THE TWO CAREER CHOICES AND WHAT I CHOSE
My own company, my own firm, my own car. This was it! I was going solo. I rented a place right on the River Tyne, next to a car auction room; it was right on the quayside. It was filthy, it was damp, it was overpriced, and it was pre-Victoria British building at its finest. Windows you couldn’t see out of, overhead lights that took longer to turn on than a witch’s tit, and an echo like King’s Cross. I had no startup money to speak of, and no employees to call me boss. But nothing would stop me building my windscreen and vinyl-roof empire. Well, except one thing: customers.
So I had to go get ’em, and transport was key. What should I get that could act as a van and a car and be value for money? I found all of the above in one strange vehicle: the Austin Maxi. Not only did it have a crap name, it looked like a matchbox with a hard-on. It was British Leyland mustard, the color of a chemical meltdown or the contents of a baby’s nappy. The interior trim—once again, using the word loosely—was a slightly darker color called “Gorilla Minge.” The dashboard was a bookshelf with a square dial on one side, a speedometer, and that was it. The steering wheel and seats were the only thing that told you this was not a skip. But the good thing was the rear seats folded down and I could get all my stuff in there. And it was pretty reliable.
Now I needed someone to work in the office and help answer the phone calls that were soon to come flooding in. I met a great lad called Ken Walker, a big, smiling man who could drink for England. And he had a posh voice and played rugby and stuff. We arranged to meet at the pub.
“Hey, Ken, I’m Brian. How are you?”
“Fer-fer-fer-fer-fer-fine.”
Uh-oh! “So, Ken, you’ve done vinyl roofs before, then?”
“Aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-almost.” He smiled. I smiled, too. Who was gonna answer the phone?
“Can you put in windshields?”
“N-n-n-n-n-not as such.”
Ken was a bit like the way he spoke; he never quite finished anything except his pint (he was meticulous in that department). I liked him though. He was jovial and fun. We went to the office and I showed him ’round.
He said, “Th-th-th-th-th-there’s not much fuckin’ here, is there?”
“No, my son,” I said. ”But there soon will be.”
The next few months really were good. People and garages remembered me from Windshields, and I got a lot of their work: the Datsun garage, the Lada garage, and a few other prize ones. Ken’s stammer got worse when he got excited, and his head would jerk like he was hanging on to a pneumatic drill. I said to him, “Why don’t you see someone about your stutter?”
“Oh, I yu-yu-yu-used to be m-m-m-m-m-much worse than this,” he said.
“You are friggin’ kidding?” I said.
“N-n-n-n-n-no. D-d-d-d-d-dad h-h-h-had a f-f-f-friend who came to h-h-h-help.”
“What did he do to you?”
Still stammering, Ken said, “Well, he came in the house and told me to take down my trousers, I protested, but my father said to do it. I had to lean on the table and part my legs, then he heated up a soldering iron and shoved it up the crack of my backside and I screamed, ‘Aaaaaaaarrrggghh!’ Then he said, ‘Good lad! We’ll start on B tomorrow.’ ” Now I don’t know how true this tale is, but the treatment was not a breakthrough in the treatment of speech impedimenta.
Ken worked hard when you could find him, usually at the Cooperage pub, and of course, when Ken was on the phone, the bills doubled. But, as I say, I liked him, he was good company and always smiling. Well, except when his girlfriend turned up.
Cars were starting to fill the garage, and we had to tell people they’d have to wait a couple of days. It felt pretty good. The classier cars were coming in: Rover Vitesse, BMW, Mercedes. Wow, this was cool! Everything was going good. My band, Geordie II, was booked solid and very popular; the company was going great. I’d moved back home with my mother and father. I thought I’d cracked it, and to celebrate we bought a company car, a Jag saloon 420G, huge and daft. There were more things wrong with it than with Italian politics, but it was cheap and posh. People who saw us driving into the garage would say, “Look at them scruffy posh people.”
Then came the fateful phone call that changed my life forever. It was February 1980, about three thirty on a cold but sunny ordinary afternoon. “North-East Vinyls,” I said into the phone.
“Allo, ees thees Breean Yonson?”
“Close,” I said.
“Ah, güt! I am vantink you to come to Lonton to sink viz a groupen.”
It was a sexy female voice that I later learned belonged to a woman nicknamed “Olga from the Volga.”
“Which group?” I said.
“Zis I cannot tell you. It is a secret.”
“Listen to me, darlin’. I’ve already been bitten by the music factory and I’m still paying for it, so could you be a little more specific?”
“No, I cannot tell. How old are you?”
What the hell was she on about? I said, “I’m thirty-two and probably past a new band’s sell-by date.”
“Ah,” she said. “Ve haf been lookink for you for many days now.”
Shit, who was this? What did they want with me? “Listen, lady. I am not driving all the way to London to do an audition with somebody I don’t know. Gimme a clue, give me the initials.”
“Okay, okay. Zey are ze AC and ze DC.”
“You mean AC/DC?”
“Scheiße!” she cried. “I haf said too much!” (By the way, I’m not kiddin’. This is all true.) “You must come,” she said.
“I’ll think about it. Gimme a ring tomorrow.” Holy shit! I’ve just spent a year building up a nice little earner; I’ve got money in my pocket, a cute girlfriend, I’m living with my parents, and my band’s doing well. Do I throw it all away and get stung by the music business again? AC/DC were a great band and well on their way. Their singer, Bon Scott, had passed away and the boys wanted to carry on. What to do?
The phone rang again thirty minutes later.
“Hey, Brian, remember me? André Jacquemin?”
I said, “André, of course I do. Bond Bug three-wheeler, right?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Anyway, Brian, I have my own studio and I do a lot of commercials for the telly. I’d like you to do one for me.”
Wow! Nobody’s asked me to do that before. “It’s a Hoover ad, and I’ll pay you, plus residuals.” Holy shit! That was big money. And then the magic words: “I’ll pay for your gas.” My mind started buzzing. Maybe I could do the ad, then pop over to audition with AC/DC. “I’ll do it,” I said.
“See you next Thursday, and don’t be late,” he said. André was a good man; he did all the Monty Python music and songs, so I knew this was a proper gig.
Simon Robinson was a guy who did rust-proofing not far from our garage. I told him I was going to drive to London to do this gig.
“Not in that Jag, you’re not. You’ll never make it.”
Oh bollocks, he’s probably right.
“Tell you what, I’ve got a Toyota Crown, nearly new. Why don’t you take that and we can trade off the cost when I need you?”
“Done!” I said.
Off I went to London Town in my nearly new Toyota. Fifty miles outta Newcastle, and bang—a puncture in the front-left tire. You wouldn’t believe it! I changed the wheel and set off again. At Redwood Studios, I heard the music, and it was a little embarrassing. “The new high-powered mover from Hoover. What a beautiful mover!” It was riveting stuff.
I finished the ad by about three thirty p.m. and then I had to go to Vanilla Studio, about three miles away, for AC/DC. Opposite was a café, an old-fashioned one with mince pies and tea and a toothless miserable old hag behind the counter, speaking a language all of her own: “Wotcha, lav. Dat’s free paand twenny-free.” I sat and ate my mince and onion pie. The top crust seemed strangely welded to the sides of the dish, and no amount of softening would remove it, so I couldn’t get to my mince or my onions. “I know,” I thought, “I’ll go in through the bottom.”
“Oi yew, wos gawin’ on over dare?” I gave up and walked across the road to the studio and to another life.
In the rehearsal room sat the boys of AC/DC, looking quite bored—they’d been auditioning singers for a month. When I walked in, I introduced myself and Malcolm said, “Ah, you’re the Newscastle lad,” and promptly gave me a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. He said, “Well, what do you wanna sing.” I told him “Nutbush City Limits” by Tina Turner.
Eyebrows arched, feet shuffled, Mal looked at the band and said, “Does anybody know it?” Sooo . . . great start then. But they did start playing it, and I belted out the words. That’s when a special tingly feeling came over me. I looked around and everyone was smiling. Boy, were these guys good, and boy, did I want to be one of them.
They asked me to stay in London overnight for more rehearsals, but I told them I couldn’t, because I had to open my shop in the morning in Newcastle. That kind of stunned them a bit.
I returned home, and the next day I thought it was all a dream. Until the phone rang at one thirty p.m. The rest is history.