21

Welcome to Paradise

Maxiphoto / iStock Photo via Getty

I wasn’t even a week into my new job, and already I was being jetted away to a tropical island in the West Indies. I could get used to this, I thought.

Now, I should probably mention that Compass Point Studios in 1980 was nowhere near as famous as it would be later. It had been built just three years earlier by Chris Blackwell. He’d wanted it to be a place where musicians like Island’s own Bob Marley could work without any of the distractions of a big city.

Meanwhile, we’d been told that we’d have to share part of the studio with a band from New York called Talking Heads.

Only two weeks earlier, I was on stage at Westerhope Club full of working men and women – and now there I was, flying to the same recording studio that The Rolling Stones had just used. It didn’t feel real. And in a way, it wasn’t real, because I still had to prove that in picking me for the job, Angus, Malcolm and the boys in the band had made the right decision.

At least one thing hadn’t changed – our seats were still at the back of the plane, just as they had been when Geordie went to Australia all those years earlier.

It was strange suddenly being in such close proximity with the band for the first time. But Peter immediately broke the ice by producing a bag full of professional-grade Sony Walkmans – the posh ones that came in a special leather case – then handing them out. I felt like a kid on Christmas morning when I got mine. The Walkman had been out only about a year at this point. It was the most high-tech thing that I’d ever seen in my life – and when I put on the headphones and hit play, the sound quality was better than just about anything that I’d ever heard before. And, of course, the boys had brought along a cassette of the riff that they’d been working on, so I spent a part of the next six hours getting familiar with it, and thinking about what I could sing over the top, all while downing as many beers as the flight attendants would give me.

I didn’t expect to sleep a wink during the entire 4,000-mile flight, but the booze kicked in, the lights went out, and my head went dead.

It was still daylight when we landed. I looked out of the window at palm trees and blue sea. It was paradise.

It took all of five minutes for us to run into some trouble once we were off the plane though.

The customs officers basically took one look at our long hair and denims and decided that they didn’t want us on their island – so they pulled Malcolm and Angus aside and started to interrogate them about what was inside their guitar cases. It was the same power game played by people in uniform the world over. But what the customs officers didn’t realize was that Malcolm and Angus were pretty good at playing the same game themselves – and they could out-intimidate just about anyone. So, this incredibly long and tense stand-off ensued, until eventually the lead officer snapped and declared that he was confiscating everything.

And that was that – our guitars were impounded – while Malcolm and Angus were dragged away for more questioning. It took hours. And even though the lads were eventually released, their gear wasn’t, including the guitars – amongst them Malcolm’s Gretsch and Angus’s Gibson – that we needed to start making the album.

‘Oh, don’t worry about it, Brian,’ said Peter, ‘it’s just the way it goes.’

Malcolm and Angus didn’t like anyone in a uniform, Peter explained. They just got their hackles up if spoken to disrespectfully. At the first sign of trouble, they’d put up this shield of immediate and total resistance – and if they thought they were being picked on, they wouldn’t give an inch.

As for my own suitcase, the customs officers couldn’t confiscate it because I didn’t have one. I just had a carrier bag containing two pairs of socks, three pairs of underpants, one pair of jeans, a denim jacket, three T-shirts – including the ‘22’ one – and a cloth cap.* That was it.

We were put up in a guesthouse right where the jungle ended and the beach began – and when I say beach, I don’t mean a beach like Whitley Bay in Newcastle, or even Bondi Beach in Sydney. No, this was a proper beach, a Robinson Crusoe beach, with powder-soft white sand, swaying palm trees, and water of the most perfect aquamarine blue – although our guesthouses, in contrast, were about as basic as you could get.

What surprised me the most when we arrived was that even though the studio was only about 150 yards away, we were advised by our very large and strict Bahamian landlady to use our Honda Civic rental car to get there and back or jump on one of the studio’s 50cc motorcycles – and if we insisted on walking, she said, to always go in a group, and never at night. We thought that she was just being overprotective – probably on the orders of Atlantic Records, which wouldn’t want us wandering off and getting distracted. But we soon found out that she had every reason to worry.

The Bahamas were in the middle of a crime wave. All kinds of boats were disappearing off the coast, stolen for drug-running. And there were these illegal gangs living in the forest, and hiding from the law. Dangerous buggers.

Armed robberies were also becoming common – especially home invasions. The victims had included Robert Palmer, who then lived opposite the studio.* While he was in the studio one night, some guys broke into his home, shot his dog, and held his poor mum and dad at gunpoint – which had left everyone who worked at Compass Point a bit shaken.

Our landlady wasn’t taking any chances. Before she even showed us to our rooms, she presented us each with a harpoon gun. They weren’t for fishing, she explained – but in case any nasty lads broke into our rooms while we were there. Then this guy came in and gave us each a machete, as a backup in case the harpoon guns failed. During my entire stay, I kept my harpoon gun by the door, and the machete under my bed – fully expecting to have to use them both at some point.

As for my room . . . it wasn’t really a room. It was more like a little hut, about twelve feet by twelve feet, with a single bed, a handbasin, a small writing desk and a toilet.

No AC and no television, obviously.

Meanwhile, it was so hot and so humid, I didn’t know what to do with myself. And, of course, I hadn’t brought any shorts – never mind any swimming trunks – because the only shorts I had were for football, and they were back in Newcastle.

So, I just wore jeans, like everyone else in the band.

There was very little we could do for the first five days because of the impounded equipment, other than set up Phil’s drums. I ended up just walking around the place, trying to find something to do, until I found a pool table and a foosball table in the studio’s communal area. Then, just as I got some games going, the guys from Talking Heads appeared, taking a break from a session.

Great, I thought, some new people to talk to. David Byrne seemed confused by the pub etiquette of putting a coin on the side of the pool table. I must have explained it to him five times. But he kept looking at me like I was speaking a foreign language, which to be fair, to his ears, I probably was.

That said, we did end up getting along well with Tina Weymouth and her husband Chris Frantz – the bass player and drummer of Talking Heads. In fact, the two of them later helped us out by standing in for Phil and Cliff when they went missing out in the jungle one day.

While we were still waiting for our equipment, Malcolm woke up one morning to find all his money gone, so the police were called in, and there was an investigation that ended with the landlady going out on the beach with our tour manager Ian Jeffery, armed with their harpoon guns. They never did find the culprit – probably just as well because I didn’t much fancy their chances against any of the local criminals.

Just as we were starting to think that our gear would never turn up, Keith Emerson appeared and invited us out on his boat. Keith was great. He had this incredibly cool little speedboat with a cassette player built into the dashboard, which I thought was just the best thing ever. On a later fishing trip, Cliff managed to catch this massive tuna, which was a cause of great celebration – until it was established that none of us had the first idea how to cook the bloody thing because the only tuna that we’d ever seen before had come out of cans.

Cliff ended up cutting the giant creature into steaks, each about three or four inches thick, then he put them in the fridge in the guesthouse’s kitchen. But that night there was a power cut, and when we went in there the next morning, it looked like the scene of a murder. Because of the heat and humidity, the fridge had basically turned into an oven, and the tuna had gone off – spectacularly – with the blood seeping out all over the linoleum floor. It smelled like a fart past its sell-by date in there. So, we left the landlady to fumigate the premises, and relocated to a more fragrant room – where we were relieved to hear that our gear had finally cleared customs.

At last, we could get on with what we’d come here to do.

And I was straining at the leash to get started.

This would probably be a good moment to mention the guy who’d been hired by the band to produce the album – Mutt Lange, teamed up on this occasion with the sound engineer Tony Platt. I’d met both of them when I was at E-Zee Hire in London, but to me they were just two of many, many faces that had stopped by during the auditions.

At the time, of course, Mutt wasn’t really a well-known guy. Born in Zambia and raised in South Africa, he’d been in a few bands around Johannesburg, so he knew his stuff, and it was the record company that noticed he was a bloody good producer. That’s when they cut him in to produce Highway to Hell for AC/DC, and the boys liked what they heard.

One of the first things I learned about Mutt when I got to know him in The Bahamas – aside from his work ethic – was that he shared Malcolm’s gift for near-superhuman hearing.

During one session, I remember we were listening to a playback of one of the songs and Malcolm went, ‘What’s that noise?’ None of us could hear anything out of place at all, of course, even after listening to it three or four more times. But then Mutt came in and immediately picked up on the same noise. So, he went through each track – bass, vocals, guitars, drums – turning them down in turn, until finally, there it was, a noise on one of the drum tracks like a tiny pair of castanets. But, of course, that begged the question, what was causing it? We just about turned the studio upside down to get to the bottom of it – and low and behold, it turned out that a crab had wandered in from the beach and was making the unwanted noise with its pincers in the corner of the room and getting picked up by the drum mics. How Malcolm or Mutt had managed to hear that over Angus’s guitar was beyond me.

My other early impressions of Mutt were pretty limited – mainly because on the morning after our gear arrived and we started working on the album, Malcolm came into my room with a request that made it hard to concentrate on anything else.

‘Hey Brian,’ he said, ‘how did it go with those lyrics that you were writing?’

‘Oh, pretty good . . . I think,’ I said, remembering the lines I’d written about the ‘fast machine’ who ‘kept her motor clean’ – which was now almost a complete song.

‘Good to hear,’ said Malcolm. ‘Can you keep going and write the rest of the album?’

For a moment, I thought he was kidding.

But no – he wasn’t kidding.