Earlier that year, Mike Cawley, Woggy, Terry Irvine, and I had decided to form a pop combo.* We’d all seen the 1960 movie Pay or Die starring Ernest Borgnine as Lt Joseph Petrosino, the only honest Sicilian cop in Little Italy, up against the Black Hand and their empire of extortion. We had noted the prodigious elegance of the Mobster dress code; if this movie was anything to go by, those guys seemed to be getting it all. Our enthusiasm inspired our group name: The Mafia.
The Cawleys were a pretty musical family. There was Eddie, the youngest, Mike the middle one, and their older brother Pete, a really handsome bastard, who played the drums in a moderately successful local group. Mike had an electric guitar, a red and black Dallas, solid body, two pickups; you could get splinters off the fucker, but they weren’t that common. To know anybody who possessed an electric guitar was quite something back then. It wasn’t the ubiquitous chunk of furniture it is today. Mike was also, unfortunately for me, a dead ringer for George Harrison.*
When we formed The Mafia, apart from Mike none of us could play. As far as I was concerned, the main requirement in any musical career involved poncing about in a silk suit. The playing of chords called for a degree of manual contortion beyond my abilities. I therefore opted for the bass guitar. One string at a time. How difficult could it possibly be?
I bought a second-hand bass, a Framus Star, from Reno’s, where they sold repossessed musical equipment at a knock-down rate. I got it for the prohibitive price of £38 and was paying for it on hire purchase. The Framus was a respectable instrument – Bill Wyman had one, albeit the larger model with two pickups, but I preferred my single pickup because it was dinky with a single cutaway design, redolent of a Gibson Les Paul. On the downside, it had a hollow body and was inclined to feed back. That didn’t bother me; on the contrary, I was never confident about my abilities on any instrument and it gave me an excuse to turn it right down to an inaudible level.
Terry Irvine was going to be on second guitar. He’d recently acquired a Rosetti Lucky 7, also from Reno’s. After the Vox Stroller, it was the second cheapest electric guitar you could get. It came in a black into turquoise sunburst finish, featuring a single pickup and scratchplate unit made out of plastic, dressed in that iridescent fake abalone pearlised stuff often found on fountain pens, flush door handles, drum kits, cufflinks, and most piano accordions.
I had also acquired a big battleship-grey Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, the kind of thing you see in movies used by blackmailers, or kept men who want to have their wealthy wives committed to an insane asylum: ‘I distinctly heard his voice.’ ‘You’re imagining it, darling.’ I don’t know what my fucking plan was, but I thought a reel-to-reel would be a more versatile and fun vehicle for music than a mere record player. It also came with a microphone and had a three-inch plastic speaker in a plastic case so it doubled as an amplifier, although you couldn’t plug a bass guitar into it or you’d have blown it to smithereens.
Woggy was the designated drummer, so at some point a kit was deemed necessary. Everything was on the drip, obviously: we didn’t have the kind of kerplinky to go buying expensive drum kits. Even on hire purchase, our choice was limited by budgetary constraints. The cheapest kit he tried out was a Gigster, but that was more or less a toy: the cymbals were the size of a pan lid and the drums were like the bucket from a kid’s beach bucket-and-spade set. Woggy looked like a giant on it. Given our serious ambitions for The Mafia, a more proportionate kit was necessary, and Woggy went for the second cheapest option: a ‘marine pearl’ Broadway drum set, yes, clad in that iridescent fake abalone stuff that flush door handles, fountain pens, cufflinks, and most piano accordions are often made out of.
Other than that, we didn’t have any equipment at all. Rehearsals would take place at each other’s houses in a vague rotary system. Mike would plug his Dallas guitar into my Philips reel-to-reel ‘amplifier’ and it was all systems go until somebody told us to shut up. When we were practising at our place, it would be the usual words of encouragement from my dad: ‘Bloody awful, that!’
We only knew two riffs: the Bo Diddley ‘Shave and a Haircut Ten Cents’, and ‘High Heel Sneakers’ by Tommy Tucker, also used on ‘Hurt by Love’ by Charlie and Inez Foxx: bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam. Oh, and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’.
Not long after the pyjama party, we somehow secured a booking for the Class of ’64 Freshers’ Ball at Salford Tech, where Mike and Terry were studying. Various groups were playing that night, carefully chosen to reflect the Mod/beatnik demographic predominant in every art college at that time. This was our big break. We were even on the posters, just below the bottom of the list.
Mike Cawley’s brother Pete’s group was called the Challengers. They were a little bit old-fashioned to our taste, like the Shadows: they all wore the same suits and had quiffs. Then they got this singer who could carry a tune, but his name was Stan something or other (back then, everyone was called Stan). The condition of his joining was that he changed it to something that would alliterate with the Challengers, anything starting with ‘Ch-’, like Chick:
‘I’m not calling myself Chick; I’m not a woman.’
‘Oh all right. Charlie then.’
‘I’m not calling myself Charlie. They’ll call me a right Charlie.’
The one that didn’t seem to invite ridicule was Chet, and so it was that they became Chet and the Challengers, a very old-school sort of name to us. But they were really serious about making it, and got a lot of bookings, including at one of Manchester’s largest and most prestigious venues, Belle Vue Gardens. Why? Because they could really play, and they obviously had proper equipment, including Selmer amps, which were second only to Vox AC30s.
We tried to blag some kit from them for our debut outing at the Tech in order to look like a proper outfit.
‘Ask your kid, Mike.’
‘I’m not asking him. He’ll tell me to fuck off.’
‘Put the mither on him, Mike. It’s our only chance.’
Chet and the Challengers weren’t very encouraging. The word ‘punk’ was even uttered in its pre-Seventies pejorative sense, but they grudgingly came across with two amplifiers and a Reslo microphone. No guitars.
You only get one chance to make a first impression. With this in mind, I decided that we should all go blond for the big occasion. We bought this stuff called Colaire, which came in a small plastic bottle along with an applicator the size of a mascara brush. The instructions read, ‘Use Sparingly’. It should have been evident by the size of the brush that Colaire was for highlights only, whereas I wanted the full blond cover. Finding it just wasn’t working fast enough, we wound up emptying a whole bottle each over our heads.
We looked all right in my bedroom, but when we got out the front door into the sunshine . . . It was a case of ‘What the . . .? Huh?!’ It wasn’t blond. It wasn’t even golden blond. I’ve seen golden blond, and this was just gold. Gold, I tell you. Full-on metallic-Christmas-tree-decoration gold. We just gawped at each other.
‘What the fuck are you going as?’
But we all looked the same. We were like Martians, visitors from a rock and roll planet beyond our galaxy. Terrible. And it was too late to do anything about it.
Top of the bill was a group called the Measles, a bunch of long-hairs modelled on the Stones. Their extremely charismatic frontman was the whippet-shaped Red Hoffman, name-checked on their only single, a moderately successful cover of ‘Castin’ My Spell’, which had been a stateside hit for Marie Adams and the Johnny Otis Show in 1959.
The Measles wore those Madras cotton blazers with brass buttons beloved of Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames: muted candy stripes in mustard, maroon, and bottle-green. And centre stage on vocals, maracas, and gob-iron, Mr Hoffman in a different coloured jacket, of course.
But it was the second act that gripped our imagination: the Victor Brox Blues Train. They had a three-horn brass section, and Bruce Mitchell, the greatest drummer I’ve ever seen – and I don’t usually notice drummers, to be honest. Victor himself, with his elegantly topiarised Vandyke and his snakeskin jacket, sang and played electric organ, violin, and pocket cornet.
We were on first. Thirty-watt amplifiers were a new sonic experience for us, and we’d never heard ourselves at full volume before. Now we were not only inept, we were also unignorable. What a thrill: we were giving them full voltage and there was nothing anybody could do about it. To this day, I don’t know why the entire audience didn’t head for the exits.
In a world where anything goes, it was enough that nobody else sounded like us; and nobody else sounded like us because they could play. We had invented a whole new sound, all right. The one that everybody had avoided up to that point. We were unquantifiably bad, but any criticism was met with scorn. To us, our primitive untutored approach was enviable, a badge of authenticity, a welcome breath of fresh air.
Obviously, we expected to get loads of bookings after the Freshers’ Ball, but inexplicably, not a single offer ensued. This didn’t make us question our performance, however: we convinced ourselves it was nothing to do with our lack of expertise. No, it was our unsympathetic nomenclature. That was the stumbling block.
Gangsters in general were getting a bad press because of The Scarface Mob, a movie starring Neville Brand as Al Capone and Robert Stack as his nemesis, Eliot Ness. A spin-off TV series, The Untouchables, soon followed, and all of a sudden nobody had a good word for La Cosa Nostra.
We changed our name to the Vendettas.