It’s unwise to base your music taste on numerology. If I had, then I’d be a devoted Sum 41 fan by now, because my older brother’s favourite band of all time are Level 42 while my younger is still fixated on UB40. (Stranger still, when this book is due to be published those will be our precise ages, and in that order – 40, 41 and 42.) Our worlds collided in a similarly coincidental fashion when they required a ‘name’ band to entertain two (anonymous) Russian oligarchs along with certain Hollywood A-listers and a bunch of models on a super-yacht in St Tropez during the summer of 2004.
My brothers were raking it in as Jim’ll Fix It-style party organisers for the jet set – namely the Russian nouveau riche, who were still in the first flush of being flush. (In other words, they knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.) The seemingly innocuous plate-smashing parties on the island of Mykonos, the privately arranged bullfights in Ecuador and skiing trips to Whistler in Canada. The changing scenery made no odds. High-class hookers and class A chemicals may be expensive but our oligarchs were still pigs at a trough. They’re not called filthy rich for nothing.
In reality, by this time The Darkness had peaked and people were starting to get a bit sick of us, but the very wealthy live in a bubble, so they weren’t to know that. They simply wanted something big to happen at one of their parties and we happened to be big. At least, that’s what my brothers told them. Centuries of Tsarist autocracy, decades of Communist dictatorships, years of ‘perestroika’ anticlimax, and now 45 minutes from Britain’s finest purveyors of pub rock – you could almost call it ‘Crime And Punishment’, if like me you had a penchant for tiresome literary references.
Our manager Sue widened her eyes when I put it to her. Who wouldn’t? We were set to make over a quarter of a million pounds with all expenses paid – a private jet from Luton Airport (with Louis Cristal champagne, a lobster buffet and smoking on board), production costs covered and a couple of days’ holiday on the super-yacht for the band to ‘unwind’. We agreed it would be mad to turn the gig down, though homeboy Dan wouldn’t stop muttering about the Russian mafia and how he’d prefer to spend the time with his girlfriend.
The day before departure, Sue and the band suddenly did an about-turn without explaining why. None of them took my calls, except for Ed, and he didn’t have a clue what was going on.
My brothers had been let down at the last minute and were set to lose a lot of money. I put it down to a fear of gangsters, plus variations on a theme of ‘Frankie must be taking a backhander from his brothers’. The first case looked like classic knee-jerk paranoia – ‘They’re Russian guys with a lot of money so they must be dangerous, surely?’ In the second case, it seemed they were ‘projecting’ somewhat: i.e. ‘How could Frankie not be taking a backhander from his brothers?’ Both reactions were nonsense, of course – there were no gangsters and no backhanders.
Yet fate decreed it would be a momentous occasion for my older brother, Tim. After last-minute rescheduling, apologies to oligarchs, fruitless negotiations with Simple Minds and the re-booking of luxury private jets, he managed to locate and book his childhood heroes, Level 42. It was beyond surreal but strangely gratifying to imagine my brothers – along with certain Hollywood A-listers and the aforementioned oligarchs – enjoying the eighties cod-funk atrocities of Mark King and his chums on a super-yacht down St Tropez way.
In the end, everyone was happy – except for me. It was the principle that rankled. That’s one of the countless hazards regarding French blood: that knee-jerk Gallic sense of injustice rears its righteous head at the most inappropriate moments. With the perceived betrayal of my family members – and the accompanying mistrust and paranoia – it was all I could do not to lose my faith in reconstituted eighties hair metal.