chapter 6

Looking back, it does seem rather cruel to have a crew set up an entire drum kit and a whole backline just for a stupid television mime. Three minutes later and they’re back to grab guitars and dismantle drum kit hardware in seconds. Like the unsung heroes they are.

We are in a rush though.

As the cameras are about to finish rolling, filming promo for our latest single ‘This Is My Time’, Tim Television Somebody comments on my tattoos.

“Yeah...we gotta go!” I tell him, only semi-joking, and we’re off. From the TV studio straight into a people carrier, destination Glasgow Airport.  We arrive somewhere around kicking out time and decide to do as the Scots do.

Whisky galore!

I remember the light bouncing from my airport issue tumbler, and not much else. Goddammit. I use to love nothing more than a neat whiskey on the rocks and a cigarette in a bar. With a clean shiny ashtray.

Especially when I was left alone. 

Four fingers? Four strings.

Two hands? Two vices. 

Gotta keep your hands full, man, we’re not here for that long.

It’s always when you’re reaching the best bit, when you’re just starting to relax... 

“We gotta board”.

Which we do. Planes, like time itself, wait for no man so I drag myself up from my bar stool and reluctantly stagger, drunkenly following the heels of the crew down the tunnel to our potential deaths. It’s no wonder they welcome you aboard so nicely. 

We’re going to Florida. 

This is a long one and I am officially the worst person to be sat beside on any flight path. Tired from the days travel and TV shoot, I’m also suitably dried out from the majesty of the single malts. A little woozy but still, and eternally, I find it impossible to sleep on aeroplanes.

I was once given 30mg of Diazepam on a New York flight to help me sleep. As the plane touched down both my hands were gripping deep stressed imprints into each armrest, dribbling, from the mouth.

Wide awake.

My dentist couldn’t remove my wisdom teeth. I could feel the nerves after three cartridges of anaesthetic. I’m a sensitive little motherfucker.

I’ve no idea what time we reach Florida.

Or what the day is.

You’re seriously tranced at this stage, trust me. Barely. Existing. A soulless ghost of yourself.

Just the small issue of 11 hours of no sleep later, plus added jet lag and then…

…more waiting around at baggage claim. Heel kicking. Dying for that beautiful cigarette you’ve had rolling around your fingers for hours. I always thought smokers should have had a Fast Track. 8 billion to the Treasury? Annually? It’s killer Queen Lizzie-Bets stamp of approval on every death pack of the third most addictive substance (after heroin and profiteering) and you still put us around extremely happy holidaymakers and make us wait?

You sick fucks.

Not that you’ll have time to finish one usually as this is (for the on-the-surface mildly shambolic organisation) a military op, with a non-smoking control freak in self-appointed charge.

Crammed again into yet another people carrier, I am desperate to get to wherever the fuck we’re going so I can finally sleep. We inhale each other’s alcohol, amphetamine, THC and biomes of seething hatred, and are off... to Disney World!

We’re staying at the resort’s hotel. We have a late arrival and a 5am call.

Sweet holy mother of fucking Jesus have mercy. I’m already well fucked.

You’ll spend at least 85% of your time in a signed band barely cognisant.  The other 15% asleep. And though you may receive a little financial reward, at least at the starting gun, you’ll spend most of that keeping yourself awake anyway. 

Like the beautiful game?

It all evens itself out in the end. 

Yeah I know... it looks so glamorous on the cover of that magazine you just bought. But we all buy the same bullshit, one way or another. 

It’s now somewhere around midnight. I’m at my room door and I am faced with a serious dilemma. I have my black bag next to me, dumped on the floor. It’s very dark and I cannot, for the life of me, work out how the fuck this room key card works.

I hit meltdown.

I contemplate sleeping outside the hotel room door.  It won’t be the first time my bag has been my pillow. 

I’m so tired and don’t know where anything is. I don’t know anyone else’s room number, either. Reception is a million miles away. As am I, physically and mentally.

In England I’ve just been on Top Of The Pops, CD-UK, TFI Friday.  Right here and now in Disney World Florida, I’m a lone, petulant, drunk.

I am completely unrecognisable to anyone (including my own band). Just a no-mark angrily slapping a key card against a Disney World reader, like a baby slapping the side of a carry cot after it’s just shat it’s own nappy.

You don’t get written very many cheques as a performing musician.  The reality checks though, are an everyday occurrence. 

I stop, momentarily, to look down and see if I’m missing a trick. Staring at my key card in this balmy heat, amidst the midnight silence broken only by crickets, I notice Mickey Mouse waving a wand of magic stars across a dark blue night and marvel at the majesty of corporate cartoons for a second. Before remembering I’m still locked out.

Like this whole thing of late, though...it’s a bit fucking Mickey Mouse.

Back home we’ve just scored our highest ever chart position and spent 6 weeks in the Top 40 (usually we’d be in and out in a week or so).

We’ve just at least quadrupled our reach with it, but aren’t at all enjoying what will turn out to be about 4 months as an all but mainstream rock band. One that’s not on speaking terms.

I finally get into my room and get my aching head down. Only to come round a couple of hours later and head to the filming.

Given the success we’d just had with the last single, you’d have thought the record company would have gone into overdrive for the promotion of this new one. Maybe a label not going into liquidation within 6 months might have. Seeing the set-up on arrival, I realise that whatever I’d been thinking about the promotion for this single, the record company clearly hadn’t.

It’s a stage, yes, elevated by about a foot and there are film cameras circling into position…but there’s something desperately awry about it. I don’t know, maybe it’s because the whole thing is going to be filmed at a wet and wild holiday resort?

My heart, and ambition sink simultaneously.

A symbiotic giving in. A reluctant but resigned acceptance of this latest, and hardest, reality check, yet.

This, our most potential moment yet? The biggest we’re ever going to be? And I’m waiting for Clark Griswald to walk by and punch a moose. 

I am Lidl Richard 

Jim Morrison’s.

I’m Aldi Pavarotti, booked for a turn at Butlins. Minehead branch. 

Even the ever-up guitar player is, for once, visibly deflated.

Upon his suggestion we tune our guitars down so the strings flap, and plug them in for the TV mime run through. Just to amuse ourselves.

At least the amps get used, for once. 

It’s about the only moment of solidarity we’ve shared in aeons. It’s a release. Our marriage of convenience having recently turned very inconvenient for me. A joint realisation though, of this all-too-real Spinal Tap ‘puppet show’ moment now looming large upon us.

When I wrote this song it was meant as an ethereal and trippy, triumphant and godlike fucking anthem.

Tim Television Somebody liked it, anyway.

Nearing the end of run through I close my eyes. It’s amazing how far you can go in your imagination when reality is just too bright and loud.

In my head, the song is a one man salute to the underclasses, all slow motion, moody, brooding, dark yet uplifting. Yes. The loser wins, for once. The band is battered, long divided and conquered, but we’ve scaled the North face wall, goddammit, we’re reaching the summit, surely?

I open my eyes again after filming ends.

A 22 stone prototype tourist waddles by. He’s wearing a baseball cap, Hawaiian shirt, shorts covering half of his sausage factory legs, finished by knee length socks and Jesus sandals. He’s probably called Bud, and has his own personalised pint glass, hanging by the optics, at his local Irish bar.

Upon hearing our flapping guitar strings and disappointed, discordant noise he stops, before cupping his right hand around his mouth to holler across the plastic miniature ocean, with blue plastic miniature smiling dolphins, between us.

“Heeeeeeey... You guys? ...kinda sound like Frank Zappa.”

This, was ‘Bud’:

Over here, they joke about something we’re not.

Back home until recently (or until Radio 1 A-listed my latest composition 6 weeks ahead of release) they joked about what we were.

Hell, even Noel Gallagher upon hearing it enquired to our label boss “did they really write that?”.

No Noel ‘they’ didn’t.

I did.

Anyway, we’re here and it’s baking hot. There’s a shit ton of rides and enough sugar to wake the half dead.

We make our way up the steps to a massive rubber tyre water ride. Both band and crew now have a rare 2 hour gap in the itinerary, so about four of us place ourselves equidistant around the huge rubber ring at the top.

I feel dozy as all fuck. 

In a second we’re shunted off.

We shout, laugh and spin around fast whilst dropping a few feet every few seconds, upon hitting each edge of the downward shelving. 

The last drop is a few feet lower, about 8ft or so.

When our massive rubber tyre hits the water this time? It lands perfectly horizontal and slaps the final landing with a hard and sudden jolt.

Which cracks one of my ribs immediately.

It leaves a short and painful reminder that I’ve now reached my newly allocated oxygen quota. Every half a breath.

And I’ve got to do a gig tonight...

Or is it tomorrow night? 

Brilliant.

For the remainder of the duration I decide a beer, cigarette and sun lounger is about my best option. I’ve always loved the heat and well fuck it, I’m not good for much else.

Our all too brief time in the sun over, we get in another people carrier to another airport to cross another Atlantic and end up in another fucking baggage claim, all within two days (or was it one?)

I’ve had about 4 hrs sleep in about 3 days now...or, was it 2? 

I’ve also realised that I’m not entirely immune to sunburn. It is the only time to this day that I’ve had an immediate and clinging redness, courtesy of the midday Florida elements, which tighten my already half wrenched chest. I’m in a more than mildly severe fucking agony.

Another 11 hours of no sleep later, and we’re shunted into yet another people carrier, with a two and a hour drive to Cardiff ahead of us.

Back on home turf though, we at least have stimulants which will help me no end.

Our recent success has resulted in us being the headline act on the Radio 1 Evening Session tour.  Tonight’s show is the first where I not only unveil my newest acquisition, a 1967 Ampeg headstock scroll bass (there were only 200 made, and hey, I’m quite the bespoke punk these days) but also, as an ironic statement of sorts...

I decide to give my newest raglan it’s first outing for the show. I had it made especially.

It says, across the chest: A Creation Records Product.

Trust me... even the best job in the world becomes routine and even if you think you don’t have a boss? You do. If you’re really unlucky he’ll be very, very hands on. 

The irony of the message is not lost on me.

It is, however, completely lost on our press guy who upon seeing the baseball tee, asks excitedly if I’d be up for modelling it for the record company website.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

I also, at this most inopportune time, have my parents at the show. Great timing.

Half hour to showtime and I’m a shell of myself. I think my name is Pete. I am, allegedly, the bass player, singer and main songwriter of the headline act on this tour. Front and fucking centre. I run on pure adrenaline, no sleep, a cracked rib and cannot breathe. I am badly sunburnt, with a double-dose, 22 hour jet lag to contend with and the prospect of a full one and a half hour energy-sapping show to do. I still, cannot hear out of my left ear from the last flight.

Cheap cocaine dust crowns both blocked nostrils.

My Eastern European father, sat idle, barks at me from 8 feet away, in front of the whole dressing room, plus crew, members of other bands dropping in and out... 

“EEEEEY, BOOOOOY, WHEN YOU’M GONNA MAKE YOU OLD MAN A SAM-WIDGE THEN?”

Last thing I remember before heading out to the gallows, the boiling hot, retina burning bright spotlights, the baying of the crowd?

I’m focusing hard to make out my right hand, trying to scrape some freezing cold butter onto a dry crumbly wholemeal bap for my expectant and perennially hungry Dad.

Like the over-dutiful prick I am, I push at the knife but the unthawed butter breaks holes into the bread. I cannot explain the feeling.

You just wouldn’t understand.

For some of us? That butter will never soften.

I push harder.

(now becoming angry)

I push even harder.

(and become even more angry).

Until I push a little too hard...

... and the white plastic of the knife, finally...

... snaps.

chapter 5

Outside the Headmistress’s office. 1976.

I’m here because I’m in trouble. The class I’m in have been given an assignment to make handmade ‘Welcome Back’ cards for Miss Roberts, our Headmistress, who has just returned from hospital. 

On my card I draw a brick wall. On the brick wall are spray can slogans, like the one of ‘CRASS’ in my local park. Everybody else’s cards are reverential, warm and welcoming. 

Mine has two messages ‘sprayed’ on the wall. The first says: “WE DON’T WANT YOU BACK MISS ROBERTS”...

...and the clincher:

“FUCK OFF MISS ROBERTS”

5 years old. I know, right?

1984/85

My send off from middle school is a flea bitten old slipper from the headmaster, for drawing a huge phallus on a school desk, which sort of looked a bit like this:

After hearing the command “BEND OVER, BOY!” I’m told, between hard whacks on my 11 year old, bare, fat ass, that I’m a “disgrace” to my family . I sneak a curious - and morbid - peek at the headmaster who is now busy lifting the slipper upwards and, amidst his fevered and frenzied working up of sweat, notice his white Brylcreem’d hair falling out of position and dropping into his eyes. His glasses having now fallen to the middle of his nose, which looked very very much like this:

He seems to be really enjoying it and, as if to confirm his own hyper masculinity, asks “DOES IT HURT?”. People pleaser that I am, I appease with a strained and for effect “yes Sir” although I’m well used to this ‘hands on’ stuff at home. So, no… not really. 

At ‘big’ school, some will impose themselves on you. Some, without even knowing who you are. I’m walking across the assembly hall when I’m stopped in my tracks. She has a right side parting, bottle blonde hair with dark roots coming through. Her 3D ‘flick’ is constructed entirely of hairspray. She is made up to the nines with dense black eyeliner, foundation and lipstick. Her gold chained handbag, an accessory to her 3/4 length black and white chequered Cromby, flashes the familiar and warming gold of a 10 Benson and Hedges cigarette pack. She is a twelve year old Alpha Female, flanked by a girl at either side, and chews gum with a mildly intimidating authority.

“Will you go out with me?” she demands, before the gum chewing resumes, like a pillow case being thrown around a washing machine drum. Her words hang for a brief eternity and as I was brought up to smile sweetly, to be a good boy, I am not entirely sure how to do this without hurting her feelings. I blurt a feeble, dying, reply. More a question.

“Uh... yeah?”

And with that I am a taken boy. I have, a girlfriend. A girlfriend who doesn’t even know my name. Unlike Jimmy Fox, who lives opposite me, and who 24 hours later will come out of double art and inform me - excitedly - that I had better take off my school shirt. 

“Why?” I ask. 

“Neil Ryman is gonna cover it in blood and wants to smash your fuckin’ ‘ead in” followed by “Vuckovic”. Why do kids always address you by your surname when it comes to settling matters?

So, in roughly 5 minutes time I’m going to get the absolute shit kicked out of me.

I feel, justifiably, compelled to ask my mate what I’ve done to deserve this? “It’s cos you stole his girlfriend”, he’ll tell me, matter of factly, no longer behaving as someone I’ve grown up with and now, more neutral. 

I did? 

Right now it’s a pretty solitary ice-cold world for me, but there is only one way out of this school. So I walk. Fast. I walk and walk and walk and walk until, all of a sudden, I’m passing the 100 kid fight ring. A killing field now replacing the usual playing field, like a slow motion cloud drifting across my right side periphery, the very one I’m supposed to be at the centre of, getting covered in my own blood.

‘Has anyone noticed me?’ I think to myself, and ‘how am I getting away with this?’ but incredibly I am and, like the final scene of Alan Parker’s ‘Midnight Express, I leg it at the end of the school path, out onto the pavements.

A free man.

For now.

Just another one to avoid if I didn’t want my “fucking face smashed in”. 

I didn’t fall in with a bad crowd, they fell in with me. At night I’d walk to the top part of town and hang out with my new girlfriend’s friends. Cold nights at the park, smoking cigarettes and getting the piss taken out of me as I hadn’t yet lost my virginity. 

Back at her house I am given explicit permission, a council house rites of passage, to smoke in the sitting room. It’s where I will meet her older brother - officially the ‘Hardest Bloke In Year 5’ - who, after a secret porno viewing in his black painted bedroom, tells me he is the boss of a cleaning team at the town supermarket. He asks if I would like a two week trial at becoming a part of the team.

I say “yeah” and now have another job to go with my other two. Cleaning key locks (for my Mum) and helping (my Mum) clean the local Job Centre after school.

A 12 year old about to enter his own part time occupation, wrestling a buffing machine around the top and bottom floors of the supermarket. A 12 year old learning to clean menstrual blood from a ladies toilet with bleach. A kid who grew up way, way too soon. A 12 year old, fresh from the crash, and now…no longer a virgin. 

A few months in, and having now settled into my new position of mild mannered janitor, it’s 8.47am and the floors are swept, mopped and buffed. My co-worker mate Shaun and I are on our way to school after the morning shift, walking slowly towards the glass exit door. When you’re trying to look innocent you don’t do things like walk fast, or look behind you, that’s too obvious, a dead giveaway. We’re trying to not look like we’re in a rush, trying to not look like the thieves that we are.

So neither of us are ready for the tap on the shoulder and the polite request to follow the store manager back to his office for a “routine check”. 

FUCK.

A few nervous minutes later and Shaun has the zip to his Harrington jacket three quarters undone, revealing the top half of a mega-pack of Duracell double AA’s. There are also 3 or 4 more items poking from the inside, revealing the unmistakable form of plastic packaging. A mini-mountain of stolen items form in a small pile on the managers desk beside him. Black may indeed, be slimming...

... no good for stealing, though. 

Ah, what’s a poor boy to do when he’s spent all his dinner money on cigarettes? 

Batteries were standard. My orange-ear padded Aiwa cassette tape personal stereo never once ran out of power. I was never short of socks, trousers, birthday presents for my Mum, a 30 piece screwdriver set for my brother, endless albums, and bits and pieces I’d pick up for mates. 

I am Robbing Hood.

The trousers, jeans and socks were easiest, you stuck them over your existing school trousers and skipped your way out merrily. This morning though? I have the brand new AC/DC album about my person. My heart beats fast and I adopt the “I’ve done nothing wrong” look from Mother’s bollockings.

I’m looking at Shaun, and his spilled loot, his anxious expression haunting me whilst I’m being frisked by the store manager. Unbelievably though, he does not notice the rectangular plastic protrusion of the cassette tape box wedged between my school trouser button and my chubby waist and says “alright Pete... on your way.”

I’m off to school. Shaun’s off to the police station. 

It was largely the same for my other job, stacking shelves at the same supermarket on evenings and Saturdays.

Peckish?

Simple. Just grab a brand new tray of anything edible and shove it underneath the empties. You had the time it took for the lift to go down 3 levels to wolf your swag.

I grab a 20lb turkey from the freezer section on my way out one Christmas and shove it into my coat for the holidays. 

Ho ho ho!

Back at home and it was time to take my fat bottom end outside. Out of Mother’s earshot, but only as far as the garage.

You could form a band in eight seconds back in the early 80’s. My Older Brother is the guitar player, who knows a great little drummer from just out of town, and we find a guitarist to play rhythm who is the younger brother of the towns hottest rock act. 

We had a band.

Now... every band is going to need a singer.

Here’s how I remember it. We’re stood between songs, guitars on, arms folded. It’s a stand-off. Older Brother swings the boom arm of the microphone stand until it’s in a perfect line with my face, and says:

“You’re singing”

So I swing the microphone back to his face and say “No, I’m not”. 

Older Brother could be quite persuasive. I’d already been clubbed over the head numerous times by two pillows held together, whilst crawling across the landing on all fours with two cassette tapes in my mouth, in a game he had ‘invented’. The rules of the game? You had to deliver the cassette boxes into the slot handle of the linen basket without getting them whacked out of your mouth, no prizes or anything, you just did it.

I had also previously, upon his suggestion, upturned a toy car mat and rode it bare knuckle from the top of the stairs to the bottom.

I’d even been a ‘London bus’ for when he wanted to be Evel Knievel.

But I’m not fucking singing. 

“Well I ain’t doin’ it” he says.

“I’m playing the bass, so I ain’t doin’ it either” I protest.

“If you don’t sing I’m gonna tell Mum” he threatens.

“Go on then” I reply. 

It starts with him going back into the house to ‘tell Mum’ and ends half an hour later with me, returning through the garage door, now apparently a ‘singer’. Yes. It took the threat of getting my mullet chopped short to give you, ‘me’. The all-dancing, all singing bass player.

Phil Lynott, Sting, Jack Bruce, Tom Araya, Lemmy Kilmister… and now, me.

For me though, there is no great dream of becoming a singer, no hairbrush, no mirror, no diva hissy fit or costume change, just a simple case of needs must, or, more to the point: “You’ll do”. 

And at least I kept the mullet. 

Dad's garage was his pride and joy. It was - at least twice at any rate - perfect for rehearsing a band in, although woe betide any kid who'd accidentally touch his garage door with a football:

"OI!! You f**kin' bastards, f**k off, go on... F**K OFF!"

Those experiences were magic. Days of wonder. I remember the sunshine would pierce the dusty interior of our new rehearsal space through it’s one solitary window, highlighting the first live drum kit I'd ever seen.

On our first ever practise break, my brother takes our new drummer out for food and I get the nod to play his drums until they get back. They return to a nice 2 inch crack down one of his brand new Paiste cymbals. Thankfully though he’s a cool kid, a nice guy and a decent time keeper, but with the slightest nervous disposition when it came to song arrangements.

These types, like yours truly, will often have aggressive, underachieving yet over demanding parents. My first drummer’s father was one. Big fish, small pond. All sheepskin coat, cigar and far too much advice. It is amusing to recall the types of people you encounter without award, reverence, fame nor fortune, that are always first in line to dole out all the advice a 12 year old should ever need for a career in a business this guy, clearly, has none of, and it's the old classic:

"Listen boys, you wanna get anywhere in this life, there's only one way... it's called hard work". 

He booked us a gig once, where the only thing I remember seeing was the shape of this portly, gregarious, amplified Del Boy cartoon of a man, ‘puuh puuh puuhing’ on a cheap cigar swirling a brandy and gently tap tap tapping his foot in the way that old people do to let you know they have rhythm. An edge. They've been there and seen it all. They’ll let you know, before your sweat has dried, what you should be doing better. You’ll stand, sweating, knackered, cold with a mild case of hypothermia, having to look interested. Taking it. You’ll never be 'good enough' at this point. 

You know how good your gig went, you were up there doing it. You can see and hear as well as anybody.

I learnt, early on to not ask anyone’s opinion of your gig. It’s just easier. 

We were good enough, however, to procure the opening slot of a bill playing at our local private school, which none of us, obviously, went to. The headline band were the guitar player's brothers band.

My first gig, 12 years old. I drink four small cans of Carlsberg Special Brew before sobering up when I bump into the microphone stand. A girl from my class at school will later ask me how come in school I am so quiet - yet onstage I am really loud?

Our set is largely uneventful, but the whole evening will end in farce when the headline band gets the power pulled on them after the headmaster deems they’re playing past the 11pm curfew. It’s my first recollection of a real life lunatic in the form of the headline band's one man road crew, who swiftly appears at the middle microphone, arms flailing, eye's bulging, with a righteous anger I've not seen since, demanding to know whether the crowd wanted more. He didn't need a microphone.

It was here I learned that you could swing a situation to your own advantage on the spur of the moment. It was here I first saw genuine excitement. The headmaster shuffled off and the band played on. 

Pure theatre. 

By the way.

If you don’t want the police around your house on a Sunday afternoon? Then don’t do this:

It’s an early ad, drawn by me to advertise our first bookings at a local pub which pays £50 plus chips. (£10 each and a tenner for petrol)

It was a kind of residency eventually, the Sunday night slot where we'd jam our borrowed Marshall cabs into the drummer's car, after he's unloaded the kit first, always a two time load-in. You won’t have a band van at this point, so drummers are always handy because they drive (extra bonus) and have cars with space in the back for drums. They are beautifully practical beasts, drummers: I have found mostly that they (as well as drum) - can cook, are great mechanics, have boundless energy, and are great drivers. Drummers, in general, are pretty cool guys. They make Joe Public's foot tap at the bar, are the heart of a 90, 000 strong clap along at any stadium ever, they make Majorettes strut and lead armies of frightened men into battle. They have to be solid or very grounded and strong, they are, but, the very heart and rhythm of your vision. 

Not that I had much of it back then, a chubby teenager shyly fronting a band kicking out 8 AC/DC cover versions, a few blues standards, and a couple we'd made up ourselves and hoped no-one would notice if we stuck them between some famous ones. You're nervous as all fuck, but pub gigs are instant learning schools and I swear you will never know the excruciating feeling of expectant silence after a song ends if you've never had the responsibility of fronting a band in front of 80 odd piss heads in a local. It goes quiet, a pint glass chinks, a bar stool scrapes, then silence.

And you're on.

You. 

All eyes transfixed through the cigarette smoke and house lights.

The drummer, he'll adjust his snare a little. R-r-r-ra rattle...

The Marshall cabinet feeds a second...

You'll say:

"Thank you".

Desperately. Trying not to sound either too local, American, or night club. 

Remember when someone removed your armbands at the swimming pool?

Time you were pushed off on your bike without stabilisers?

First take off in an aeroplane? 

First cigarette?

Tetanus injection? 

Your first fuck?

It's worse than all of that.

You'll say:

"This next song's called... "

Guitar stage left will hiss in your ear "Louder, they can't hear you... "

... and you freeze.

Your drummer, your salvation.

He counts in 4 clicks and you're free. You'll soon come to rely on this guy. Especially if you're not a natural, are painfully shy, or didn't really want to be the singer in the first place. There is nothing and no-one who can quite prepare you for the radio silence that it will become your job to fill a good few thousand times eventually in your life. It is a largely thankless task thinking about it. Like when you become the singer, it says nowhere that you will have to speak to and entertain people over a public address system. But the job, like wiping your ass after shitting comes as part of the territory.

You kinda have to.

I have played thousands of gigs in my life, yet still struggle on a microphone. Even at sound check. I’m still not sure I even want to be a singer.

Those pub gigs were good grounding. End of the night, punters gone home, dim lighting, pre-smoking ban, these are your first lock-ins. These are the moments you know everyone from school is packed up in bed for the night. Meanwhile, your 13 year old ass is supping a refreshing cool pint and sucking back a Marlboro red, the barman is happy because he's sold drinks. The band is happy, excitable, drunk on Bloody Mary's and 1664. 

Our residency was in a pub with a bleak history, talk of the place getting closed down was common. Rough as arseholes. The kind of place where punters would piss in letter boxes on their way home. Passing by, on the other side of the road with a bag of chips one night, I saw a guy get punched in the jaw and knocked cold to the pavement outside. From time to time it could have done with a little chicken wire to protect it’s turns.

One night we finish up with a cover of Chuck Berry's 'Johnny. B. Goode'. Rhythm guitarist takes the lead vocal on this one, but halfway through the song a pissed guy in my Older Brother's year strolls through the crowd, grabs the lead microphone and starts yelling in a drunk slur 'Bye bye Johnny... Johnny B. Goode" until our rhythm guitarist has an angry word in his ear. Next thing I see is the guitarist’s head snapping back quickly. He's been punched square in the cheekbone a couple of times, but in the spirit of things carries on, like a trooper. A fight was never far away in those days, I once saw a guitarist who upon spotting his girlfriend being chatted up mid song, threw down his guitar, scrambled his way through a packed crowd, laid the guy out, then turned up, back onstage casually putting his guitar back on. 

Meanwhile, back in school, we were getting a name for ourselves and were put forward for a nationwide competition to get a slot on a bill playing at the Albany theatre in London as part of the Live Aid charity. We win the preliminary contest and get the coveted prize of the gig. Initially we are told we'll be playing alongside a couple of guys from Status Quo, but are later told by a 6th form teacher that it’s changed. 

It’s about 7.45p.m with my now growing hair dragged into a wet pony tail and I’m stacking shelves at the supermarket. He happens to pass by and stops, there’s something he's just that second remembered:

Teacher: "Yes... it's changed... Yes, it's um... something 'head'... I forget the name... Um."

Me: "Uh... Would that be Motörhead, sir?"

Teacher: "Yes, yes... That's it! Motörhead! Yes, well done."

Me: "Thanks sir!"

We were going to do 'Rockin' All Over The World', which changes rapidly, and gleefully, to 'The Ace Of Spades'.

On the day of the gig I remember turning up to the venue, taking pictures outside, we were excited, young and wide eyed.

In all seriousness? You heard Lemmy Kilmister before you saw him. I’m standing with rhythm guitar in the dark stalls of the theatre gazing up at the stage, when we suddenly hear a chink... a clunk...  then a chink... another clunk, and then:

"Alright?"

It’s the great man. Bullet belt. Black jeans, boots, t-shirt and a black leather motorcycle jacket emblazoned on the back in silver with the Ace of Spades insignia. He wants to go to the pub over the road so after unloading we’ll meet him there. Sure enough, when we arrive he is hogging the one armed bandit, cigarette clenched between snaggleteeth, full pint in hand. We also meet Motörhead's most recent acquisition, Würzel.

We stand around, drinking and smoking, having a proper fucking laugh with him. He too, will speak with a Silk Cut clenched tightly between teeth. It’ll be at least 2 years before I learn about amphetamines, and so think it’s just normal. 

Later, at the venue, it’s time for sound check. Lemmy is ambling about the stage whilst I locate the stagehand, who’s a proper theatre dah-ling, round eyeglasses, tight wrapped scarf, blazer jacket and lots of thick curly student hair.

I ask: "Um... excuse me, but do you have a longer lead for my bass please? This one’s only about 4 ft long... " I’m helpless, intimidated and not very important.

After my 10th minute of being made to wait, the guy passes again, I try to ask again but am appeased by a bothered "Yes, yes... I know" and an extravagant wave of his hand. We had to soundcheck in minutes.

I go into panic mode...

... along comes Lemmy.

"Lemmy... I asked that bloke there for a longer lead and... "

He was off... I was becoming increasingly tired of being ignored until I hear him roaring:

"Get ‘im a fuckin' lead... NOW!" 

I get my longer lead in less than 10 seconds.  

We soundcheck, then go up to their dressing room for some quality Motörhead time. Walking through the white painted brick walled corridors, I remember June Brown (Dot Cotton from BBC’s Eastenders) passing and saying hello to Lemmy, “Oh, hello Darling!” came his reply. Jesus. This guy knows everyone! When we reach the safe confines of the dressing room I ask him how he gets that distinctive bass sound, he says something about “ramming the fucking thing through the fuckin' cupboard door”.  

So I leave it at that. 

We’re then treated to some of his Jim Beam bottle, poured from a brown paper bag, and shown some photographs of some on tour ‘antics’, Kilmister style. I remember seeing some shots of girls in various poses, but the overriding memory is a shot of someone's cock, cigar and glasses, placed, just so:

Lemmy: "Look! Groucho Marx!"

As first dressing room experiences go, this should be up there as the best ever. I don't remember much about the gig, other than watching as they strutted out from the wings, bass and guitar strapped on and ready, dream-state like, and did the song with us four.

Does life get better than this?

Well... maybe, but not much. I would have another Lemmy experience a few years down the line which I’ll tell you about later. I love Motörhead. If you don't like Motörhead, you cannot be my friend.

After the event, the local newspaper will do a write up all about our latest adventure, giving full details, names and ages, and on a quiet Sunday night shortly after, the barman will walk over to the table we are drinking at, lay the paper open on the table, by the half drunk pints and over flowing ashtray, and enquire: 

“Now… which one of you is 13?”. 

chapter 4

Caesars Palace, March 31st 1999

Nevada 1999

It’s the fuckin’ desert out here. It’s hot. We’re sucking up serious highway, ghost towns, the odd passing truck, tumbleweeds, boarded up long out of business gas stops and countless, unmarked graves. 

Gram Parsons ashes and U2’s Joshua Tree are a couple of hours drive from here…somewhere…but are still probably easier to find than a mobile phone signal. 

We crawl a steady 50mph on a weather worn, rusty, fading light blue bus which couldn’t have seen an M.O.T certificate in 19 years. 

The thing is rickety, teeming with spores of mould. Patchwork woven cushions strewn across patchwork throws, held in place by their own dampness. It’s musty smelling, agonisingly slow, plus we have the added bonus of having a fuckin’ idiot at the wheel. 

Later, realising we’re perilously close to missing our gig in Vegas, there forms a gaggle at the front near the driver.

West Brom asks the question…

“Ow muuuch lon-gaaa to Vaaaay-goos, maaaate?”

Our hillbilly GPS is momentarily at a loss.

He lets out a “hhhhhhhuuuuuuunnnggggk???”

Which was...well…exactly like this: 

“hhhhhhhuuuuuuunnnggggk???”

Before adding “aaaaaah thought we were goin a-Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeno....”

“GIGS OFF LADS!” hollers West Brom. Stating the obvious with his dry and understated humour. 

If you’re looking for a good Tour Manager? Look no further. 

A parka wearing football fan who’s colour never ran... who held a sweet rarely used authority. A gentleman, who never raised his voice.

Some? Don’t need to. 

We were due to do a Melody Maker interview in Vegas later anyway so head, with a certain resignation, toward Caesar’s Palace.  Honestly? I didn’t really mind. It’s usually the singer that always has to dig deepest in a live setting unless you’ve got, say, Angus Young in your band.

We might have missed our support slot with Silverchair…every dark cloud though.

Twenty years on, as I write, I ask myself…

Would I rather have played a tired show to 97 mildly uninterested Americans?

Or...

Would I have rather met a genuine Stars and Stripes All American hero?

(No brainer, right?)

After doing photos on the strip, we are now sat doing the Melody Maker interview around a lounge table in Caeser’s, when Front Of House casually says to me: 

“Evel’s at the bar”

“Uh?” I reply.

“Evel Knievel... is at the bar” he repeats.

I look up from my Long Island Iced Tea and - fuck my eyes - there he is with his back to us, sitting alone, the coolest motherfucker in the world. Elvis on a motorcycle, replete with black and white chequered leather jacket.

Without a word I get up, leave the interview, and make a beeline for Evel fucking Knievel. It’s much preferable, and way more exciting, than trying to compete with the exaggerated sound bites and tacky, bike shed braggadocio.

I approach Evel, who has the slumped frame of a man who has broken every bone (and the odd journalist’s) in his tired, aching skeleton.

His head is heavy and gaunt at the same time. It hangs downward, staring with the slightest hint of regret through the rocks that keep his bourbon cold, gripped by a bony right hand. 

“It’s an honour to meet you” I say, sitting myself down next to him. 

He waves his hand with a sweeping grandiosity and doesn’t even look up. It’s either a touch arrogant, or he’s broken his neck a few too many times.

When I was about 6 I got the best Christmas present.  My favourite childhood memory.

The Evel Knievel wind up toy. 

In the 90’s I got the reissue, it’s not as good but I still have it on display on a shelf over the stairs in my flat, backed by an enormous poster of Evel, beer gut and receding hair blowing in the wind, in a standing position on his XR-750 Harley Davidson. Sat next to it an original 1973 Scramble Van.

Some plastic, doesn’t end up in oceans. 

I’m so excited and I ask him “can I get you a drink, sir?”

He says, whilst still avoiding eye contact, through a hard-assed downturned mealy mouth, supported by a clenched jaw “thaaaas aaaalriiiiight son... I got ‘em on the house.”

Free drinks at Caeser’s?  Quite impressive.  All you have to do then, is risk your own life quite a lot, take out a photographers eyesight and get your broken-boned coma-induced rag doll of a body hoisted into an ambulance for a thirty day stretch in the nearest I.C.U.

I tell him about my toy. I tell him I used to bloody my knuckles trying to wind it...

He snaps, abruptly...

“YOU WEREN’T CRAAAAAANKIN’ IT HAAAAARD ENOUUUGH...”

Sensing he’s a little aggravated at having to talk to a mere mega-fan, I try to explain my bloody knuckles again.  He takes another route, an unexpected twist, which completely floors me..

“I SAW YOOOOOUUUUU”

He says this accusatively. And this time I get the full, side-on Evel glare.

“Uh?” I reply... now, a teensy bit afraid.

“I SAW YOOOUUUU.... “

“You did?” I ask. 

“YEAH.... I SAW YOOOUUU...”

There’s a pause, before he delivers the oddest line I’ve ever heard. From anyone. On this planet. Ever.

“YEAH” he says “I SAW YOU IN THAT SHOP. YOU STOLE THAT TOY, DINT’CHA?”

Okaaaaaay….time for a sharp exit, before he breaks both my arms with a baseball bat. 

They say to never meet your heroes. I disagree completely. The man was mad as a box of frogs. Mentally herding kittens through his own vast desert. 

As fucking brilliant as I could have ever wanted him to be.

So happy landings Robert Craig Knievel, and may those bones finally knit. 

Your type just isn’t allowed anymore. And I miss it sorely. The fucking devil may care spirit of it all. It’s disappeared from music as well. It’s not de rigeur to be unhinged, or mildly uncontrollable these days...

It’s just not, cost effective, I suppose. 

6am the following morning, still up from the previous night, West Brom and I, unsteady on our feet, stumble and sway through Caeser’s parking lot on our way back to the bus. Blinded by a panoramic and beautiful Nevada sunrise, he’s thinking aloud as to how best describe Evel Knievel to his 6 year old boy.

He laughs drily before settling on:

“Ee’s a daaaaaredevil, son”.

We board the steps of the bus, ticking, fizzing and buzzing, excited as we were as children.

Still drunk.

Still chuckling. 

chapter 3

Back in the bedroom I share with my younger brother, the posters are wall-to-wall. They are all precisely cut out pictures from rock magazines. I take scissors and cellotape to the first ever edition of Kerrang! magazine, and hide my beige painted wood chip wallpaper. Completely.

I cut a hole in one, so it would fit around the tape recorder plug socket. The pride of joy though, that you could see from the street if my curtain was drawn just right, was a near life size live shot of Rob Halford and Glen Tipton from the heavy metal band Judas Priest.  

When I was really young, I'd pick my nose and smear the prized bogies on the wall by my top bunk, then flick them from the wallpaper once they'd hardened. It's primitive stuff, the modern day cave painting by way of stiffened mucus, followed, in time, by rock posters.

Eventually it'll be Ikea.

We are, all of us, territory marking. Birth to death.

My first bass guitar was a mahogany finished Fender Precision copy from Kay's catalogue for £139.99. 

I got home from school, as usual, otherwise occupied.  Mum tells me there is an ‘ironing board’ in the sitting room that needs ‘taking upstairs' but I don't catch on. I’m legging it up the stairs, about halfway up she yells, in pure exasperation:

"Your bloody bass guitar, it's here! In the sitting room." 

I three-step back down the stairs, before excitedly ripping the packaging tape from the box, prizing the cardboard apart in seconds. This thing should have come with its own light show, a chorus of "Hallelujahs", carried aloft by an elephant, whilst having its path swept clear by servants.

It’s all mine. A brand new, fully owned bass guitar.

At first, I’d press my left ear into the upper horn of the body to make out the notes. It created a sort of amplifier in your inner ear, 20HZ of pure bass reverberating and awakening possibilities around my young dormant head.

I couldn't get the amp yet, though.  Mine was a straight up, valuable lesson in life: If I wanted something? I worked for it.   

I'd be paying off my new bass, once a month, for a whole year.  

I got a paper round, £4 a week. I had to get up every morning before 6am to go get my greasy paper bag weighed down at the newsagent, sling it around my back, cutting into my young right shoulder blade before I went out there, 5 or 6 miles a morning on my home made bicycle - wind, rain or shine. I’d almost freeze to death some mornings, weaving through the fog and traffic lights, sucking up thick plumes of monoxide from the exhausts of the bored and frustrated at junctions.  

I got bollocked a few times for leaving newspaper print around the door frame whilst dumping the paper bag back in the kitchen cupboard. 

Factotum.  10 years of age.

One morning returning from my paper round, I’m accosted by a massive unit hurtling towards me. He’s shouting through thick lips, staring angrily with conjunctivitis ridden eyes and there’s a sudden, awkward realisation that it's me he's actually addressing. He is the town's milkman who is now accusing me of stealing milk from his customers doorsteps (I hadn’t).  He is as angry as the shocking red of his hair, and it’s a hard shunt in my chest every time he uses the word 'You'. 

“I know it's you”

“People have seen you”

“Don't you dare deny it”

.. and so on.  

Which was kinda like this:

Milk Cunt

I got bullied a lot as a kid.  They were generally a bit overweight, bit ear waxy, bad teeth, not that pleasing to the eye. The very, very last privilege of the fuck all...

Bullying.  

(cowards)    

I have found that people usually are, in this life, almost exactly as they look.  If you look shifty? You generally are shifty. If you look shy? You’re probably shy.

If you look like a cunt?

Odds on you are one.

Council estates are a tough place to grow up on. I saw a lot of violence as a kid. Brutal, without end fights. I saw one, near teatime on our road, that went on for at least 10 minutes. This kid, sat, pinning the other down at the shoulders by his knees, the kid on the floor trying to kick back whilst being punched full in the face. Through protective flailing hands you hear the sickening sound of bone clacking bone, blood stains the road and trails tiny dark red spots back onto the path. The back of the kid’s fragile skull continually bouncing from the asphalt. 

Cars do not matter here. Not, in this fucking jungle. 

The kid, now a Type-O smattered Jesus nailed to his own gravel laden crucifix by trip hammer left-rights in the middle of the road. He's all guts and not much glory. It takes his Dad to come running out from his house to peel them apart, shouting furiously at his own split flesh and pissing blood. His son was underdog, but he kept fighting, kept taking it. 

His face turns back in slow motion from the front door surveying his own mad scene, a display of skinny red lines like b-roads on a map of pure fucking defiance. 

He would have died before being beaten.  Inspirational. 

To me? he won that fight, by not giving in. 

Anyway…I digress.

My first bass amp? It’s a different proposition. 

Even a kid just into double figures has to learn bullshit - which is a great lesson for a short lived career in music.

If there had existed a more dodgy music shop owner in any hemisphere, he’d have never out-shat this bullshitter. Still, when you've got the bug and it’s the only music shop opening in your small town, you'll gravitate towards it, on your way home from school, like a moth who’s just noticed a light bulb. 

In you’ll go, wide eyed, scanning everything with a neck and strings, gazing longingly at your first amps. You're getting your first feel of musicians too. It's here you encounter the more carefree, extravagant and eccentric. Some have strange, half-closed, bloodshot eyes and smell a little ‘musty’, some have trilby hats hiding their long, thinning, hair. They speak slower, a different tempo to the merry dance you've been led. You'll learn new words like 'gig', 'chick' and 'jam'.

You'll kind of like it if you're me. Seeking alternative steps.

I have my limited budget and let Trev, the bullshitting shop owner, talk me into buying a Kay 50 watt Solid State Bass Amplifier. 

“Take abaaaaat 4 weeks, mate”

“Really? 4 weeks and it’ll be here?”

“Yeah mate, it’s comin' from Wales by cargo line, it might be 'ere next Friday, somewhere from 6-8pm they usually deliver.”

“Right, see you Friday!”

I’m Charlie Bucket, without the ticket.  Far too fucking trusting for my own good.  Gullible’s travels.

Meanwhile, the weeks roll on, and on, and on.

Eternally hopeful, I’ve been in to the shop, every Friday without fail. Sometimes Thursdays. 

Week 7?  I've taken to sitting on the 3rd step of our stairs as another excruciating Friday evening passes slowly on. It’s still light, about 7pm, when suddenly a shady figure approaches the glass in the centre of our front door. I am so fucking excited.  I’m on my feet exactly the same time as the mystery finger reaches for the doorbell:

Dingdooooooooooooooooong.

I open the door, fast as a gunshot.

"The amp will be 'ere in abaaaaat 2 weeks, mate..."

It's my older brother. He’s teaching his soft young brother a lesson, like big cats do.  

After 9 weeks of waiting, I'm starting to sense the runaround, so agree to take another bass amp home until mine arrives. It takes two of us to get it upstairs, a hulking great fucking billion watt thing made by Carlsbro, that made a fart noise when you pressed the 'on' switch at the back. With far too much speaker cabinet for a bedroom of my size, it's the beginning of numerous Mother/Son run-ins, a perennial battle of volume versus will. 

Of her... versus me.   

Day after day I'm in my room learning to play the bass.  I stop going out.  I become more withdrawn.  I start by playing Shadows songs with my older brother on lead, a few rock standards, eventually entire albums, emanating my favourites.  First up? A plectrum with AC/DC's Cliff Williams, then my fingers for Iron Maiden's Steve Harris. I'm getting serious. I go to Rush and Geddy Lee, but stop, sensibly, at the gusset typing of Jaco Pastorius, even though the poor bugger died from a beating outside a New York nightclub in his 30's.  Monies owed for drugs, allegedly.  It just doesn’t happen on the X-Factor.

Sacrilegious to some, probably... all that jazz.  

Not for me, though.  My given Christian name is Peter.  It means, at least in Greek biblical terms, ‘rock’. 

I used to pick out notes on the tape recorder and copy them. You don't need to read music in order to play it. With a hard headed youthful determination comes swift progress. There weren't a lot of albums I hadn't listened to, all the 70's players:

Lynott, McCartney, Bruce, Entwistle, Hook, Burnel, Jones, Waters, Matlock, Sumner, Butler, Kilmister, Fraser, the lot.

Chewed up, studied, spat out in months.  Lock, stock, and four smoking strings.

My Dad's mate tells him, in Serbo-Croat, that I won't be "emptying bins for a living." 

(Do all parents stand in bedroom doorways with their friends watching you?)

I have two bass lessons with an older guy in the school orchestra.  I must have been doing alright when he cuts my second lesson to 20 minutes and says with a shrug of the shoulders “I can't actually teach you any more." 

I was getting the buzz. Proper.   

My bass amp must have turned up at some point, as I remember it in my room during another showdown with my mum.

"I've told you to turn it down 3 times already... How many bloody times do I have to repeat myself?"

"I have turned it down" 

"Well you haven't bloody well turned it down enough, I can't hear myself think downstairs"

"Tell you what Mum…why don't you turn it down to where you want it?"

She brings her big hand to the volume button and finds somewhere between inaudible and 0.1. You can hear the plectrum hit the strings over the bass speaker. It’s fucking pointless. 

She once referred to her own Mother, simply as “cunt”.

It’s the fatty plaque choking the artery of ambition, root to branch, lovingly passed down through generations, without even so much as a thought. 

The baton of fuck you.

She could have gone to France and lived a simple life crushing grapes with her feet, she’ll later tell me. Providing, of course, that she hadn’t had me. 

Crushing her son’s dreams will suffice for now.

I get up and lean my new bass carefully against the wall. I click off the amp at the back and walk out slowly. Defiantly. 

"No point in even playing" I mumble under my breath. 

"What did you just say?" comes my reply... 

"Nothing"...

I say.

chapter 2

Summer 1997.

2 a.m

The black cab makes it way up the Edgware Rd towards Maida Vale. I’m accompanied in the back by my girlfriend and The Agent. We’re on our way home from a self congratulatory magazine award show. It was the usual roll call of journalists, photographers, music execs, ‘celebrity’ guests, yes men, hangers on and last, but very definitely least, musicians. All back slapping each other for dear fucking life, whilst simultaneously looking over the shoulder for someone more important to talk to. It’s all largely cocaine drivel, which won’t matter after tonight…tomorrow…or indeed, ever.

Back in our cab, we laugh about the embarrassment and blatant desperation of it all. We are young, in our primes and at this point in our lives, still newly acquainted. We did not know each other a year ago. 

Suddenly, The Agent freezes.

His face turns ashen as the blood drains from his head to his stomach, revealing the white of his one remaining open eye, now fixed, with a foreboding dread. There’s a pregnant pause before he hoists his index finger up, like a Northern Krishnamurti minus the wisdom, and quietly states:

“hold on a minute, Pete... “

There follows a short gurgle.

A burp.

And then...

...a perfect arc of dark red wine which slaps the screen that divides us from the driver with so much velocity it all but cracks the Perspex.

Which looked not unlike this:

We are now adults on the naughty step of licensed Hackney carriage life.

The otherwise pristine taxi now drips with the contents of The Agent’s stomach. It is an aromatic mix of forest pine air freshener, with hints of bile infused Shiraz, topped off with a note of completely fucked off driver.

5 minutes later we’re outside my flat where the cab owner continues with his angry diatribe, although somewhat pacified by the promise of a £50 cleaning surcharge and a hefty tip as my girlfriend rushes inside to grab some cleaning products. 

Me?

I’ve got to be at an airport in 3 hours.

I say goodbye to The Agent, leaving him in a crumpled heap. Though mildly traumatised, he’s cognisant enough to haul his inebriated carcass forward and pull me in by the arm to address me.

Through his half-closed bloodshot eye he slurs...

... pleading…

“don’t tell anyone about this, Pete, okay?”

Ok, ‘The Agent’...

I won’t.

A little later… I’m unsteady, but on my feet. It’s 4.45am. It’s still dark outside and I’m still drunk. A car is coming to pick me up in a few minutes to take me to the airport. Destination? Somewhere in Belgium. 

I’m gonna need a special kind of ‘wake up call’. A little toot, if you will.

I put an empty blue plate into our cheap microwave and, after the 1 minute ping, I mindlessly throw my right hand inside to lift the now nuclear hot chinaware. I get it about 5 inches from its heating glass before my pre-numbed nervous system kicks in and punch fucks my pain receptors.

Brilliant.

I am already deadly tired, and now my right hand’s proper fucked.

Later that same day…

From centre stage, I’m looking out at the overcast sky. It’s a so so gig at best, but fuck it, I’m not at all sentient. I have a creeping paranoia and have already dropped 5 plectrums due to my ‘third finger and half a thumb grip’ that I’ve had to adopt due to my early morning ‘heroics’. I’m a mess, and more than a little intimidated by the sea of barely interested festival goers, who are waiting for Metallica (probably).

I decide now is the appropriate time to shake things up a little.

I stride purposely towards the centre stage microphone, taking the deepest breath possible for a chain smoker on one hour of sleep, and roar - from the bottom of my burning, acidic, appendix scarred stomach - with the little reserves I have left:

“COME ON BRUSSELS...SHOW US YER’ FUCKIN’ MUSCLES!!!”

Therein follows a little movement in the crowd. A few heads are now animated. People are reacting a bit.

Job done. 

10 minutes later, post gig, and I’m in our dressing room slumped in a chair. A white towel draped over my tired and aching head. There is a cold beer in my left hand and a Marlboro Red burns a long ash between the third and little finger of my badly singed right hand.

My trusty, and kind spirited, bass tech wanders by. A knowing smile has replaced the usual glint in his eye.

“Alright?” I ask him, curiously. 

“Aaaaaaaye, Pee-tah” he replies, in his lilting Middlesbrough accent “or at least I know what f’kin’ town I’m in!”

“Eh?” I blurt.

He smiles sympathetically, before letting me know, North East style.

“We’re in Liege... ya daft cunt!”

chapter 1

Listening back to the recording now and it comes to mind just how noisy, annoying and screechy you are as a kid.

I found a cassette tape, pressed play...

... and magic:

Using his own, unfathomable inner metronome, my young Brother palms a stuttering rhythm on an old brown and white fur covered native American drum, I’m playing a bass guitar that's a little bit big for me, whilst my older Brother delivers the riff to Deep Purple’s 'Smoke on the Water' in barre chords. It’s a cacophony of noise, each trying to outdo the other with volume, intercepted by stabbing arguments. We smash the tape recorders input levels to full distortion, with our high pitched emotional jostling, though my older Brother’s voice is breaking with a refreshing, soothing tone in contrast to the hot heads in his rhythm section. This is my first memory of interacting musically in his room.

You make out in one part an angry, distant shouting from the stairs, to 'keep that bloody noise down, will you', it goes unnervingly, deathly silent for a moment and the screeching instead quietens to frightened, contemplative whisper.

I actually wanted to be a drummer.

My first drum kit was home made. Washed up ice cream tubs flipped upside-down for toms, thick cardboard box for a snare drum, cooking pan lid for a cymbal precariously balanced on a bed post, with a gold plated vinyl rack for hi hats, all along the bedroom floor. I didn't need a drum stool. You use your knees for everything when you're a kid, and even though you stand in later life, you're always, technically, on your knees, so It's good grounding.

“If I ever win the pools I’m going to buy him a drum kit” promised one of my Mum's friends, pulling on a Rothmans kingsize one afternoon, watching me from the doorway of our shared bedroom, through sun lit plumes of cigarette smoke I am happily pummelling ice cream tubs and smashing the cooking pan lid from the bedpost. From that day on, every time I see her, I ask her... Well? It could perceivably happen, I think, and why couldn't it happen?

"Barbara?"

"Yes, my love?"

"Have you won the pools this week?".

“Not this week my love”.

The same rueful answer. Every time.

My Aunty was an influence with the drums, she used to play a snare drum in a marching band, when she wasn't whooping my sorry balls at table tennis, Tuesday nights after school.

Me? I just wanted to hit things.

I got my first drum sticks by pestering my Dad after seeing The Police drummer Stewart Copeland hitting the rockets at Kennedy space centre on Top Of the Pops. I used to walk to the cycle path at the top of my road, pretending the brick and mortar was Cape Canaveral spacecraft, my new drum sticks and me. The medium of early pop video had captured my young imagination. He told me I couldn't have the drum kit, but I got the sticks. I must have been adamant, determined.

Annoying.

He never parted easily with his cash.

Truth is you don't really need a drum kit if you have the fire. I'm in my Sister's room on my knees again, by her record player, air drumming to Black Sabbath’s 'Paranoid', teeth clenched, eyes closed, I am a young plump prepubescent king of my own techni-coloured glorious stereo surround sound imagination, onstage at some Odeon, some tour, somewhere far away from here, full capacity crowd, and had been playing my vinyl so loud that I hadn't noticed my Dad at the bottom of the stairs calling my name and catching me in the act, laughing, I was mortally embarrassed. it's like someone bursting open a toilet door whilst you're crapping one out.

My first unofficial performance, swirly black and white Vertigo label, with a forty five r.p.m plastic spindle snapped to the centre of my newest and most precious love. The centre of my everything. I must have been a 6 or 7 year old.

Music was everything to us in that house, our escape, sanctuary, catharsis, fucking... religion.

Our first loves. We weren't very good at showing it to each other.

Moving from door to door in our Thatcher era 'buy your own' house on our council estate was a musical journey in itself, Mum in the kitchen with Phil and Don Everly, Sister in her room blasting The Who's 'I'm a boy', Dad bellows, lustily, along to Pink Floyd's 'Comfortably Numb' and my Brother shoots to thrill with 1980 AC/DC. It alleviated us and helped drag us a little, from one more of those dreary, oppressive, argumentative and claustrophobic households. A little melody goes a long way when you're stuck on the frozen bread line.

Us Panzer divisions of poverty.

Our mornings, sound tracked by the sound of smug, self satisfied radio 1 disc jockeys droning out the unspoken suffering of suburban working class English familial dysfunction. The margarine tub studs with burnt toast crumbs and is already down to the clean plastic, time it gets to you, so you learnt to scrape the lid with the straight back edge of your knife.

The Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter of our discontents. These future knights of the realm, subjects of empire, sex tourists, oh... these superstars.

Kevin Keegan falls from his bike.

'Our tune'.
Simon Bates.

Stolen money.
Stolen cigarettes.

Us colour television children.
Us coal bunker cunts.
Us replacement smokers.
Us dropped cabbages.
Rod Hull.
Jimmy Saville.

Jack a fucking nory.

One day a family friend comes by and presents me AC/DC's 'Rock 'n' Roll Ain't Noise Pollution' 45 on vinyl, the hook slashes my cheek deep and beds the fuck in. I wilfully leave the water that day. Music was everywhere. He also gives me a Police poster on my birthday, so I go 8 miles out of town to his house to watch a live German broadcast of a gig, late night BBC2, rare, scarce, precious and wonderful, until the 2.45a.m signal starts intermittently cutting out. I remember another time being laid down on the floor with my index and middle finger stuck to the play and record buttons of my tape recorder, in anticipation of a live radio broadcast of The Police at Newcastle city hall, the year is 1980.

You had to be there, with hindsight, to know and fully understand the excitement, pre-VHS, pre-Betamax, pre-compact disc, pre-mini-disc, pre-mp3, pre-internet. You had to actually press big clunky buttons to make music actually work. I bought a brand new cassette tape as well, a blue TDK AD-90, which looked a bit, like this:

My cousin was a punk, stripy red and black mohair, zips in his trousers, the town hairdresser's version of punky hair. I remember looking at his record sleeves, The Sex Pistols’ 'Never Mind The Bollocks', 'Into The Valley' by The Skids, 'Babylon's Burning' by The Ruts, Ian Dury and the Blockheads 'New Boots and Panties'. 

'Arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks'.

All the vinyls in his collection had his name handwritten neatly at the top right corner of the back sleeves in biro. That's how much they meant to him. Gold dust, man.

I just missed real punk so the plastic ones would have to do for now.

On my 9th birthday I get the first 2 Police albums, 'Outlandos D’Amour' and 'Reggatta de Blanc' on vinyl and put on my first gig, 'live' from my bedroom, I get my mate from down the road on my ice cream tubs and brick splintered drum sticks, my older brother  is  'Andy Summers' and I am fat ‘Sting’ doing vocals down a used bog roll tube sello-taped to the head board for a microphone whilst playing the bass, we mime with plastic red Bontempti guitars we get for Christmas and our Police cover band's rider that day consists of orange coloured cheese crisps and lemonade, we stop the gig only to turn over the brand new static vinyl as the stylus catches the end grooves:

Shhhhhhshhh.. b’ka shhhhhhshhh b’ka 

(“Don't touch the vinyl, kid... ALWAYS, hold it by the edge, son”)

No-one is allowed in to the gig.

When my older Sister gets an acoustic guitar, black coloured with a nice red rose design, it sets a passion on fire within the household. I guess it all really starts when one morning and without her consent I go into her room, pick it up and begin picking out the notes to AC/DC’s ‘Riff Raff' before school. 29 temper tantrums and 62 angry plectrum indents into the scratch plate later, and I’ve loosely mastered it. 

 Life...

...coughs, splutters and chokes out another odd beginning. No, Mr. Lennon, you're not the only one, make way for my degeneration, here I am, a young fur ball spewed onto the great, joyous, hope filled, promising and alluring piss stained carpet of life.

My older Brother is a fine, fine guitar player. 
I mess on with a thing called the bass.
Our kid brother even comes home with a second hand violin, one day...

But we don't much talk about that.

'this wouldn't make a very good film' journals of my life in and (mostly) out of the music industry

prologue

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." Hunter. S. Thompson.

Ring ring... ring ring... ring ri...

Click...

"Heh............ lo-oh?"

I'm in a public call box, excited. It's taken me longer than I had thought, but I finally get to say those usually unspoken words...

"Mum... I got a record deal."

It is Primrose Hill.

Camden town.

North West London.

Summer '96.

Post grunge, height of Brit Pop.

The red yellow hazy sun sets on this beautiful, balmy late summer evening. From behind cheap wraparound sunglasses, I am armed with two brand new £50 notes, a pint of whisky and coke, pack of Marlboro cigarettes and a wrap of cocaine. I've just turned 25. I have everything I have ever wanted.

What could possibly go wrong?