The lives of brian a mem.., p.16
The Lives of Brian: a Memoir, page 16
When I rang the bell at the gate, I wondered if Roger (it felt strange even thinking of him as Roger) would remember who I was – never mind having invited me over for lunch.
‘Hello?’ said a woman’s voice through the intercom. ‘Who is it?’
‘Hi . . . I’m Brian, Brian Johnson. From the band Geordie . . .’
‘Oh . . . Roger’s not here right now, but if you drive up and park in front of the house, he’ll be back soon.’
So, I drove in and waited in the van. Then suddenly I heard the thud of approaching hooves, and when I looked up, I was treated to the most sensational sight – a beautiful white horse galloping towards me, no saddle, ridden by a bare-chested and barefoot man in powder blue jeans, with long, golden curly hair. He seemed to be holding onto the horse just by its mane.
If this isn’t rock star, I thought to myself, I don’t know what is.
‘Alright mate,’ said Roger, as he brought the horse to a halt right in front of me, ‘you been here long?’
He ended up taking me to a barn, which he’d had converted into a state-of-the-art recording studio.
‘Townshend’s outdone himself this time,’ he said, ‘I just got this back. See what you think.’ It was a studio tape of The Who’s new album: Quadrophenia.
This was a moment.
We ended up listening to a few of the tracks and, of course, they were brilliant, soon to become classics. Then Roger asked if I was hungry. I admitted that I was pretty starving after the long drive, and off we went back to the main house.
The manor and the lunch were everything that I’d imagined they would be and more. The dining room was all huge fireplaces, thick floorboards, high ceilings and views of rolling countryside. It was grand and stately and homely all at the same time. The dining table was the size of a football field. And we ate the most delicious meal of roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, English vegetables, the works. I felt like I was dreaming. And Roger’s wife Heather – the lady who’d spoken to me through the intercom at the gate – was lovely.
It was just as I was leaving that Roger finally explained why he’d invited me in the first place.
‘You told me that you were living in a filthy flat in Hackney,’ he said. ‘Well, me and the missus went through all of that. So, I wanted to bring you here and show you what you can do if you stick at it, because there’s really no easy way – and if our paths never cross again, I just want to say that I really hope everything works out for you.’
What struck me most was that you could tell he really meant it. From one singer to another – even though he was this huge rock star, and I was just a guy in a struggling band from Newcastle – he genuinely wanted me to succeed. ‘The secret is,’ he added, ‘don’t give up. Never give up.’
The following week, thanks to our appearance on Top of the Pops, ‘All Because of You’ rose to No. 6 in the charts. It was our first Top 10 single. It would also be our last.
Later on, when the lean years hit and my days of fame faded like a politician’s promise, there were times when Roger’s words were a distant memory. But I clung on to them all the same, never giving up hope, even after my thirties crept up on me and kidnapped my twenties, even after I had to give up being a musician and get a ‘real job’ again.
Roger had been right all along, of course – like everything else in life, there really isn’t an easy way.
Meanwhile, I’m happy to report that our paths did cross again.
In fact, we still talk to this day.
I might have been only twenty-six years old, but I was very married, and after the arrival of Kala* – which I rushed home for during the tour, all the way from Somerset – I was the father of two little girls who I absolutely loved. So, the best I could do was cheer from the sidelines as my very single and free bandmates, the jammy bastards, went out and had themselves a good time.
But my marriage had never been a happy one, and when you added long periods away from home to the mix, things started to fall apart. I’m sure that it wasn’t just me who often ended up wondering what life would have been like if different choices had been made.
Which brings me to one night not long after our second Top of the Pops appearance.
We were playing a show out in the countryside – the posh countryside, down south – and a girl came up to me afterwards and, in this fabulous Julie Christie accent, she said, ‘Gosh, I thought that was just so awfully good.’ I was instantly smitten. I mean, she was just gorgeous, early twenties, confident, so stylish, with short black bobbed hair. I’ve forgotten her name, which is terrible, but probably just as well. Anyway, we got talking and after a few drinks, she was going, ‘Brian, do come and visit at the weekend, I live in Bagshot in Surrey. I would love so much for you to meet Mummy and Daddy.’
Now, I had no idea where Bagshot was – I certainly didn’t know it was right next to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The only clothes I had were my stack-heeled boots, my hillbilly dungarees and a yellow jumper. And as usual, someone else had nabbed the Granada, so I was driving the Mercedes van.
An hour or so later, I was pulling into the gravel driveway of this lovely big house. Then the girl introduces me to her mum, who’s probably only about forty and very attractive, then I meet her dad and . . . holy shit, he’s a high-ranking army officer. And I’m thinking, Brian, what the fuck are you doing here? I mean, my hair was a mess, I was sweaty, my clothes were dirty from last night’s show – The Pig would have taken me around the back of the house for a good hiding. But her dad couldn’t have been nicer. And he had the poshest Fiat that you could buy, a four-door 132, a choice I respected so much because the obvious car for a guy like that was a Rover. But no, he’d gone for this beautiful Italian saloon instead.
‘Are you staying for dinner?’ asked the girl’s mum.
‘Well, if that’s alright,’ I said, ‘I don’t need to get back to London for a little while.’
‘Oh, never you mind about getting back,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you what, go to the pub with John and have a couple of pints, and by the time you’re finished, we’ll have dinner ready.’
So off I went with her father – I couldn’t bring myself to call him John – and sure enough, when we got back, there was a beautiful table set, the smell of a casserole wafting through the house, and all these bottles of expensive French red open.
All through dinner, we’re getting through the wine and I’m getting a little tiddly and this lass is just making eyes at me. Then her mum says, ‘Oh, there’s no need to go back to London, Brian, you can sleep here. We’ve got a spare bed.’ And the General chips in, ‘Yes, no need to travel on a Saturday, bloody waste of time.’
Later on that night, of course, I got a knock on the door.
I forgot to mention that I was married, of course.
But she’d already guessed.
‘If you don’t love your wife, why don’t you leave her?’
‘Because she’d take everything,’ I sighed.
‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she replied, with her lovely smile. ‘You don’t have anything.’
She wasn’t wrong.
13
Highway to . . . Nowhere
A month after the triumph of ‘All Because of You’ entering the Top 10, we found ourselves in Torquay, on the coast of Devon. It was Easter Monday, 23 April 1973. The date sticks in my mind because it was one of those days when the universe seemed to be trying to tell me something.
Now, Torquay is only about fifty miles across the English Channel from France, and we’d been told that it had a near-tropical climate with palm trees lining the streets. And being naive Geordies, we believed it, booking ourselves into a B&B right on the seafront, and making sure to pack our swimming trunks and suntan lotion.
It was the coldest night in Torquay’s history. The wind blowing in from the Channel was just as bad as the North Sea gales back home, and it wasn’t raining, it was sleeting. Earlier that morning, there’d even been a layer of frost on the ground.
Our accommodation was one room between four grown men with each of us on one of those little divan beds that you fall out of if you roll over in the night. The paint was peeling off the walls. The sheets were made from the kind of nylon that gives you electric shocks whenever you move. And, of course, there was no heat, unless you fed 5p pieces into the meter in the room – which we stopped doing when we realized 5p got you about five minutes of warmth. The heat just went straight out of the cracks around the window frames.
At least we had a place to sleep. In those days, the owners of B&Bs were notorious for giving away your room before you showed up, especially if you got in late.
Not that our landlady was in any way welcoming.
‘I lock the door at midnight on the dot, so if you’re not back by then, hard luck.’ As for breakfast, she added, there’d be a toaster and some bread made available at the crack of dawn for about twenty minutes.
‘And if we miss it?’ I asked.
‘You’ll do without.’
The show that night was at Torquay Town Hall. Everyone from The Rolling Stones to The Who had played there, and David Bowie was booked to do a show a few months after us.
The first thing we noticed when we pulled up was the bus parked outside. Not a normal bus, but a gigantic American model from the early 1950s, with stainless-steel side panels and a bullet-shaped back end. It was a Flxible Clipper, which I later found out had been built for an Australian tour operator, which explained why it was right-hand drive. I couldn’t believe that anyone had managed to get a vehicle of that size and shape into the country.
‘Whose is that?’
‘Must be the support band’s,’ shrugged Vic. Support bands were usually even more broke than we were. So how could they afford transport like that?
When we walked in, the support band in question were still on stage, with about fifteen minutes left to go – so we got some beers in, sat down at the bar, and had a listen.
The band were from Australia and had just changed their name from Fraternity to Fang after messing up their U.K. debut the previous year. I couldn’t stop looking at the lead singer, because he was one of the wildest-looking cats that I’d ever seen. Coconut-bob hair. One tooth missing. Abe Lincoln beard. He looked like an elf. But, fuck me, the guy could sing. What he was singing wasn’t rock’n’roll, though. It was more like . . . prog-folk. Along the lines of Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past. Only proggier. And folkier. At one point, he even whipped out a wooden recorder and started to play it in a way that would have brought tears to the eyes of Mrs. Patterson, my old teacher. Then at the end, he swapped the recorder for this thing that looked like a cross between a bong and a rocket launcher. It was a bassoon, apparently.
As Fang finished up, we drained our beers and headed backstage.
‘Who’s that singer?’ I asked a guy wearing a now-out-of-date Fraternity T-shirt.
Because there was no doubt about it, Bon Scott was clearly no ordinary singer.
I’d love to tell you that I made a note to look up all of Bon’s previous work, but Fang weren’t really my cup of tea – and by the end of the night, we were exhausted and frazzled from the show and from all the driving earlier on in the day. So, we headed back to the B&B, teeth chattering in the cold, and the decision was made to break open the coin box on the meter, so we could keep putting in the same 5p, over and over again.
It worked like a charm. But just as we were finally starting to warm up . . .
Tap-tap-tap.
‘What’s that noise?’ asked Tom.
Tap-tap-tap.
‘Shit!’ hissed Vic. ‘The landlady must have heard us breaking the coin box! Quick, put it back on!’
A mad scramble followed as we tried to unbreak the electric meter, until we realized that the knocking wasn’t coming from the door. It was coming from the window.
Then we heard the whispers. ‘Pssst. Hey? Hey lads? Open the window! It’s us . . . Fang!’
I was drunk and I can’t remember much but I am told that when we pulled back the curtains, there was Bon and a couple of the boys from Fang, shivering on the street outside. Their tour bus had broken down, which meant no heater – and because the bus’s side panels were made of stainless steel, it had become like a fridge inside. A mechanic was already working on it, they said – although where on earth they’d found a guy in Torquay at 11.30 p.m. on an Easter Monday who knew his way around a big-block American diesel, I had no idea. Whatever the case, Fang desperately needed somewhere to get out of the cold, especially since it had started to sleet again. So, we forced open the window sash and heaved the boys from Fang inside, while trying not to wake the landlady. I’m not sure if this really happened, but I was told it did. But being so drunk, I have an excuse.
Eventually, Fang’s roadie knocked on the window to say that he’d finally got the bus started again.
The next night we played at Plymouth Guildhall, with Fang once again in support.
I remember nothing of the show apart from the fact that about two-thirds of the way through, I suddenly got an absolutely terrible pain in my gut and collapsed on the stage and started to roll around, moaning and howling. The crowd thought it was all part of the act and were lapping it up and going crazy, so I forced myself back on my feet and carried on with the song that I was doing, but that was it – we finished twenty minutes early, I was off to A&E.
I’d come down with a bout of appendicitis. Not bad enough to require emergency surgery, thankfully – but I did need to go on a long course of antibiotics.
The tour went on regardless, night after night, six or seven days a week. We were driving hundreds of miles a day, sometimes in the Granada, sometimes in the van. But we were so young and so excited – and our hopes were still so high – it was a magical time.
I never saw Bon again, I’m very sorry to say. But it’s so strange to me that our fates entwined on that one night on the Torquay seafront in the freezing cold.
I wish that I could have got to know him better.
On the road, it was becoming increasingly obvious that Geordie were two different bands. The first band was just kinda poppy and played songs like ‘Don’t Do That’ and ‘All Because of You’ – with the teenybopper magazines running profiles of us and organizing competitions like, ‘Win a day with Geordie at a fun fair!’ The other band, meanwhile, was represented by tracks like ‘Black Cat Woman’ and ‘Keep on Rockin’’, and had more in common with Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath than anything glam. But the press only ever seemed to notice the first band and kept comparing us with Slade – which started to get pretty frustrating after a while – and our management was firmly of the opinion that we belonged in the pop world.
I wasn’t so sure. And one of the moments that persuaded me was in, of all places, Faslane submarine base.
Geordie were playing at the base club. We were headlining and a Scottish band called Nazareth were the support. I had never heard of them; not many people outside of Glasgow had. Before the show, I started chatting with their singer Dan McCafferty and we got on immediately. We were from the same background of council houses and industry, and both had been apprentices.
The audience was made up of uniformed sailors and some in their civvies. They lined the walls and bar that surrounded the dance floor, and then in came the girls. It was the perfect Friday night for a fight, especially because submariners didn’t like sailors and vice versa. The air was electric with trouble, you could actually touch it.
Dan said, ‘Well, we’d better get on before they get a wee edgy.’ I thought I’d stay and watch and Nazareth came on and started. I was mesmerized. It was a thunderbolt. They were loud and rocking and so very tight and I thought, I wanna be in a band like that. All the tenseness went out of the room, everyone was locked into this brilliant band. The next thing I thought was, how the hell are we going to follow that? They finished to howls of ‘MORE, MORE’.
And then it was our turn. Although we were a tight rocky little band, our singles had been a tad poppy. We gave it our best shot, the boys were playing up a storm, but we were following a hurricane and tornado all in one.
Halfway through the set, I saw the first bottle fly at the sailors, and then a chair at the submariners, and then the world went mad. There was blood. There were people running on stage for safety. These were not Jolly Jack Tars.
We somehow kept going, it was a mad house. Military police were called and it slowly emptied. Dan came over and gave me a whisky and said, ‘Oh dinnae worry, it was much worse last week . . .’
We worked our arses off during the rest of 1973 to try and build on the success of ‘All Because of You’ and get to the next level. But our album, Hope You Like It, wasn’t selling enough to turn us into a proper headline act, meaning we had to keep putting out more singles to keep the momentum going. We released three more singles that year – ‘Can You Do It’, ‘Electric Lady’ and ‘Black Cat Woman’ – with only ‘Can You Do It’ getting into the Top 20. The others didn’t even chart.
As much as this wasn’t exactly an encouraging sign, we just thought we needed a new album.
So back we went to Pye Studios in Marble Arch and Lansdowne Studios in Holland Park, with the wildly eccentric Roberto Danova once again producing, and we made Don’t Be Fooled by the Name. For the cover photo, we dressed up like Al Capone-style gangsters, complete with black hats and black suits, me with a cigar in my mouth. The idea being that we’d grown up a bit after the more light-hearted Hope You Like It.
One of the best parts of making the album for me was getting to know André Jacquemin, a composer, producer and arranger who’d just moved his studio from his dad’s greenhouse into Red Bus’s building on Wardour Street. He was the guy who Monty Python used to produce all their albums – he’d later write the James Bond-esque theme tune for Life of Brian – and being a massive Python fan myself, I couldn’t hear enough of his stories. Mind you, André also nearly got us both killed because he had a Bond Bug,* which was a three-wheeled ‘microcar’ shaped like a wedge, with screens instead of doors. It looked like a slice of orange with a sense of humour – it only came in that colour – but André was so proud of it he insisted on taking me for a ride, and we very nearly ended up under the wheels of a London bus.
