March 1979

Giving Head

 

Tim and I decide we should use the Stranglers in Japan story as the main feature of our first syndicated column along with record and concert reviews. We do a mass mail-out to every local paper in the country with a covering letter saying they have permission to use this free of charge, then pay twenty-five pounds for each subsequent weekly column.

Lots of papers use the column, but only two agree to pay for a regular supply. Tight bastards. The road to riches is closed for extensive works and won’t be opened again for a year. It’s back to the bread-and-butter stuff of phoners and phonies.

It’s a never-ending story of love, hate and redemption. An orgy of celebrity that demands cynicism. The boy can’t help it and it leaks out during a speed-fuelled meeting with Motorhead in their manager’s London office …

Well, first of all there’s Lemmy – a couple of protuberances on his face (de rigueur for a heavy metal beast), Quo coiffeur (that’s long, no-nonsense greasy), hirsute top lip (curling Zapata moustache currently fashionable among London taxi drivers), mean look (very effective behind a mike), hairy chest with medallion (the Greek pose) and leather jacket. Bassist.

Then there’s Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor – thin eyebrows (sign of a psychopath), narrow, piercing eyes (sign of a psychopath), Sid Vicious barnet (sign of a psychopath), two days’ facial growth (sign of lazy psychopath), not so tall as other members of the band (sign of short psychopath) and leather jacket. Drummer.

And, of course, there’s Eddie Clarke – er, no painfully obvious physical characteristics (is this man really a member of Motorhead?) and leather jacket. Guitarist.

These men actually appeared on Top of the Pops.  And they are probably the most slagged band of our time. Just a few years ago they were voted the Best Worst Band. They’ve been ridiculed, accused of having no musical talent and even disliked a bit too. And because of that they now have a single and an album in the charts. Nobody could accuse them of being insidious.

‘We’re resigned to the fact that we’ll never be accepted on a musical level by the critics,’ says Lemmy, lounging on the lino of his manager’s office in West London. ‘All they ever review is our stance. Okay, at the beginning it’s a laugh, but after a while it becomes both boring and annoying.’

That attitude has recently escalated with the release of their aptly titled second album Overkill. Record Mirror’s lithe, libidinous Chris Westwood has just been awarded the coveted Motorhead Intellectual Nerd of the Year Trophy. His album review really got to their dandruff.

‘He said I should grow up,’ Lemmy complains. ‘Christ, if I grew any bigger I’d be out of reach! He wasn’t constructive at all. It was just one big bitch. Fancy some speed?’

I acquiesce. Hot stuff. In fact, I’m sitting here eating my heart out, baby …

‘Yet when we met him he was really nice – drinking our drinks, smoking our fags. Maybe we didn’t give him enough.’

‘People like that are really beginning to get to me. I seriously think they regard us as three geezers wandering around in leather jackets and gun belts causing mayhem. Well, I regard them as pseudo-intellectuals who lock the world out when they sit behind their little typewriters. I’ve got a really good wall for them to bang their heads against.’

So we’re confronted by two opposing Motorhead schools: (1) the pupils who think the traumatic trio are just another bunch of metal gurus; (2) the pupils who like Motorhead quite a lot.

‘Rock ’n’ roll refused to die and now heavy metal is refusing to die,’ says Lemmy, white speck in a nostril hair, white heat in a brain cell.

‘I hate that term "heavy metal",’ interrupts Phil. ‘It immediately conjures up visions of heeled boots, Spandex trousers and demented fools.’

‘Right,’ says Lemmy. ‘I think we’re more a molten-metal band.’

A molten-metal band that was just a solid mass four years ago when Lemmy first formed it after leaving Hawkwind. You remember them − unidentified flying objects in Lurex strides. Motorhead number one recorded an album that was never released. Lemmy drafted in two new musicians – Taylor and Clarke – and they’ve never looked back.

Mind you, they’ve never looked forward either.

Their first album sold around 50,000 and a single, ‘Louie Louie’, actually showed in the charts. Grown men were seen to break down and cry when they saw the record at number sixty. And now the new success, which has jettisoned Motorhead into the £45-a-week bracket -- each!

But things weren’t always rosy. ‘We looked like splitting at one point,’ says Phil. ‘One night, just before a gig, I punched our tour manager on the head and broke my hand. It was over a chick …’

Lemmy’s eyes light up. Not sure if it’s a chemical or spiritual reaction. ‘Never take chicks with you on the road -- they’re bad news. Hawkwind were destroyed by chicks.’

‘Now we’ve got a good manager and a great lawyer,’ says Lemmy. ‘With a combination like that we’re impregnable.

‘That’s the thing about punk. They were all such a bunch of kids. If you don’t get yourself organised in this business, people will walk all over you. People had been walking all over us for a long time. What do you do when people hate you? You just keep going. You fight back. You survive. That’s why punk was destroyed – it never fought back. Mind you, heroin also helped it along the path to destruction.’

Lemmy and Eddie continue to slag off the use of heroin.

Lemmy: ‘Smack has killed three musical movements – first acid rock, then pub rock and now punk. Okay, I admit I’m a bit of a speed freak – and I’m afraid I’m influencing the rest of this band – but I’d never touch smack. People who like smack also like Lou Reed and that can’t be anything in its favour.’

Eddie: ‘I knew a guy who was into needles so much he once stuck an eye dropper into the veins of his wrist and bled to death in a public toilet.’

Lemmy is thirty-three, nurtured on Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, Gene Vincent and those other two tasty trios, Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. He once worked as a roadie for Hendrix. He’s a man who lives very much in that Middle Earth world of Trafalgar Square hippies and kimonos. ‘I play the kind of music that I’d like to go and watch. There ain’t a band in the world that enjoys doing what they do more than us. We’re so happy doing what we’re being.’

(The indomitable Lemmy has ensured that Motorhead – minus Taylor and Clarke − have continued to record and perform to the present day. They have become something of an institution and even picked up a Grammy in 2005 for Best Metal Performance. They released the their 21st studio album, Aftershock, in 2013).

Apparently, Lemmy, who I actually think is a pretty groovy guy, isn’t terribly enamoured with the intro to the article (unsurprisingly) and tells a colleague that he’ll beat the shit out of me if ever our paths cross. I thought he’d laugh at what I considered to be an obvious joke but, in the cold light of print, it may not have come across that way. So it’s official − I’ve turned into a cunt.



But not where Steve Jones is concerned. He’s always good for a laugh…

Next: Nice, quiet, Steve Jones

Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY
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www.wetdreamsdrylives.com
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February 1979

The night I became a proper ochinko

The foyer had been full of girls when I returned to the hotel with some of the band and their entourage after touring Tokyo’s hot spots straight after the gig and meeting some real, live Yakuza in a club full of semi-naked women and malt whisky.

Many of the fans are actually staying at the hotel after booking double rooms months in advance and sneaking in some of their friends to keep costs down without the management’s knowledge.

We went to the bar where the girls giggled at tables in corners. At around three a.m. we decided to call it a night and strolled to the elevator followed by a bunch of around eight girls, and we all squeezed in together.

I’d been drinking solidly since 6pm and I was pissed. Really pissed – a gallon of sake, beers, brandy.

And that’s why, as the elevator stopped at my floor, I shouted, for a laugh and for the first time in my life, ‘Right, who’s coming back to my room, then?’

‘Yes, please.’ Softness is a thing called comfort. Her voice sounded miles away. And then, there she was, suddenly, magically, standing next to me in the corridor as the elevator door closed to the sound of applause from the roadies.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Haroko.’

She wore shiny red boots with high heels, a shiny red mac over a shiny red mini skirt. Her shiny black Stranglers t shirt was as shiny as her shiny black lipstick.

Her eyes stretched into infinity and beyond, I was pissed. When she smiled my heart skipped a beat, I was pissed. She was gorgeous, I was pissed.

And now here I am, outside my door, fumbling for the key. I may be pissed but I’m as nervous as hell. What if she thinks I’m Jet Black? (After all, we are the only two people with beards in this travelling show, maybe in this entire country). Do I play along?

When we get inside I don’t quite know what to do. Does she expect sex or is she just being polite?

Then she starts to cough.

Shit, it’s a nasty one. And it’s persistent. And it’s a bit wet. Knowing my luck, the only time this happens to me I get someone with some weird oriental flu for which there’s no known cure for westerners. Why isn’t she wearing a surgical mask like everyone else?

I convince myself she’s okay. The gallon of sake has distorted my judgement.

‘Bad cough,’ I say, pointing to my throat, like a fucking jerk.

‘Sorry. Very sorry.’

‘That’s okay.’ I tell her I’m feeling tired and indicate by closing my eyes and resting the side of my face on my clasped hands, like a fucking jerk. I point to the bed and start to undress. Like a fucking jerk.

‘Would you like to sleep here?’ I ask. Like a fucking jerk.

‘Yes, please.’ She removes her clothes and we both get into bed, my pants still firmly intact. We kiss. She coughs. We kiss again. She coughs again. I feel like Benny Hill.

‘Sorry. Very sorry.’

‘That’s okay.’ I tentatively touch one of her breasts – and immediately feel a lump. She coughs. No! Japanese flu and fucking cancer? Maybe you get the cancer as a result of contracting the flu. Oh my God! Infectious cancer! You’ve got to be kidding me.

Then she starts to cough again. I convince myself she’s at death’s door and whatever she’s got, I’ve probably got now. I’ve just signed my own death warrant, and all I did was kiss a Japanese girl in the dark.

I have to get her out of here.

‘Are you staying in the hotel?’

‘Yes, with some friends.’

‘Look, let me take you back to your room. You’ll feel more comfortable.’

‘Yes, please.’

We both dress and before we leave the room I give her a signed copy of the band’s X-Cert live album. She starts to cry. ‘Thank you so much. Sorry. Very sorry.’

My heart breaks.

Her friends welcome her, and me, with open arms, and Haroko sniffs, and coughs, as she proudly flashes the signed album and they all go, ‘Oooh!’

None of them has a cough.

I’ll never ask anyone back to my room again, and even think twice about asking myself.

‘It’s amazing,’’ says the normally diffident Jet Black the following day, on the bullet train to Tokyo. ‘The girls are everywhere. We get off the train and they’re there. We go to the hotel and they’re there. We go to our rooms and they’re waiting outside. Sure, that happens in England – but there it’s not girls, it’s the fucking police!’

I know what he means – not the police, the girls. It’s like being an eighteenth century European sailor in the South Seas greeted by a bevy of lei-bearing beauties with Bali Hai’s to die for.

Jet admits he’d rather think than talk. ‘I leave all that to Jean and Hugh. If I wasn’t an introvert we’d probably be fighting all the time. I’m in the classic drummer mould. When bands try putting the drummer up as a front man they fail.’

Dave Clark Five, Genesis, 10cc?

‘The only thing that gets me annoyed is incompetence when we tour. I’ve come across people who can’t organise a bunk-up in a brothel.’

About the disparity. ‘We have all the ingredients for failure. But the pressures, all that we’ve gone through, have given us a mutual respect for each other. We’re all very strong individuals. That’s why we’ve got so much more to offer than anyone else.

‘We’ve been managing ourselves for the last six months, although things on that front are improving. I tell you something – show me a good manager and I’ll show you a Martian.’

It’s raining in Tokyo. The coruscating skyscrapers are wet yet still they gleam, still the cars are meticulously polished, still there are no stains on the pavements, still the women out walking their dogs bend down to sweep the steaming damp turds into polythene bags to deposit in nearby litter bins, still the victims of flu wander around in surgical masks to prevent spreading their kamikaze germs.

Tokyo is straight out of The Shape of Things to Come. It’s more advanced and consequently more civilised than London or New York or any other major city on earth.Wells envisaged the vertical aspects perfectly. He just didn’t latch onto the horizontal aspects of the inhabitants.

The magnificent metropolis of the east is dripping and glistening in the glare of a billion neon lights while the Stranglers prepare for the show. They’re pretty pissed when they find out it’s an all-seater tonight at the Korakuen Hall.

‘You two keep playing,’ Jean says to Jet and Dave in the dressing room, like someone planning to break out of Colditz, ‘while Hugh and I jump into the audience and start wrenching up the fucking chairs. If that doesn’t get them going, nothing will.’

They did. And they did. Result – the most immaculate Stranglers’ show this side of the Nashville.

When you see them perform it live, you realise just how underrated Black and White is. No More Heroes was merely a stepping-stone, a transition between the singalongastranglers of Rattus and the psychopathic delusions that course through the veins of B&W. There’s death and night and blood in Toytown tonight.

In the band’s dressing room after the gig I start talking to the very glamorous Kato, who insists she’s not a groupie. She’s bright and sassy and twenty-one with a bullet and no bra. She taught me oppai (tits), shakuhachi (blow-job), senzuri (wank), omeko (‘girl’s one’), ochinko (‘boy’s one’) and omekoshiyo (fuck). That’s all you really need to know to get by in any language.  ‘Before they came, Japanese girls thought the Stranglers would rape them,’ she tells me. ‘See, English bands often make fun of Japanese girls, but this band seem more friendly than most.

‘Also, in general, English men have bigger ochinkos than Japanese men. It frightens the girls, y’know. They had to make a slightly smaller condom especially for the Japanese market.  ‘There’s no doubt we are hampered by our lack of English. Usually the only thing a Japanese girl can say to a guy in a band is, "Can I come to your room?" That doesn’t give you much of a start! And the girls then get very sad because they know the guy will leave shortly, Barry.’

When you get right down to it, rock stars are just singing sailors. It’s all in the game and many a tear has to fall.

I love hearing Kato pronounce my name -- not only is it sexier than a French accent, it also makes me feel kinda important. Kinda big and crisp and tall.

I find Haroko sitting outside my hotel-room door when I get back from the gig. She’s followed me to Tokyo. I can’t believe it.

Then I start to worry that she’s some kind of mad stalker. That she’ll stab me repeatedly, mercilessly and tomorrow in the Tokyo Daily Bugle under the headline

‘Coughing Killer Strikes Again’, they’ll report that Jet Black was found stabbed to death in his hotel room.

Fate has decreed that Dina is my last, my everything.

So I tell Haroko she can keep a-knockin, but she can’t come in.

Next: Motorhead bite back
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H0IM2CY
www.wetdreamsdrylives.com

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February 1979

Outside Tokyo

So the self-styled Queen of Pop, Nina Myskow, and I board a plane for Tokyo.

She’s in first, I’m in economy. She works for the Sun, I work for myself. She wears red, I wear black. She’s a sweetheart and so am I. The same can’t be said of the Stranglers …

And I tell you what – it’s definitely not true what they say about Japanese girls

Unless, of course, you happen to be cross-eyed.

So tell me more . . . They wait, these Nipponese nymphs, on bullet train stations, in airports, in hotel lounges, in the shadows of afternoon corridors, in vain, in rain, armed with heart-shaped chocolates, flowers, love letters, sugar-sweet smiles, bird-wing eyes, all things feminine, for… the Stranglers. It could’ve been any other band, any other full-cream hard-ons in Brylcreemed trousers, any other bunch of matinée idols with false bollocks and painted smiles.

But the Stranglers?

As the band alight from the bullet train onto the platform at Osaka station, they’re immediately surrounded by a mob of girls, all manicured giggles and stiletto-heeled admiration, looking as incongruous as dogs on hot tin roofs.

‘They don’t think of us as idols,’ says Jean in the cab on the way to the hotel where another gang of honeydew peaches is waiting to pounce. ‘They’re really into what the band says. They understand.’

To back up his statement he flashes some letters written in over-formal, shaky English. They’d been thrust into his hand at various points of his journey across Japan by girls anxious to identify with his admiration of the writer Yukio Mishima and to provide a few enlightening anecdotes on the subject of his decapitation after committing suicide or seppuku (sounds like a word game)

Not exactly love letters in the sand. Japanese girls are like that.

Osaka is around two hundred miles from Tokyo. It’s like a brass rubbing of Birmingham but more curvaceous and sparkly. It’s the second concert into The Stranglers’ Japanese tour. The previous night in Fukuoka – many Japanese words sound vaguely obscene − they apparently went down so well they were banned from ever playing there ever again due to audience overreaction.

Tonight the barriers again didn’t prevent the fans tumbling down to the front in desperation to celebrate the appearance of sour-faced Jet, doe-eyed Dave, lecher Hugh and jumping Jacques flash.

After years of heavy-metal conditioning in the shape of clapped-out, podgy, monolithic dross kings from far beyond the seas, it’s not surprising they find the Stranglers something to write home about. These normally placid, peek-a-boo people from the valley of the dolls are even starting to spit! What other race would go berserk for an hour, kick stewards in the bollocks, mob the band and then politely bow to each other afterwards as they file out of the hall?

I expected order. I expected rules. I expected the Stranglers to be regarded as a novelty act whose only redeeming factor was Jean’s romantic attachment to their country and his cutie-pie smile. But with kind of indomitable elegance, the fans accept the moribund meat the band relish chewing before their very eyes.

They seem to get it.

Back in the Osaka hotel basement bar, Jean intimates, in no uncertain terms but with a snappy smile, that he wants a fight. And he wants a fight with Judas Priest, who’d just played a concert of their own and sit like Madame Tussaud rejects in the corner being ogled by a dozen leopard-skinned groupies.

Jean scrawls, ‘Judas Priest R Fucking Women.’ on the back of a menu and places it on a silver platter held by an unsuspecting waiter who proceeds to deliver the message to the Birmingham metalheads.

No takers.

Jean departs, disappointed but still smiling. Judas Priest may not have even heard of the Stranglers.

The evening culminates in manager Ian Grant insulting a concrete-arsed groupie, tour manager Tom playing tunes loudly on a silver tray and Ian banging nails into the ceiling.

None of the band participate in such on-the-road antics. They’re parsimonious with their off-stage energy. Apart from Jean’s occasional muscle flexing (he does tend to tread on your toes a great deal: I put that down to him being French an’ all), they’re more inclined to exercise the larynx than the inebriated soul.

I guess that’s part of their attraction.

The following day we coach it to Kyoto, the ancient capital awash with Buddhist temples all made entirely of wood and without the merest hint of a nail. Despite the overbearing symbolism that pervades the ornamental parks in which these wonderful edifices are set, it’s difficult not to snigger when confronted by ‘Get your souvenir Buddhas here’ signs.

The band pose for the Sun’s Queen of Pop outside one temple. Nina’s probably still feeling a little freaked out after seeing Jean’s balls swinging like church bells in the dressing room the night before when he emerged stark naked from the shower. Still, he didn’t seem to mind.

The venue tonight is Kyoto University. There’s holes in the ceiling, holes in the walls, holes in the hearts, holes in the holes. This black hole of Kyoto is tailor made for the band. No police are allowed on the campus. No chairs are allowed in the main hall. No holds barred.

But without the barriers and red-jacketed stewards, the element of anarchy is dispelled. Unfortunately it becomes just another gig – unusual in Japan, maybe, but I’ve seen more exciting nights at the Palladium.

‘No, I don’t mind Jean getting all the attention at the moment. After all, he makes a prettier cover than me.’ Hugh, wearing the tongue-in-cheek sincere look he cultivates so well, pours another beer in his hotel room at the Nagoya Miyako Grand the next day. Initially, he was the Strangler who grabbed the attention but in recent months he’s taken a back seat‘Last year I got pissed off with being pushed into situations. We’ve had a very depressing time on the business side but things are looking up. I haven’t got time for the pain.’

There’s a knock on the door and the tour manager wanders in with a leather-jacketed boy who looks around eighteen and a slightly older girl. ‘You said you wanted to talk to some fans,’ he says to me. ‘Here’s one.’ Hugh leaves us to it.

Aya is a student and has saved up for months just to accompany the band on every gig and he’s taken a week off work to do this. Why?

‘Because the Stranglers are unique,’ he says. ‘They sing about all our lives and I understand and identify with what they think. Other rock bands sing about love between men and women, they sing about the government. People are afraid to sing about the government, but they’re not.’

Ayako Shimizo is twenty-three, works for a bank and lives in the dormitory her company provides for its employees. She has a record player in her room, a boyfriend in LA and a thing about Jean. Or she did have.

‘He was my favourite. I liked his playing. I liked his philosophy. I think he is very strong and very manly. More manly than Japanese men. But I was disappointed when a friend told me he had gone to bed with a Japanese girl while he was here, I was surprised. I didn’t think he would be just another rock star.’

She leaves. Hugh returns and I mention the conversation.

‘She’s just like anybody else,’ he says ‘She can’t cope with reality. She hasn’t sussed out yet that there are no more heroes. You’d have thought the Zen way would have taught them to think otherwise.’

Nagoya lies sixty-seven miles outside Kyoto and is the fourth most populous city in the country. It’s a little like Osaka but with a shade more character.

Before going to the sound-check, I corner Jean and tell him what Ayako had said. He’s obviously upset. ‘It’s frustrating. What her friend told her just isn’t true.’

This is becoming a soap opera.

What her friend told her just isn’t true. No. We don’t behave like rock bands with their idiotic on the road antics. I don’t want this band to be like any other. The Stranglers are all I’ve got. No. Shit, man, that’s a drag. I didn’t expect to hear something like that, something so palpably untrue.’

I mention the conversation I had with Hugh as he puts his Dr Martens on.

‘At the beginning I felt Hugh had a lot more going for him than me. He’s got a regular place to live. He can concentrate on higher things. I’ve never had security, just the Stranglers.’

The show in Nagoya is a triumph. The stewards, up until now fairly tame by Japanese standards, are coming on strong. So strong, in fact, that the band stop playing to point an accusing finger at one particularly venomous steward who is subsequently hounded out of the hall in a blaze of vitriol.

Backstage I meet up with Marl Takahashi, a bespectacled twenty-year-old, and the president of the Japanese Stranglers’ Information Service. She, too, has been travelling with the band for the duration of the tour.

‘At the moment there are seventy members,’ she says, ‘but I expect that to really increase after all this. The average age is eighteen but we have a few thirty-two-year-olds. We also have a fanzine.

‘For me The Stranglers are so different from other bands. They have opinions and they point out all the wrong things in England. Other bands just sing and wear pretty clothes and I’m tired of all that. I know the band look so wild, but after meeting them I know they are gentle. But all the girls that come to the hotel don’t understand them. They just want to go to bed with them. I don’t. I just want to be their friend. If I went to bed with Jean I wouldn’t be his friend anymore.’

Why do I get the feeling that I’m turning into a News Of The World reporter?

And you thought The Stranglers were a boys’ band.

I’ve been going out with Dina pretty solidly for nearly two and a half years. I love her madly but I know she’s unsure about me, about the kind of job I do, about the way I live my life. She could hardly be described as a rock chick. She hates receptions, doesn’t matter how glitzy, she doesn’t care much for most of the music and she definitely never bothers with people she hates. It’s part of the attraction.

Despite the obvious temptations, I never fool around at home or away. I sussed out a while back that sex without love was intensely unsatisfactory and not worth the hassle. Hey, but if you’re a rock star it’s part of the nine to five.

I love Dina and want her so much to be my bride. It’s the most important thing in my life: why fuck it up?

So what am I doing walking down this endless corridor to my room at the Nagoya Miyako Grand holding the hand of a girl called Haroko with oriental sex on my mind…?

Next: The Stranglers in Japan Part 2

Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H0IM2CY
www.wetdreamsdrylives.com
www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives
 

February 1979

Murder most foul

During the late night interview with UFO’s Phil Mogg, I discover I saw a friend of Phil’s being murdered in Manor House when I was fifteen . . .

 

My own personal song of death and kisses is ‘Try A Little Tenderness’ by Otis.

It’s the one I remember most from that hot summer Saturday night in 1968 when I was fifteen and women were goddesses. There was a schizophrenic club above the Manor House pub at the junction of Green Lanes and Seven Sisters Road. On Friday it was called the Bluesville and showcased some of the hottest blues-rock bands in town, like John Mayall, Chicken Shack and, best of all, Ten Years After. The punters were hippies and local dudes like me, who loved a fast guitar and a puckered lip. I always wore jeans and a T-shirt and succumbed to the slick chords and heavy-duty four-play.

On Saturday nights the Bluesville slapped on a suit and tie and became the Downbeat, a juicy soul-searcher packed out with skins in mohair and girls you could occasionally dance with when you got a little pissed and Brenton Wood was waiting for the sign. There were also a lot of black guys there who also occasionally hit the Royal dancehall in Tottenham on a Thursday like drugstore truck driving men and sometimes met the wound-up, woolly-bully white boys head on. Black guys never got drunk. They didn't need booze to fuel their domain. They took the women and song away from the wine – it was their secret. Oh, and the fact that most of them could dance the hind legs off Nureyev.

The Downbeat was a place for a fifteen-year-old boy to grow up, and that night I shot up like fucking Godzilla.

There were three of us. Terry was a sixteen-year-old printing apprentice. Being a printer – especially on Fleet Street – in 1968 was a licence to print money and some of them even found time to do the knowledge and become black-cab drivers. Ray was twenty, the son of the caretaker on our estate. He worked for Robert Dyas and was handy for getting the drinks in.

These were the light-and-bitter days at two bob a throw. I had an after-school job cleaning a nearby office block every night. I was flush. My semi-hippie Friday clobber was replaced by the bespoke blue mohair three piece my Dad had bought me. Terry wore a pale green mohair suit and Ray, not a fashion god by any stretch of the imagination, had the suit he wore to work.

After several pints we headed out on the highway to the dance-floor. It was the third time I’d been to the Downbeat on a Saturday night and I’d never danced with anyone. None of us had. We’d stand on the edge of the floor and look at the girls and dream.

But tonight I was determined to walk out of my dreams and into my heart and as ‘Hold On I’m Coming’ segued gently into Otis Redding’s ‘Try A Little Tenderness’ I took my chance.

I entered the void...

Oh, she may be weary...

Would you like to dance?

‘Okay.’

Them young girls do get wearied . . .

What’s your name?

‘Mary.’

Wearing the same shabby dress . . .

I’ve got an aunt called Mary.

‘What’s your name?’

Barry.

And when she gets wearied . . .

‘I’ve got a boyfriend called Barry.’

Oh.

‘Only joking. How old are you?’

Eighteen.

All you’ve got to do is try a little tenderness . . .

We suddenly kissed. It was my very first and when her tongue searched for mine I nearly fainted. That was the moment I realised I was tongue-tied: the membrane that attached my tongue to my mouth was at the front instead of the back and although I could welcome visitors I couldn’t make any house calls. I kept falling at the first, my bottom teeth.

I know she’s waiting, just anticipating . . .

In the end she gave up.

The thing that you’ll never, never, possess, no, no, no . . .

Three months later I had the unwanted flesh snipped during a five-day stay at the Royal Free Hospital. I assumed Mary was the only girl to have a slut tongue and I adored her for it. I thought of marriage and kids and a little house on the prairie before realising I was fifteen and in blue. I never saw her again.

As Terry, Ray and I walked out at closing time, down the long, wide flight of stairs that led from the club onto the Seven Sisters Road, I noticed that on either side of each step was a line of white dudes in suits – members of a notorious local mob – each one brandishing a
cutthroat razor, each one checking the punters, each one desirous of seeing twisted flesh and internal organs made external on these stairs with stares. I was shitting myself.

When I reached the bottom with my bollocks still intact, I asked a guy what was going on. He said it involved strangers and women. Don’t they all? Someone asked a girl he shouldn’t have to dance. When she refused he got stroppy. It was time to die.

‘Who’s the guy?’ I asked. ‘No fucking idea.’ He shrugged. ‘He’s with a couple of mates. I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes for all the money in the world.’ I looked back up the stairs at the gamut of flashing blades and I knew what he meant. Suddenly, a guy came hurtling down the stairs and ran out of the door pursued by an army of razors. He managed to jump on the luckiest bus in the world as it sped past down the Seven Sisters Road into infinity. The number 38 saved his life that night.

The boys from the black stuff returned, disconsolately, to the club and waited like clay pigeon shooters for the next target. Sure enough, another guy − the one Phil Mogg knew − came bounding down the stairs. Alas, there was no bus, just a warm breeze and a heartful of soul.

He turned right. Wrong move. He turned right again into a quiet residential street. Really wrong move. About twenty or thirty guys were on his tail. Terry, Ray and I stayed outside the club. I was curious -- it was the latent journo in me. A few minutes later most of the guys strolled back to the club. They looked elated. Their work here was done.

The three of us decided to go and see what had happened. The guy was lying face-up in the gutter. A small crowd began to form and an ambulance pulled up. We stood just a few feet away and he didn’t look too bad. I said to Ray he’d had a result as two ambulance men lifted the guy onto a stretcher. Splashes from the impact of his brains spilling out of the back of his head and plopping onto the pavement danced on my blue mohair turn-ups, and Terry fainted. I’d never seen someone so dead. From that moment on, I knew it was unwise to argue with strange guys in sharp suits with lipstick on their collars, especially on a Saturday night. A few years later Diana Dors took over the club but I never went again.

Couldn’t get the splashes out.

Next: The Stranglers in Japan
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY

www.wetdreamsdrylives.com
www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives

February 1979

A place to run

 

As Billy Idol splits from Karen O’Connor, Des’s daughter − ‘I knew when it was Des on the phone,’ Billy tells me, ‘ ’cos he kept singing "1-2-3 O’Leary"’ – I spend a couple of nights on the road with heavy-metal gorillas UFO where I get to wonder, just how over-the-top is over-the-top?

A question that has vexed many a lonely soul.

Oh, sure, several people have sussed out the answer − Gandhi and Sid Vicious, to name but two. One doused himself with petrol and asked a passer-by for a light, the other pumped himself full of five-star smack when he only had a two-star engine and met his maker in a two-bit Greenwich Village laundro-flat.

It transpires that UFO have often pondered the very same question, searching for an answer as some men hunt for El Dorado. Then, out of the blue, they found it . . .

One night during a show, lead singer Phil Mogg was accidentally hit in the face by Pete Way’s bass. The gash required ten stitches and left an ugly scab. A week later Phil turned to Pete in the dressing room after a particularly forgettable gig and asked yet again . . .

‘Just how over-the-top is over-the-top?’

Pete didn’t bother to reply. He grabbed Phil’s head and ripped the stitches and scab off with his teeth, chewed them up and swallowed the lot.

‘That’s when I realised just how over-the-top is over-the-top,’ recalls Phil, as he drops his trousers backstage at Lancaster University in preparation for the gig.

UFO are the real deal.

Like some hideous hibernating creature, yer average heavy-metal merchant comes to life only when he’s touring and spends the rest of the year snoozing in a flash LA Brillo pad. UFO are no exception. Their tours are fantasies, peopled by soporific groupies with twin carb tits, sneaky dealers, indifferent writers, emaciated, hysterical fans in trench coats and flares, demons, gods, sleazebags, all caught in the split-second blindness of a flash gun.

They go to bed when it’s light and get up when it’s dark. They get drunk, stoned, exhausted, all in the name of a glorious guitar solo and wailing vocal.

‘There’s only one thing that comes first in this band,’ Phil tells me in his hotel room. ‘Either you enjoy it or you don’t. If you don’t, don’t do it. Whatever comes after that is secondary.’

I first met Mr Mogg in his manager’s office just off Baker Street. I knew next to nothing about the band and only agreed to do the interview because Record Mirror commissioned it. He
reminded me of a young Frank Marker in Public Eye, the suburban Phillip Marlowe with the hangdog look and the beat-up mac.

It’s when he said, ‘Bob Geldof is the modern day Eamonn Andrews,’ that I decided I liked him and that his band would be worth checking out. I wasn’t disappointed.

Theirs is a perceptive blend of pretentiousness and night-on-the-town fun. They scream songs of teenage dementia and the beer-and-bum-fluff audience lap it up. Mogg, the Tottenham toreador, looks suitably all-powerful, cultivating the character of tight-arse demagogue as he whips through the songs like a whirlpool, making me spin.

Meanwhile, Pete Way runs around the stage like he’s dying for a piss. Pete Pete Pete . . .

By contrast, lead guitarist Paul Chapman, who’s recently replaced misfit German Michael Schenker, is immobile. ‘It’s natural that a lot of people are going to compare me with Schenker,’ Chapman tells me after the show. ‘But I find it difficult to accept writers accusing me of dressing funny and not blending in with the rest of the band on stage. Before you can think about image you’ve got to think about more important things – like music.’

Chapman was a former member of UFO anyway. ‘The first time I was with them I wanted to go back to Wales and play with my friends.’ He formed a band called Lone Star and when they folded Chapman rejoined UFO on a Stateside tour after Schenker mysteriously vanished. ‘Three days after I got married I went on that tour. And I took my wife with me. Can you believe that? Taking your wife on the road with UFO for nearly three months!’

He wants the band to be associated with ‘strong songs’.

‘I tend to see music in songs rather than guitar solos. But it’s down to me to prove to people that there will be no difference in the style of UFO because I’ve joined.’

‘I’ve told him he’s got to wear a Nazi uniform and sing "Deutschland über Alles" between songs,’ jokes Mogg.

All five members sit on Phil’s bed in his Preston hotel room two hours after the encore. UFO, unlike most of their contemporaries, like to hang around in their dressing room and meet the fans.

Paul Raymond − nope, not the stripper-dipper king − takes a back seat tonight and drummer Andy Parker looks tired. So it’s down to the Mogg/Way team of incessant lunacy to provide the action.

‘I used to be in the Enfield Harriers,’ says Pete, ‘and I was the third fastest athlete over my distance in the country.’

‘He keeps telling me that,’ says Phil, ‘yet when I challenged him to a race around a hotel in Cleveland I slaughtered him.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ says Pete.

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. And I’ll prove it. Race you along the corridor.’

‘Nah, don’t be stupid,’ shrugs Pete, as he lights another fag.

‘C’mon. Or are you too chicken?’

‘No, I’m NOT!’ says Pete, looking and sounding like a little-boy-lost Terry Scott. He puts out his fag while Phil limbers up. The others watch incredulously as they stroll out of the door like pathetic gunfighters and mosey on down the hall.

It’s three a.m.

‘On your marks, get set -- ’ere, tell ’im to stop movin’. Cheat,’ says Pete.

‘No, I ain’t.’

‘You are too. A fucking cheat. Go!’

They tear down the corridor, crashing into each other as they burst through the doors that lead to the staircase. Phil wins.

‘You fucking cheat. You bastard,’ yells Pete, tears in his eyes.

‘No, I ain’t.’

‘Let’s do it again, then.’ The two wander back to their starting blocks. Go! Pete wins this time. Both are far too breathless to argue but Phil demands a recount. Pete collapses on the bed.

‘I used to box, bantamweight,’ says Phil, still trying to regain his breath. ‘I was doing quite well too, until I met our local milkman Reg Hicks in the ring. With one punch he gave me a nose from eye to eye.’

Phil, ebuillent, buoyant, Sterodent, is 26 and married with two kids. He seems to have a morbid fear of being left alone and begs for me to stay up talking long after the others have gone to bed. His words are as multifarious as the snowflakes strangling Preston tonight as he conjures up visions of insidious UFO exploits during their ten years together.

He loves spontaneity on stage. ‘It’s easy to become just another Vegas act acting out well rehearsed, clinical shows night after night.

‘Know something? I used to love B.B. King until I heard he did the same rap every night. That’s a big difference between English and American bands. The former ride with the moment, the latter have it all written out.’

He smiles his words, embellishing them with a pair of impish eyes. He tells me UFO have broken on 46 radio station in America, that he doesn’t particularly love the place but that living there means they can at least begin to understand it.

Last time I saw Phil Mogg he was singing in a hotel corridor in Preston at five in the morning, looking for company. I reckon Phil’s a boy who’s afraid of the dark. He also happens to be great fun, a natural showman, athlete and the leader of one terrific band.

Lights out . . .

(UFO released their twenty-first studio album, Seven Deadly, in 2012 to universal acclaim. Shit, over forty years of playing heavy metal. Wonder if Phil and Pete are still racing down hotel corridors?)

Next: Murder and mayhem in Manor House
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013

Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY

www.wetdreamsdrylives.com

www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives
 

January 1979

Bob’s yer uncle

‘Hello, Bob.’


‘Hi, Baree. Welcome to my ’ome.’

Bob Marley leads the way into the heart of 56 Hope Road, Kingston, and my heart skips a beat, strolls, and skips another beat. Back in the UK we call that atrial fibrillation − here they call it reggae. I watch his dreadlocks wriggle like a nest of funky snakes as he bounces along the corridors beneath the minatory ceiling fans that spin the heavy air into gold through seven rooms of gloom. He points out a few interesting objects of memorabilia before taking us – that’s Alan Edwards, who’s organised the whole trip and spends much of his time on the phone to the UK running Modern Publicity, Sounds journo Hugh Fielder and the NME’s Chris Salewicz − into the Tuff Gong studios, which he founded in 1970.

He plays tracks from the yet to be released album Survival and I know this is a moment I’ll carry to the crematorium.

‘Fancee a kick around in da yard?’

And that’s how I get to play football with Bob Marley. Honest. You ask Joyce and Vicky. He’s a blinding passer of the ball but his dreadlocks smack you in the face when you try to tackle him, which I think is a little unfair so I give him a sly dig in the ribs next time I try to get the ball off him. He gives me a friendly kick as he leaves me standing, minus the ball, in a cloud of dust. Fucker, in a nice way.

As a parting shot he gives us all a chunk of Lamb’s Bread, the island’s most potent ganja and his personal favourite. Mr Marley is a true gentleman and a musician touched by God.

The next day the four of us are driven to Chris Blackwell’s house for tea. Chris isn’t around but we’re given a guided tour of his beautiful colonial property, high on a hill, before lighting up the Lamb’s Bread. I’ve never smoked such dope − three puffs and I’m paralysed. I can’t get out of this unfathomably deep armchair and when I eventually do, I struggle outside to look at the sunset. Shit, I’m smoking a joint given to me by Bob Marley while standing outside Chris Blackwell’s home watching the sun go down on Jamaica. What have I done to deserve this? Maybe I did my time during those three nightmare school years. Maybe in return I get a sweet life. Maybe, just maybe, this is payback time.

We leave the house and head for a Rasta party in downtown Kingston where the smoke is thick as smog, pierced only, like luminous moths, by the flash of a green, gold and red Rasta tam worn by a Tribesman with a point to prove and a joint to roll.

After a couple of days’ lounging round the hotel pool, Island tell Alan to fly us all to New York to interview Jacob Miller, stay a few days, then return home to London. But it’s snowing in New York with temperatures below freezing. Why do I want to go there? Besides, the average Record Mirror reader won’t have a clue who Jacob Miller is anyway.

So I decline and spend the next two days in Kingston before agreeing to meet up with the others at Kennedy Airport en route to Heathrow.

I persuade my unofficial guide, Maurice, to accompany me on a cab ride around Trenchtown although he assures me we won’t find a taxi driver willing to take us to a place where white light spells danger. Sure enough, the first six we hail refuse. Lucky seven, who obviously needs the money more than the other guys, agrees but insists he won’t be held responsible if anything happens.

Maurice is not happy. He’s only nineteen and drowning in roots. ‘You sure you wanna do this?’ he asks, as we climb into the back of the cab. Why not? I walked home through Brixton on a few Saturday nights and nothing ever happened. I’ve been to Harlem in diamonds and pearls and nothing ever happened. I’ve searched for a cab in The Bowery at four a.m. and nothing ever happened. I’ve tried to shit after four lines of speed and nothing ever happened. Trenchtown? Bring it on.

‘Why not?’

The hype had hoisted images of zinc huts and chicken wire into my willing brain. Instead there’s a proliferation of redevelopment. I expect murderous stares and get curious side glances.

‘So, what do you think of Trenchtown?’ asks the driver.

‘Yeah, it’s . . .’

‘Wind your window up quick and lock the doors.’

Four guys are standing in the road forcing the cab to stop. One of them comes over and stares straight at me and, yes, it’s a murderous one.

‘Hey, man, you wanna fight me?’ he screams. ‘Come on and fight me, man. Come on and fight me now.’

I start to wind the window down with a milky, shaking hand.

‘I wouldn’t do that, man,’ warns Maurice.

Shit -- I’m getting called ‘man’ a lot. I undo the window just enough to make my terror audible ‘Er, no thanks.’

He smiles and, without looking away, says, ‘Hey, guys, he don’t wanna fight. Maybe he’ll buy some ganja. You wanna buy some ganja, man?’

‘I’d buy the ganja if I were you, man,’ prompts Maurice.

‘Yeah, man.’ My words are stumbling out. ‘I’ll buy some ganja, man. How much, man?’

‘Easy, man. Easy.’ He produces the dope wrapped in a tissue. ‘Give me ten US dollars.’

I hand over the money, the four guys walk away laughing and the cab proceeds.

‘You’re a very lucky man, man,’ says the driver.

‘Yeah, man, yeah,’ concludes Maurice.

Oh, man!

The cab goes to Tuff Gong studios. Bob’s away but there’s six or seven guys kicking a ball around the yard. Maurice recounts the tale of Trenchtown and I produce the ten-dollar deal. One guy takes the dope and starts filleting it.

‘Too many seeds. See? Not good qualatee.’

He rolls a few joints and hands me back the remainder of the deal. For the next few minutes the group puffs in silence. Not good quality? A raging storm of paranoia buffets my brain and I convince myself that everyone around me is talking in code because I can’t understand a word. I feel terribly isolated. I’m a long way from home and everybody has got it in for me. Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me. A toga-clad Kenneth Williams flits across the yard kicking a ball.

Shit, I’m fucked.

I decide to leave before I die and spend the next hour trying to lose them because I know I'm being followed by a bunch of buffalo soldiers with swords drawn in a bloodlust frenzy. I finally make it to the hotel in one piece and collapse on the bed. An hour later I wake up feeling good and craving food so I order a steak sandwich, fries and a beer from room service. I also feel mightily embarrassed. Shit, what must those guys back at the yard think of me, leaving like that? This Jamaican weed makes the dodgy London black smoke feelo like weak piss.

Thirty minutes later a knock on the door wakes me up again.

‘It’s room service with your order, Mr Cain.’ The guy looks about sixty. ‘Where shall I put it?’

‘The table will be fine.’

When I glance at the table to indicate, there’s my deal, spread out on the tissue for the whole world to see.

‘What have we here?’ he asks.

I start to wonder what Jamaican jails will be like.

‘Got any skins?’ he asks. ‘It’s quiet tonight.’

‘Er, no.’

‘No problem.’ He looks around the room and espies a brown paper bag containing an ornament I’d bought for my mum. ‘Can I use that?’

‘What -- the ornament?’

‘No, the bag.’

‘Er, sure.’

He then proceeds to perform the best room service I’ve ever had. Like an origami master he transforms the bag into a perfect − very large − joint, which he hands to me and which we polish off in no time.

Fifteen minutes later he’s dancing on my bed.

‘If you want I can get you a lot of this and you can take it back to London, no problem,’ he says, as we sit out on the balcony. It wasn’t that long ago I saw Midnight Express and a dancing bell hop who can roll joints like a magician could easily be a passport to violent beatings and rape behind Kingston bars of sodomy. So I graciously decline his very generous offer and fly home the next day, zonked but ganja-free and a little more appreciative of roots reggae.

Next: UFO in Lancaster
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY

www.wetdreamsdrylives.com

www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives
 

January 1979

The Circle root

In Jamaica the cocks never crow before ten a.m.

The blistering sun devours haste and time is a thing of the past.

To the musicians who congregate outside Randy’s record shop in the heart of Kingston, the hour is of little consequence. It’s all just a matter of hanging out until the heat on the street becomes unbearable. Then they split for a spliff in the shadows and play a little reggae, Jamaica’s sweet soul music.

And I’m watching all this courtesy of Island Records, thanks to some well-placed punctuation and even better-placed publications. Maybe the Farringdon Agency is finally paying off. They want me to interview Inner Circle and I know fuck all about ‘proper’ reggae. Doesn’t mean to say I can’t write about it. Right?

Over the last ten years, reggae in its many guises − like ska and bluebeat − has become big business. The classier exponents have earned fortunes and Bob Marley, the richest of them all, has brought his island’s joy and tears to the masses. In the last year reggae has burned through the rainclouds to tan a whole new market in America and Europe.

‘I’ve been very disappointed at the indifferent reaction the music has had up until now, although it’s always been a major industry in Jamaica,’ says Chris Blackwell, who, as head of Island Records, is the man responsible for breaking Marley. ‘But this year I’m confident all that will change mainly because reggae is beginning to assimilate other kinds of music and consequently growing stronger.’

There are two radio stations on the island, more than a hundred record-shops and around twenty recording studios. There is precious little live music. If an artist wants to play, he gives an impromptu show almost anywhere and passes the word round his friends beforehand. The locals tend to rely on the numerous mobile deejays to catch up on the latest sounds. The deejays’ influence on the music scene is considerable – especially at a ‘rockers’ dance, although dance is altogether an inappropriate word since the thousand or so people who usually attend the functions are predominantly male and spend most of their time getting stoned.

Yeah! Tell it like it is. Reggae, reggae, reggae, here comes Johnny Reggae, lay it on me...

Okay, I admit I've always found roots reggae totally inaccessible.

It's a mystifying mixture of incomprehension and grotesque repetition enjoyed only by guys far across the sea or in Shepherds Bush basements, and vaguely condescending middle class honkies who like to ‘identify’ with the black man's plight and can't dance a step.

Now Desmond Dekker I could get off on. Never had the faintest idea what he was rabbiting on about but I felt flash swaying to it down the local Birds’ Nest.

And then I get offered this trip to Jamaica by Island Records to interview Inner Circle. At first it seems both exciting and alarming. I’d read about the poverty-stricken ghettos and drug-driven violence in Kingston, the murder capital of the world. But an island capable of producing sweet airs that have danced across oceans and grooved nations can’t be so bad. And there’s always a chance of drifting on a Jamaican breeze. Come on, man. It’s roots, and the Maytals.

So I go, and prepare to be shocked. And I am, but it’s not the shock I was expecting as I find myself being chauffeured up to a mansion in Beverly Hills. Can you get that? Lavish houses peppered over verdant hills on the outskirts of Kingston and home to Inner Circle.

Their mainman, Jacob Miller, who, someone whispers in my ear, is ‘legendary’, is holed up in New York. Apparently there’s some friction between him and the police regarding gorgeous ganja and he’s decided to prolong his stay. So we’re left with the mighty Lewis brothers − Roger and Ian.

I tell ya, if these two ever decide to visit Venice, all those charities to keep it above water might as well jack it in. The city would sink without trace. Roger weighs in at twenty-three stone and Ian ain’t far behind. By comparison, Meat Loaf looks like Twiggy after a six-month bout of anorexia.

Oh, yeah, and Toto the keyboardist is hanging around in this year’s fashionable Jamaican outfit − a football kit.

They give me a glass of iced coconut milk, an inch away from nectar, and we start talking. You never know what you’re gonna get when you sit down and interview someone you don’t know from Adam. So you indulge in chit-chat to suss them out and weigh up whether to use a lot of foreplay and beat about the bush or just go straight in because they’re moist and eager to please.

Now, as it turns out, the guys are friendly, happy to communicate their thoughts and downright hospitable. There’s only one snag − I can’t understand a fucking word. It’s a real heavy accent, almost indecipherable. Ian does all the talking initially, and it’s like trying to hold a conversation with a geezer operating a road drill. But the more he talks, the more I hear.

They’ve just released ‘Everything Is Great’ as a twelve-inch − and if you’re gonna try and kid me that’s roots you may as well add the Queen’s a smack freak.

Maybe I’m not comprehending the subtleties, but I can’t find a trace of reggae on this Earth, Wind & Fire visitation. It’s disco with guts and it’s as hot as Colman’s.

‘We want everyone to understand our music,’ Ian tells me, in a grim voice, as we step out onto the patio where a hummingbird hovers like a gargantuan bee. ‘It’s energy. It makes people really start rocking. A lot of people from outside Jamaica think that all people like here is reggae. But Jamaicans love all music, from Billy Joel to soul, from the Eagles to disco.’

The band have been together for five years and before that they were all part of the Third World set-up. They’ve been making and producing records for most of that time (which

explains the affluence) but it was only at last year’s Kingston Peace Festival, attended by the world’s press, that they really came to the attention of the uninitiated.

‘We were really good that day,'' recalls Ian as he scratches his beard for the umpteenth time.’Mick Jagger approached us afterwards and has since become great friends. The vibes were right and−a−everything.’

But what you play ain’t exactly reggae, is it?

‘It’s reggae, all right. We’ll never forget our roots. We’re always reggae. It’s just that we add a few things, like a synthesiser. They’ve never been used correctly in that context but we know how to make it sound right for reggae. Jacob Miller is roots. He’ll always be roots.’

Ian becomes more adamant. ‘Reggae can’t be left out. It’s always got to be there. You have that first and everything else is secondary. But you’ve got to do it the right way. We ain’t afraid to experiment. We’re more theatrical than most bands. As long as you know where you’re coming from, it’s okay to use backdrops or even lasers. It’s not a deviation, it’s a transition.

‘Everything is great. It’s a laugh. Simply a matter of seeing things in a revised form. You just gotta make the people feel happy, that’s all.’

I can tell Ian is running out of things to say ’cos he stops scratching his beard and peers longingly back into the comforting solitude of the lounge. Happily, Roger is now cultivating a communicative mood and wanders onto the patio like an articulated meat lorry.

I ask him what he feels about the writers who are more patronising than pure when it comes to black music − and I don’t mean Boney M.

‘I don’t feel they check their facts. They write all this stuff about lifestyles related to music and what’s roots and what ain’t and if you ain’t you’re not worth listening to. Why should I play music to please them when they don’t know what they’re talking about anyway? Either they’ve never seen Jamaica or they come over here with preconceived notions which they refuse to change even though what they see contradicts those notions.’

His voice wavers. His lips tremble. He shuffles backwards and forwards on the patio cutting a strange, wild figure in this pacific, wealthy garden of joy.

‘It makes me feel bad. Don’t write about my lifestyle. Don’t write about my personal existence as a human being. Don’t say, "Roger Lewis is not crying from the streets of Trenchtown." If you criticise me then you must criticise Bob Marley for living in a hundred-thousand-dollar house or Joe Gibbs or any one of a number of reggae singers.

‘I was brought up in the ghetto. So what? All I’m doing is trying to bring reggae to the marketplace of Britain, Europe and America. You either like the music or you don’t. It’s not a question of culture. We all got different ones anyway. We play reggae music because we come from Jamaica. But that doesn’t prevent us getting into other areas of music One of the biggest disco records of all time was "Kung Fu Fighting" and that was sung by a Jamaican − George Douglas.

‘And look at Boney M.’

(A year after the interview, Jacob Miller was killed in a car crash. Inner Circle’s biggest UK hit came in 1992 with ‘Sweat (A La La La La Long)’, which was new roots and panties. The band now run Circle House, a famous Miami recording studio.)

Next: A kick around with Bob Marley

Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013

Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY

www.wetdreamsdrylives.com

www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives