The lives of brian a mem.., p.13
The Lives of Brian: a Memoir, page 13
But the offer came with conditions. First, we needed to hire a keyboard player so that we could play a wider variety of material. Second, we needed to book ourselves into Studio One on Clayton Street for rehearsals, because Ruth had noticed our lack of practice and wanted us to be (in her words) ‘as tight as shit’. Ruth wanted us to get ourselves some proper stage gear, so we looked the part.
It was all incredibly exciting . . . but pretty stressful too. Exciting because we found a keyboard player – a guy named Alan Taylorson – making us a five-piece. (Alan had previously played with Ken, Steve and Fred in another offshoot called Crusade.) But it was stressful because when we booked ourselves into the rehearsal studio and started traipsing around for clothes that would pass muster with Ruth, the bills racked up fast. We even had to drive all the way to Manchester because that’s where Ruth wanted us to do our promotional photo shoot. And we really didn’t have the money.
Still, we were about to go on tour.
When we got back from Manchester, we were told that our first show had been booked at a cabaret club in Newcastle – a trial run, to see if we were ready to go full-time on the road.
On the day of the show, Ruth burst in and announced with great excitement that the stars of the travelling production of Hair – which was at the Theatre Royal that week – would be stopping by that night to hear ‘all the songs that we’d learned’.
‘What songs that we’ve learned?’ I asked, genuinely confused.
‘The songs from Hair!’ replied Ruth.
‘But we haven’t learned any songs from –’
‘Here’s the sheet music,’ she said, handing me a binder. The shame was, no one in the band could read music . . .
We all looked at each other and groaned. On top of the set we’d already rehearsed, we’d now have to spend the hours before our first show rushing through new material like ‘Aquarius’ and ‘Good Morning Starshine’. Not to mention songs with titles like ‘Sodomy’, ‘Hashish’ and . . . worse. (You really couldn’t do some of that stuff today.)
In the end, almost the entire cast of the musical turned up to the gig. Which was a good job, because no one else did. The male actors had the big fluffy things over their shoulders. The girls took their tops off. Peak late-1960s shit – even though this was by now the spring of 1970. So there we were, playing this music that we didn’t much like, to a near-empty room, with all these actors jumping and dancing around us.
What a waste of time.
Ruth didn’t even seem to like heavy rock – whereas the stuff that I was listening to was getting heavier by the day. The big eye-opener for me had been going to see Status Quo play at Blaydon’s Central Youth Club, of all places, in October of 1969.
I can’t remember who I went with, but I wasn’t going to miss it.
So, on Friday night, I set off for Blaydon, about three-and-a-half miles away. My transport was the 89 double-decker bus right into the heart of Blaydon. I bought my ticket at the hall and went into a dark place with not many people in – most people went to Newcastle on Friday. But still, I was excited. The stage lights got a little brighter, then people were moving about on stage. Hang on, these weren’t people, they were musicians, and right in the middle was an unbelievable kit of drums, with more cymbals than I’d ever seen before. The amps looked enormous. To my eyes, it was everything I thought it should be.
Then, out of nowhere, Rick Parfitt, one of the guitarists, walked up to the mic and barked ‘WE PLAY FUCKING LOUD, SO IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, FUCK OFF NOW, AND WE WON’T BE PLAYING FUCKING “PICTURES OF MATCHSTICK MEN”.’
Wow, he said the F-word in a town hall, out fucking loud.
Then they hammered straight in to ‘Down the Dustpipe’ . . . oh, that harmonica, it was electrifying. If there was a moment in my life after Little Richard that sparks, then that was it.
Whilst being out of the public eye for a while, they had metamorphosed into a Rock’n’Roll Monster. I can’t remember how long they played. It was fucking good, and it was fucking loud and, lo and behold, I was fucking hooked. I was transfixed. It ended too soon, and they left the stage with no encore. They were probably wondering how to get their hands on the moron who’d booked them there.
We left the hall, got a pint at the pub next door and hung around outside. After about an hour, this six-wheeler transit van came round the corner and we could see some of the band sitting in the front, then watched them disappear down the road. I wanted to be a part of that, whatever it was.
While I was preparing for the tour with Ruth, meanwhile, an even harder, louder band came along – Black Sabbath. I can’t even begin to put into words just how revolutionary those guys sounded in early 1970 – especially their first big single, ‘Paranoid’. Every day at Parsons, I’d volunteer to get lunch for everyone from the café next door – The Paddock, I’m pretty sure the place was called – for the sole reason that they’d just added ‘Paranoid’ to their jukebox because it was at No. 4 in the charts. All the older guys in the queue for meat pies must have hated me, because I’d dump every coin in my pocket into that jukebox and play the song, over and over again. We even added ‘Paranoid’ to Jasper Hart’s set list for a while – even though Ruth didn’t like it. In fact, I was starting to have serious second thoughts about the whole idea of turning professional just to sing songs from Hair in half-empty cabaret clubs.
I shouldn’t have worried though.
Before the tour started, Ruth disappeared from the face of the earth. Just vanished. We never heard a thing from her again – even though we were all now deep in debt after buying our stage gear and all the equipment for the show. I’ve since learned that she became ITV’s first black presenter at around that time. We had no idea.
It was a lucky escape, really.
During my time in the T.A. Parachute regiment, I had been told that we were to go on a huge military exercise in West Germany. So, I had to go off and protect Western democracies against the Communist hordes. The name of the exercise was Red Hammer, or some other bloody silly name.
We would have to be behind enemy lines for two weeks. The enemy being played by the fearsome Scottish Black Watch regiment and French Canadians.
We were to be parachuted in by night and cause as much havoc and destruction as we could manage. Of course, all ammunition would be blanks, but it was still pretty scary stuff.
To parachute at night is never a good idea, but they always find a way to measure the size of your balls. I believe I was a size 7¾.
The inside of the aircraft at night was a ghostly, smog-like colour – the colour of a really bad dream. It’s like being in a tube of noise. The smell of bloody hell. The weather was bad, it was cloudy, and we were bouncing around. I felt my last meal reach my Adam’s apple, then oof! Home again. And there is no toilet!
This night, we had a guy who was a very experienced jumper, and his designation was ‘Pathfinder’. He would jump and make sure it wasn’t too rough. If he made it safely to the ground, he would signal the aircraft. If he didn’t, it meant he was dead or seriously injured. Brave lad.
The jump master signalled to us, we went through the usual routine, then off we went into the black.
On night jumps you’re always told to never drop your guard, because you can’t see the ground, or anything else for that matter. So, keeping your knees in the bent position was vital to keep both testicles intact.
The thing is, after a while, you keep wondering where the ground is and just as you relax, bang, found it!
It was raining and chilly, but we gathered our chutes and equipment and went into the woods, our officers and sergeants getting us sorted into our squads. Someone at the front must have known where to go, because we kept walking deeper into the forest.
When we stopped, Corporal Stirling said, ‘Right, make your bivouacs, get something to eat and get some shut eye.’
Now, that’s easier said than done. First, you have to find branches, stick four of them into the ground, hang on, I’ll draw a picture, it’s easier. Then put leaves and such underneath as a kind of mattress and your waterproof poncho over the top of it all. They were only about eighteen inches tall, so it was pretty hard to crawl in and, either way, you still got wet.
When I’d finished my built-in-the-dark craphouse, I decided to see what was for dinner. So, I opened my backpack and pulled out my field rations, mmm! That agony of choice: a small tin of sausage and beans and hard biscuits or stewed unknown-to-mankind meat, or how about a tube of cheese, or a tube of jam, and finish it off with a nice piece of blood chocolate. Then again, I did have some packets of soup – now that took heating up. To do that we had these small white blocks of something that smelled vaguely of urinal tablets. The idea was to light them, fill your mug with water from your canteen and sit it on the flames, which you had to keep covered. It took for fucking ever to heat up. Eventually, it was hot enough to absorb the powdered soup or a brew of tea.
The next few days saw us walking and hiding from the enemy, then setting ambushes for convoys of trucks, which never came. And it kept raining. I was singing in a band one week and the next I was in Germany with a rifle. Being my dad twenty-five years earlier, without nearly being killed.
Then one black night in a forest, somewhere and nowhere all at the same time, we stopped. We’d had a long, exhausting day and I just wanted sleep. No cigarettes allowed, no lights allowed, it was pitch black and the trees hid the sky.
‘Johnson,’ the sergeant whispered, ‘follow me, I’m putting you on first sentry duty.’
Oh, bollocks, I was just dropping off.
We stumbled along for a while and he said, ‘This’ll do. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears sharp, I’ll be back in two hours with your replacement.’
‘Yes, Sarge,’ I said.
I lay on my belly looking at nothing and, after about thirty minutes or so, I started to drift off and then, out in the dark, I could see something. What the hell was it? It looked like a milky-white soldier with a First World War helmet on. With an outstretched hand, it felt like it was asking for water or help or . . . Holy shit, was this a ghost? I turned away and splashed some water over my face to clear my mind and eyes. I turned back again, oh shit, it was still there. That’s when I turned into a girl and ran as fast as I could, back in the direction of the squad. The sergeant was a little pissed off. He said, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
I told him I had just seen a ghost. He grabbed me by the armpit, and we went back to the scene of the haunting. There was nothing there, and probably never was, but I still had another ninety minutes by myself waiting for my new friend to come back. I still don’t believe in ghosts.
Footnote: it all ended, thankfully, courtesy of a big, hairy Scotsman who was with the Black Watch, who had been watching us and attacked suddenly. He was no more than two feet away when he fired his rifle right at my stomach. Thank God it was a blank, but bloody hell, the percussive power knocked me over and left me winded. That’s when the umpire said, ‘You’re dead’, and gave me a little ribbon to stick on my uniform. We, the dead that is, were put in the back of a three-ton truck and driven to the P.O.W. camp. It was there I was given a cup of tea and a sandwich. After ten days of sleeping in the woods and the rain, it was luxury. No more sleeping rough. I wish I had been killed sooner.
Back home, the disappointment and financial hit of the aborted cabaret tour with Ruth Saxon were too much for Steve Chance and Alan Taylorson. They both left The Jasper Hart Band soon afterwards. (I’m told that Alan went on to manage a DIY chain store in Sunderland.) But the rest of us weren’t ready to give up yet. So, we put the word out that we were hiring, and quickly found two very talented guys, Tom Hill and Brian Gibson, to take over on bass and drums respectively. Both of them were well known locally, having previously played in a band called Sneeze, and we all hit it off immediately.
Soon enough, we’d become the ‘tight’ band that I’d always wanted to be in, playing two or three shows a week at working men’s clubs and nightclubs – sometimes two shows in one night. That was good money to earn on top of a draughtsman’s salary. Better yet, we didn’t have to play a single song from Hair . . .
Then another opportunity came along.
This time, the offer was from a guy called Mike Forster – a manager, songwriter and aspiring music mogul – who’d started a company called Circa 2000 Records. After seeing us play, he wanted us to record three songs that he’d written, with the aim of shopping them around and getting a record deal. So off we went back to Clayton Street – this time to the recording studio next to the rehearsal room – and laid down these okay but rather middle-of-the-road tracks. It was the first time that I’d ever sung in a studio with the big microphone in front of me and the tape going around – and it felt fabulous. Ken still has the master copies today, and you can find a snippet of one of the songs – ‘Down by the River’ – on the internet somewhere. When you listen to it, though, you can tell how wanting we still were as a band. It’s just so empty in places. We were almost there . . . but not quite.
In the end, we never got the chance to take our demo tape to any record companies because over the following weeks, The Jasper Hart Band lost all but one of its members.
It wasn’t that people left.
We were poached.
The poacher in question was Vic Malcolm, a guitarist from South Shields, and about as much of a legend as you could be in the North East without being an actual rock star. He’d been in a band called The Influence with the singer John Miles, later known for his epic song ‘Music’, and the drummer Paul Thompson, later to join Roxy Music. They’d even released a single in 1969 called ‘I Want to Live’. Vic had also been in a couple of other bands with Paul Thompson – Yellow and Smoke Stack Crumble – and both of them had released singles too. He’d even played a two-week residency at the famous Top 10 Club on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg.
Vic was the real deal – there was absolutely no doubt about it.
Anyway, the first I knew that something was up was when Tom Hill told me that he’d been asked to try out for Vic’s new band, called U.S.A. – and had been offered the job.
Then Brian Gibson told me that he’d also tried out . . . and had also been offered a position.
I was gutted. Tom and Brian had only just joined The Jasper Hart Band, and we were better than ever. And with the songs we’d just recorded, it seemed like we could go all the way.
‘We can’t turn down Vic Malcolm,’ sighed Tom. ‘The guy could be the next Pete Townshend.’
‘Aye, I know, I know,’ I admitted sadly. ‘I’d probably do the same in your shoes.’
‘Well, that’s good to hear,’ grinned Tom. ‘Because Vic wants you to try out for the band too.’
The audition was in a scout hut, of all places, in the middle of a council estate in South Shields. It was a pretty low-key thing. On the phone, Vic had just said, ‘Come and have a sing.’
From the moment I walked in, though, I could tell that this was going to be next-level stuff.
Vic was in another league as a guitarist. He could have joined pretty much any of the biggest bands in the world and fitted right in. But the riffs and songs that he was playing were his own. And they were good. So instantly catchy that you felt like you already knew them from the radio. He looked the part too, with his Fender, hair and low-necked T-shirt, not to mention all his Keith Richards-style jewellery.
Whatever you do, Brian, I told myself, don’t fuck this up.
Vic had three or four of his songs written out for me, amongst them ‘Don’t Do That’ and ‘Keep on Rockin’’.
Before I started, I hadn’t even thought about what it would be like to sing completely new material. But the feeling of exclusivity – of having a potentially chartworthy single that no one else had – was magical. In the back of my mind, of course, I was also thinking that the clubs would never let us play this stuff, because they wanted covers. But Vic didn’t care. He had his sights set far higher than the clubs. Besides, if you didn’t have your own songs, you were never going to get a record deal.
‘You’re in,’ said Vic once I’d got through the songs. ‘If you want to be, of course . . .’
He added that his plan was to get U.S.A. out on the working men’s club circuit, get the band nice and tight, then make a demo, take the demo to some of his record company contacts in London, get a record deal, turn professional, and release some singles that would get us on Top of the Pops. It sounded almost easy, the way he said it.
There was only one problem – Ken. The poor guy was the only one who hadn’t been offered a place in Vic’s band. He was a guitarist, after all, and Vic didn’t need a guitarist, given that he was one of the best guitarists in the North East. It was especially awkward because Ken was going out with my sister-in-law. But the truth was, The Jasper Hart Band had run its course. It was cruel – especially after everything we’d been through with Ruth Saxon. But that’s the music business for you.
It was early 1972 when U.S.A. played its first gig.
I believe it was in the town of Peterlee, County Durham. It was one of those ‘new towns’ created in Britain, which meant it was a nightmare to navigate because it was split into zones, with each zone sharing the same street names, and all the red brick houses looking identical. Meanwhile, the venue was a working men’s club, but there were about a half dozen of the bloody things, also identical, with just slightly different names. By the time we found the right one we were seriously late, and the club’s ‘concert chairman’ – that was the grand title these union men liked to give themselves – was none too happy. Not the best way to start our first gig, especially given how nervous I was about singing original material.
But our jitters disappeared within a few minutes of getting into our set. Vic’s songs were so good the crowd barely noticed they weren’t covers. By the time we got to our encore of ‘Don’t Do That’, a few people were even singing along. I was stunned.
Next thing I knew, we were playing the same clubs and dance halls that had previously refused to give The Jasper Hart Band the time of day – and within six months, we were headlining a show at Croft Park, home of the Blyth Spartans football club, with a capacity of 5,000. We even had two supporting acts that night – a band called Lyght Plynth and a rock outfit that went by the name of Brass Alley. The lead singer of Brass Alley was a local star called Dave Ditchburn (and he’s still one of my favourite singers to this day), who’d previously been in a band with Vic called Vince King and The Stormers . . . whose main claim to fame was that in 1963 they’d won a competition to play at Middlesbrough’s Astoria Ballroom with a hot new band from Liverpool.
