Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (33 page)

I mean, what?
The wrong end of the greyhound gravy train!
That, to me, given the speed at which I speak, was a hellish obstacle course that had more to do with an acrobatic Ronnie Barker routine than my natural patterns of speech. Even worse was the one a week later, focusing on a group of North London lads hoping to break into pop music. They were Spandau Ballet. Here’s me again, cross-eyed and confusticated under the studio lights:

‘Hello, this week on the show we’re going to be having a black-and-white look at a band who many people believe are ushering in a whole new era in rock music.’

Ushering in a whole new era in rock music?
Thanks for that one too, Janet. Thank God I wasn’t Jonathan Ross! Trying to make this all look and sound like I was simply shooting the breeze only served to freeze my facial features and paralyse the very vim that had got me the gig in the first place. And everyone who worked there seemed so mean!

The studio was in total blackout, save a harsh light on my chair and the blue screen behind it on to which the programme’s logo was to be post-added. I had no idea who, or how many, were out there in the darkness, and any chummy dialogue I tried to get going while people shifted lamps and adjusted boom mics seemed to disappear straight down the Grand Canyon. I can recall rather desperately trying to see if there were any other Millwall supporters on the floor. Masking my eyes from the glare, I put the question. Nothing. So I carried on, ‘No? No? Not Millwall. No? No one from the Lions . . . the old Millwall . . . nobody . . . eh?’ in a voice that started out boldly but ended up as a squeak about the size of a cocoa puff. I wasn’t going to like this game at all. This wasn’t like my world. Nobody seemed to want to waste time bullshitting, or arguing about obscure musicians, or creating pointless jokes at others’ expense. In fact, everybody seemed to have something to do and they were busy doing it. (Don’t worry, I later found out how fantastically wrong these early impressions were.)

The social low point came when I was in the canteen around show three. Still desperately searching for common ground with somebody, anybody, at the LWT studios – Janet being forever bound up in script and production duties – I was haplessly pushing my tray along the selection rail when I saw a man much older than me, coming towards me, beaming.

‘How’s it all going, are you finding your way around all right?’ he asked breezily.

‘Oh, hello!’ I chirped. I didn’t recognize him, but enormously relieved I had made some sort of impression at last, I added, ‘Tell the truth, I thought I might have become invisible. Yeah, I’m enjoying myself, but it’s very serious around the studios . . . isn’t . . . it.’ The last two words were said at cocoa-puff level. This man was now giving me a look like I was waving my private parts at his mother. Then another voice started responding to his initial question from directly behind me, and I realized he hadn’t been addressing me at all. I quickly slunk away from the hot-food bar, having only selected some baked beans and a few boiled potatoes. I did not belong here.

Twentieth Century Box
only took up one morning a week. I was paid £75 for each show, which I think rose to £125 by the series’ end, possibly because Janet had a bizarre attack of conscience. Truth is, she could have slipped me a tenner and I’d have been OK with it. Not because I thought the gig was some sort of big break into show business. No, the real reason I was more than happy to trouser the extra cash was that, despite the alien surroundings, I found the ‘work’ risibly easy. This insouciance stemmed purely from complete indifference about ever doing it again. Quite simply, I had a great job already. The idea of giving up getting on planes and tour buses to knock about with pop stars purely in order to put a bunch of ‘young people’s issues’ into the Petri dish on airless local TV didn’t require much thought. As far as I could see, most ‘young people’ would love to be doing what I did for a day job in the first place, so why the hell would I be chasing my tail there?

The collected rabble rousers, cynics and savage wits at the
NME
lost little time in deflating any ego I might have been nurturing since getting in front of the cameras. They found particular joy in my apparent endorsement of Spandau Ballet – a group who, though generally unknown, were already veterans of the review-room toasting fork. When I presented a similar show about some other newcomers called Iron Maiden they all but debagged me and made me walk up Carnaby Street wearing a bell and a placard around my neck. To shut them all up I would simply remind them that I was earning two grand an episode. And they believed it. And they did shut up. Possibly their greatest triumph, though, was when somebody on the staff got in touch with a colleague who worked on one of the more breathless teen-girl magazines over at IPC central. He arranged it so that I – a marginal, briefly glimpsed presenter of a regional Sunday lunchtime show – was surprisingly installed across a heart-festooned half-page as that issue’s Gogglebox Hunk of the Month. Bravo, boys, bravo.

My specialty at the paper had by this time refined itself purely and simply to cramming in as many jokes as I could. I wrote tortuous headlines for the articles and two or three captions for every picture we ran; sometimes the sub would use more than one of them and, once, in a feature about Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter, ran all six of the options provided. I would completely make up short bogus items for Thrills, our ‘quick news’ section. Typical of these was the news that Peter Gabriel – then still not quite the huge solo star he was to become – had passed his final exams to be a lower league football referee. Pete, I wrote, had made his debut, not behind the whistle but running the line at a recent Southend home fixture. I even furnished it with a post-match quote: ‘Amazing really. I feel the same rush as when I had just stormed it with the band. The ball moves a lot faster than when you see it on telly but, yeah, all in all, I’m chuffed.’

There was a running joke about a gang who would break into bands’ dressing rooms while the group were onstage and
leave
as gifts valuable guitars and PA equipment. Anywhere I could create a little mischief, I was home. There were press releases to send up, gossip items to mess about with and, my forte, dozens of single releases to review. I must admit that the actual sound of a 45 came a poor second place to any material I could wring out of its name, lyrics or even what the group looked like. More than a decade later, I was approached by a chap at a media function in a Mayfair club: ‘Hello, Danny, you reviewed my old band’s single once,’ he said, a sentence guaranteed to make me apologize in advance. ‘You took the piss out of it so bad, we broke up.’ Well, naturally I was mortified and started making all sorts of conciliatory noises. ‘It’s fine, really,’ he laughed, ‘we were rotten. Pretend mods. You did us a favour. I’m MD of this place now.’ We chatted a bit more, but I still felt like a louse. Before parting I apologized again but went so far as to suggest that they really couldn’t have been much cop if a review finished them off. ‘Oh no, we weren’t,’ he smiled. ‘Pretend mods, like I say. You ended the bit by saying, “And off they go – like Lambrettas to the slaughter.” ’ I winced for him but secretly was thinking, ‘Oh, that was rather good.’

I began to do less and less by way of proper interviews. Chiefly, I confess, because I absolutely hated having to transcribe them from tape to paper by longhand afterwards. There’s dedication to craft for you.

One absolute howler I had with this was after being away with The Jam in Germany. The band were at a real crossroads in their evolution, but were also, as it transpired, on the verge of a string of truly classic 45s including ‘Going Underground’, ‘Eton Rifles’ and ‘When You’re Young’. At the time, I was due to hook up with them in Berlin just as they were about to bring out their first truly top-grade pop single, ‘Strange Town’. The great thing about being on the road with The Jam was that Paul Weller’s dad, John, was the band’s manager and always saw to it that the record company, Polydor, put the band up in proper hotels. Also Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler – bass and drums respectively – were a tremendous amount of fun to be with. On this tour we tested the pace of life particularly strenuously in Hamburg’s always attractive Reeperbahn district. Paul himself was a more serious and brooding concern back then. Fed up with simply being front man to a ‘good time, live for the moment’ outfit, he was already attempting to find the path to true and lasting musicianship. It was now dawning on him that he probably wouldn’t be able to achieve this with The Jam, loved as they were, and much more loved as they were to become.

Number One hit records and lasting credibility certainly seemed a long way off when the group played at the famous Star Club a few nights after I arrived, where exactly twelve people were in the audience.
Twelve
. I don’t produce this paltry figure to emphasize how small the crowd might have been but as a genuinely accurate statement.
Twelve people saw The Jam in Hamburg.
Bruce Foxton and I went around and counted them. Afterwards, unusually for a musician, Paul asked if he could meet me in the bar of the hotel, ‘to talk about things on my own’. A few hours later, after sitting separately from the other members of the group, accompanied by his then girlfriend Jill, he waited until she went up to her room and the chaps had made their way into the night before coming over to join me.

‘Turn on your tape, Dan,’ he said, ‘I’ve got plenty to say.’ And he had. This was a pour-your-heart-out scoop all right. As I remember it, Paul all but quit the band there and then. Disillusioned about the way punk had fizzled and been corrupted, he was creatively frustrated and growing apart from his colleagues as well as unsure exactly what was the point of any of this empty noise-making. I knew all I had to do to this cover story was stick a couple of quotation marks around it and, late as it was, I rang one of my mates at the
NME
to tell them as much. This was going to be BIG.

So you can imagine the mask of confusion I wore when I turned on my cassette to feverishly scribble down all this great copy and was merely greeted by an anaemic cover version of ‘Girl from Ipanema’. Even odder was that Paul Weller himself seemed to be providing a distant scat vocal backing to this shoddy samba. Then I heard myself joining in, a little clearer, but not by much. I tried to piece the mystery together and eventually figured what had happened was that in boozily plonking down my all-in-one cassette recorder on the bar table I had positioned its directionally sensitive microphone right underneath one of the hotel’s muzak speakers. All I had recorded was the output from that and, consequently, the only quote I could rely on was the less-than-earth-shattering scoop that a woman in South America was small and tanned and young and lovely.

This endless dreary dirge had taken precedence over Paul’s sensational gut-spilling. Worse! The sit-down had taken place at about one-thirty in the morning of a long night, so while I could remember the broad tone of the conversation – I think – I definitely couldn’t reanimate enough of the proper confession to give it that all-important horse’s mouth element. I realized I was going to have to make a lot of it up. You sit there, fingers hovering over the typewriter keys, thinking, ‘Now what did he say about that?’ and ‘Who did he blame for that again?’ and worst of all, ‘Would he have said this?’ When the piece came out, it was a half-hearted mishmash, a real flabby blancmange. It did not run on the cover. I saw Paul not long afterwards.

‘What the fucking hell was all that blather you had me saying in that piece?’ he asked, a little hurt. I had rather overdone the word count and made the normally guarded PW seem suspiciously verbose. I told him what had happened and he actually smiled. ‘Fuckin’ ’ell, eh? I’ll be stuck with some of them quotes you put in me mouth forever now! Still, I’m glad most of it was left out. I’ve changed me mind on a lot of it.’

To this day I have no idea what really should have been in there, or how it might have changed the fortunes of one of Britain’s best-ever pop groups.

That particular debacle happened when I was still hurtling around on various rock-band itineraries pretty much non-stop. By mid-1980 I was at least openly making up stuff for publication rather than attaching it to some hapless personality or other. Very few ‘happening’ groups now seemed to pique my interest and for a while my byline only really showed up when interviewing comedians. I spent the afternoon with Roy Hudd, who had a terrific album out of old music hall standards. This was perhaps not quite what the
NME
readers craved between their 3,000-word treatises on Joy Division and, ahem, Crispy Ambulance, but this is what they got. Bob Monkhouse couldn’t have been nicer, picking me up at the station, taking me to his house, making sure I got to see him before, during and after a recording of
Family Favourites
and even writing to me after the piece was published. Quite why he needed the
NME
, I couldn’t figure, but there it was.

Truly exploiting the ‘meet your heroes’ luxury, I jumped at the chance to hook up with Peter Cook. Something that happened during our long, fuzzy day together remained a private joke to Peter whenever we met again in the fifteen years he had remaining. At some point during our discussions – I think I was initially allocated an hour with him – we had, rather inevitably, decamped to thrash things out in more depth at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho. After about an hour there, Peter made to excuse himself. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he began, threatening to leave me in the fearsome company of Dr Who Tom Baker, genius columnist Jeffrey Bernard and a growing table of terrifically seasoned drunks. ‘I’m just going to exchange my pornographic videos for some fresh ones.’ He was not joking, and relished saying it as though he was announcing a suburban library trip. I had noticed earlier that he’d been carrying under his arm a shabby Tesco bag wrapped around what appeared to be a couple of house bricks. Now I surmised it must contain roughly four hardcore VHS tapes. Though legitimate home-video releases of major films were still a notable and haphazard affair back then – as well as an expensive one, with major new titles costing, on average, about £40 – the Soho adult shops already had a system in place wherein they would (illegally, of course) sell you blue films on tape that, once returned, entitled you to 50 per cent off your next purchase. The price of your initial stake varied greatly. I asked Peter how much he was paying for them.