Sick On You Page 10

  It doesn’t last all that long, actually.

  I got excited in 1963 when I saw the Beatles and maybe Helen Shapiro topped. Later, in 1976 at the 100 Club, the Pistols were a bit different. But in 1973 there was nothing quite like the Hollywood Brats at the Speakeasy.

  Ken Mewis

  Manager

  Hollywood Brats

  1973

  I

  Lou and I stroll the streets of Watford, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom, Nowheresville. We have chump change burning holes in our pockets. The window display at the Oxfam shop proves so alluring that we just have to pop in. We flick through the racks and the only thing that grabs our peepers is a couple of dresses. Mine is a silver lamé sheath and Lou’s is a brown nylon affair, zip up the back with a modest ruffle around the hem. While we are trying them on and discussing their various merits, the elderly ladies behind the counter are flush-cheeked appalled, fanning themselves with newspapers and applying hankies to foreheads until Lou tells them we are in a band and then just generally swamps them in the warm, damp funk of his charm. Then the old dears are all smiles and helpful suggestions.

  Two days later in London Street, a few doors down from Stein’s, the band convenes for our first photo session. The photographer is an Italian guy, a hundred years old, with a mustache like a clichéd villain from any old wopera you care to name. He’s even called Tony—pardon me, Antonio. Stein found him. So there we pose, late afternoon, cheap chairs, stark-white backdrop.

  Roger’s in leather, naturally, wearing my rock ’n’ roll sweater, naturally. Stein’s in white strides, tight top, bangles, fabulous hair. Eunan is in satin, both strides and top, with my red scarf, and a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. Lou and I wear, what else, our new frocks. Lou’s brown nylon ensemble is complemented by beat-up jeans and plimsolls. Halfway through I switch to Mr Fish and black cords.

  Oh yeah, Stein showed up sans mustache. Must have been his New Year’s resolution. He has never looked lovelier.

  We are desperate for a place to rehearse. Gone is the church hall, gone is the Railway Hotel club with the Pete Townshend ceiling hole, gone is Suicide University, gone is the Bushey bedroom. We must rehearse, at least semi-acoustically, one amp for guitar and bass, Stein on acoustic guitar, me crooning soft as Perry Como, Lou bashing away on whatever cardboard box is available. Eunan volunteers his place in Canfield Gardens, off the Finchley Road.

  The band descends on his cramped bedsit on Monday night, January 8. And we are grateful to Eunan, the new chap, for coming up with this short-term solution to our rehearsal problems. We’re so grateful that the first thing we say when we walk through the door—we can’t help ourselves—is, “What a dump.” First impressions can be so spot-on, don’t you think? Always in life, always, judge a book by its cover. You’ll never go wrong. Like now. What a tiny, squalid, effluence hole. This place makes our Aldenham Road slum seem positively hip.

  After a warm lager we run through a few songs, and then comes a pounding on the door. Proceedings screech to a halt. Eunan cloppety-clops on his heels to the door and opens it. There stands an unkempt, hunched-over dead ringer for Ron Moody as Fagin in Oliver!, wearing a gray cardigan that moths apparently find delicious and slippers worn down at heel and perilously thin at toe. I mean perilously. There is imminent danger of a big toe that doesn’t even know the word “pedicure” poking through this nasty, threadbare slipper, and that’s a sight nobody wants to see. Not here, not now, not when, not then.

  His hairy eyebrows stay as high up on his intriguingly bemoled brow as they can go, while he waggles his gnarled forefinger and demands that we keep it quiet or the pointy end of his right slipper will meet Eunan’s Irish keister and, kaboom, out he’d go from these much-sought-after premises.

  Eunan backs off, stammers, then blathers, and finally, his Catholic past reaching out and grabbing him by the raisins, almost genuflects in front of this still-raving twit.

  I stand up and walk behind the open door. Lord Cardigan’s spittle-flecked harangue shows no signs of abating so, with forefinger extended, I slowly close the door in the landlord’s face. In the hall we hear one final snarling sentence then the sound of filthy, worn slippers plodding away over filthy, worn carpet. Then silence. I go nose to nose with Eunan. This is unacceptable. We can’t let the world shove us around, elbow us to the sidelines. Come on, man. Rehearsal over.

  * * *

  Lou, Eunan, and I go to see A Clockwork Orange in Watford. What a film. And yet, throughout the screening there is a definite undercurrent of something untoward, p’raps a semblance of the old ultraviolence in the cinema itself? I do know this. People come out of the cinema after seeing that film and they’re not talking about the subtexts of redemption, rehabilitation, social cohesion, alienation, or any of that malarkey. All they want to do, after seeing A Clockwork Orange, is to find somebody weak and vulnerable and beat them to death.

  Afterward, the three of us sit in a coffee dive and Lou and I continue our quest to convince Eunan to rehearse the next day, which is a Saturday. Roger will no longer rehearse on weeknights. It probably has something to do with him holding down an actual job. But weekends are okay and so weekends are all we’ve got. And we have to rehearse. It’s our lifeblood.

  But Eunan’s got some problem with tomorrow. Apparently other Saturdays are fine, but not tomorrow. He won’t budge and he won’t come up with a decent excuse, either. He mumbles and shrugs, goes all vague and evasive and murmurs into his drink, but he’s adamant. I am not amused.

  What the hell is he doing tomorrow that is so important?*

  * * *

  The photos are okay: stark, black-and-white. Everybody looks good all wrapped up in rouge.

  Whatever the case, it’s time to record a demo and get a record deal.

  Eunan says he’s found a guy with a home studio in Hackney Wick and we can record there for a tenner. We show up at the appointed time, Monday, January 15, with uncharacteristically chipper attitudes and characteristically tatty equipment. Roger pulls up to the curb in his Zephyr in a sour mood, due to the fact that he has had to miss a day’s work. I can’t ignore the fact that a nagging, indefinable something is off-kilter in the Roger part of our equation, and it’s been nagging for a bit now. Things are not as they were. I decide the best course of action is to be forthright and ignore it.

  The studio is in a dark flat on the second floor of a large, rundown Victorian stack of bricks and timber-rot on a non-salubrious though leafy side street. It is pure hippy haven: general filth, of course; joss sticks and ashy bits of joss sticks everywhere; scarves with burn holes draped over lamps with red lightbulbs; huge four-cigarette-paper joints being smoked at 11 a.m.

  There is also a hippy domestic scene going on, which, among other things, means two snotty little piglets in rancid, saggy nappies are crawling around the beanbags and milk crates like postapocalyptic floor creatures. The “studio” owner is Alvin and his “old lady” is Grizelda. Grizelda, whose twin-curtain hairdo is strapped to her skull with a tooled-leather headband, sports embroidered loon pants and a distastefully diaphanous flared-sleeve top. She welcomes us as though we are the living embodiment of polio.

  So yeah, let’s record our first music here. Very rock ’n’ roll. Ta, Eunan.

  Stein and I have written together every few days since the moment we met. We concoct ideas in our individual noggins, his while selling Union Jack paperweights in Paddington, mine while wrapped in a blanket on Aldenham Road, then we collide, when Sonja’s out, at 17 London Street. Not one of our songs can we envisage ever being in the polluted, insipid charts or on the telly or anywhere else, for that matter. Still.

  We haven’t got the slightest clue what to do in a studio. We’re at the mercy of Alvin, head hippy, engineer, and would-be producer. We cram into what must once have been a bedroom—purple walls, splintered wooden floor, egg cartons over the window. Lou sets up his drums, Ste
in has a wee electronic keyboard at his disposal, Roger and Eunan are cozy in a corner. Me? I’m in the kitchen, of course, hooked up with wires and headphones next to a greasy stove. I can’t see the boys. What I can see is a sink full of crusty crockery, penicillin on every dish. I’ve never been apart from the lads before. What about my hand signals, my instructions, my general sniping and barking that they have come to so love and depend upon?

  As it turns out, our initial stabs at recording in this manner are inept. Take after take we deem timid rubbish.

  Stein, Lou, and I stop the world, we have to get off, get our bearings, get a Long Life. We have a chat. Against Alvin’s “expert” advice we move me from the greasy stove into the tiny room with the rest of the band. Alvin bleats about microphone “bleed” and “leakage” and other stoned, “hey man” type problems, but we are adamant.

  The difference is immediate. Yes, it’s messy and noisy, but it sounds like what we want it to sound like. It is raw and exciting. This is bedroom rock and if there is one thing we know it’s how to rock in a bedroom. We can do this blindfolded.

  Alvin is going nuts, tugging and braiding his beard feverishly. He quite obviously hates what he hears, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. Through his food-infested face hair he imparts ever-decreasing instruction. Grizelda, with her grim face, split ends, and massive-aggressive mutterings, infests the proceedings like an odoriferous vapor. Her modus operandi is to storm in, hiss in Alvin’s lughole, and stomp off in a fury. Repeat as necessary. Can’t she just stomp off for a long walk? Can’t she stuff her smelly little kids in a sack and drag them along with her?

  We lay down “Melinda Lee” and “Son of the Wizard.”

  Tuesday, and after a veritable athletics meeting of leaped turnstiles, coupled with Lou’s charm with London Underground ticket takers, we are back in Le Studio Alvin. Roger is even less amused than yesterday. The way I see it, Boosey & Hawkes will just have to struggle on without him for another day. One fewer section of one fewer saxophone will roll down the assembly line because Roger Cooper is here in Hackney Wick, laying down the definitive bass track for “Southern Belles.” So what?

  Alvin doesn’t look as though he has had the most relaxing sleep of his life.

  We bash out “Southern Belles” in a couple of takes. Stein and I are taking over more and more, relegating a sulky Alvin to knob-twirler and tea-maker. I keep a wary eye on the tea process in case he decides to gob in mine. Grizelda is in an even fouler mood today. She opens the door in the middle of a take and sticks her nose in, the pint of patchouli oil she evidently poured down her knickers this morning barely overpowering the nostril assault of her personal body-funk.

  Later, on the way to the loo, she traps me in the hallway and tells me, apropos of nothing, that I’m not half as good as I think I am. I refuse to be drawn in by this psycho, but as I squeeze by she adds that our music is, in her charming phrase, “fucking shit, man.” She reminds me of a young, tie-dyed, and slightly less attractive Gertrude Stein.

  Day three at Alvin’s House of Horrors. We overdub some guitar on all three tracks. Alvin is baffled by the technology required to do this. He swears, he plugs and replugs, he rolls tape, rolls joints, swears some more, and rewires a mysterious black metal box. The original track and the new guitar track are miles out of sync. Take after take, Alvin adjusts and swears until the two tracks begin to sound less like an echo and get closer and closer to syncing up. Finally, he manages to bring the original recording and Eunan’s overdubbed guitar within a split second of each other. He is about to make the last required sync adjustment when Stein and I, who have been staring at each other since the last playback, yell at him not to touch a thing.

  That music, with its weird out-of-sync guitar track, sounds amazing. It sounds like that razor-chainsaw guitar concept we’ve had in our heads all these months but have been unable to throttle out of the guitar boys. Until now. This is the eureka moment. We get Eunan to lay down another track without hearing the first ones and, given his, shall we say, unique sense of timing, this one is ever so slightly out of sync with the previous two.

  The effect is remarkable. It sounds like a raw, undisciplined guitar section.

  Meanwhile, the lovely and enticing Grizelda can be heard in various other parts of the “studio” rattling pans and slamming doors. She is drunk on homemade nettle wine that she swigs from a succession of beer bottles. As we pack up she walks in to tell us to never, ever come to her house again, smashing a beer bottle into the wall behind us for an emphasis that is frankly unnecessary.

  Eunan hands a ten-quid note to Alvin and the poor, stoned, bearded sod almost gets to pocket the dosh, but the missus snatches it and sticks it down the front of her stained purple smock, where it is completely safe.

  Got the tape. We are out of there.

  Down on the street, and out of the blue Eunan flips out about Stein and me taking the tapes. Seems he was under the impression he’d be waltzing off with the goods. He claims he paid the ten quid so the tapes should be his. Lunacy. You daft sprite, sod off and sober up. Later that night he calls Stein and says he’s quitting the band.

  Next day, we all meet to talk to Eunan. I don’t say much because I’m afraid I’ll end up throttling the bastard.

  Afterward, when everything is soft and cozy again, we join hands in a prayer circle then have a pajama party with hot chocolate and a pillow fight.

  II

  Chris Andrews wants to meet us.

  Stein had seen an ad in, where else, the Melody Maker. The gist is that a new company, started by Chris Andrews, invites bands to send in tapes. We’ve now got a tape. So we did.

  I hadn’t the faintest who the guy was, but Stein educated me. He is, apparently, a sixties popster who had a couple of hits, the biggest of which was “Yesterday Man.” I never heard any of that, but when Stein mentioned that the man also wrote “Girl Don’t Come” by Sandie Shaw, I got the picture. I love that song.

  We put the tape, one of Antonio’s black-and-white photos, a paragraph or two by yours truly, and Stein’s phone number into an envelope and stuffed it into a postbox in Paddington.

  A few days later Stein tells me that Chris Andrews called, saying he wants to meet us. At an office near Oxford Circus we are introduced to the man himself and his sidekick Colin. Chris invites us to sit on the sofa while he settles back in his chair behind a kidney-shaped desk. He reaches into a small wooden box and takes out a cigar. For some reason, he holds it up to his ear, as though he feels the cigar wants to tell him something. That something turns out to be “please chop my end off.” So Chris sticks the cigar into a miniature guillotine on his desktop, pulls a tiny lever, and down comes the blade—thwock. Chris then picks up a piece of marble the size of a curling stone that turns out to be a lighter. Three minutes of sucking, blowing, coughing, and lighter-clicking follow, until finally the thing is smoldering away nicely.

  Chris coughs, looks at me, and says, “Cohiba.”

  I have no idea what this means so I reply, “Likewise.”

  Chris looks puzzled. “No, Cohiba. This is a Cohiba cigar.”

  “You don’t say,” I say.

  “Yep, Cohiba. They’re made exclusively for Castro. You can’t buy them.”

  “No kidding.” Jeez. Just what I need, a cigar tutorial.

  “Yep. I get them in Geneva, from a diplomat.”

  Too bored to come up with a platitude, I let his sentence hang uncomfortably in the air.

  Chris blows a cloud of smoke at the ceiling and leans forward.

  “The point I’m making is that I recognize quality when I see it, or in this case smoke it. And I pounce. I want it, I get it. See that bin?”

  He indicates a plastic rubbish bin filled to the brim with cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes.

  “We’ve got two more just like it. And Colin here has had the dubious pleasure of listening to every one
of those tapes. Right, Colin?”

  Colin looks up, bleary-eyed, like a basset hound with the flu. “Right.”

  “And what did you think, Colin? What was your professional opinion about all those tapes?”

  “That a rubbish bin is exactly where they belong.”

  Chuckles all around. Chris continues.

  “There was, however, one exception to that verdict, and Colin immediately brought it to my attention. Your tape, lads, it was your tape. It is raw and, if you’ll pardon my candor, terribly recorded, but I don’t mind telling you it’s the best sound we’ve heard in . . . what . . . years, Col?”

  “Yeah, years.”

  “So, what I’d like to do is set up a rehearsal, have a look and a listen, then get you in a studio and lay down some tracks as soon as possible.” He looks at me. “What do you say?”

  I shrug and say, “Cohiba.”

  Within days we rehearse in an actual rehearsal studio on the King’s Road, deep in the heart of Chelsea, courtesy of our new manager, Chris Andrews. This is a long way from a bedroom. We’ve got space, we’ve got volume, we’ve got carpet, and we’ve got a snack bar that sells cans of lager. Chris shows up to listen for a bit, leaning on a wall, hands deep in the pockets of an expensive-looking overcoat, head nodding. Then he hands us £30 and leaves. Coincidentally, seconds later, we wrap it up and take the thirty quid for a walk.

  To the Chelsea Potter.

  Days later, a telegram arrives at our slum with an urgent message: “Please contact Chris Andrews at 01-202-9601 immediately very urgent studio booked today.”

  Chris has us booked into Gooseberry Studios in Chinatown. Somehow, mostly thanks to a dedicated and insistent telegram guy, we make it almost on time. We show up excited, looking sharp and trying to act as though we are to the manner born. This place is so fab it’s hard not to drool: beautiful carpets, huge speakers, boom mics and baffles, fabric on the walls and ceilings, mixing desk all the way from here to there. Shangri-la-la land.