Nynex? It’s absurd.’
‘You’re going to die on your arses out there, lads.’
‘Have you all got private medical insurance?’
‘Christ, that’s foul, Chunky, what have you been eating?’
A thoroughly charming Damon and Blur guitarist Graham Coxon, who’d dropped by to say hello and share a can of Kestrel, witnessed the return of our sandwich-board-toting accomplice, Steve. Dressed in a flat-cap and brown dust-coat, he’d been hired to amble among the queuing fans wearing a board that read, ‘The end is nigh, but it’s not too late to buy The Worst Album in the World . . . Ever . . . Ever by the Shirehorses.’ You could tell by the looks on their faces that Damon and Graham wished they’d thought of that, too.
We changed into our chosen stage gear: leather trousers blagged from a warehouse in Scotland, near Newcastle, and striped Fair Isle pullovers bought in the sale at Halon Menswear, over the road from the Monsoon curry house. Hastily hired hand Ben the Beard made the final instrument checks and, deciding they were out of tune to the requisite degree, tipped the wink to our ever-grinning tour manager Dave Hardy, who guided us to the side of the stage. I’d be lying if I said the auditorium was full, but there were between six and seven thousand people already in their seats and it looked like the whole world to us. We buoyed each others’ confidence with a swift exchange.
‘Right, this is it. Let’s rock a fat one, everybody.’
‘Yeah, rock’n’roll.’
‘Hello, Manchester, d’you wanna see my love gun?’
‘Christ, Chunky, that really is foul. What have you been eating?’
As ‘The Ride o
f the Valkyries’ started to rumble through the Stonehenge-proportioned speaker stacks, the arena was plunged into darkness and two thousand cross-legged adolescents leaped to their feet and charged towards the stage. The air of excitement ripped through me like an electric charge, although obviously not as powerful a zap as someone strapped in an electric chair or I’d have been dead, which would have been a bit of a bummer; and though I knew deep down it was all an elaborate joke that had gone much too far, it would take a bigger man than me not to believe it was all real for just a couple of minutes.
I strode up to the mike and, in the timeless tradition of vocalists without an intelligent thought in their heads, shouted, ‘Yeah.’ The audience, to their eternal credit and in a show of collective irony, responded in the equally timeless tradition of the concert-going flock of sheep with an emphatic ‘Yeah’ of alarming volume. On a roll, I continued, ‘We are the Shirehorses,’ which we were, ‘and we have come to kick some botty tonight,’ which we hadn’t.
Showbusiness - The Diary of a Rock 'n' Roll Nobody Page 20