Not long before the wind comes up over the ocean and whips the sunbeds across the lawns and into the swimming pools, I stroll down to the far end of the Haywards Resort Hotel complex, towards the sound of the calypso band and the chatter and munch of hungry guests tucking into a lavish barbecue.
I’m here in the tropics to meet the splendid Eddy Grant, recently back in the higher reaches of the UK charts with a greatest hits collection. Back in the days when record companies knew how to spend money, everyone waited with great anticipation for Eddy to put out anything at all that might be worth talking to him about. Since he could never be bothered to quit his paradisiacal retreat on Barbados, it meant for years that not without a hint of regularity several lucky members of the UK music press would find themselves packing up the beach towels, suntan lotion and cheerful holiday slacks and flying out to sun-kissed Barbados. This year, the postcards are on me.
It’s not all frolics, cocktails and sea-breezes out here, however. Sitting around a swimming pool for hours, skimming through the new Elmore Leonard and knocking back cold beers is something of an uncommon perk – but after being boiled to a shining lobster-pink and made somewhat senseless by a remorseless sun, things can get a tad tricky for the hapless holidaymaker more used to dreary overcast skies with occasional showers.
The evening of our second day on the island, for instance, a group of us are watching a spectacular sunset from an attractive patio bar, enjoying our cocktails and generally feeling on top of the world. Which is about when I feel myself starting to glow like a nuclear accident, some kind of Chernobyl meltdown apparently imminent. Even my hair is hot. In fact, I am burning up like tree bark in a forest fire.
Perhaps a cold shower’s in order, so I announce that I’m off to my room to take one. I don’t get far. I’m off the patio and half-way across the adjoining dance floor when the room begins to spin around me like the carousel in Hitchock’s Strangers on a Train. There’s nothing but crashing surf in my ears. Someone is walking towards me, saying something I can’t hear. And then I’m swaying like I’ve taken a heavy calibre round in the chest. It feels like I’m falling through space in a suit of lights. The next thing I know, I’m on the floor and after that everything goes black for a moment, possibly longer.
When I open my eyes, people I don’t know are standing over me.
“Is he drunk?” someone asks.
“Heart attack,” someone else decides, attempting to give me the kiss of life, which makes me sit up with a start, frightening everyone.
“It’s only heatstroke,” another voice chimes in. This is Eddy Grant’s English PR, the dapper and moustachioed Keith Altham, a celebrated veteran of the British music press who as a reporter in the Sixties for New Musical Express hung with Jimi, The Who, the Stones, The Beatles, Small Faces, everyone.
“For God’s sake, get him a drink,” he now orders one of the waiters, who rushes off to the bar, reappearing moments later with something festooned with umbrellas and other bits of paraphernalia peculiar to the more exotic kind of cocktail.
“When I told you to get him a drink, I was thinking, you know, of a glass of water,” Keith admonishes the waiter who’s already given me the cocktail, which I have now come around enough to enjoy.
Altham hasn’t lost a journalist yet on one of these much-loved trips and he’s not about to start now. He grabs the drink off me and hauls me to my feet, looks at me like a corner man checking to see if there’s any light left in his fighter’s eyes, reckons I’ll live, but insists, all the same, that I have an early night. He then instructs two flunkeys to escort me to my room, presumably to make sure I don’t stop off at every shorefront bar on my way to my bed.
The next morning, I’m feeling much more chipper. Just as well, really, as somewhere along the line, and probably after a few rum punches too many, I appear to have volunteered to take part in a hotel tennis tournament. My opponent? Ilie Năstase, the former Wimbledon favourite. In his heyday, of course, the flamboyant Romanian was a volcanic Centre Court presence, as fiery as Connors and McEnroe, who followed shortly in his tempestuous footsteps. He’s here to play in a tournament for ageing tennis pros and have a knockabout with the likes of me for the amusement of our fellow guests.
On the morning in question, Ilie turns up in immaculate tennis whites. I’m wearing a Clash T-shirt, baggy black shorts, Converse sneakers and fluorescent purple socks. Ilie looks at me like I’ve just insulted his mother, probably a capital offence in Romania. He invites me to select a bat – or “racquet”, as the professionals call them – and join him on court. He then suggests we limber up and smashes a ball over the net between us. The ball hits me on the shoulder, nearly dislocating it. Ilie says something to the throng of sun-tanned beauties bouncing around in bikinis behind him and eyeing him adoringly. Then he points at me and they all laugh. I knock a ball back at him, but it doesn’t make it over the net. Cue much laughter from the sinister Romanian and his beach whores.
Ilie now wants me to kick off – or “serve” as the pros have it. I toss a ball in the air, take a swipe at it and inevitably completely miss the falling ball, which then hits me between the eyes. Ilie indicates via a series of guffaws that such is my hopelessness that he will now serve. Something whistles past my ear. This is the ball, which has come at me with such velocity it could have taken my head off. He aims another ball at me and I manage to get the racquet to it but succeed only in knocking it out of the court and straight into an adjacent swimming pool.
“You are pathetic,” Ilie is shouting at me now. “A dog! This is for sure. You are hittink the ball like a potato. I am not playink any more. This is too bad.”
He starts walking away, swiping the air with his racket, a man in escalating dudgeon, simperingly pursued by his tan-limbed harem.
“You never put me down, Ilie,” I call after him, Jake LaMotta on the ropes in Raging Bull, bloody but unbowed, all that. “You never put me down.”
But Ilie’s not listening. Head thrown back, he stalks imperiously off the stage, in the manner of a once-proud lion of the theatre reduced now to bit parts as butlers, valets and other assorted menials, all the great roles now being played by someone else.
And Eddy Grant? Brilliant bloke, wore his charm like a crown.