My first ever show wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t even with Section 5. I was just minding my own business at Parsons one day when these two older lads came up to me and said they had a band and they’d heard I was a bit of a singer, so would I be interested in playing with them at Sunniside Working Men’s Club the following week.
These were boom times for working men’s clubs, of course, with the demand for live music far exceeding the supply, which meant the bar for getting a gig wasn’t exactly high. But I didn’t know that at the time. As far as I was concerned, it was incredible that anyone could get themselves a real paid gig anywhere – and my heart almost leapt out of my chest at the very mention of it. Also, Sunniside was only a few miles up the road from Dunston, so getting there wouldn’t be a problem.
‘What kind of stuff do you play then?’ I asked, trying to sound like this was no big deal.
‘We’re a folk band.’
‘What, like Bob Dylan?’
‘Bob who?’
My heart sank. How could they be a folk band if they’d never heard of Bob Dylan? ‘Look, I’m sorry lads,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know any folk songs, and I’m already in a band, so I can’t –’
‘Here you go,’ they said, handing me a book of lyrics. ‘We’ll see you next Tuesday, eh?’
We were billed as . . . I can hardly bear to write this down . . . The Toasty Folk Trio.
As for our set, it consisted of six songs, the lyrics to which I wrote out in longhand to help me learn them by heart. It wasn’t folk music, as such. More like country and western. The stuff that Gene Autry used to sing. One of the older lads played guitar and the other had a stand-up snare drum. Well, Brian, you’ve got to start somewhere, I said to myself as we waited to go on. Then the club’s emcee introduced us by saying, ‘Aalreet, so the lad coming oot to sing tonight might look a bit young, but divvant boo him or hoy anything at him, just give the bairn a chance, eh?’
The whole place groaned. Then about half the room got up and went out for a piss.
This is gonna be a long night, I thought.
The first song was ‘Red River Valley’, a traditional number that originates from Canada.
That was also the last song – because we were so fucking awful, the emcee jumped back on stage and said he would pay us ten bob each to pack up our stuff and go home.
I felt terrible. Totally humiliated. But as I collected my book of lyrics, the emcee grabbed me and said, ‘Not you, sunshine – you stay right here.’ Then a big fat woman came out and invited me to sit down next to her at the club’s Hammond organ so we could belt out a few songs together. And it turned out she was brilliant. She could play that organ like no one’s business, and she had this absolutely terrific, almost gospel-like voice . . . She also kept trying to give me cuddles between songs, which wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined my professional debut. But still, a gig was a gig . . .
The last song we did was ‘House of the Rising Sun’, which the lady introduced as a ‘good old Geordie song’ – but of course it wasn’t, really, apart from the fact that The Animals had just released a version of it. But we did it proud . . . so much so, in fact, that many years later I would cover it again in my band Geordie, and we’d record a version that I’m very proud of to this day. (It would later be used in the Al Pacino film Hangman.)
We walked off stage to a standing ovation. Well . . . either that or the tickets to the bingo had just gone on sale. Whatever the case, the club’s manager was so pleased he gave me £5 – five pounds! – in addition to the ten bob that I’d already got for the Toasty Folk Trio to fuck off. I couldn’t believe it. Five pounds was three times as much as I was getting for a weekly wage at Parsons! The two lads from the Toasty Folk Trio couldn’t believe it, either. In fact, the moment I walked out of the door, they jumped on me and told me I owed them two-thirds of it. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘That’s our management fee,’ they said.
‘But I don’t have managers!’
‘You do tonight, son.’
The first show that started it all for me, and it was important for the rest of my life, was Section 5’s first gig, which was a few weeks later at Walker Boys’ Club. It was more of a church hall than anything else, but it was a start and I’ll never forget it.
Seeing as we were too young to drive – not that we could have afforded a van, anyway – we had no choice but to take the trolleybus and stow our gear under the stairs. If I’d once felt like a rock star hauling my little P.A. around by myself, I felt like an even bigger deal with an entire band and their instruments in tow. It was brilliant. Not that the conductor or the other passengers were too happy about the time it took for us to carry all our gear from the pavement onto the bus. Especially since we just went one stop – then had to do it all again in reverse.
The only reason we’d got the gig was because Steve and Les had been members of the club when they were kids – at the same time, they claimed, that one of The Animals had been on the boxing team. (Which Animal, no one seemed too sure about.) That had been many years before, however, and when we walked in, it was obvious that the place had gone to the dogs. I mean, it was basically just an empty room with bare floorboards. A total shithole. Then again, Section 5 weren’t exactly ready for Wembley Stadium just yet.
All we played that night, I’m pretty sure, was Chuck Berry. Or at least the kind of Chuck Berry songs that The Rolling Stones had made their own. Tracks like ‘Come On’ and ‘Carol’. I think we also did ‘Walking the Dog’, another Stones number.
It was a moment of truth for us, really. Because we’d been rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing for this moment . . . and we were still shite. We’d told Rob, the drummer, ‘Just do what they do on the record’, but he either wouldn’t or couldn’t, and on stage, he just froze. The guitars were too loud. Les broke a string. I forgot the words . . . to everything. Our worst number was the Manfred Mann song ‘5-4-3-2-1’ – instantly recognizable back then as the theme of the hit ITV show Ready Steady Go! It was a hard enough song to begin with, with a lot of harmonica in it – which no one could play – and some group shouts of ‘5,4,3,2,1’, which none of the other lads wanted to do because they couldn’t sing and they didn’t have microphones. So, our version of it was missing two-thirds of what made it worth playing in the first place. And the third that remained was a dog’s fucking dinner.
For the sake of a good story, I’d love to tell you that the audience booed us off stage.
But the reality was, they’d barely noticed us to begin with.
They deeply and truthfully could not give a fuck.
The few people who were paying attention just stood against the wall, looking depressed, not moving an inch. There was no booze. Not even pop. Nothing. The only reason they were there was because it cost only a shilling to get in – about £1.80 in today’s money – and there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go in Walker. When we were finished, there was just complete silence, not even a smattering of polite applause. Everyone just buggered off to the chippie next door.
But the night was a roaring success in another way. In the audience that evening happened to be a flaxen-haired young German bird of about nineteen or twenty years old – her dad must have worked on a merchant ship or something – and when I walked out of the club for a tab, there she was on the pavement, waiting for me with some friends. I’ve no idea if she enjoyed the show. All I know is that her tongue ended up in my ear, and before I knew it, she was beckoning me to follow her to a romantic hideaway around the back of the club – the hideaway in question being a brick alleyway filled with nettles, tab-ends and general rubbish. Then she pulled down my jeans, pushed me to the ground, and I felt nettles stinging me all over my arse and down the back of my legs. But it didn’t seem to hurt at the time. Especially not after she’d hitched up her skirt and started to lower herself on top of me.
And lo, it came to pass that on that evening – after Section 5’s first-ever show to a near-empty room at Walker Boys’ Club – I lost my virginity to this quite unbelievably sexy older German girl, who jumped up and down on top of me like she was riding a horse, all the while still wearing her coat and jumper, smoking a cigarette, using my stomach as an ashtray and looking around furtively to see if anyone was coming. Which, as it so happened . . . I just had.
‘You’re finished already?’ she asked.
‘More?!’ was all I managed to reply – those being the days when once you were up, you were up for the night.
‘Where did you go?’ asked Steve, when I returned to pack up my gear, feeling ten-feet tall. ‘And why are you walking funny?’
‘I sat on some nettles,’ I explained.
‘There’s toilets in here, y’know,’ he said, looking confused. ‘You didn’t need to crap in the bushes . . .’
But I wasn’t really listening, because I couldn’t stop thinking, why me – and why on this night, of all nights? It’s got to be the singing, I concluded. Which led me to another thought. If I get better at this singing business – and eventually join a better band – maybe this will happen to me every night . . . for the rest of my life.
Such are the moments when Important Career Decisions are made.