TWELVE
I’d left home to seek my fortune and had come home lamenting my failure to do so. I’d lost one job and found another.
Eventually, I fell in with a gang of like-minded fellers with whom I’d formed a band that we called Flip City, after a few even more farcical attempts at finding a name. We all needed somewhere to live, so we scraped together our meager funds and lied through our teeth in order to rent a three-bedroom semidetached house adjacent to a spark plug factory on the A3 road out of London.
It was a decent enough address, but it backed onto a stretch of common land across which we occasionally welcomed vermin. I slept in the dining room, where they’d come to look for crumbs, while the others slept upstairs.
I never slept that much anyway.
We lived on toast and jam or beans on toast and spent most of our spare money on records, which were played every evening, ahead of watching any television.
I don’t recall there even being a television.
Each resident would take turns playing DJ.
This meant you might end up in the dark, listening to “The Gift” by The Velvet Underground, followed by the “Cheese Shop” sketch from the Monty Python comedy record or a Donny Hathaway album.
We were opinionated and sometimes wrongheaded. We favored Tim Buckley’s lusty Greetings from L.A. over his more artistic and poetic Elektra records, but I could never persuade anyone to listen to my David Ackles albums on the same label. Five of Van Morrison’s albums were in constant rotation along with Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind and Innervisions, and of course, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere by Neil Young and Crazy Horse was still in the mix.
Current singles were mostly trivia to be dismissed. This was the era of the album experience.
Nobody ever managed to convince me to sit through an entire side of Pink Floyd, as I contended that we’d be better off listening to Joni Mitchell. When Court and Spark arrived in 1974, it clinched the deal and settled the debate unanimously.
In the middle of that summer, an event at Wembley Stadium was announced that was somewhere between a concert and a rock festival. The bill featured a good portion of my record collection, opening with Jesse Colin Young followed by The Band, Joni Mitchell with the L.A. Express, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
I alerted my pal from Liverpool, Tony Tremarco, and he joined my bandmates and me, and Mary, who was by then four months pregnant and unsure about standing for that long in the late-summer heat.
The last time I’d been at Wembley, I’d entered the field of play to strains of Dave Edmunds tearing through Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” with his group Love Sculpture. That was our reward for struggling the thirty miles from Windsor Great Park to the football stadium on a giant charity walk to raise money for Oxfam. It even made the Pathé newsreel.
In truth, my mate Dale and I had stumbled at the final fence and hopped the bus up the hill on the last mile to the Twin Towers of Wembley, so we didn’t miss out on The Idle Race or Amen Corner.
Cupid’s Inspiration, Yes, and Status Quo also performed that day, but by the time they hit the stage we had beaten a retreat to soak our feet.
• • •
I DID NOT GET to pay my penance for swindling my charitable sponsors out of thruppence, three farthings until I took an overseas call, shortly after playing the Sydney Opera House in June 1985. The voice on the other end of the line was that of Bob Geldof. He said he wanted me to take part in the giant Live Aid concert that he was organizing for the following month.
There was just one catch.
The overcrowded bill meant that there was no time to set up another full band, so Bob wanted me to sing just one song on my own, after a set by Spandau Ballet and while the road crew was preparing the stage for the entrance of Nik Kershaw.
It is at times like these that vanity must be laid aside, but Bob’s request confirmed how far our fortunes had fallen in the pop music world.
For something like this to work you had to have the most recognizable faces of the moment singing their best-known songs. This was not about career opportunities.
It was hard to be cynical about the money raised, even if it was harder still to put aside the thought that any number of profiteering corporations or wealthy governments could have simply written the necessary cheque out of the kindness of their hearts.
That the invitation card to play Live Aid had not included the name of The Attractions didn’t go over very well with the band. They obviously thought I should have held out for a full band performance, but it would have been futile to argue the case with a lad who had been schooled by the Fathers of the Holy Ghost order.
In any case, the band and I had played only one show together that year, and that had been a benefit for the South Wales miners at Logan Hall in London, just six days after NUM’s yearlong strike had finally collapsed. That night, we’d shared the bill with Billy Bragg and The Men They Couldn’t Hang. The Attractions played with fire and a focus that we hadn’t always found in the previous year, when I was looking for an answer in any song other than the ones for which we were known.
The show at Logan Hall was like a defiant wake. The communities in the mining towns of South Wales had been decimated and impoverished by the struggle, but along with their comrades in Kent and Yorkshire, had remained resolute with more than 90 percent of their members remaining on strike until the very end. Whatever case you could advance about the inevitability of industrial change, or the impact of coal smoke upon the air, this mortal fight between the government and the unions, Marx and Milton Friedman, corruption, coercion, and the brutality of a police cavalry charge against unarmed men during peacetime, there was no denying the suffering of families. The small amount of money that we could raise was too little, too late.
A Welsh miner’s choir completely stole the show in matters of heart and passion, but we followed Billy Bragg’s rousing set with a mix of well-known songs and some that I had not yet decided how to record, including a very early draft of “Tramp the Dirt Down,” which was then called “Betrayal.”
When I ran out of words of my own to serve the night, we played Merle Haggard’s “No Reason to Quit.”
I faced the same conundrum approaching this brief solo appearance at Live Aid. I honestly didn’t feel I had a song of my own worth singing. Playing some song that had just scraped into the UK Top 30 two years earlier or performing a hit from 1979 might have raised a cheer of recognition but would have felt trite or even seemed needy. Then there was the matter of what words I would be singing. We had closed the Logan Hall show with “Shipbuilding.” It obviously had nothing to do with mining, but it was about a workingman facing a moral dilemma.
None of my own songs seemed suitable for the purpose on that summer afternoon. For a moment I thought about singing Nick Lowe’s “Peace, Love and Understanding” as a ballad, but this led me to the much better notion of singing “All You Need Is Love.”
When you saw the pitiful news reports from Ethiopia, it was absolutely clear that love was not all that was needed.
John Lennon’s song was not one that I had ever thought of performing before, so other than from singing along to the radio, I didn’t have all the lyrics jammed in my head along with five hundred other songs. I wrote the key words—“nothing,” “nowhere,” and “no one”—on the back of my hand with a black marker. David Bailey was backstage taking portraits of the participants and took a photograph of me beneath the stands in which this scrawl is visible.
In the artist’s area there were a lot of additional people standing around wearing lanyards with complicated credentials, giving it the appearance of a garden party. At my own shows I usually refused to wear any kind of pass, reasoning that if people couldn’t be bothered to connect my face with the one on the poster then I should probably not be playing the venue.
However, on this occasion, I was anxious to keep my ID in view in case I was ejected for not being glamorous enough. I had recently grown a beard. My hair was then still black but my beard betrayed my Grandad’s auburn coloring.
“Auburn” was flattering it. I looked as if I had glued someone’s ginger wig to my chin.
Backstage, I ran into Paul Weller, who helpfully opined, “That beard makes you look ancient.”
I suppose that was the idea.
I’d last seen Paul in 1983, when we sang his song “My Ever Changing Moods” together at a well-intentioned but long-winded theater event called The Big One.
The best thing about it had been the Gerald Scarfe cartoon on the poster and program. That night it seemed that almost every English actor of note had made an impassioned speech or acted in a theatrical skit arguing against the deployment of cruise missiles and generally concluding that nuclear obliteration was “a very bad thing indeed.”
Harold Pinter sent a newly written sketch called “Precisely” in which two men argue about numbers until it is clear that the twenty million of which they are speaking is a body count.
The musical interludes featured Ian Dury and Hazel O’Connor, concluding with U2 playing a stripped-down theater set with members of The Alarm as their guests, just at the moment when they were beginning to outdistance the pack of their contemporaries.
My main contribution, other than singing a couple of songs with Steve Nieve and my duet with Weller, was to lurk in wardrobe and act as a punch line.
The actress Susannah York had organized the event. During the third hour of the show, she starred in a mildly racy skit in which two lovers are faced with the “three-minute warning” of the nuclear apocalypse and confess their wildest sexual fantasies to each other.
Having listened patiently to a catalog of rather tame erotic desires, Susannah’s character breaks down and admits that she had always fantasized about being ravished by a Prussian Hussar in full dress uniform, on which cue I burst out of the cupboard, stuffed into exactly that drag.
Sadly, I hadn’t brought that outfit with me in which to sing “All You Need Is Love” at Live Aid.
In the final seconds before I took the stage, I was tuning my guitar in a Portakabin that served as a dressing room when a familiar face and Swansea voice came around the door. It was Terry Williams, former drummer of Rockpile, who was now playing with Dire Straits.
“Okay, El? Don’t worry about the TWO BILLION people watching on television,” he said encouragingly.
Before I knew it, I was pushed out into the sunshine in front of seventy thousand sunburned people and I introduced an “old Northern English folk song.”
People even sang along without too much bidding, whether it was the title line or the dah da-dah da-dah brass refrain from the Beatles recording.
It was the first time my singing voice had ever been heard live on the BBC. All my previous appearances to that date had been about miming and wearing stupid jackets.
• • •
I DIDN’T STAY for the rest of the show, as I was leaving for Moscow early in the morning, where my son, Matt, and I were taking our first father-and-son holiday together.
I had promised to take him anywhere his heart desired.
At ten, he believed that space was the place, and despite all my efforts to persuade him that a visit to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida might also take in a trip to the hell that is Disney World, he had settled his mind on a rocket to Russia.
We spent a fascinating week in the monolithic, appropriately named Cosmos Hotel on the Moscow ring road, right next to the Park of Soviet Economic Achievements. There, among the triumphal arches and giant statues of noble workers brandishing sickles to the sky, was a Tupolev jet parked among the shrubbery.
Small parties of people arrived by bus to faithfully trudge up the front stairs then out the rear exit, presumably never having boarded a jetliner before. At the very center of the park, we located a large hangarlike building that might have contained giant tractors or Stakhanovite drilling equipment, but we discovered, suspended from the roof, a dazzling selection of Sputniks and other satellites, and our search for the Final Frontier was complete.
Years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the place became a popular rave venue.
Each evening, we phoned Matt’s Mum in London to reassure Mary that her son hadn’t been kidnapped by the KGB. I didn’t mention an incident at customs until we were safely home, which was just as well, as you were aware that an operator was listening in on the call from time to time.
On the way into the country, a few items in my carry-on bag had been of interest to the border patrol. I hadn’t emptied the bag since my return from my Australian and Japanese tour, so it was full of fascinating swag. Among my notebooks were a number of loose sheets of paper—handwritten translations of lyrics by Frank Wedekind and Joachim Ringelnatz that Agnes Bernelle had given to me in preparation for the recording of her album Father’s Lying Dead on the Ironing Board, which I was funding as the president of my own, short-lived label, Imp Records.
The tattered pages were taken off and examined and determined not to be anything seditious, but an envelope containing a few hundred forgotten dollars for which I’d exchanged my yen at the end of the Japanese tour made me a currency smuggler.
Despite my protestations, the guards refused to allow Matthew to come with me to the interrogation room. As they marched me away, I looked back to see him looking completely stoic as his father disappeared, flanked by armed, uniformed border guards. I was glad that Matt had not yet seen The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Or The Ipcress File and that business with Harry Palmer being strapped to a chair and driving a rusty nail into his own hand to avoid the effects of brainwashing.
The “strip search” actually didn’t extend beyond taking off my shoes—perhaps that’s the favorite place for stuffing dollar bills—and I was sent on my way with a stern warning and without the illicit dollars, which naturally went into the senior officer’s pocket.
It wasn’t the best start to the visit, but we spent the next days with me frantically decoding the Metro map with my schoolboy grasp of the Cyrillic alphabet and my codebreaker skills or riding around in a big black hired car with a private tour guide for a mere $30 a day and listening to the production statistics of a ball-bearing factory that we happened to pass.
We visited Red Square and St. Basil’s and many of the other historical sights, but I thought better of taking a ten-year-old to see the embalmed body of old Lenin in his mausoleum.
Each evening we found that all of the hotel’s five restaurants were entirely booked for some Bulgarian trade union delegation, so most nights we dined on Pepsi-Cola and Nestlé chocolate bars purchased in the hard-currency shop in the lobby.
It was the holiday of a lifetime.
• • •
THAT CSN&Y CONCERT at Wembley Stadium in 1974 seemed as if it belonged to another age. It was actually only a mere eleven years earlier but it was obviously a very different proposition than either the Oxfam event of ’69 or Live Aid. The only similarity was the weather; it was sunny and uncommonly hot for mid-September.
My friends and I arrived to catch the end of Jesse Colin Young’s set but were well in place on the halfway line for the most anticipated name on the bill, The Band.
If this was to be the only chance to see my favorite group, then I would take it, but a football stadium was hardly the location that their songs demanded. I suppose I imagined them sailing by on a riverboat, in sepia tones.
The blazing sunshine certainly stripped away some of their mystery. I was astonished to see that Robbie Robertson was playing a “rock star” guitar like a Stratocaster, rather than the Telecaster he’d always been shown playing in photographs. Seeing those shots and hearing the shrill, piercing cries that I’d assumed came from that guitar was the whole reason that I’d finally traded in my Les Paul copy for a brand-new Fender. I always imagined he was somewhat self-effacing, as while he was credited with most of the songs, his three bandmates took all the lead vocals, so I was startled by how showy his guitar playing was in person.
Knowing nothing of “set lengths” or “curfews,” let alone any other reason why everything seemed accelerated, it felt as if The Band was dashing through their songs on their way to the exit. As each number ended, I hoped they would follow it with my favorite song, “The Unfaithful Servant.” I now realize it was highly unlikely that they would have performed such a song on a stadium stage, but it is the fan’s right to wish for the impossible and the artist’s responsibility to play what the hell they want.
When they lit into an unmemorable rabble-rouser like “Endless Highway,” my heart sank a little, but it was still thrilling to hear Garth Hudson play any song and to hear Rick, Richard, and Levon singing, if not howling along, together.
Then their time was up and they were gone.
Joni Mitchell’s set required a different series of adjustments. I’d last seen her alone with a guitar, a piano, and a dulcimer on her knee. Now she was surrounded by fusion jazz players, and sometimes seemed to yield too much ground to the L.A. Express.
Despite this, her set was astonishing when you consider that she was playing delicate songs like “The Last Time I Saw Richard” and “Blue” along with new sophisticated tunes from Court and Spark such as “People’s Parties” and “Help Me” to seventy thousand people in an outdoor stadium.
When it came time for the headliners, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young brought their most popular numbers to the stage. There were ragged and rambling moments, but as a longtime fan standing all day, waiting for them to arrive, these were the songs that I’d come to hear.
Only Neil Young seemed to be singing from a different hymn sheet. Halfway through the set he played a fantastic unreleased song of which I retained only these lines at the time:
The punches came fast and hard
Lying on my back in the school yard
It seemed like a bitter memory, all the more so when he reached the refrain that simply repeated the phrase “Don’t be denied” over and over again for what seemed like seven minutes, over some fuzzy chords on his Gretsch White Falcon.
If you ask me now, I’d say Neil Young invented the attitude of punk rock before my eyes that day.
This was the lesson that I took away from the day: If there is an applecart, you must do your best to upset it.
• • •
BY MONDAY MORNING, I was back on the train to work, replaying what I could recall of Neil’s song in my head, wondering if I’d ever hear it again, and waiting in vain for our next gig to turn up.
We didn’t always find a gig on the weekends, as venues usually booked better groups than us on those nights. So, many Friday nights, my bandmates and I would haunt a large pub in the middle of Kingston, as it had a DJ who only played American import records, which were still expensive and hard to locate. He played a lot of California records by Steve Miller, Jackson Browne, and even The Eagles, interspersed with the more cynical East Coast sound of Steely Dan, though he would occasionally surprise us with a rarity, and it was there that I first heard “Return of the Grievous Angel” by Gram Parsons.
I’m not sure that anyone got up one day and wrote a manifesto called Pub Rock—that was just something journalists invented in retrospect. The way I heard it, a couple of likely lads from Washington, D.C.—Austin de Lone and his partner Jack O’Hara—brought their group, Eggs Over Easy, to town and tried to replicate what they would have been doing in the D.C. club scene, and “pubs” turned out to be the most accessible venues.
A few disaffected groups such as Brinsley Schwarz, Ducks Deluxe, and even Ian Dury’s Kilburn and the High Roads saw the chance to take charge of the stage at a time when rock music was heading in a more grandiose direction.
Up until this moment, “pub” meant a smoke-filled hostelry where sad and sallow old men went to drink weak brown beer and listen to country-and-western music. While “rock” was bombastic music played by demigods clad in lamé and wreathed in dry ice.
We wore overalls and work shirts. Our conga player wore clogs.
We’d decided to become a band while standing in the audience in the cellar of the Hope and Anchor at a Brinsley Schwarz gig.
The Brinsleys had fought shy of the limelight since an attempt to transport the band and a charter plane full of journalists who were to witness their being catapulted into the U.S. concert scene at the Fillmore East had gone so spectacularly wrong. They seemed more down-to-earth now, more close at hand, and certainly more approachable than musicians you could only ever know through their recordings and the photographs on record sleeves.
I was writing plenty of songs by then, but few of them could yet stand the light, let alone the dark of night. I feared they sounded much like our little band, smug and apologetic at the same time.
Everything Flip City attempted to do as a group was based on the Brinsley Schwarz blueprint. I thought we’d cracked their secret formula. All we needed was a rare New Orleans song to call our own, so we worked up the old Chris Kenner tune “Packin’ Up.” To this we added The Coasters’ “I’m a Hog for You,” Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Pontiac Blues,” and Chuck Berry’s version of “Don’t You Lie to Me.”
The only recent songs we played were Gram Parsons’s “Big Mouth Blues” and the Jack Nitzsche rock and roll song “Gone Dead Train,” which Randy Newman had performed for the soundtrack of Performance.
Naturally, we had a Hank Williams song in the set and a Bob Dylan cover, “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” which our lead guitarist, Steve, sang, giving me a chance to make some horrible noise with my amplified Harmony Sovereign Deluxe acoustic guitar.
We started out with good intentions.
Our initial gig was at the North Pole.
That’s not that cold place at the top of the world but a shabby pub in Acton.
Fame seemed to have arrived early when a few weeks later we unexpectedly got a booking to open for Dr. Feelgood at the famous Marquee Club on Wardour Street. The Who had played there in the ’60s, for heaven’s sake.
However, we played to a nearly deserted venue, as all the Feelgoods fans refused to pay inflated club prices for beer and were still drinking in a nearby pub when we went on. At least that’s what we told ourselves.
Eventually, we settled into a steady pattern of inertia laced with a few moments of faint hope. Our first drummer, Malcolm, worked in a Fender music showroom in Soho Square, so on Friday afternoons the shop was stripped of stock as staff members who were in part-time bands borrowed its gear for the weekend. Saturday shoppers must have wondered if the place was having a fire sale.
Our unreliable van would usually lose the race, so we would arrive to find that the shop had been cleared out and might have to settle for two old Hiwatt bass cabinets to serve as a PA.
One Sunday afternoon, the Irish landlord of a venue took against me while we were hauling this ill-proportioned equipment into his pub. I think the fact that we turned up every week with different gear led him to believe that we were dilettantes or rich kids, when in fact our bookings were so far apart that we could barely call ourselves semiprofessional.
We were much more likely to be identified as ungifted amateurs.
It’s hard to recall now which were the venues that I merely attended as a fan and those that we played for little more than petrol money, but I know we played The Lord Nelson, Newlands Tavern, and a number of times at The Kensington in Russell Gardens, just shy of Shepherd’s Bush.
Future Attractions drummer Pete Thomas came to this last venue, and a ripple of recognition ran through our ranks, as he was in a name band with a record out. He lasted for three songs and fled.
The one time we made it out of London to a gig at JB’s in Dudley, near Birmingham, we ended up sleeping in the back of the van on top of the equipment until we could repair the engine for the journey back to London.
It was pretty much your standard catalog of apprenticeship disasters.
By the time the group broke up in 1975, we were playing a Sunday lunchtime residency at the Red Cow in Hammersmith to disgruntled Irish country-and-western fans who would have much rather been listening to a jukebox full of Ray and Philomena hits, and the morning after rather better attended Saturday-night sets by The 101ers, led by Joe Strummer, shortly before he jumped ship to form The Clash.
Two years earlier, when we still imagined that lightning might strike, we got a call from a major promoter, wanting to book us for a special engagement. His name was on various posters around town, but due to his earlier interest in horticulture and a brush with the law, he also had the job of booking entertainment for Wandsworth Prison.
It was proposed that we might increase our experience by going to jail one Sunday afternoon.
Needless to say, there was no fee, but there were a lot of rules and regulations. We were not permitted to perform “Jailhouse Rock” or “Riot in Cell Block No. 9”—not that we knew how to play either of those songs—and it was assumed that we wouldn’t be singing any Johnny Cash songs about prisons. The legend had spread about an earlier Wandsworth appearance by the psychedelic group Hawkwind, which had gone well until the prison officers realized the “space suit” that their dancer, Stacia, was wearing was actually just silver paint.
She was effectively naked.
We couldn’t find anyone to confirm this tale but thought it would probably be better if we kept all of our clothes on.
The small iron door in the gate of the Victorian prison swung shut with an ominous clang and our footsteps echoed around the high walls from the stones of the courtyard. We struggled our guitar cases and modest gear into the recreation room. It wasn’t a place that I’d ever want to visit without a Get Out of Jail Free card in my back pocket.
Wandsworth Prison was not a place that housed so many stranglers, poisoners, or armed robbers. Rather, it was the address of recidivists; sad, petty swindlers, burglars, and pickpockets, the only glamour and mystery coming from the presence of the occasional spy.
The trusty, with whom I’d got into an uneasy conversation, was serving time for forgery. I didn’t mention to him that I’d just narrowly avoided being fired from a bank.
Still, there were enough people present who looked as if they knew the address of someone violent. A few of them were wearing blue informs. It was not the moment to make jokes about anyone being a captive audience.
The prisoners filed in with all the enthusiasm of an algebra class and we commenced to play. There was an apathetic response to our first few tunes. The bright strip lights in the assembly hall peeled away any sense of this being a show, making my halting announcements seem endless. A few of the men stared at us blankly, while a few seemed to leer as if they had sussed out that we were not up to the task.
Eventually, we roused a little applause with Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land” and stretched out “Willie and the Hand Jive,” which might not have been the most tactful choice of song. Then it was over.
There were a few words of thanks given by someone in uniform, perhaps a chaplain, and the audience filed out and back to their cells.
Back in our increasingly tatty and chaotic household, we celebrated our jailbreak with tea and cheese on toast over a lick of blackberry jam, sprinkled with paprika and Worcestershire sauce—a sweet-and-savory specialty of mine—and thanked our lucky stars that we had the keys to our own front door.