The lives of brian a mem.., p.12
The Lives of Brian: a Memoir, page 12
Our days would begin at the crack of dawn, when The Pig would walk around bashing two dustbin lids together, right next to our heads.
After that, it was breakfast at the Naafi* – a.k.a. the canteen – followed by non-stop marches, drills, lectures on breaking down your gun, then visits to the firing range, until it was time to eat, then hit the sack. By which time you’d be so knackered, you’d be fast asleep the second your head hit the pillow.
The firing range should have been the best part. But we were too worried about failing the test to have much fun. There were no telescopic sights or any of that shit. And the targets were about 200 to 300 yards away, with some as far away as 600 yards, and, of course, The Pig would be breathing down your neck, screaming things like, ‘No, no, no! Not like that! Steady your hand!’ just as you were about to pull the trigger. I qualified as average, which meant I missed as many as I hit – enough to pass the test.
The upside of all the adversity was how deeply it made you bond with your fellow recruits.
Within a couple of days, I’d become fast friends with the likes of Jimmy Shane – the guy who’d given me the idea to join the T.A. – along with another lad named Jimmy Smith and a huge fella we knew only as The Dane. But, of course, the more comfortable we got in each other’s company, the more we started to mess around . . .
Never a good idea in the military.
One morning, for example, we turned out for parade and The Pig was nowhere to be seen, so I thought that I would do my best impression of him in front of the lads. I must have been doing a good job because the lads were howling with laughter – but then suddenly they stopped and stood to attention. I thought, boy, I’m good at this. Then I heard heavy breathing from behind and a voice filled with unconcealed hatred. ‘I hate you, Johnson, and I’m going tae make your life misery.’
Oh, shit . . . The Pig.
I was dead.
He made me run around the parade ground holding my rifle above my head until morning parade was over.
We had a twenty-mile route march with the full kit, then we returned to camp, the lads went to the Naafi, but not me. Sergeant Pig had other ideas, like running round the parade ground again with that fucking heavy rifle getting heavier. After that, I cleaned out a huge coal bunker till he thought it satisfactory. My arms were knackered, the P.A. system seemed a long way off. Needless to say, spanking the monkey was right out of the question for the next couple of days.
Having finished Basic training, I was basically a very basic part-time soldier. But to be the complete parachute package, I had to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft, at 800–1,000 feet, and to do that, we had to go to parachute-training school at RAF Abingdon in Oxfordshire.
There were about forty guys, all wondering what they’d let themselves in for. Laughter was way too loud, and bravado was bouncing off the walls, meaning we were all shit scared.
The first thing you notice at a Royal Air Force base is the absence of parade ground shouting. Everyone was so nice and polite, the sergeant, who greeted us, was so charming.
‘Hello lads, I hope you had a good journey, now follow me and I’ll take you to your quarters, and you can get settled in. I’ll be back in an hour and I’ll show you where you’ll have lunch.’
Oh, this was great. I liked this nice polite sergeant, and then lunch, brilliant. The canteen was better than I’d dreamed of. This is where the bomber crews had bacon and eggs after a night raid over enemy territory, magic stuff.
The food was good too. After dessert, the lovely sergeant fella said, ‘Right boys, we’ll now go to the lecture hall and tell you what the next two weeks of training consists of and introduce you to your jump sergeants (masters).’
I had this feeling that someone had just walked over my grave, but I put it down to an errant bowel movement. Into the lecture hall we walked, and there, with a glint in his eye, was the dreaded Pig. Oh, shit! I’m dead, and he must have read my mind because he gave me a microscopic nod.
This time he had brought his friends with him, and they all looked eager to get started on the jumping from a great height bit. My dreams of singing in a band in front of an adoring audience disintegrated, along with thoughts of a long life. Still, I was determined to see it through.
The next morning started with the usual parade and inspection, then breakfast, then learning how to fall from varying heights. The sergeants would always shout ‘GO!’ right in your ear, and when they did, you went.
The most frightening thing was climbing up The Tower. It was basically an electric pylon, and when you got to the top it swayed with the wind. The fear factor was sphincter-rattlingly catastrophic. Then they put a harness round your waist and shoulders, which was attached to a wire. This was attached to a pulley, which when you jumped would spin a two-foot square board, and that was your brake as it were.
The jump sergeant was having the time of his life watching wide-eyed recruits pissing their pants as they realized just how high up they were. I tried to be civil to him, and he smiled and said ‘GO!’, so I did.
You must realize, at the start of this course we were told that if you hesitated or refused to jump, you would be out of camp within thirty minutes, baggage and all, so you couldn’t talk to anyone else of your fear.
That afternoon, we were told that our first real parachute jump would be tomorrow morning. One kid whooped and cheered, but we beat the shit out of him.
The next morning was a beautiful blue-sky day. Nobody ate much breakfast. We lined up for our parachutes and, as we put them on, belting them up around crotch, waist and shoulders, you immediately wondered if yours was okay. We’d been told of the dreaded ‘roman candle’, which means the chute doesn’t open, and the song we sang when drunk was the old parachute ditty.
They jumped from 20,000 feet without a parachute
They jumped from 20,000 feet without a parachute
And he ain’t gonna jump no more.
Glory, glory, what a hell of a way to die
Glory, glory, what a hell of a way to die.
And he ain’t gonna jump no more.
They scraped him off the runway like
A pound of strawberry jam. . . .
I think you get my drift.
‘Right gentlemen, check your reserve chute is properly fixed in position on your chest, and the red handle is facing up and if you lose the handle in any way, we shall take 10 shillings and sixpence out of your pay. Follow me.’
I thought, bollocks! All I wanted was a P.A. system. The Beatles and The Stones never did this. They were on the road, shagging birds and getting high, but not as fucking high as me!
We followed the jump masters to our transport to the skies. It was a basket hanging from a balloon, just like the Montgolfier brothers. The sergeant major shouted, ‘This is not a fucking balloon, it is a dirigible, and that underneath is not a basket, it’s a gondola. Call it anything else and you will face my ire!’
I can’t really remember what was going through my mind, but it resembled a white cross with a poppy on it. We were to jump in groups of five. I was number four.
‘Right, you lot, your turn, follow me.’
And we did. We walked into this basket, sorry gondola, hanging onto the sides for grim death. Then it started to ascend, the J.M. shouted ‘HOOK UP!’ and we hooked our chutes to the static line. Up and up, we went. God, this was proper stuff. As usual, my arse was doing its impression of a squirrel’s nose. But the scariest of all, was the sheer and absolute silence. So quiet, you could hear birds breaking wind.
‘Right lads, here we are, 800 feet. Do exactly as I say.’ There was a doorway that remained open at all times. We were still gripping the rail of the basket for dear life.
‘What are you holding that for, you’ll all be jumping in a minute.’
And that’s when it hit me, sod the P.A., sod music, I wanna live.
‘Number one, to the door, hand on the door, GO!’ And he went, then two, then three . . . ‘Number four, to the door, GO!’
And I did, and I fell and kept falling, till a big hand pulled me up and I was floating down and I started to laugh at the same time as steering down my chute. I landed and it didn’t hurt, it was an explosive feeling of relief, and I wanted to do it again, because I’d just earned £8.
We did one more that day, £16.
To get your wings as a para, you had to complete seven jumps, two from a dirigible and five out of an aircraft, and that was next and very different.
The next morning, we assembled in the hangar and were shown our 60lb kit bags. These were tied to your right leg, and from that a fifteen-foot lanyard type thing was attached to your waist strap, with a quick-release catch. Once you had jumped and your chute was fully opened, you had to let the bag go, and it hung from your waist. Meaning when you landed, your gear was right beside you.
The trouble was these things started to oscillate, which means swinging like a pendulum, and they can really fuck with your genitalia. On top of all that, if you got scared and jettisoned it, you would be neck deep in shit from everyone who mattered. Basically, because it was very dangerous for those below you.
The whole experience of jumping from an aircraft is bewildering to men or boys. You are hardly able to walk with 60lb strapped to you and there is the noise of the aircraft engines (it was my first time on a plane ever). Climbing into the fuselage; finding the netting; which was your seat. Checking your helmet was secure; no smiles from anyone, no jokes, just rigid looks on everyone’s face.
The plane takes off, climbing slowly. It was a Blackburn Beverley, as old and tired as a pit pony.
We circle, then the jump master stands. He looks down the plane and lifts both hands. That means ‘stand up’. We do, and face him.
‘HOOK UP!’
We can’t hear him, but he crooks his forefinger, and we do.
‘CHECK EQUIPMENT!’
That means, check the man in front’s straps, and that he is safe to go. Meanwhile, hoping the guy behind you is doing the same. And then you’re ready. The red light is on, bloody hell, what the fuck am I doing here? I keep getting myself in these situations. ‘Dear Mrs. Johnson, here’s a bucket of PVT Johnson’s remains.’ Stop thinking, Brian.
Green light, and the first man is gone. You can’t see anything until you get to the door, and there’s the earth.
A long way down and moving fast, go, and I was gone. Almost horizontal for a few seconds and then that lovely chute opens, phew!
Oh shit, I forgot the quick release. I release it, and down my kit bag drops and hangs there, and down we go. I land with a slight roll and pull in the chute. I’m safe, I made it (£24).
We did another four, all exciting as hell and as scary, but I had fucking done it.
11
Geordie Boy
I bought the P.A. system from a music shop called Windows in Newcastle’s Central Arcade, a beautiful glass-roofed indoor market that dates back to Edwardian times. What I paid for it, I’ve no idea. All I remember is that when the salesman asked if I was interested in a hire-purchase agreement, I uttered a phrase that I never thought I’d hear coming out of my own mouth – ‘No thank you, I’ll pay cash.’
The P.A. was a WEM system with a 100-Watt amp and two columns of four eight-inch speakers – less powerful than the stereo in the average South Korean hatchback today, but the absolute dog’s bollocks back then. I even had some money left over for an echo machine. Boy, did it sound professional. I was careful not to overdo it, though – you could always tell the terrible singers by how much they turned up their echo machines.
The P.A. system wasn’t the only boost to my self-confidence. Now that I’d completed my seven parachute jumps, I was also officially awarded my ‘wings’ at a special Territorial Army presentation ceremony – and it was one of the greatest moments of my life. Even better, I got to go home in my full uniform of red beret, combat smock and jump boots. That was the best thing about the Paras – the uniform looked so tough. There were no shiny buttons or sashes or any of that shit. You dressed like you were about to jump out of a plane over enemy territory, then crawl through twenty miles of mud to blow up a bridge. I swear my dad shed a tear of pride when he first set eyes on me – before rushing me straight down to his social club to show me off to his friends. It made me so happy to see that look on his face.
Meanwhile, now that I had the right musical equipment, it was time to get back to more important business than fighting the Cold War. I needed to join a new band and start playing some shows.
Before we get to that, I should probably rewind a bit and explain that I hadn’t completely left the music scene after leaving The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub and getting married.
For a while, I’d messed around with a couple of lads from Seaton Delaval and a keyboard player who I only ever knew as ‘Shrimp’. They’d previously been in a band called Hannibal Kemp – where they got that name, I’ve no idea – and they wanted to form a new band but under the same name, so they’d keep their old fans. The only problem with that plan being that they’d never actually had any fans, so when we booked our first show, no one showed up. An emergency band meeting followed, but after several hours of chin-stroking and heated debate over what we should call ourselves, inspiration still hadn’t struck. ‘We just need something . . . fresh!’ I said. And that was that. From then on, we were called ‘Fresh’.
It was actually a great little band, was Fresh, because we did stuff that was more chart-y and mainstream than the heavy blues of The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub. We covered songs like ‘Magic Carpet Ride’ by Steppenwolf, and ‘Back in the USSR’ by The Beatles – a great rocky number, with that hard-driving piano riff. Not that I looked much like a rocker. I was still in paratrooper training, preparing to save the world from the Communist hoards, so my hair was short. If it had been a few years later, I could have at least pretended to be a punk. As it was, I just looked very out of place.
Even if we rarely played though, I still loved that sense of belonging that came with being in a band.
We’d walk around town as a band. We’d go to the pub as a band. We’d hang around outside Windows in the Central Arcade as a band, waiting for the hot-off-the-press sheet music to arrive for new songs that had just entered that week’s charts.
Fresh reached its creative peak when we hired a sax player. He was one of the top turbine engineers at Parsons, as it happened, an absolutely brilliant guy. Just not so brilliant on the sax. Technically speaking, he couldn’t actually play the sax at all. But he could do a few chords.
But our sax player’s greatest achievement was building this ingenious, almost Pink Floyd-esque lighting rig. The guts of it were made from an old record player, which he modified by putting ten microswitches on the turntable, so that when it was spinning, the switches would hit different contacts in a pre-set sequence. The contacts would then send electrical signals to an old floorboard with ten light sockets attached to it, each one with a different-coloured bulb – not the kind of bulbs you’d use at home, but big, floodlight-type things. When he gave us a demonstration, our jaws dropped. It was like a strobe, but in colour. Absolutely stunning.
After another band meeting, the decision was made to deploy this secret weapon at our next gig – during the guitar solo in ‘Magic Carpet Ride’. We were so excited, we played all the songs before it at about twice the usual speed. Then the big moment arrived. As the guitar solo began, the stage lights went down, the jerry-rigged turntable started to spin, the microswitches were activated in sequence, then . . .
As each giant light bulb lit up, it exploded, sending shards of coloured glass flying everywhere.
I’d always wanted to play to a screaming audience.
But without the wounds and blood . . .
I still miss the boys from Fresh. They were great times.
Then another opportunity came along from an unlikely source – a big, black and very sassy young comic and singer called Ruth Saxon, who was known for going on stage wearing platinum blonde wigs.
Originally from London, Ruth was a breath of fresh air on the working men’s club circuit – and she was constantly booked. What’s more, she carried herself like a star. She put on a little bit of an American accent, she had a big rented house, she even had a manager. This being the 1970s, I’m sure she must have suffered some racial abuse, but she was such a force of nature, no one dared to give her any stick when she was on stage.
Now, what you need to bear in mind is that this was the time when the hippie rock-musical Hair was still very much all the rage. It was just this huge phenomenon. And, of course, the fact that the cast got their kit off halfway through the show didn’t harm when it came to selling tickets.
Anyway, Hair had given Ruth an idea. Not to perform stark naked, I’m pleased to say, but to write and star in a cabaret act that would tour the country, but with a Hair-style rock’n’roll band.
That was where I came in . . . along with some of my old pals from The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub.
After I’d bought my new P.A. system, the band had basically re-formed under the new name of The Jasper Hart Band. (Once again, I’m afraid to say that I’ve got no idea where this came from.) On guitar was Ken Brown. On bass was Steve Chance. And on drums again was Fred Smith. The only problem being that we all had full-time jobs – and a wife and a baby, in my case – so the only time we had to practise was at gigs.
We were at least getting gigs, which was in part thanks to my P.A. system, but also down to the fact that we’d expanded our repertoire to include songs that didn’t all have fifteen-minute blues solos. Even the working men’s clubs were starting to ask us back.
It was after one such gig that Ruth’s manager approached us and told us about her idea. None of us were really into Hair, of course, musicals were for tarts and twats, but hey! Where there’s cash, there’s a will. To play covers from hell.
