Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography Read online

  Gillingham, Oxford, Southend, on at least two separate occasions at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park, and most vividly to me, during at 6–1 defeat at Loftus Road – these were but a few of the grounds where Spud was assisted to exit early amidst a flurry of flailing arms and bad language. I soon got used to it and would just sigh inwardly as I was denied the denouement at yet another match.

  I would also, during school holidays, wander around to the notoriously intimidating ground – once superbly described as ‘an enormous trap’ – to watch the players training. You could do that then, simply amble unchallenged through the club gates and sit on the echoing terraces while your heroes larked about in front of you. I would then stand in the tiny car park, wait for them to get changed and ask them all for the latest in a series of repeated autographs.

  ‘What do you do with them all – sell ’em?’ they would chuckle as they obliged me with a signature for the fourth time that week. Of course the market for football trivia then was practically nonexistent – particularly for a modestly placed team like Millwall. What I would do was cut them out and stick them in scrapbooks next to match reports from the South London Press (we rarely made the nationals) or spend hours attempting to replicate their writing styles myself, be it the angular scribble of Tommy Wilson or the succession of loops by which Eamon Dunphy left his mark. In all I was as besotted with my football club as any fan of the Beatles then or Justin Beiber today.

  I could play a bit too. I played for school and borough – Bermondsey – and rose early every Sunday morning to take part in the far-off Norwood Sunday league for a team inexplicably called Loughborough. The one thing I didn’t have was aggression. I could be intimidated by an opposing team member at the drop of an eyebrow. I had seen many post-match scores being settled in the changing rooms and, like Geoffrey Kelly’s series of broken arms, it didn’t appeal to me. Therefore on the pitch I was fly, a good goal scorer, and blessed with what they call a good footballing brain – but absolutely no bottle at all. As my dad correctly put it after one lacklustre match: ‘Don’t get stuck in much, do ya, boy?’

  And here would be a perfect point to once and for all let everybody know that I did not kill Bob Marley. Let me say it again: Bob Marley’s death had nothing to do with me. Now, if you are unaware of the Internet legend that claims I did indeed kill Bob Marley, you are probably wondering quite why an individual should wish to go round noisily ruling themselves out of murder inquiries. Particularly celebrity ones. Particularly if the celebrity concerned was not actually murdered.

  Well, I know exactly who to blame for this outrageous and criminal slur. Me. Oh, and I had an accomplice. My big mouth. Okay, so the rumour goes that while representing the New Musical Express football team against the Wailers one evening, I savagely tackled Bob Marley and mangled his big toe. So injured was Marley that he had to hobble off. Cut to several years later and Bob tragically dies of a cancer that doctors say originated from an old football injury. In his toe. Got it? No further questions, your witness. Except, and here’s a humiliating confession, I never did play football against Bob Marley and the Wailers. It’s true that in 1974, many years before I joined the NME, the nascent Jamaican legends had indeed played an informal match in Hyde Park against an NME XI. And it’s true that I later played many games for the same – rather good – rock press team. But that wasn’t until 1979 and, useful a squad as we could be, the hurtful truth was that knocking over the likes of The Jam and Madness hardly pointed to glory when old stagers constantly reminded us young pups how good Bob and the boys were. You couldn’t get near them, apparently, and to pit yourself against opposition of that calibre was, unlike these punky lightweights, a real test. Which was why, many years later, on the radio, I shamefully parlayed my playing past to include the Wailers fixture – though a cursory examination of the dates involved would have exposed the fact that by the late seventies Jah Bob and Ting were global superstars and hardly likely to have been indulging in casual kick-abouts in public parks.

  On about the tenth re-telling of my boast – and by that I mean lie – a chuckling caller interjected, ‘Here, you weren’t the one that gave him that injury that killed him, were you?!’ and I suddenly figured how funny it would be if indeed that grim penny dropped on me live on air. Feigning shock, I pretended to piece together the events and of course recalled how heavily I had actually tackled the great man at one point. For the rest of the show I pretended to be very distracted by this awful realization. Then I went home. Then the Internet got invented. Then people started hissing at me in the street. Then it was too late.

  Above and beyond such things as dates and radio bravado though is the undeniable fact that anyone who knows me can vouchsafe: far from being some sort of midfield animal, I have never actually put in a tackle in my life and am rightly infamous for it. Useful in other ways, maybe. But getting stuck in, as Dad would say? No. See, they might bite back. Even from the grave.

  Just Give Me that Rock’n’Roll Music

  ‘There’s a lady there got opera glasses on me! She thinks I’m a racehorse!’

  The snippet above is lifted from the pelting dialogue on Max at the Met, a record of Max Miller’s 1957 appearance at the Metropolitan Theatre, Edgware Road. By the age of five I knew every word on the ten-inch disc, which goes to show a) how much I loved it and b) how much it was played indoors. I actually understood but a fraction of what was being said – opera glasses? – but found the attack of Max Miller’s performance, plus the waves of hysteria that followed even the simplest of his asides, tremendously exciting.

  ‘He’s a boy, isn’t he, eh? Well, you can’t tell. You can’t tell! You can change overnight!’

  The whoops of disbelieving laughter that followed lines like that carried me along with them. The fact that I had no idea what was being implied was irrelevant; this stuff was galvanizing. There was one line, delivered after Max said he’d arrived home early to find a naked man in his house, that ran,

  ‘So she said, “Don’t lose your temper, Miller, don’t go raving mad – he’s a nudist and he’s come in to use the phone.” There’s a clever one from the wife, eh!’

  Kaboom! I was gone, busting a gut harder than the audience on the record, even though I was hearing it for the hundredth time. Why? Well, I think I had figured out what a nudist was, and that was more than enough joke for me. My mum, though, would raise an eyebrow.

  ‘Here, I don’t know what you’re bleedin’ laughing at – you shouldn’t even be listening to stuff like that.’

  Why not? Everyone at the Metropolitan seemed to be terrifically cheered up by it. Did the rest of the world know you could attain such heights of pleasure, or was it only experienced by us free spirits?

  As a family, we never owned many records but those we did have were hammered into the ground around the clock. These included Craig Douglas’ ‘My First Love Affair’, Frankie Laine’s ‘The Kid’s Last Fight’, ‘Sixteen Tons’ by Tennessee Ernie Ford, ‘April Love’ by Pat Boone, Danny Kaye’s ‘The Little Fiddle’ and a raucous, almost surreal, performance by the Victorian theatre troupe Casey’s Court that whizzed around at 78 rpm. I later found that none of these pre-rock’n’roll sounds had actually been bought by either Mum or Dad; they’d been given to us as a job lot by my aunt Pat.

  Like most people, for their own tastes, my parents relied on the BBC – via a huge radiogram that took up a hefty portion of our living room – or used the record library in Spa Road, a ten-minute bus journey away but attended twice a week. Everyone in my family belonged to the library anyway, but only adults could join the record division. I could never understand why it was de rigueur to be as quiet among the records as it was among the books, but this wonky restriction was observed by all. On allowing the hushed members to take out a library record, the assistant would first consult a small postcard stored with the disc. On this card would be a diagram of both sides of the album with any scratches or scuffs it had already suffered clearly marked in biro. If upon re
turning the LP it was discovered you had added to this damage-map, you could be fined 2d. A good system but one that was rendered useless in the face of something Dad did to all library records before returning just to ensure the staff wouldn’t be touching him for any tuppences. Every time, before setting off on the bus for Spa Road, he would vigorously wash the LPs under the hot tap in the kitchen and then dry them with a tea towel. He did it in good faith and it did give the discs a lovely temporary gloss, but any subsequent playings of them would sound as though the performing orchestra was led by a deep fat fryer. It is a powerful moment for me whenever I conjure up the memory of Spud drenching Russ Conway beneath the raging torrent and it is only matched in its unlikely juxtaposition by another of his kitchen habits, that of steaming his trilby hat over a boiling kettle prior to a night out at the Duke of Suffolk. ‘Brings the shape back handsome, this does,’ he would assure me. Though here was a man who, upon learning that hot lemon was good for a cold, would boil up fizzy bottled lemonade and swig the scalding liquid down.

  In terms of their musical choices, once we were at the library Mum would gravitate toward the soundtracks and show tunes, Dad the comedy records. For the next few days on our player albums like South Pacific, The King and I and Oliver! would alternate with the Goons, Hancock and Peter Sellers’ solo stuff. The one record they both adored was a beautiful EMI compilation of Ivor Novello’s greatest hits; Mum chiefly for Vanessa Lee singing ‘I Can Give You the Starlight’, Dad because Novello’s narration of the lyrics to ‘My Dearest Dear’ struck him as the campest thing he’d ever heard. It wasn’t that the old man had no ear for music, just that he didn’t care for anything too new and stylized, preferring instead the full-on sound of a rough pub trio hammering out ‘Red Roses for a Blue Lady’. Live music was his thing and, conveniently, there was only one type of venue he knew that could offer that, preferably with him leading the charge.

  By 1962, however, other music had begun infiltrating the house. For me, this aural revolution first announced itself visually. My sister, then twelve, one day asked for the Sellotape and her tiny bedroom was henceforth dominated by a large colour poster of Cliff Richard. Swiftly my brother Michael, ten, got in on this giddy self-expression by gluing a small black-and-white picture of Brenda Lee to his bedhead. We shared a bedroom, and I would stare nervously as, before sleep, he would flamboyantly kiss Brenda goodnight. I remember feeling that if Mum caught him doing such a thing she would throw him out. Being only five years old, my icons were TV puppets Rag, Tag and Bobtail, and so I cut out a picture of them and put it up.

  Then certain new records started turning up that had to be played sparingly, almost dangerously, and most importantly when Dad wasn’t in the room. When he did hear them he would pronounce both their sound and our wild gyrating to them as ‘batchy’ – a word I have not heard anyone else employ, but one he regularly used to describe anything he found crass or ludicrous. These batchy discs – again mostly hand-me-downs from Aunt Pat – were meaty beaty bounces like Johnny Preston’s ‘Cradle of Love’, Tony Newley’s ‘Anything You Wanna Do’ and Adam Faith’s terrifically snotty howl, ‘Big Time’.

  Over the years I have noted many other people’s rock awakening seems to have been sparked by the far more credible and rootsy noises as made by Elvis, Gene Vincent or even John Lee Hooker, but our flats were a long way from the nearest US Air Force base and so the culture that was later to dominate my own life crept in via these rather tame, ersatz, seemingly square grooves. Today I thoroughly stand by each and every one of them though, and genuinely believe that entering the rocking new world through such a poppy portal saved me a lifetime of dry musical snobbery, forever fussing about the authenticity of this basically boss-eyed art. In fact, whenever I do read that somebody’s life was turned around at the age of eight by chancing across a wax cylinder of Mississippi John Hurt, I find it hopelessly pretentious and not a little tragic – they seem to have missed out on whole chunks of innocent goofy fun from home-grown peppy warblers like Helen Shapiro and Johnny Leyton. Possibly, like Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk, they yearn to be a poor black child from deep down Mississippi. Not me. This early sixties world seemed full of joyous, jumping new music and I was in clover just where I was. And then, one day, like a Technicolor piano falling from the sky, like an electric choral earthquake, came the Beatles.

  The day my sister brought a copy of the Please Please Me LP into our house things seemed to get faster, sharper, headed in a new direction. She had bought it with some birthday money she still had in her Post Office book from Starr’s, in the parade opposite Surrey Docks – the only record shop near us. Starr’s was, in truth, only a semi-record shop. It mainly sold balls of wool and knitting patterns, but had a couple of racks of albums by the door as well as a shelf with some chart singles to one side. Quite how this woollen/vinyl hybrid ever came into being is anybody’s guess but I later learned that, as a radio phone-in, the subject of shops that sell disparate items never fails to engage. The best call I ever took told of a place in Suffolk that sold shellfish and suits of armour.

  In my lifetime I estimate I have owned around fifty thousand records. It may be ten million, I don’t know, but I don’t regret a single purchase and feel warmly about each and every one of them.1

  Many, I admit, were out-and-out caterwauling turkeys. Hurray! So what? A substantial core though became my most trusted loyal companions and remain so. The first record I bought with free independent choice and with my own money – via a freshly cashed postal order from Aunt Pat – was in the spring of 1964: the single of ‘Can’t You See That She’s Mine’ by the Dave Clark Five. I became deeply enamoured of its B-side, a mid-tempo ballad called ‘Because’ and would mime to it, imagining our round, wall-mounted living-room mirror was a TV camera and I was breaking the hearts of all the adoring young girls viewing my show from their boring, non-pop star homes. This was when I was being Mike Smith, the handsome keyboardist and singer in the DC5. When I was being drummer Dave Clark himself, I would form a fantasy kit by arranging the two smallest pieces from Mum’s nest of tables as snare and tom-tom along with a leatherette pouffe turned on its side for a bass drum. Once this crackpot roadying was complete I would then energetically keep the beat with invisible sticks. To their credit, my parents never actually laughed out loud when they saw me doing this but Mum, as she hoovered around my commotion, would often caution me, ‘They’ll come and cart you off one of these days – ’salright, there’ll be room in the van for all of us.’

  My alternate life as Britain’s latest pop sensation extended beyond the music. Sitting on the toilet, I would visualize myself being interviewed and mouth silent replies to such hard-hitting probes as: ‘Won’t you tell us, Danny, what you have planned for your immediate future?’ In response I would give my fans a few hints as to what might be in store without ever giving the sensible answer, which was of course, ‘Well, first I intend pulling my trousers back up.’ I also developed a most blazing passion for Dusty Springfield, and these same phantom interviewers would often enquire as to how our marriage was coming along.

  The truly exhilarating thing about the first awakenings to pop is that not a single record strikes you as anything other than a friendly shining masterpiece. Everything is good and everybody knows exactly what they’re doing. This sense of genius everywhere was particularly acute during the early sixties because the whole world was on the same new page – apart from the Beatles, who were somehow writing the next chapter.

  Lord, we were all so keen and I saw no difference in quality between a hokey old stomp like the Migil Five’s ‘Mockingbird Hill’ and the Kinks’ blistering ‘You Really Got Me’. As far as I was concerned, they were of a piece and both groups probably lived in the same house dreaming up fresh hits. So immersed was I in this burgeoning dawn of pop creation that, like most of Britain, I even found Freddie and the Dreamers credible.

  While the jangling sounds confidently rained down like Rainbow Drops at Debnams Road, the
changing fashions saw our house on shakier ground. Put succinctly, while Dad ‘put up with’ the music, he ‘wasn’t having’ the clothes. My sister bore the brunt of that embargo and some of the more swinging extremes that caught her teenage eye simply weren’t going to fly with the old man. Then there was my brother’s Donovan cap. Donovan, that quasi-spiritual Celtic imp whose winsome vocal meanderings were perfectly matched by his wandering minstrel style, was never really going to have much of a fan base among dockers called Spud. I don’t recall my brother having that much of a thing for him either – Michael’s overwhelming passion was for the Beach Boys – and yet one day he came downstairs wearing this peculiar Breton cap. The following dialogue ensued:

  Dad: What the fucking hell you got on your head?

  Mike: It’s a Donovan cap. The singer Donovan wears it.

  Dad: Yeah? Well, you can fucking well give it back to him then, because you’re not going out in it.

  Mike: Why not?

  Dad: Because you look like a fucking ginger beer, that’s why not.

  Mike: But it cost me fifteen and six.

  Dad: Did it? Well you might as well have tossed that straight down the drain, because the only place you’re wearing that is in fucking bed.

  Mike: Aw, Dad! Can’t I just wear it round Mickey Ball’s house?