May 1979
White dopes on punk
Back in New York and I find myself asking the age-old question: what do you want from life?
To watch a meretricious show pumped full of more costume changes than Liberace had in his entire career.
To enjoy a showroom dummy spectacle as transient as it’s torrid?
To whistle one song on the way home and wake up the next morning totally devoid of musical memory, just the routines, and the high heels, and the big tits, and the chainsaw, and the bondage?
Or. . .
Do ya wanna see some kick-ass rock ’n’ roll with the occasional embellishment to accentuate rather than drown?
Me, I’d rather suck my choc ice while watching the TV Tubes!
Yes, by special request, brought to you at great expense (but not nearly so much as last time -- or the time before that), we have the meticulous, the desultory, the alarming, Tubes.
The San Franciscan sluggers with the neat line in swashbuckle have now become neophytes in the land of three-minute rock. The Tubes ain’t so gross any more. Sure, it was fun while it lasted but they eventually discovered there are more important things to attend to – like making music without the blinding flash of techno-theatre, and like making money. So they’ve stripped the rococo trimmings from their show.
Now, how do I know this? After all, they don’t play their first show of a sell-out British tour until this Friday.
Come with me now to the backstage area of the Palladium in New York City where Fee Waybill pulls me to one side. ‘Hey, do you know a writer called Tim Lott?’
‘Not personally,’ I lie. ‘Why?’
‘Well,’ he says, pounding his right fist onto his left palm, ‘if I ever meet him again I won’t be responsible for my actions.’
‘Why?’ Fee’s a big guy. He looks a little menacing.
‘Because when he did a review of one of our concerts he kept talking about the size of my nose. That’s fucking wrong, man. It’s not fucking relevant. So, you don’t know him?’
‘No.’ My nose nearly grows a foot. Shit, I hope he doesn’t find out in the next two days. Could be a little awkward. Gee, these guys are touchy.
Fee is brimful of nervous energy while watching Squeeze, who are supporting The Tubes, win over yet another bunch of fastidious Yanks. ‘Great band, huh? I love ’em.’ The feeling, I later discover, is mutual. ‘Hope you like our show,’ he says, continuing to boogie to ‘Take Me I’m Yours’.
In the Tubes’ dressing room the rest of the band limber up. Drummer Prairie Prince does a tricky little two-step twinkle around the floor, which percussionist Mingo Lewis paces conservatively. Tension around the huge plastic bins packed full of ice and cans of beer.
Out front, that unmistakable US rock-show smell pervades the air – grass. As pungent as fish and chips, as thick as cold porridge. The audience is curious. They’ve obviously heard of the Tubes’ metamorphosis. Would they still cut it in that old cynical, spectacular style? Or would they now simply be another bunch of rock ’n’ roll rookies looking for somewhere to hang their burnt-out blues?
‘Would you please welcome from San Francisco . . . THE TOOBS!’
The show spells the end of Fee’s alter-ego, Quay Lude, who is finally banished to that great exposed clit in the sky. Oh, it’s still over the top, but the big bucks are missing. The technoflash may have gone, but the rock has really set in complete with a Who encore − ‘Baba O’Reilly’ and ‘The Kids Are Alright’.
The show’s an unqualified, unequivocal, underarm success.
Cecil B. DeMille has been replaced by John Cassavetes, but it’s a change that had to happen.
And that’s the point Fee makes in the Tubes’ tour bus the next day on the road to Providence, Rhode Island, the submarine capital of the world. ‘When we started this US tour we were really apprehensive of blowing it in front of the fans who only came to see the Tubes for their theatre as opposed to their music,’ he says -- he always looks so innocent with those big eyes and curly hair. ‘Granted, we amassed an impressive following because of that – but that wasn’t necessarily a following of record-buying fans. Christ, they’d see our show, then go home and build up their movie systems, not buy our albums.
‘We’d been doing the show for four years and we were flat broke. Oh, sure, we’d make thousands of dollars on the road – but that was all spent on the show and providing for thirty people in hotels every fucking night. I got fed up with going home after a tour and having to borrow money from friends. I was killing myself. It was time to change. We had to become the new Tubes. We’d created a monster that just kept getting fatter. We had to kill it.
‘But it’s a lot more than just economics. We’re trying to make a career out of this business. Listen, five years down the line I don’t want to end up playing in a Bonzo Dog Band. They went on for years – lots of people know their routines, but how many remember their songs?’
Not the urban spaceman, baby, that’s for sure.
‘We decided we had to make people listen to the music, not just get off on the million dancing girls, the elaborate sets and the costumes. We wanted to become a kick-ass rock ’n’ roll band. The music had been suffering. Weak songs were being reinforced with extreme visuals. It got to be such a headache, thinking of different scenes to match the songs. I was spending more time on changing my costumes than actually singing.’
The initial dates on the tour were, as Fee put it, ‘murder’.
‘I was dressed in little kid’s clothes, which was supposed to signify how I was brought up on TV and never left the set. But unfortunately nobody understood it. So there we were, changing the format of the show after two concerts.’
That night in Providence, the Tubes play an ice-hockey stadium this time without the Who encore because the Rhode Island doss-heads thought ‘White Punks’ was the final song and left.
Silly puckers.
(Fee left the Tubes in 1985 but rejoined eight years later to tour Europe and release a few, largely unsuccessful, albums. Vince Welnick committed suicide in 2006 and the following year the remaining members of the Tubes reunited in Phoenix for their induction into the Arizona Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame. The band are currently on a US tour).
Within five minutes of my getting back home to London the phone rings. It’s Tim. ‘Can you do a phoner for me? I’m double-booked with Iggy Pop.’
Who is it?
‘Your favourite, Billie Jo Spears.’
Throw that blanket on the ground, I think I’m gonna be sick …
By the way, Fee Waybill sends his love. Click.
Next: Ronnie Wood in Chicago
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
May 1979
Rush hour
I arrive at the Newcastle hotel where Rush are hanging out before their second-night concert at the City Hall.
Outside there are a dozen fans jumping in front of anything on wheels to catch a glimpse of the Canadian capers. They’ve been on ice all day − school’s out and this is dole-queue rock, sonny. This is the punter’s paradise. This is what mitigates their unconditional surrender to the inevitable grey. This is the early pay cheque, the visit to the movies, the undignified grope in the back row.
Rush and their ilk tamper with their dreams. Epic allusions, day excursions to Parnassus (where the nuts come from), huge diaphanous characters battling for Good in a galaxy far, far away.
Rush’s music is an extravagant, electronic enema, complex and facile, gross but with the occasional delectable nuance.
One critic recently condemned the whole operation (and it is nothing less) as fascist. But there’s no attempt to indoctrinate. Rush are simply true purveyors of pomp-and-circumstance heavy metal. Three-piece suites are their forte: some may be a little chewy and difficult to digest, but their music is a glorious overkill. In fact, it’s a two-hour maim.
Alex Lifeson (‘Hey, isn’t that Schencker?’ asks the air steward, peering over my shoulder as I read a Rush review on the flight from Heathrow to Newcastle), with the glittering Gibson solos, Geddy Lee of the stoned-choirboy voice and multifarious moogs, and drummer Neil Peart.
Neil has just ordered a steak, with sherry trifle to follow, in the hotel restaurant a few hours before the concert. ‘It’s really difficult to get trifles on the other side of the Atlantic.’
He’s Rush’s lyricist and was instrumental in changing the band’s direction from a bottom-of-the-heap HM a-go-go band to top-flight spectacle when he joined four years ago. Neil, with the Edwardian moustache and Georgian barnet, came to London from Canada in the early seventies to seek fame and fortune as a musician. After bumming around with a few bands he eventually ended up selling souvenirs in Carnaby Street.
His rock-star ambitions thwarted, Neil returned to Canada and started work with his father, a farm-equipment dealer. He was promoted to parts manager, selling the odd tractor track or combine cog and looked assured of a fairly affluent life in the agricultural world. It was around this time he was approached by Alex and Geddy who were on the lookout for a drummer after the departure of original percussionist John Rutsey.
There then followed a series of albums that showcased Peart’s predilection for the myth, the fantasy, the sci-fi scenario, the magic.
They toured Britain early last year to a tumultuous reception. Their last two albums − A Farewell To Kings and Hemispheres have now gone silver over here and the current tour sold out weeks in advance. Yet their songs have been dismissed as immature and pretentious.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ says Neil. ‘I’ve matured a great deal during my association with Rush and managed to maintain my integrity. I’ve come to understand a whole new aspect of life which I’ve never been able to articulate before.’
Hence the ‘message’ accusations.
‘Okay, maybe there are messages in the songs. I just write about anything that seems important to me. If I have a "pure" idea to express I’ll put it over in grand style to blend in with the structure of the whole thing and to illustrate my point. The songs are specifically aimed at people my own age, twenty-six, and younger.’
Another accusation leveled at Rush is that their songs praise capitalism.
‘To make it clear once and for all, I believe totally in personal freedom. As long as I have the choice I don’t care. I went through the stage when I was interested in politics but now I’m interested in other, more spiritual, things. Our integrity is not for sale, our art is. It costs us a lot − both financially and personally − to produce our music and we deserve a just reward. We are, first and foremost, a hard rock band − and the cornerstone of all hard rock is excitement.’
Neil in a nutshell: he’d like to write a novel if he ever gets the time. He reads voraciously, anything from Agatha Christie to Plato. The Who were the first band he ever really got into. He has a sweetheart and a child back home and he visits them every fourth week during the tour. He never drinks before a gig and smiles when he talks about anything he considers important.
Then I get this headache.
It thumps through the journey to the Newcastle City Hall of the crimson kings, does a Chinese burn on my brain during the support, devours rational thought during Rush’s two-hour set, and totally blinds me in the après-gig Rush dressing room. As I crunch a clutch of Anadin, I try to convince Geddy Lee that it wasn’t their music that caused it.
Rush leave early and decide to drive through the night to the next concert in Glasgow.
I stagger back to the hotel. No dreams for me that night. No Apollo. No Dionysus. No Xanadu. No mighty oaks or shimmering palaces.
Just a world of pain.
(Rush went from strength to strength in the eighties and nineties but then hit a brick wall in 1997 when Neil’s daughter Selena was killed in a car accident and his wife Jacqueline died of cancer ten months later. Neil took off on a motorbike, rode across America and clocked up 55,000 miles. He remarried in 2000 and the band released a new album, Vapor Trails, in 2002. The album Snakes & Arrows was released in 2007 and sold 100,000 copies in its first week. The band also embarked on an extensive world tour to promote it. Their last studio album was Clockwork Angels released in 2012. A June 8, 2013 show the band played at the Sweden Rock Festival was their first festival appearance in thirty years. To date, Rush have sold over 40 million records.)
Next: The Tubes in New York
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
The Boy About Motown
Motown is now a ghost town. It curled up and died along with my youth a long time ago when the days I could dance without feeling discomfited came to an end.
Not only was it the sound of my dancing youth, it was also, as Gary Kemp once succinctly put it, the sound of my soul. When the Four Tops descended from heaven in Tottenham Royal or Streatham Locarno or The Lyceum, well sugar pie honey bunch, I couldn’t help myself. I’d steam onto the dance floor fuelled by an ocean of Double Diamond – it really did work wonders – and start to groove in the hope of getting entangled in a web of sticky-sweet stares spun by creamy girls.
When they slowed things down, you were on cloud nine in dream time with your arms around a shapely stranger hoping upon hope she’d let you in… ‘I'm gonna use every trick in the book, I'll try my best to get you hooked. Oh baby…’
And while each slice of three minute Motown vinyl caressed the gleaming threads of my three piece mohair suit, everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
When the dancehalls closed for the night and the only sound was traffic and the second hand emotions of your mates as you walked home, your soul would still be dancing to that Detroit beat. Motown, mohair, magic.
The lyrics were as infectious as the melodies. Through a funky, speeded-up osmosis (with the emphasis on speed – the pills gave you room to move on the dance floor), they infiltrated your mind. I knew the words to I Heard It Through The Grapevine after just two hearings. Baby Love only required one spin on the turntable and I remembered all its cutie pie sentiments, word for word.
We danced to Motown, snogged to Motown, ate, drove, shagged and fell asleep to Motown. Above all we listened to Motown, and heard, really heard, every glorious, impassioned moment.
The melody lingers on in a new exhibition that’s just opened at the fabulous Proud Gallery in Camden – a unique photographic homage that chronicles the rise of Tamla Motown with rare and unseen photographs of the visit to these shores of artists in 1964 and in 1965 when they played their first British concert tour and when Stevie Wonder had a Little prefix.
It charts the UK history of the label throughout the 60s and 70s, the classic years, the Berry Gordy, Holland-Dozier Holland, Norman Whitfield years when artists like Smokey Robinson, Temptations, Martha Reeves, The Supremes and The Jacksons were never out of the UK charts. All the photos on display were taken by EMI photographers at the time.
These were the sweet days, when songs rolled off the production line like the cars once did in Detroit. When Stevie Wonder ditched his cherie amour for dreadlocks and the sublime sophistication of ‘Sunshine Of My Life’ and the Isley Brothers left the label to become hippies.
After Motown finally moved lock, stock and smokin’ barrel from Detroit to Los Angeles, the hot sun slowly dried out that fecund, motor city magic and things were never the same again, Lionel Richie or no Lionel Richie.
The ‘end’ wall of the exhibition is reserved for perhaps the brightest Motown star of them all. Just think of that gorgeous, searching sax intro leading you to the sweetest vocals this side of heaven… ‘Mother mother, there’s too many of you crying…’
Marvin Gaye was always the grown-up in the Motown stable, like a sexier, despairing Smokey Robinson – mad, bad and dangerous to know, the voice of an angel with a dark secret. The photos were taken in London during visits in 1980 and ’81 just a few years before he was shot dead by his father. It’s a fitting finale.
The Gallery did us Proud at the exhibition preview when Martha Reeves and The Vandellas hit the stage for a blistering set that included their three big hits, ‘Heatwave’, ‘Jimmy Mack’ and, of course, ‘Dancing In The Street’ which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary. Scary.
Martha, at 72, ain’t no spring chicken but fuck me, she could’ve danced all night in that tight gold dress that certainly accentuated her positives, and still have begged for more. Rousing springs to mind, not just the performance but for the memories she brought back to life. It felt like this was the only place you could possibly want to be at that moment and that doesn’t happen very often.
When I got home, I dug out my old copy of Motown Chartbusters Volume 3, the one with the shiny silver cover released in November 1969. How’s this for a track listing:
1. I Heard It Through The Grapevine - Marvin Gaye
2. I'm Gonna Make You Love Me - Diana Ross & The Supremes And The Temptations
3. My Cherie Amour - Stevie Wonder
4. This Old Heart Of Mine (Is Weak For You) - The Isley Brothers
5. I'll Pick A Rose For My Rose - Marv Johnson
6. No Matter What Sign You Are - Diana Ross & The Supremes
7. I'm in a Different World - The Four Tops
8. Dancing In The Street - Martha Reeves & The Vandellas
9. For Once In My Life - Stevie Wonder
10. You're All I Need To Get By - Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell
11. Get Ready - The Temptations
12. Stop Her On The Sight (S.O.S) - Edwin Starr
13. Love Child - Diana Ross & The Supremes
14. Behind a Painted Smile - The Isley Brothers
Hardly a dud amongst them. Yet there was only one song in that smorgasbord of classics that got to No. 1 in the UK. Any idea? Have to hurry you…’S’right, ‘Grapevine’.
‘Listening to Marvin all night long
This is the sound of my soul…’
Proud Galleries, in collaboration with EMI, Bravado and Universal Music, present Classic Motown – The Invasion Begins
The exhibition runs from 14th May – 13th July 2014, Monday to Sunday: 11am – 5pm. Free entry.
Address: The Horse Hospital, Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road. London NW1 8AH
www.proud.co.uk
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H0IM2CY
April 1979
Somewhere Over The Rainbow (Part 2)
As I walk home from the Rainbow that night it suddenly dawns on me that this could be my biggest break – switching from observer to controller. A pop promoter for the biggest band in the world. Power, dosh, fame. Everything I’d always wanted, well, since meeting Dina. This was my destiny and I was going to share it with someone who beat the shit out of me when I was five.
I ring Alan Edwards the next morning to try to arrange the meeting. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein would be arriving in London in a few weeks and he’d see what he could do. He sounds sceptical but eventually manages to set up a meeting at their hotel, the Montcalm in the West End. Alan always comes through: it’s the secret of his success.
It’s an unusually warm Sunday morning in April. The meeting is arranged for noon and Frank picks me up in a smart S-reg something.
This definitely feels right. I lean back in the leather seat and decide I’ve finally arrived.
Frank and I breeze into the foyer and glide up to the reception desk.
‘Room 221,’ I say, in a voice brimming with such confidence it even surprises me.
The clerk dials the room. ‘They’ll ring back in a few minutes,’ she says, as she replaces the receiver.
We turn to find a seat and bump into Frank Infante from the band.
‘Hi, Frank,’ I say, like he’s my long-lost brother.
He hesitates. ‘Oh, yeah, hi.’ I’m used to the pretty vacant look from new-wave bands. A flicker of recognition crosses his eyes. ‘Right, yeah. The other guys are in there having breakfast,’ he says, indicating the dining room.
‘Great, I’ll catch you after I’ve seen Debbie and Chris,’ I say, still confident, still surprised.
‘Okay.’ He shuffles off.
The phone on the desk rings. ‘You can go up now,’ says the clerk.
Frank is wearing a beige suit and brown tie. He looks the part. I’m in a jacket and jeans. I think we make a cool pair, like maybe Sinatra and Martin or Starsky and Hutch.
Chris Stein opens the door. He looks like he’s been up all night.
‘Come through. Debbie will be right in.’
He leads us into an impressive living room and Frank and I sit down on the couch. Debbie walks in. She’s wearing a plain white bathrobe and no makeup. She’s the biggest pop star in Britain and walks in loveliness like the night across pubescent souls starved of glamour in the aftermath of punk.
But at noon on that particular Sunday, she looks like death warmed-up.
‘So what’s this all about?’ Chris asks.
Frank hits the gas. ‘I want Blondie to top the bill at a massive one-day pop extravaganza I’m promoting at Stamford Bridge, the home of Chelsea Football Club. Here’s the deal. We’ll fly the band over on Concorde . . .’ I suddenly feel very cool when he says, ‘We’ll’. Chris and Debbie seem to like the supersonic words he’s speaking. They start to listen more intently. This is going well.
‘Then we’ll---’
The phone rings.
‘Excuse me just a moment,’ says Chris.
Frank starts to make small-talk with Debbie as Chris picks up the phone.
‘He’s the guy who did what?’ We all turn and look at Chris. He stares at me wide-eyed. After a few moments without saying another word he hangs up.
‘That was Clem.’ He’s talking only to me. ‘He says you’re the guy who interviewed them in New York a few months back. They didn’t like what you wrote about them, man. I haven’t read it but I know they were pretty pissed. They’re sending a couple of guys up to throw you out.’
He turns to Debbie. ‘Shit, I don’t know how these guys were allowed up here in the first place. Who arranged this?'
This Montcalm moment is a doozie. Why me?
‘Er, I’m sorry about this, Frank,’ I say, still in a state of apoplexy and frantically trying to remember what I’d actually written that had caused such consternation.
‘Don’t worry.’ He’s taking it nobly.
There’s a loud knock at the door.
I fear the worst. Frank and I had fought each other as kids − now we’re united against a common foe: Blondie bouncers.
Chris opens the door. There’s an exchange of words in the hallway.
He comes back into the room and says the guys outside want a word with me.
I go out. Frank, gratifyingly, watches my back.
A big guy in a black jacket, with the word `Security’ emblazoned across the back in large letters the colour of blood, is waiting. His colleague, similarly attired, stands a few feet away.
‘Is that guy you’re with Frank Warren?’ asks the first guy like it was Mick Jagger or Dustin Hoffman. Shit, Frank from my flats was a media celebrity. The boxing shows at the Rainbow were proving to be his stepping stones to fame. He really has caught the public’s imagination
I try to say, ‘Yes,’ like Al Pacino, but it comes out sounding more like John Inman.
‘I thought so,’ says the guy. ‘Look, we’ve just been asked by the band to throw you out but I don’t want any trouble with you or Mr Warren. I’ve seen you around at concerts and I know
you’re kosher. I don’t know what it was you wrote about those guys but they’re pretty fucked-off. I’ll leave it up to you but I think, honestly, it would be better if you left.’
He’s a straight-up guy and he’s marking my card. And then the two of them turn around and walk away, though I think they were tempted to ask for Frank’s autograph.
At that moment I realise I’d never be able to pin Frank’s arms to the ground ever again. He’s a well-respected man with more influence than I could ever have imagined. I, on the other hand, am a schmuck who still doesn’t know what I’d written that had got them all so pissed.
‘When we sort this shit out I’ll get in touch,’ says Chris. Frank and I both know we’d never set eyes on him again. Or each other come to that.
‘What the hell did you write?’ Frank asks, as we walk through the foyer and out into the spring sunshine. We both laugh about it on the way home but we know we’re never going make it as Barnum and Bailey. This was my last tango in Paris. From now on I have to set my sights lower.
Much lower.
(What the hell I wrote can be found on an earlier blog. Really sorry about that Frank. What can I say? I was a klutz with a vindictive streak. I actually did meet up with Frank over twenty years later. I heard that his mother had passed away. She was an absolute gem, always a smile on her face, always a kind word on her lips. I felt I had to write a letter of condolence to Frank and he replied with a wonderful handwritten letter awash with memories.
We met for lunch, two Finsbury boys with a boxful of chat, and he invited me and my sons Paul and Andrew, who were 16 at the time, to see Herbie Hide at the London Arena. He was fighting some relative unknown called Vitali Klitschko. My boys were well impressed when we were ushered into the up front and personal ringside seats and even more impressed by the Goliath proportions of the Ukrainian. The guy was a mountain and Herbie went down in the second round. It was a wonder he lasted that long.
After the show, I introduced the boys to Frank who chatted to them for a while.
‘I tell you something,’ he said to them as a parting shot, ‘your dad and I had better fights than that one tonight when we were kids…’
When I sent Frank this article, he invited me over the Arsenal as a guest in his box for the last home game of the season against West Bromwich Albion last Sunday. We reminisced about the old days and I asked him if the piece I wrote about him was okay to use. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s fine, except for one thing. It wasn’t Monopoly I tipped up. It was Buccaneer…’ What a true gent).
Next: Rush in Newcastle
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.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives
April 1979
Somewhere Over The Rainbow (Part 1)
My first, vivid, memory of Frank Warren – or Frankie, as he was known back in the day − was getting a right-hander from him outside my flat when we were both five years old. It was my first fight.
It felt more comfortable getting punched close to my front door: I figured if the fight was going against me my dad would come out and break it up and, if not, he’d let it roll for a while before stepping in. He came out double quick that day. I’d bloodied Frank’s nose but he kicked the shit out of me. My mum gave him a banana and we shook hands, but from then on we were always on opposite sides. He ran with the enemy.
I lived on the ground floor of Bevin Court near King’s Cross and he lived up in the sky on the seventh. He had a lovely mum but he was always such a little bastard – forgive me, Frank. He’d throw other kids’ toys down the rubbish chute, tip up and ruin games of Monopoly that we often played in the stairwells of the flats, and generally cause havoc. He always seemed to be itching for a fight.
He was of slight build, a little below average in those below-average days, but he could punch well above his weight. He was kinda dangerous and I kinda liked that. I had one more fight with Frank. It was in the street that led down to the flats. I guess we were about nine. He’d hardly grown out of his five-year-old shell but I was rapidly turning into a tall, tubby kid. I towered over him and it was a complete mismatch. I knew it but Frank didn’t, and he steamed in like a raging bull and really hurt me. After a fierce struggle, my blubber managed to pin him to the ground and I placed both my knees on his outstretched arms.
We stayed like that for seconds, minutes, who knows? My locker no longer contains such secrets. The older boys who had instigated the fight got bored and started wandering off. It must’ve been hurting Frank because my knees were really aching. I think we both wanted to cry but our hearts wouldn’t let us. It was the way we were. And then I started to feel deeply ashamed. I didn’t want to hurt this person, I grew up with him for fucksake. What was the point of this? Whack! ‘You bully. Get off him.’
An old woman hit me with her umbrella and pushed me over. ‘You’re twice as big as him, you bully,’ and she whacked me again. I got up quick and ran as fast as my tubby body
would let me. I knew what Frank was capable of; I knew what all of us on that estate were capable of and, sure enough, a brick came heading my way. Luckily, his arms must’ve still been numb because I wasn’t caught by the shrapnel as it landed and for a big, fat kid that was a result.
‘You bully.’ I’ve been called a lot of things in my life but those words will always hurt the most. ‘You bully.’ Me?
That was the last ‘straightener’ I ever had. I didn’t like the look of someone’s face contorted with a pain that I was inflicting, someone that I actually, perversely, liked. I also hated getting hurt. But I hated most being goaded by older boys who wanted to see a fight. We were a pair of prize suckers. Neither of us fell for that again.
We were all beasts in baseball boots, but some of us were cleverer than others. Frank passed his eleven-plus – hardly anyone from our area did that − much to the surprise of one particular parent who actually stopped me in the street and said, ‘Can you believe it?’
I could.
By then Frank’s family had moved to another estate, Priory Green, but he was still a frequent visitor to our shores, organising football matches between neighbouring estates on concrete playgrounds with walls for goals. He didn’t play, he organised. He made it happen. When you can do that at ten, the eleven-plus is a stroll in the park.
It was patently clear that the guy had brains. He shed the ‘ie’ from the end of his name, ducked and dived like we all did and became very wise very quickly, like some of us did. I’d see Frank around and we’d chat and it was easy, comfortable. He was flash, but in that good, unintentional way. Natural flash. Organic flash. And every time I bumped into him he’d grown appreciably taller, nicer, genuinely interested in what I was doing. As his reputation grew, I felt a sense of pride that a bloke from my flats could achieve worldwide fame doing something that really did come naturally.
Our paths cross on several occasions in 1979, one of which involves probably the most embarrassing moment of my life …
Frank is starting to make a name for himself as an unlicensed boxing promoter of mainly overweight fighters who beat up each other at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. It’s popular entertainment and the media love slagging it off
I bump into him in Chapel Market and he hands me a pair of tickets for one of the shows. I take Tim (Lott) and I think he’s surprised at the sheer number of spivs in suits that pack out the venue. The fights are more like boxing matches than I’d thought they’d be. Gloves, a ring, rounds, referee, shit, it’s boxing. There are a few decent contests but no one suffers any really bad injuries. It’s boxing, it’s local, it’s a good night out.
When I meet Frank after the show, he’s backstage sitting at a desk behind a mountain of cash because it’s tickets in advance or at the door and loads of people leave it until the last minute to go. It’s all legit and includes the fighters’ purses, security payments and other staff and receipts are issued. He’s now way out of my league. He’s about to embark on his first trip to the States and I try to impress him with a few feeble stories about my travels.
‘Do you know Blondie?’ he suddenly asks.
I’m delighted. Why, only a few weeks ago I’d spent the night on the town in Manhattan with Blondie, snorting and smoking and scheming. ‘Yeah, sure,’ I reply, and proceed to relate my chemical soirée − naturally leaving out the bit about the chemicals. I figure Frank wouldn’t appreciate that, him being a teetotaller an' all.
‘Look, I’ll be honest,’ he says after listening attentively. ‘I’ve got first refusal on Stamford Bridge for a one-day rock concert this summer and I fancy Blondie to headline. Do you reckon you could set up a meet?’
Blondie are the biggest band in town. Their single ‘Heart of Glass’, released in January, has sold more than they could ever imagine. The band’s PR is none other than Alan Edwards.
‘No sweat, Frankie.’ I instantly regret the ‘ie’ but he doesn’t seem to mind. I tell him I used to be their PR and that they know me really well.
‘Well, if this comes off we’ll all do well. By the way, do you know the Stranglers too?’
Do I know the Stranglers?
‘Well,’ Frank continues, ‘that Jean-Jacques Burnel would be a fantastic attraction if he stepped into the ring against, say, Lennie McLean. He’s got a bit of a reputation of being shit hot at karate, hasn’t he? It would be perfect.’
It’s true. Jean must have every Dan in the book, including Desperate. He was as hard as nails yet supremely intelligent – a beguiling combination.
A few weeks later I’m sitting having lunch in a burger bar in Hoxton with Frank, ex-middleweight champion of the world Vic Andretti and, yes, Jean Jacques. I originally introduced Frank to Jean at a gig to promote Jean’s debut solo album Euroman Cometh and I’d driven JJ to the Ringside bar in Hoxton, which is owned by Vic. The unlicensed boxing shows at the Rainbow were making Frank rich and famous. He was becoming a celebrity and I loved it. Of course, JJ going one on one with Lennie McClean was never going to happen, but it’s good to talk and the idea did receive some media interest.
Besides, there are bigger fish to fry …
Next: Blondie bombshell
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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April 1979
Cats & dogs
In a packed Greenwich pub, I share a few pints with Chris Difford. I always seem to talk to members of Squeeze in packed pubs. And you know something? Neatneatneat. Dat’s Squeeze. Sweetsweetsweet. Dat’s Squeeze too.
They’re the doyens of cartoon-strip situation rock. Each song a two-inch-square excursion into the crazy caper world of big noses, dangling fags, words frozen in blurb balloons and painful domesticity.
Yet at the same time they’re as slick as a Sassoon quiff, as succinct as a silicon chip.
Squeeze are artifice with substance. Their dexterity is sometimes quite devastating, sometimes only partially successful due to an occasional lapse into Fantasy Land (a trap they have avoided on the new album Cool For Cats) and very rarely 24-carat oopseroonie.
But, then, a perfect Squeeze would be intolerable. Imperfection is half the fun.
A year ago the Deptford dickie-bow merchants clocked in with the hit single, ‘Take Me I’m Yours’ and clocked out with nothing more than a five o’clock shadow and a few strangled dreams.
A series of indifferent reviews followed, interspersed with downright venomous assaults on the band’s capabilities, too easily dismissed as lightweight and shallow. Then there was an album that made about as much impression as a hooker in an old people’s home.
‘You learn by your mistakes.’ Chris Difford, lyricist, singer and guitarist, grips his pint like Steve Austin and raises it above the sticky beer mat. ‘After the hit we decided, erroneously in retrospect, to try and break America.’
When Squeeze returned from their Stateside sojourn they found themselves back at cartoon strip square one. ‘The press seemed to resent the fact that we’d stayed in America for so long. But I guess the press have never really been on our side. They don’t regard us as being hip enough, a Human League or Gang of Four. That’s fine by me because we see ourselves in the same bracket as the Faces or the Stones. Just good time rock ’n’ roll. When we played Hammersmith with the Feelgoods we got an encore. That meant more to me than anything we’ve done so far. It was more important than a hundred rave reviews in the papers.
‘Christ, we’re doing seven nights at Hammersmith with the Tubes. If we get an encore every night I think I’ll retire.’
And so to the ‘cheeky, schoolboy humour’ (an Anne Nightingale Old Grey Whistle Test special) of ‘Cool For Cats’, which, by the way, was doctored by Top of the Pops.
‘A few minutes before we were due to appear they told us to substitute "blinkin’" for "bleedin."’ I was absolutely petrified because I really didn’t want to do it. But really the joke’s on them ’cos they haven’t sussed yet there are far worse lines in the song – like "Give the dog a bone", for example.’
Chris reckons he got the inspiration for the song while in a boozer, surprise, surprise. ‘In the course of an hour if you’re on your own having a drink your mind will wander over at least five or six different subjects. That’s all "Cats" is, five unrelated images linked by the same phrase.
‘We just get fed up with the acceptable structures for songs. Squeeze are influenced to some extent by Kraftwerk and there is a happy medium between the average rock sound and "Showroom Dummies".’
It’s arguable that they occasionally went overboard with the dummies on the first album, but Cool For Cats is more yer strictly roots beer foam Bensons 33.
‘It’s a London album. The next one will be European. After all, life is just a railway track – once you’ve been to Scotland you’ve got to come back.’
He never said a truer word, although I’d have gone for Newcastle.
The album is not exactly complimentary to the fairer sex. Chris’s songs are littered with earthy references, so women become ‘it’ or ‘dog’. ‘We call ’em trouts round here. My songs are simply observations and you find men often refer to women in such terms.’
One thing young Chris thinks about is his ever-increasing folio of songs – around two thousand at the last count. ‘I’ve sent some to lan Dury because I think he’s the best social writer around. I’d love to team up with him because I’m sure we could become the Gilbert and Sullivan of rock and write a new Threepenny Opera.’
Squeeze have got a new drive, a new bassist, a new series of cartoons, a new confidence. They’ve also got a first-class return ticket to Scotland. What more can you ask?
The Daily Record version of that meeting that I did leaves the Squeeze PR Versa Manos livid. ‘Chris is furious because his words were misconstrued and it shouldn’t have appeared like that.’ I do appear to be rubbing interviewees up the wrong way these days. One in particular hits very hard, causing a landslide that blocks the way to the biggest money-spinning opportunity of my life.
And all thanks to that Debbie Harry interview nine months ago…
(Difford and Tilbrook kept the Squeeze box going until 1999 when they both started to pursue solo careers. In 2007 the pair re-formed Squeeze − minus Jools Holland and drummer Gilson Lavis – and toured the US. Live At The Fillmore was issued on iTunes and as a limited-edition white vinyl double-LP in April, 2012. Last year, Glenn Tilbrook confirmed that Squeeze would be recording between January and March 2014. The songs would feature on an ITV 6 part series based on the autobiography of Going To Sea In A Sieve by Danny Baker. Two songs per week would be featured in each episode).
Next: Blondie bombshell
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives that’s free to download for three days from 30 March to 1 April inclusive:
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March 1979
Quiet please – it’s a Sex Pistol
Hampstead in the rain smells like the countryside, but there’s not much green down Jones Street.
‘Yeah, come round to me gaff for a chat. I’ve moved up to posh ol’ Hampstead now.’
Steve Jones’ phone words, still ringing in my ears during the solemn umbrella trudge from the tube station at midday, provide little solace since they have to compete with an insidious shoe squelch due to one tiny sole slit.
His newly acquired flat is on the second floor of a large house. I ring the bell for ten minutes on the main front door. No reply. I ring other bells, hoping someone might deign to answer and let me in out of this interminable wet.
Eventually, a little old woman opens the door. ‘You’re looking for Mr Jones? To tell you the truth, I don’t think he’s in, but you can try.’ She leads me along a passage and up the kind of staircase you usually find in thirties musicals, full of lipsticky smiles and top hats. ‘That’s his door.’ I knock. No reply. ‘Yes, he’s definitely out. This happened the other day when a young girl came to see him. And in this weather too.’
I try the flat next door. Another elderly woman answers. ‘Mr Jones? No, I didn’t hear him leave. I’ve been asleep all morning. Besides, he’s such a nice quiet boy I wouldn’t hear him if I was awake.’
‘Yes, our Mr Jones is a quiet chap,’ says the other. ‘I live underneath him and the only sound you can sometimes hear is when he plays his records.’
I leave this distinctly unPistol-like situation cursing the Milky Bar kid but not before bringing in two pints of milk for the first woman. ‘If I see him I’ll tell him you came. But he’s so quiet you don’t hear him come in.’
Can I believe my ears?
When I get back to the office I ring him. ‘Sorry ’bout that. I had to rush out and there was no way of contacting you. Come round again. I’ll definitely be in.’
Take the motor this time. The hole in my shoe just got bigger.
Inside his flat, I take a close look at him. Steve Jones is beginning to look more and more like one of those photographs in the window of a flash barber shop. His hair is remarkably immaculate and enough to make Tom Jones reach for the curling tongs.
Two-tone too. His face is chiselled like Burt Lancaster’s and beneath the T-shirt he appears to have a Charles-Atlas-was-here physique.
All this, coupled with an indifferent attitude of almost swashbuckling proportions, and you have the Adonis-flavoured chewy pop star. He’s as straight as a Yorkie, as interesting as a Topic and as durable as a Kit Kat.
His flat is epic. The lounge is predominantly black with no furniture except a few large cushions and a portable colour TV in one corner. There’s even a stage, which maybe fulfils a certain need in those long gaps between his public appearances (although it was installed by the previous owner).
‘The flat cost me fourteen grand,’ says Steve, as he shows me the rest of the property, which includes a bedroom done out entirely in wickerwork that the handyman did himself. ‘And then it cost me another six grand to decorate. It’s all I’ve got in the world now. I ain’t got a penny in the bank. Whenever I need any money I just have to go and sell a guitar or something.’
The word ‘unfair’ immediately springs to mind. The Pistols sell as many records now as when Rotten and Vicious called the tune and teased the media. There seems little doubt that, had they survived intact, the band would have transcended reputation and gone on to become the biggest selling ever, in this country anyway.
The success of ‘Something Else’ and ‘Silly Thing’ (best routine Legs and Co. have done in years) reinforces the fact that there are still plenty of people around who refuse to forget.
Unless, of course, you don’t remember in the first place.
‘It’s really strange,’ ponders Steve, strumming a guitar he hasn’t sold yet. ‘There’s all these thirteen-year-old punk rockers wandering about who don’t even recognise me. They don’t know how it all started or why.
‘Everything’s really changed now. There’s no fun any more. People are too straight. All these punk bands are writing songs that mean nothing. The reason rock ’n’ roll lasted so long was because the songs were great. But what’s going down now is rubbish, so the bands don’t last five minutes. Some journalist asked me the other day if the Pistols would ever get back together again and I told him I’d never team up with those sods -- for a laugh, y’know. He printed it, and I tell you something, that was the only true punk thing I’d read in a paper for a long, long time.’
Fun is a key word in both Steve’s vocabulary and lifestyle. It’s fun to be a rock star. It’s fun to be dubbed a charismatic cockney Casanova. It’s fun to be young and curly and popular and twenty-three and to frequent bareback skaters’ haunts full of creamy women and write hit songs and appear in movies and---
In movies?
’S right. Steve plays a diligent dick in The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. You’ve heard the soundtrack, now wait for the movie when you can …
. . . GASP as Sid jumps out of bed in his underpants.
. . . SCREAM as he rides a motorbike down the high street − ‘It was a three-wheeler ’cos Sid couldn’t ride a bike.’
. . . MOAN as Steve hops into bed with sex queen Mary Millington.
. . . LAUGH as Steve is then pursued by Mary’s screen husband, piano man Russ Conway.
. . . THRILL to Steve as a detective on the trail of Malcolm McLaren.
. . . CRY as they all die.
‘It’s gonna be really funny although I think Malc is trying to make it all too political. He’s rapidly getting away from the point of what he originally set out to do -- have a bit of fun and make a few bob.
‘Rotten’s in a few scenes, like the early days of our gigs, but he didn’t want to know about anything else. Irene Handl is also in the film and so’s that Shaft-like DJ who does that ad for K-Tel records on the telly. I hear the distributors are queuing up for it. I only hope none of this legal wrangling will prevent the film from being released.’
Steve is convinced that people want to know what it was really like in the good old days of the Pistols. ‘They just want to have a laugh, that’s all.’
The movie should also reflect that Steve was, and still is, the original punk beast.
‘It was me who used to get up to all the bother most of the time. Rotten was always pretty quiet. Funny, I knew he’d slag me off when the band split. Same with Matlock. If he got chucked out, everyone was to blame.’
I’ve no doubt that Steve could, if guided in that particular direction, hurl abuse at Rotten all day quite happily. But Pistols’ in-fighting has become rather monotonous, vapid and documented, to tedious length, in other publications. Let’s just say that Steve preferred Sid.
‘He was better than Rotten. I really liked ol' Sid. Naturally I felt sad when he topped himself. It’s not every day one of your mates dies. At least he was one rock star who lived up to the "hope I die before I get old" thing.
‘Paul and me were gonna go over and do an album with him after he got nicked to raise some money for lawyers’ fees. But the day before we were due to fly out we got the news that he was dead. I was looking forward to working with him again.
‘I always knew he wouldn’t last. He couldn’t help but be in bother all the time. Always up to stupid things like fights and getting cut up when he started getting too flash. And what with the drugs … You could never imagine Sid at forty.’
Can you imagine Steve Jones at forty?
‘I suppose I’ll live to be a hundred. I look after myself,’ he says, while chewing into a chocolate bar taken from a bowl of sweets he keeps in the lounge. ‘I don’t go around beating people up. I don’t take any lethal drugs.’
It’s true, he does look the picture of health. He’s lost weight over the last months, leaving a pound or two of sunburned fat on Californian beaches.
‘I had a great time over there. One night I went to a big party where the Runaways were playing and ended up mingling with loads of film stars like Gregory Peck and Zsa Zsa Gabor.’
Didn’t I read that he pulled Miss Gabor? ‘Nah -- she’s too old. I’d like to live in America for a while. They treat rock ’n’ roll totally different over there. It’s much more of a big deal, while here nobody gives a toss. When you play at gigs everything runs so smoothly. Here you always get problems. Like when you travel up north you’re never seen again. All that crap you hear about "friendly" northerners. They hate Londoners. Northerners are so thick . . .’
When he’s not slagging off northerners, Steve is producing records for ex-Runaway Joan Jett.
‘I’ve just done her new single, "You Don’t Own Me", and there’s a chance I might go to the States and do an album with her. It would be great to get away. I hate it here. It’s all so depressing at times.’
Maybe a spot of, er, permanent female company might help.
‘I don’t want to live with a bird yet. I enjoy myself too much.’
Fitting enough finale, I s’pose. I think if I’d ever been a rock star, I’d be a bit like Steve Jones.
And old ladies would love me for my silence.
(Steve has gone on to perform with such luminaries as Bob Dylan, Megadeth, Iggy Pop and Adam Ant. He lives in LA − as does John Lydon − where he was a radio DJ for a while, and has played at all the Pistols’ comeback shows)
Next: A tight Squeeze
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
