The lives of brian a mem.., p.11
The Lives of Brian: a Memoir, page 11
Even less successful was our attempt to branch out into ‘events’ – which boiled down to one booking from Steve Chance’s uncle, who’d just opened the first motel in Northumberland, up the Roman road on the way to Carlisle, in the absolute middle of nowhere. But what a beautiful nowhere.
And this was where Steve Chance’s uncle, aspiring tycoon that he was, had decided to build his motel. This was ground-breaking stuff, to go where no Northumbrian had gone before, because they didn’t know what a motel was.
It wasn’t until we got there – which was a miracle in its own right given the state of the van – that we realized we’d be playing for a local fire brigade’s Christmas party. This meant the crowd would be composed mostly of big lads in their 40s and 50s, and their wives, and they’d be tucking into a cigarette ash-sprinkled buffet of ham and peas pudding sandwiches and pies as we played.
‘Are you sure it’s a good idea?’ I asked Steve nervously, as I peered in through the window.
‘It’s a paying gig!’ said Steve. ‘What more do you want?’
It was when we were unpacking our gear that the fire captain came over and dropped the bombshell. ‘Alreet lads,’ he said, ‘when you’re ready, I’ll get on the mic and introduce you, and then – as discussed – you’ll open up with “Fire Brigade” by The Move.’
We looked back at him blankly.
‘I’m not sure I understand,’ I said, as politely as I could. ‘We never discussed that with anyone.’
‘Well, I made it very clear to the motel manager. “Fire Brigade” is our theme song.’
All eyes turned to Steve – whose uncle was presumably the manager in question. Steve just shrugged.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘but we don’t know “Fire Brigade”. We thought we’d start with some Chuck Berry.’
‘Of course you know it!’ laughed the fire captain, before launching into a rendition of it himself. ‘Run-and-get-the-fie-uh-bruh-gaade, get-the-fie-uh-bruh-gaade, get-the-fie-uh –’
‘I mean, aye, we know it,’ I interrupted, ‘what I mean is, we don’t know how to play it.’
‘It’s at No. 1 in the charts! How hard can it be?’
I was starting to feel a bit desperate now. ‘Can we please just do Chuck Berry?’ I asked.
‘Look, son, the only reason we booked yers was to play “Fire Brigade”. So can you just give it a shot, eh?’
Oh, fucking hell . . .
Once our gear was set up, we huddled for an emergency rehearsal. Dave, Ken and Steve tried to work out the chords, I tried to remember the lyrics and Smithy tapped out the rhythm. (This was 1968 – you couldn’t just open your music app and have a listen.) Still feeling totally unprepared, we then got up on stage and tried our best to get through the song. I was just making shit up during the verse, but the chorus was easy enough, the gist of it being that Roy Wood wanted someone to ‘run-and-get-the-fie-uh-bruh-gaade’ because the lass he sat next to at school was so gorgeous. And the audience didn’t care, they just wanted to sing along.
When we finally made it to the end, I’d never felt so relieved in all my life.
‘And now,’ I panted, sweat pouring down my forehead, ‘for some Chuck Berry . . .’
Which went down like a lead balloon. Followed by, ‘Dee “Fire Brigade” again! Dee “Fire Brigade” again!’
‘We don’t fucking know it!’ I said into the mic, causing a squeal of feedback.
‘JUST FUCKING DEE IT AGAIN, MAN!’
We must have played it five times. Then some smart arse called out and asked for ‘Penny Lane’. It took a moment for that one to click. Then I remembered the lyrics about the fireman keeping his fire engine clean. But we had to try and play it. You don’t argue with a room full of pissed-up firemen.
Whether it was the fire brigade gig that killed us, or the fact I was about to become a new dad – or our inability to get into the bigger venues where our kind of music was played – I’m not sure.
Whatever the case, the van crapped out at about the same time that we did. I was driving it back to North Shields one night – after dropping everyone off at their houses – when I saw blue lights behind me. Oh, shit. I was being pulled over by the cops. Which was a problem . . . not least because the van’s brakes didn’t work, so the only way to stop it was to force it into first gear with the pliers, while yanking up the handbrake and hoping that it wouldn’t cause some kind of catastrophic mechanical failure.
‘Out of the van, son!’ snapped the copper once I’d bounced and rolled to a halt. ‘I can’t let you drive this, it’s a danger.’
Then he noticed the tax disc . . . which was, of course, a Brown Ale label. Any van owned by anyone under the age of twenty-five in the North East had a Brown Ale label instead of a tax disc (well I did, anyway). It was as though Scottish & Newcastle Breweries had deliberately made it almost the exact same shape and size. ‘I’m gonna pretend I didn’t see that,’ said the copper. ‘And to make both of our lives a bit easier, I’m not even going to ask if you’ve got insurance, because I’m pretty sure I already know the answer to that question. But I am going to insist that you follow me – slowly – to the police station, where I’m going to take possession of this van and put it out of its misery. At the scrap heap.’
My heart sank.
No transport meant no gigs – which meant no band.
But the truth was, I had bigger things to worry about.
I got married to Carol on 1 June, 1968 – by which time she had a very obvious bump. Everyone had tried to talk us out of tying the knot. Carol’s ma had offered to look after the baby. My dad had kept telling me I still had my whole life ahead of me, that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But like every other teenager before me, I didn’t listen. Marrying the girl I’d got pregnant just seemed like the right thing to do.
The venue was a church in North Shields, the town on the coast where my bride-to-be had grown up – which was a bit awkward, because North Shields is a fishing town and Dunston is a coal village and, historically speaking, fishermen looked down their noses at coal miners, and would never let their daughters marry into coal-mining families. I mean, it was proper Romeo and Juliet shit. But thankfully none of Carol’s family were in fishing any more, and the tension had eased over the years.
The service went by in a blur. We were just kids. We had absolutely no idea how to handle ourselves on such an occasion. All I can tell you is that Dave Yarwood was the best man, and that my ma made the wedding dress.
Once the vows had been exchanged, my dad looked at me and went, ‘You happy?’
‘I’ll be alright, Dad,’ I said, but the fear was written all over my face. How was this going to work? How was I going to hold down a full-time job and do extra half-shifts and look after a wife and baby and still play in a rock’n’roll band? I already knew the answer, of course. I couldn’t. Something would have to give. And it wasn’t going to be the job or the extra half-shifts or looking after a wife and baby.
The reception was in a hall just by the church. The whole family was there, including my granddad and grandma. All the women got a sherry, all the men got a whisky. Then we sat down to this very inexpensive but tasty hot buffet. By which time everyone was getting on like a house on fire because we were all half-cut.
The honeymoon – such as it was – consisted of one night at Carol’s uncle’s house in Belmont, near Chester-le-Street. I had a second-hand Cortina Mark I at the time with a dodgy powder-blue paint job – it had bubbled within ten days of coming out of the shop. It would later develop a nasty habit of losing its bonnet in high winds – the thing would literally just fly off down the street, like a big metal kite – so I suppose we were lucky that the fourteen-mile journey went without incident.
Then suddenly we were at this house, which was small and semi-detached, with a fridge filled with food for us to eat. I remember us looking at each other and thinking, now what?
‘I could kill a sausage sandwich,’ said Carol, who by then was having all kinds of pregnancy cravings.
I ended up trying to cook – and failing miserably. On my wedding night.
When we got back to North Shields the next day, I moved into Carol’s bedroom at her parents’ house – ‘living in’ it was called, something most newly-weds did back then. It was so awkward, especially when I came down for breakfast the next morning. Not to mention crowded, given that they had two other kids in the house.
I don’t know how we did it, looking back, I really don’t.
My musical career, meanwhile, was going nowhere. If anything, in fact, it was going backwards because I’d stopped gigging entirely. The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub was now history, and none of the bigger bands around town would employ a singer with a measly 10-Watt P.A. system. For good reason too. For your voice to be heard over a rock band at a theatre or nightclub – or even at one of the bigger working men’s clubs – you needed a far bigger amp with a proper Shure microphone to go with it. But that was well beyond my means, even with a hire-purchase agreement.
Then Carol’s dad, Bill, did something brilliant that took a huge weight off all our shoulders. He’d got some insurance money from an accident at work, so he bought a nearby downstairs flat for £600 – 61 Chirton West View was the address – and he let us move in there as tenants, paying next-to-nothing in rent. It was the first house that he’d ever owned. (He rented his own from the council.)
It was such a relief when he told us, I could have cried.
I mean, yes, the place had been built in 1910 and there was damp on the walls and the toilet was outside, right at the back of the yard, in an outhouse so cold there was a hammer hanging on the wall to break the ice on frozen mornings. But at least we had a place to call our own. And it had a coal fire in the bedroom and another in the front room, so we could have heated the place if we’d had any money, of course. But a small bag of coal from the corner shop cost two shillings and seven pence, and it lasted just a couple of hours. So, we chose to shiver and save our money for food instead.
A few weeks after we moved in, the woman upstairs phoned Bill and told him that her roof was leaking. ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that,’ he replied, ‘but what’s it got to do with me?’ That’s when he found out that he hadn’t just bought the downstairs flat – he’d bought the whole house! And now he was on the hook for all the repairs, which were going to cost far more than the pittance he was getting in rent.
Mind you, he soon got his mates over there with some tiles and fixed the place up.
Carol wasn’t loving life any more than I was. The poor lass was just sixteen and should have been out having a good time. But she had to stay home and look after a baby. Looking back now, I feel terribly sorry for her. But our little Joanne was a constant joy – as was her sister Kala when she arrived a few years later. The love that both of our daughters brought us, you can’t put into words. It’s why I wouldn’t change a thing.
Rock bottom arrived when I went back to my parents’ house one night and found my dad on the street outside, red in the face, shouting in his loudest sergeant’s voice at my sister Julie and some guy she was seeing. Julie must have been about fifteen or sixteen at the time.
Poor Julie was in floods of tears and her boyfriend was so scared, he turned tail and ran. But my dad kept on shouting – and I just snapped. I felt like he was always shouting at someone, usually my ma, and it was so embarrassing and so unnecessary. But the truth was, of course, I was wound up to breaking point myself.
‘Dad, that’s enough!’ I screamed at him, in a voice almost as loud as his. ‘What’s this all about?’
But my dad was in a blind rage. ‘Don’t you talk to me like that, or I’ll take your head off!’ he roared.
‘I don’t think so, Dad,’ I said. ‘You lay a finger on me and I’ll –’
My dad went for me like I was still a ten-year-old boy. But I was a grown man and strong from all my factory work – and I was on a hair trigger. So, I whacked him. Harder than I meant to. And when he went down, I jumped on him, and I told him that if he ever bullied anyone in my family again, I wouldn’t be responsible for my actions. He was all flustered and frustrated, and I couldn’t tell if he was proud of me for standing up for myself, or shocked and disgusted.
It didn’t matter in the end. I felt so terrible, I went back the next day to apologize.
I just got the usual grunts in return. But I think that he felt bad too, because everything was fine again after that. But the shock of it woke me up and made me realize that I couldn’t go on like this, just hoping for a miracle.
It was time that I actually did something.
10
A Horrible Shower of Shit
Wikimedia Commons
The answer to my problems came in the unlikely form of a lad named Jimmy Shane, who burst into the light machine shop at Parsons one morning, very excited, because he’d just signed up to join the Territorial Army – Britain’s answer to the U.S. National Guard.
‘All you have to dee is march aroond on a Wednesday, and every odd weekend you get to gan up the range and fire a gun!’ he told me, speaking so quickly, I could barely understand him. ‘And if you stick it oot for a year, they give you a £200 bounty!’
‘What?’ I said, barely able to believe what I thought I’d just heard.
‘I said . . . all you have to dee is march aroond on a –’
‘No, no, no – the last part.’
‘If you stick it oot for a year, they’ll give you a £200 bounty!’
Holy shit, I thought – this is it. This is how I can buy a bigger P.A. system! This is how I can get back on stage . . . but this time with a bigger, better band. (I also loved the idea of earning a ‘bounty’.)
I ran down to the T.A. recruitment office that same day and filled out an application form. Then I was taken to a separate room for a rigorous medical exam.
Doctor: ‘Name and address?’
Me: ‘61 Chirton West View, North Shields.’
Doctor: ‘Is there anything wrong with you?’
Me: ‘Well, er –’
Doctor: ‘You’re in.’
Now, I should explain at this point that there was a choice of divisions that you could join, but the parachute regiment – the one that Jimmy Shane had signed up for – was the only one that paid you the almost unimaginable sum of £200. If you joined the engineers, for example, you got ‘only’ £125. What’s more, in the paras you were promised an £8 bonus for every time you jumped out of a plane – not that I thought for a second that I’d ever be doing that. I mean, the British government didn’t have money for anything in those days. And this was peacetime. And the North East. So, the idea that they’d be sending lads like me up on joyrides in the skies seemed laughable. The paras would be just one step up from the Sea Scouts, in my mind. We’d wear our uniforms, do some drills, maybe go on a camping trip, and at the end of the year, I’d be £200 richer, thanks very much.
Next thing I knew, I was reporting for duty after work at a drill hall in Gosforth, a well-to-do suburb just north of Newcastle. I’d even managed to talk George Beveridge into coming with me. Not that he needed much persuading after hearing about the bounty.
A shiver went down my spine as we approached the drill hall and heard the shouts of command and the thud of marching feet. And that part of me was going, oh, fuck yeah. I mean, I was also a bit nervous – the T.A. lads looked hard men – but when they took a break and started talking to us, they couldn’t have been more friendly.
The same could not be said of the drill sergeants. Every other word out of their mouths was ‘fuck’, and when they called out your name – or rather, screamed it in your face – it was nearly always followed by, ‘You horrible shower of shit.’
The first thing I had to do was sign the Official Secrets Act, which seemed a bit much, but also quite exciting.
Then I got my first order: ‘YOU! YOU HORRIBLE SHOWER OF SHIT! GET YOUR FUCKIN’ HAIR CUT!’
Oh, crap. I’d forgotten you needed a short-back-and-sides to join the military. I should have remembered the footage of Elvis getting his head shaved and being flown to West Germany so he could sit on a tank. My hair was kind of long and curly, and it looked just the part on stage. But it was useless to me without a P.A. system. And if Jimi Hendrix had been a U.S. Marine – who was I to object?
I was issued my second-hand uniform, which smelled of old battlefields and old hookers – not to mention old stains. We were given new boots – brand new and shiny black, with khaki puttees, or leg-bindings – followed by the coveted crowning glory, my red beret. Only the beret had no wings on it. You had to earn them.
We were then told to make arrangements for two weeks of leave from our workplaces for Basic Training. This was another thing I wasn’t planning on. What the fuck was Basic Training all about? I was about to find out.
Basic Training took place at a fucking huge place – Catterick Garrison on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales.
The group of lads I found myself with had been put under the command of a short, stout and incredibly noisy Glaswegian drill sergeant who we nicknamed The Pig.
When The Pig screamed an order, the word ‘you’ would exit his throat as ‘YEEEEEEOOOWW!’ – the same sound you might make if someone was trying to insert a cheese grater up your rectum. And when The Pig marched us up and down the parade ground – which was pretty much all of the time – his ‘lefts’ would come out as ‘EFFs!’ and his ‘rights’ as ‘HAIGHTs!’ As in – ‘EFF-HAIGHT! EFF-HAIGHT! EFF-HAIGHT!’
Aye, The Pig’s love of misery was legendary. As was his generosity in spreading it around.
Our quarters at Catterick were World War II-era Nissen huts – basically sheets of corrugated iron that had been bent into half cylinders, with a breeze block wall and a door at each end. There was a stove pipe for heating, but we didn’t use it, otherwise we would have had to clean it out every night to pass The Pig’s morning inspection – The Pig would drop a sixpence on your bedsheets, and if the coin didn’t bounce, that meant you hadn’t pulled the sheets tight enough, and you’d have to face his wrath.
