Lard approached his microphone and announced, ‘We are the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world.’
‘Ever,’ screamed the crowd, obligingly on cue. With that, we ploughed into a version of the Osmonds’ ‘Crazy Horses’, with ‘shire’ ingeniously substituted for the word ‘crazy’, that was lumpen, leaden, lumbering and therefore not entirely dissimilar to the original.
We played for about half an hour before returning to the dressing-room to drink the remaining lager, divest ourselves of sweat-soaked leather trousers with the aid of tyre levers and congratulate each other on having played to that size of crowd without either collapsing in a gibbering heap of nerves, perspiration and methane, or being bottled off.
Over the next couple of days we played the NEC and Sheffield Arena as planned, but even though we were operating on a scale beyond our wildest dreams, Lard and I reached a momentous decision. We were going to break up the band. For one thing, Chunky was leaving to move back down to London, and in his absence someone else would have to be the butt of all the jokes, and none of us wanted that. We’d miss him, too. Without Chunky it would never have felt quite right. For another thing, we’d played the Glastonbury Festival, done our own tour, played an album launch party at the legendary 100 Club on Oxford Street and performed at three of the biggest arenas in England. What could ever come close to that again? The last thing we wanted was to be playing Loughborough University on a rain-lashed Monday to thirty-two acne-riddled undergraduates at a social for the Philatelic Society. We didn’t want to become a bunch of sad old tossers hauling a tired old cabaret act round the circuit, although many would say this was akin to locking the stable door after the shire horse had bolted. Basically, we’d had a great time living out all our fantasies and wanted to bail out before reality kicked in.
I’ve got the final gig at Sheffield Arena on video, and I’m not ashamed to say I watch it regularly. I love the bit where Lard tells the crowd that we’re splitting up, but informs them that the Samaritans are on hand to help deal with any trauma. I love the bit where Chunky is berated for hitting a bum note in front of ten thousand people. I love the bit where ‘West Country Boy’ grinds to a painful halt during the intro. I love the bit where Lard straps on a sitar and produces the most unpleasant sound ever to come from a musical instrument, not counting the bagpipes. I love the bit where Patrick, on stage with an unplayed saxophone for no apparent reason, lends his fur coat to Lard, revealing a pair of faded, frayed and unnecessarily skimpy black underpants.
Most of all, though, I love the bit where the camera spins round and sweeps over the audience. When you talk about ten thousand people it’s hard to visualise exactly what that means, but as the camera pans round that stadium in the half-light reflected from the stage, there appears to be an endless ocean of bodies with arms aloft and hands clapping. And they’re clapping for us. It was a moment for which I’d served a twenty-five-year apprenticeship, and every time I see it I relive it in the pit of my stomach. Through all the days of the Berlin Airlift, Billy Moon, Zoot Suit and the Zeroids, She Cracked, the Brilliantines, Bob Sleigh and the Crestas, House on Fire, the County Fathers, the Everly Built Brothers, Deep Blue Day and the Hunks of Burning Love I’d dreamed of it being just like that without ever truly believing it would happen. But it had. Under false pretences in many ways, but at least I’d always know what it felt like to face a crowd’s approval on that scale. As far as being in a band went, I knew that nothing would ever feel as special as that again and, with a sense of sadness but also safe in the knowledge that it was the right thing to do, that night in Sheffield I threw away my drumsticks and packed in playing for good.
Then we formed the Mahones.
We’re playing at the George and Dragon on St Patrick’s night.
The addiction evidently incurable, the addict prepares himself another fix.
Showbusiness - The Diary of a Rock 'n' Roll Nobody Page 21