The lives of brian a mem.., p.18
The Lives of Brian: a Memoir, page 18
We recorded about a dozen tracks in three days, after which Pip invited me out for a drink to celebrate.
‘I’d love to, Pip,’ I told him, ‘but my train home leaves at 7 p.m. – so I’d better get going.’
‘Well, you’re cutting it close,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘C’mon, let’s get you a black cab.’
‘I’ll take the Tube, Pip, it’s alright.’
‘You’ll never get there on time on the Tube, Brian. They’re on strike, anyway. You need a cab.’
That was when I had to admit that I had only enough money for the Underground fare and a beer and sandwich on the way home. Pip told me not to say another word. Then he fished into his pocket and pulled out a £20 note, the equivalent of about £150 today. I told him that I couldn’t possibly take that amount of money. But he shoved it into my jeans pocket. ‘Brian, please,’ he said, ‘I want you to take it.’
A couple of minutes later, we were standing outside, waiting for a cab. Pip pointed to my faded denim jacket, which must have dated back to the days of The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub. It was old and falling apart. ‘How long have you had that?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I shrugged. ‘Why?’
‘Try this on,’ he said, taking off his own jacket – the fabulous buckskin one. ‘You’ll look good in it.’
‘Pip, I can’t take the jacket off your own back,’ I protested, ‘I’ve only known you for three days! And look at that thing – where did you get it? It must have cost an arm and a leg!’
‘Three days in a studio is a long time, Brian. We’re friends now. And the jacket suits you better.’
‘Pip, I can’t, I just can’t, I’m fine – stop giving me things!’
Then, a cab pulled up and Pip dropped the jacket on the floor in front of me and walked away. ‘I’ll be seeing you, Brian,’ he called out over his shoulder. ‘Safe travels home. And take the jacket! You’re a rock star – so you should dress like one.’
That was a special moment for me. I felt like I was stealing it when I picked it up and put it on. And, of course, it made everything else that I was wearing look filthy and worn-out – especially my shoes.
‘King’s Cross station,’ I told the driver through the window. He nodded okay and I climbed into the back . . . while hoping to God that my brother Maurice would be on the train.
If you’re wondering why Maurice hasn’t featured more in this book, it’s because he was away most of the time.
At the age of fifteen, when I was just starting full-time at Parsons, he decided that he wanted to be a chef, and went to work at The County Hotel, opposite Newcastle’s Central Station. They made him work as a bellboy first. Then he moved up to become a commis waiter, or an apprentice waiter, and from there he became a commis chef. He’d even practise at home. ‘Boiled potatoes, Ma’am?’ he’d say to my ma, as he doled out Sunday lunch. ‘And would Ma’am care for some carrots?’
Then one night, we found him packing his bags. He told us that he was going to Jersey, in the Channel Islands, to work at a much bigger hotel in the main town there, St. Helier. It was the first that any of us had ever heard of it, because Maurice didn’t speak much. There were no fond farewells. He just got on the train and went.
Next thing we knew, he’d come back and bought himself a Mod-style Lambretta scooter – silver, twin chrome tail pipes, and the spare wheel on the back. It was fabulous. Although the first time I borrowed it – to go to the pictures – someone nicked the spare wheel. Which I still feel bad about to this day.
Then off Maurice went again, returning this time with a Triumph Spitfire sports car.
I remember coming home and seeing it parked outside our house and going, ‘Whose is that?’ Nobody had anything like it on our estate. Then Maurice appeared, but I hardly recognized him because he’d grown another foot and had a moustache.
Before he took me for a ride in the car – he had the leather gloves, the herringbone cloth cap, the whole old-school driving get-up – he made me take off all my dirty work clothes and wash my hands. Twice. I didn’t blame him. What a glorious machine that Spitfire was. It had all the dials, gauges and buttons, even indicator stalks, and when you changed gears, the engine made all these satanic woofling noises.
I was in awe of Maurice. I’d always been a good student at school – until the end, anyway – and I worked at one of the world’s best engineering companies, while earning money from gigs on the side. But I was flat broke. Meanwhile, Maurice – who’d failed every test ever put in front of him – was driving around in this.
But that’s the thing with Maurice. He plays dumb, but he’s smarter than anyone. And he’s the most lovable guy you could ever meet. For as long as I can remember, people have been coming up to me, saying, ‘How’s Maurice? I love Maurice.’ He’s just one of those guys.
Anyway . . . after coming back from Jersey for good, Maurice got himself a job as chief steward on the London to Newcastle train service, in the first-class section. And if you found yourself on the same train as him – even in the cheapest seat you could buy – he would always look after you. Everybody looked after everybody’s family in those days. It was an unspoken rule. But Maurice, being a lovely lad, extended the courtesy to friends too. My great pal Brendan Healy, who often had to go to London for auditions – there’ll be more on Brendan and his many talents later on – used to call him ‘The Good Samaritan of King’s Cross’.
I heard Maurice’s voice before I saw him.
‘Brian???’
Instant relief. Then I looked around and saw him hanging out of the first-class carriage.
‘Are you going to a Cowboys-and-Indians fancy dress party?’ he asked, staring at my jacket.
‘Fuck off, Maurice,’ I smiled.
‘Come on then, get yourself in here.’
It was a well-oiled routine with Maurice. You’d walk purposefully past the restaurant car, ticket in hand – as if heading to your seat in economy class – then a service door would open next to you, and you’d duck inside. Then you’d sit against the wall in the kitchen, out of sight, smoking a cigarette, until the train started to move. A nod and a wink would be exchanged, then you’d be ushered to a window seat in the dining carriage, with a white tablecloth in front of you, and proceed to enjoy a silver-service steak dinner with as many beers as you could drink.
‘Boiled potatoes, sir?’ Maurice would ask with a flourish, to ensure that none of the paying passengers suspected what was going on. ‘And would sir care for some carrots?’
The best part of the journey, of course, was when the train crossed the River Tyne to Central Station – those last few seconds giving you the most spectacular view of the Tyne Bridge, all lit up from underneath. That was the beautiful thing about the King’s Cross to Newcastle train service – it made coming home feel so good.
The album vanished without a trace. There were no survivors. Not even a life belt was found. But unlike the case of the Mary Celeste, this was no mystery – the album was just crap.
The marketing of it had also been pretty dire, mind you.
Red Bus’s solution to the problem of Geordie needing to move on without alienating our old fans was to make it a ‘faceless’ album with a cover featuring a naked woman shooting out of the earth, holding up a shining light. The title was Save the World, ‘featuring Brian Johnson’. But, of course, the album didn’t save anything. Not the world. Certainly not Geordie.
I remember Maurice driving over to the house in Preston Grange one morning, asking, ‘So what’s happening with the record? I’ve heard nowt on the radio . . .’
I told him that it hadn’t been officially released yet – which it hadn’t – but, of course, an album would usually be hyped through the roof long before it came out. But neither of the two singles we’d released – ‘She’s a Teaser’ and ‘Goodbye Love’ – had come even close to bothering the charts.
‘Can I at least hear it?’ asked Maurice.
‘I don’t have a copy,’ I shrugged – and it was true. I mean, it was hard to care when no one else did . . .
People often ask me how and when Geordie eventually broke up. But the truth is, we never really did. There was no big argument or walk-out. We didn’t lose anyone to drink or drugs. We were never even dumped by our record company.
It all just kind of . . . fizzled out.
15
Bailiff Blues
BBC
If there was a moment when my first career as a professional singer came to an end, it was when I was at home one day in Preston Grange and heard a rap of knuckles on the front door.
‘Mr. Johnson, I presume?’ asked the man in a bowler hat who I found standing on the mat. Before I could answer, a couple of big, nasty-looking lads appeared behind him – a brick wall of Geordie muscle – and my heart almost stopped.
‘My name is Mr. Such and Such and I’ll be your bailiff today,’ bowler hat man said, as I just stood there, my jaw hanging open. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, these two nice young gentlemen are going to come into your house and secure your furniture as collateral – including your television, if you have one. Oh, and your fridge. And by secure, I mean remove. You’ll get them back as soon as you settle your debts.’
By now it was the winter of 1978 – one of the coldest, bleakest, most depressing winters in the history of Great Britain. Nonstop strikes had seen rubbish piling up on the streets – even the dead going unburied. Meanwhile, the IRA were setting off bombs all over the place.
‘The Winter of Discontent’, the newspapers were calling it, which seemed about right . . . if only to describe my personal circumstances. I hadn’t had a gig in months, leaving me and Carol so broke we were back to choosing between heating the house or putting food on the table. And, of course, the arguments at home were more ferocious than ever, with poor little Joanne and Kala – now about ten and five years old – caught in the middle of it all.
It had always seemed too good to be true that Red Bus were willing to pay the mortgage on the house in Preston Grange – and now that I was looking at this bailiff in front of me, I realized that I should have listened to my gut.
‘What’s all this about then?’ I finally managed to stammer, fearing the answer.
‘We’ve got a court order here, on behalf of Leeds Permanent Building Society, to seize collateral against your missed mortgage payments in the amount of £500,’ explained the bailiff, holding up a piece of paper with a signature and wax seal on it.
‘But I haven’t made any payments,’ I told him.
‘Well, I admire your honesty,’ came the reply. ‘Most people claim the cheques are in the post.’
‘No, I mean . . . my record company makes the payments.’
Or so I thought.
With the bailiff in the house, I managed to get Ellis Elias on the phone – ‘Hello Brian, how fab to hear from you, gosh, I’m terribly sorry about all this, there must have been a mix-up, let me talk to this bailiff fellow . . .’
Thanks to Ellis’s bullshit, I got a forty-eight-hour reprieve.
But there hadn’t been a mix-up. Red Bus had simply stopped paying the mortgage because I wasn’t making any money. And the mortgage was in my name – as was the house – so I was on the hook for everything. I should have known, but I’ve always been naive like that.
Next thing I knew, I was at Newcastle Crown Court.
I got lucky in two ways. First, the judge was sympathetic to a guy who was about to lose his house and couldn’t afford a lawyer. And second, Leeds Permanent sent this awful, slimy little puffed-up creep of a mortgage arrears guy to represent them.
When the judge realized I wasn’t making up the story about my contract with Red Bus, he gave the Leeds guy a proper bollocking. ‘If Mr. Johnson owned and lived in the house, why did you keep sending letters to a record company on Wardour Street in London?’ he scolded. ‘You knew four months ago that this company had stopped paying! So why didn’t you go and see Mr. Johnson then? Why wait all this time and then ambush him, threatening to take away all his possessions and put him and his wife and children out on the street? I think you did it because you just wanted the house back. You didn’t want to give him a chance!’
Then the judge turned to me and said, ‘Mr. Johnson, what can you afford to pay a month?’
The correct answer was ‘Absolutely jack shit, Your Honour.’ But for some reason I blurted out seventy quid.
‘So, you’re going to need to get a job, yes?’ he said. ‘A real job. Not as, ahem . . . a musician.’
Yes, Your Honour. Whatever you say, Your Honour.
He banged his gavel. ‘Leeds Permanent is hereby instructed to add the amount owed to the principal balance and draw up a new mortgage agreement with payments of £70 per month. And Mr. Johnson, you need to find employment, quickly – and don’t ever miss another payment again.’
The satisfaction of defending myself and winning – and keeping the house – lasted for all of a couple of hours.
That was when Carol said that she was ‘going out with the girls’ to celebrate, which somehow escalated into another argument, and it was just so obvious in that moment that we had no marriage left to save. That was when I finally realized that we had to call it quits. It just wasn’t fair on the kids. So, I packed my bags, got into my car – now a very used and rusty VW Beetle with a six-volt battery that could barely pull your cap off, never mind power both headlamps at the same time – and started to drive. Slowly.
There was only one place I could go, of course – No. 1 Beech Drive.
That night, I moved back into the same room that I’d once shared with Maurice and Victor, my dog-eared copy of The Morley Method of Scientific Height Development still under the bed. And when I got up the next morning and looked out over the slag heaps, railway lines and the Vickers tank factory on the banks of the Tyne, I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d gone from appearing on Top of the Pops with Roger Daltrey to this. At the age of thirty-one, I’d lost everything. My marriage, my career, my house . . . although at least the kids got to stay in Preston Grange with their mother.*
I can still remember the awful feeling of failure like it was yesterday. It was a horrible, confusing, draining time. I couldn’t sleep. I could barely eat. I didn’t even want to see my friends because I didn’t want to feel their pity – or worse, accept their charity.
Meanwhile, it was hard to watch other bands, given how badly I wished I was out there doing the same thing. But, of course, I couldn’t resist. And the funny thing is, the one band that I remember seeing during that period was AC/DC. Not live, but on Rock Goes to College, a series on BBC Two that showcased ‘up and coming’ acts by broadcasting live gigs from various Students’ Unions around the country. There was a huge buzz about AC/DC, who’d been playing at Essex University. People kept telling me, ‘You’ve got to see these guys.’
What a show it was. They were so different to everything else out there, I couldn’t quite believe it. Angus was just manic. He must have only been about twenty-two at the time. He had the schoolboy outfit on, of course, and he did his striptease routine to ‘Bad Boy Boogie’. As for the singer – he was a natural-born frontman with tight black trousers, tattoos up his arms, and what looked like a rum and Coke in his hand. It didn’t occur to me for one second that he was the same guy that I’d met in Torquay. In fact, I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me. There was just no resemblance whatsoever. This was a rock’n’roll singer, not a folk guy.
I loved every second of it. But, of course, it was also a reminder that I’d had my shot and blown it. I mean, at my age in the rock’n’roll business, unless you were already a star, it was all over. Like the judge had told me, it was time to find a real job.
Even if I could have faced going back to Parsons, it was too late now. The place was a shell of what it used to be. I was going to have to aim lower. So, I picked up a copy of the Evening Chronicle – the same paper that had once declared me a ‘Star of the Future’ – and started to thumb my way through the job classifieds.
‘Windscreen fitter needed,’ said the first ad I saw, with a telephone number next to it. I can’t even remember what the other jobs were on the page. I just saw the words ‘windscreen fitter’ and thought . . . well, how hard can that be? I mean, I used to prepare drawings of steam turbines for power stations, where if you got a measurement wrong within a thousandth of an inch, you could cause disaster. Sticking a piece of glass to a car wasn’t going to use up many brain cells.
When I called the number, a guy named Peter answered. It wasn’t the usual ‘Hallow?’ that you’d get from your usual Geordie working man, though. Oh no. Peter was in a different class. Or at least he thought he was. ‘Good afternoon,’ he went, in this very pompous voice, like he was a Concorde captain about to take off for New York. ‘This is Peter, North East Manager of Windshields, Ltd. How may I help you?’
I wanted to beat my head against the wall and scream.
But I needed this job – badly – so I swallowed my pride and stayed on the line.
Peter informed me that I’d have to attend a ‘preliminary interview’ at Windshields, Ltd’s ‘roadside service forward operating headquarters’, which, at the end of the call, turned out to mean the passenger seat of his Ford Escort Estate, which he would park in front of Birtley Services on the A1, about fifteen miles south of Newcastle.
I was actually relieved that Peter was based so far out of town because that meant there was less chance he’d recognize me. I mean, Geordie had been solid B-list celebrities in Newcastle for a while. Metro Radio were always playing our singles – especially ‘Geordie’s Lost His Liggie’ – and Tyne Tees Television often featured us on a show called The Geordie Scene. And, of course, I wasn’t exactly hard to miss with my mass of curly hair.
But now that I was going back to civilian life with my tail between my legs, I wanted to be invisible.
