The touring came thick and fast. Back in America that August and life was great again. In Oakland, one of the roadies counted how many girls we had in our huge dressing room and gave up at two hundred. I met some amazing girls: teachers, ballet dancers, blonde twins, oh my God, and a gorgeous girl who gave up a modelling career. She’d cut off her hair with nail scissors just to spite her parents, who desperately wanted her to be a model. It was a cosmic conversation.
By this time we were getting so many girls that I just decided to go for the prettiest in every dressing room. With the allure of being in a successful group I was suddenly in their league. My first question was usually, ‘Do you come from around here?’ and then the classic, ‘What do you do for a job?’ Pretty standard fare.
One girl replied, ‘I mekochinirdseeders!’
‘Eh?’ I replied.
‘Imeakmachinmerdreaders!’
Blimey. I leaned closer saying, ‘Eh?’ again.
She was getting exasperated, ‘Imemeekmoctincirdkneeders!’
Oh shit. I was seriously in danger of blowing it here. Too much rock’n’roll had wrecked my ears. Thank God her friend took pity on me, saying loudly, ‘She makes mocking-bird feeders! You know, for in the cages?’
When I took her home she did indeed have a mocking-bird, complete with feeder. In the morning she left for work saying, ‘You know where you’re going, yeah?’
‘Me, I’m an intrepid traveller. I’ve been everywhere. Don’t worry about me.’
Later I showered and left. As the front door slammed shut behind me I gulped. I was in the middle of suburban Denver with houses stretching for miles and miles. It took me three hours to find a diner. When I walked in dressed in leather pants and biker boots, I swear I had the same effect a little green man would have.
I finally got a cab, reaching the hotel in time to meet one of our roadies coming out. Turned out he’d spent the night with a mate of the girl who made mocking-bird feeders, and he looked like he’d been assaulted by a mountain lion. Covered in scratches and bites all over.
I went, ‘What the fuck?’
‘She was wild,’ he said, looking very pleased with himself.
‘But what are you going to do when you get home?’
He hadn’t thought of that. Reality hit him. We were going home in just over a week and he was ripped to ribbons.
‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?’
We were laughing, like we normally did. ‘You daft bastard.’
This guy was a great character but he was mental and a right scrapper, a ball of pure aggression when he got going, not somebody to take shit from anybody. These days you’d get three months for nutting a member of the audience, but back then it was fine. The only person who could control him was our monitor guy.
Then he had a lightbulb moment. ‘I know what I’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’ll start a fight to cover it up.’
I had an idea who was in his sights. He and one of the local promoters had been at each other’s throats since we started touring America and it was a wonder they hadn’t already kicked off. Things were about to come to a head in Santa Monica in more ways than one . . .
Something else was reaching the boil. In my opinion, Barney had been getting more and more frustrated with Gillian. Now, whatever else I may say about Barney – that he was a moody, tight-fisted bastard who made our lives a misery – I want to be clear that I understood the pressure he was under. Of us all, he did the most work. Steve and I did bass and drums, of course, and we worked on the lyrics and vocal lines together, but Barney ended up doing most of the keyboards and guitars himself.
I know he found it hard being frontman. He liked being first to get wrecked and having the attention of beautiful girls backstage, mind you. There were no complaints about being frontman then. But generally speaking, he found it hard, and he wasn’t backward when it came to letting you know about it.
We’d talk about getting Gillian to write more. ‘Don’t you do it,’ I used to say to Barney. ‘If you don’t do it, then she’ll have to have a go.’
‘Oh,’ he’d say, ‘I couldn’t do that to Steve.’
Which is why you should never have a couple in the band.
I don’t think he was a fan of her guitar work either, and later began to refuse playing the songs on which it featured, making us even more electronic. Over time we ended up neglecting greats like ‘Sunrise’, ‘Age of Consent’, ‘Broken Promise’, ‘Way of Life’, ‘Love Vigilantes’ and so on. Very frustrating for me.
So, Santa Monica. The day began badly, with our roadie and the promoter getting right on each other’s tits, our guy winding him up something rotten – this was wrong, that was wrong – and the poor guy getting more agitated in return. ‘Fuck you, man, get off my case,’ little knowing what we knew, that our guy had an agenda. He needed an excuse for his ripped-up back.
It wasn’t fair because the promoter was a lovely bloke; he certainly didn’t deserve what was coming. But once our guy put his mind to something . . . Physically they were evenly matched so the outcome was up for grabs, but it was definitely going to happen.
We did the gig. Barney was drunk and, while we were playing, some guy tried to get up onstage and I put my foot on his head and – well, I wouldn’t go as far as to say I kicked him off, it was more of a gentle push really, but you know, maybe some of the audience got the wrong idea and thought I’d actually kicked the gentleman in question, perish the thought, and started booing.
Next they started throwing things. After that the songs began falling apart, and at the end I looked across the stage to see that Barney was going psycho on Gillian’s gear.
He had kicked her amp over, grabbed her effects pedals and thrown them out into the audience, closely followed by her guitar. When we got backstage the group was in full-on inquireeey mode (see Timeline, 2 August 1985). Gillian was very upset. She was screaming and crying, with both Steve and Rob trying to placate her.
Rob was puzzled. To be fair, we never told him how we felt and he probably thought she did as much as we did.
Well, this might bring things to a head, I thought. Only, it didn’t, because Barney backed down, probably feeling guilty because he’d made her cry. We missed our chance to voice our opinions. Again.
We had our opportunity to say it, and perhaps we could have put a few things straight, but like everything else – management, money, working hours, all the things that spent years simmering beneath the surface – it was a toxic issue that was allowed to keep on simmering.
So Barney apologised. Put the whole episode down to the stress of being frontman, and we hit the drink.
Next thing, the fight broke out. That’s right, the promoter had finally snapped, our guy’s goading had at last pushed him over the edge, and he’d had enough and thrown the first punch.
He was, of course, playing right into the hands of our roadie, who responded in kind. My God, what a fight it was. This wasn’t the most vicious fight I’d seen but it was one of the most evenly matched, and because of that it was one of the longest.
When it first broke out we tried to part them. Impossible. So we stood around watching, like you do, but after a while we got bored. It just went on and on. They were grappling and rolling about on the floor for around thirty minutes and after a while the PA guys were stepping over them to load the gear, until at last two warriors stood panting, bleeding but, hopefully, cooling down. It was a draw.
‘Right,’ said our guy, seeming to have regained his composure at last, ‘job done.’
And with that he shook the promoter’s hand, turned on his heel and went back to work.
The funny thing is, I’ve worked with that same promoter many times since. He’s a lovely guy. Of course, he gradually became aware that he had been used in order to help out in a tricky domestic situation, but to tell the truth I don’t think he really minded. It was such a memorable tussle that I think he was quite chuffed to have taken part in it. For years afterwards he would say to me, ‘Hey, do you remember that massive fight I had with your guy? Tell him I said hello.’
‘Are you joking?’ I’d tell him. ‘I’ll be writing about that in me memoirs.’
Over the course of the tour we’d noticed we weren’t getting a great reaction from the front rows. It was unusual for America and we were scratching our heads about it. The people at the back were into it, same with the sides. It was just this front-row business.
Then Terry Mason sussed it. ‘It’s their guest list,’ he said. ‘They’re all too cool for school.’
We investigated and it turned out to be true. The venues were taking 500 tickets right at the front, just for all these spoilt bastards to basically ignore you.
It affected our performance, so we insisted it change. They could still have tickets but not at the front; that was for paying fans only.
Unfortunately, the directive hadn’t filtered down by the time we played Irvine Meadows and when Terry saw what was happening he went down with some of the boys and cleared the whole of the front rows out, letting the paying audience in.
God bless him. Except the record company people complained to the venue, who then got the police to arrest Terry and throw him in the holding cells (which they had backstage for unruly clients). It took Tom Atencio ages to negotiate his release, but on his return he was treated like a hero.
So because of that I wasn’t too bothered to be stood there with the promoter screaming in my face, ‘You’ll never play in California again!’ after our refusal to do an encore had sparked a stage invasion that resulted in the gear being smashed, the PA tipped over, security beaten, you name it.
But of course we did play Irvine Meadows again. Of course we did.
And that was it. Another brilliant, riotous tour of America, the band almost at their peak, great music, plenty of laughs, plenty of back-biting, but lots of love. What more could a boy from Salford ask for?
Needless to say, we returned home and were delivered into yet another shitstorm.