Ain't Bad for a Pink (16 page)

I remember listening to Keith Marriott and Damien Darlington – both top flight players in my view – at the Leisure Club with Plum on bass. Keith Marriott nearly blew me away. Another night I saw John Darlington and another time I met Melvyn, Pete Johnson’s drummer – an inspiration. I also met Pete’s bass player, Moggsie: a nice bloke – quiet – and he did a bit of drumming. He encouraged me.

Plum was the sound engineer when The Limelight opened. He did it for the first six years or so and I did the lights for twelve months, with Plum on the sound desk. That was my inspiration to play drums: watching all the bands that came through The Limelight.

I didn’t start gigging till I was thirty-three and I’m still enjoying it. My latest band is The Start – that’s what the Crewe scene gave me as a musician. People who’ve made the big time still have their roots in this area. I was chatting to Damien Darlington at the Haslington Cosy Club a couple of weeks ago. He formed The Australian Pink Floyd in the early Nineties and travels all over the world playing to thousands of people. He’s touring England at the moment but looking forward to going back to the States – they play up to 9,000 a time there. I asked him if it ever fazed him and he said yes at first but not any more – he’s used to it.

Andy Smith.
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Keith Marriot first started coming to the shop when he was about twelve – a contemporary of Andy Boote and John Darlington. He was always reserved – he didn’t quite fit with what he was. With other musicians it was more excessive: music, sex and substances. Keith was less hedonistic: he liked girls; he liked a drink but not to excess.

He’s a fantastic electric guitarist – one of the few that has a style of his own and he’s played with a lot of people. He just stands there and does it. His bad back stopped him taking a job with the Australian Pink Floyd. He’s a bit self-effacing but his performance confidence has improved over the years and performance is what it’s all about. His latest band is Headband: “We play Rock n Blues with a twist of funk and we try to be a little bit different”.

One of the last jam nights I did at The Limelight was with Whitty’s son Raphael on drums. It was just like having Whitty there. It was a full-on Skunk Band that night: Moggsie was still alive; Bootie was there; the chemistry was there. There was a variety of time signatures but Raphael didn’t put a beat wrong: Moggsie, who could also play drums, would indicate what was to come by tapping his foot. Raphael playing with the Skunk Band was amazing and emotional.

Some musicians were peripheral to the Skunk Band but had a brief part in the story. Clive Gregson, who lived in the flat at the back of the butcher’s four doors away was one such person. This would be the late Seventies, early Eighties. Inevitably he visited the shop, as all musicians did. My connection with Clive Gregson began when the two of us set up a folk club at the Royal Hotel. Like many of the musicians I’ve met, I came across him just before he became successful. He did John Martyn stuff and had been involved in the folk scene with a number of competent local musicians. They decided to enter the pop field as Any Trouble. Their style resembled Elvis Costello.

Any Trouble went on the circuit as a good touring band and received acclaim. They did five albums and hundreds of gigs before breaking up in 1984. Clive was the singer-songwriter and also a good guitarist – certainly in the folk music world. He eventually became a solo artist: a wise move since it’s the songwriter who makes the money. If a band goes out touring then a respectable wage is possible but all the royalties go to the songwriter. Stevie Wonder benefited far more than Des for “Isn’t She Lovely?” Des has written songs and jingles and provided himself with enough money to live on: more money than he could have made performing.

Clive Gregson’s musical partnership with Christine Collister was described by
Rolling Stone
as “the state of the art in British folk-rock” and he has become a worldwide performer, songwriter, session musician and record producer. His songs have been recorded by Nanci Griffith (the originator of the genre known as folkabilly), Kim Carnes, Fairport Convention, Claire Martin, Norma Waterson and Smokie.

I continued to pursue sporting activities side by side with my business and musical career. I am a very keen skier and always choose the most demanding run: the black run. I came to realise that this applied to my music too.

I enjoyed the off-piste opportunities as much as the sport. Snow is very stimulating. I remember a mountain escapade with the Head Buyer from a famous store: we literally fell for one another in the snow. The ingredients for the coupling were all present: a party mood with singing and dancing in a local inn – me being the chief musician; guiding the lady along the piste, through the conifers; both falling in the cold snow feeling each other’s body heat; more partying and then, ever the gentleman, insisting on escorting the stylish young woman to her hotel, sending off the German rival en route and somehow, because of the lateness of the hour, the problem of keys and the Head Buyer’s plain friend, ending up in my bed together, where the fortunate woman experienced her first orgasm. So she said.

One of my horse-riding companions with whom I had a long-term relationship liked making love outdoors – mainly at her instigation. She used to go out without knickers. I remember a few compromising situations where you had to stay very still for a while. Imagine a bench on a disused railway line and a fat bloke with a bag of cans lumbering past. Then a woman in a turquoise jogging suit. Then after a short while some kids shoving one another. All going past. Then someone else in expensive trainers. Then someone on a bike. Then another jogger with sweatbands. Then someone with a sniffing dog. This amounted to a lot of starting and stopping. I don’t know how we got there. The dogs were the worst interruptions.

Round about my fortieth birthday I kick-started my solo career, appearing as Pete “Snakey Jake” Johnson. The Skunk Band still did the occasional gig for charity.

Tom Jackson, an ex-singer with Clive Gregson’s band, offered to manage me, organising gigs in Chester at Alexander’s Jazz Theatre, in London at the Twelve Bar Club, at the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge, and at a place near the Scottish border. There was a week spent in Nottingham and gigs in Derby, Huddersfield and Lichfield. He did it all for love. He loved the music; he loved my virtuosity. This lasted about a year and both of us enjoyed the experiences but, socially and musically nourishing as it had been, there was no future in this because it was impossible to make any money in this league of venues and I had to cover time spent away from the shop, when the takings would inevitably be down.

There had been the customary wrangling over money. Being an entertainer, unless you are very famous, is still a low status profession. You usually have to wait for your money; sometimes it’s dependent on the size of the audience and there’s often vagueness about the amount – but never in my mind! For example, I started on £60-£70 at the Jazz Theatre in Chester, with the promise of more money if I was a success. One night the management let in a bus load of foreign tourists and Tom asked for more money. He was refused because the tourists had not been charged! So Tom, an ex-miner and a big union man, put an end to the arrangement and things came to a natural end. Not long after, I remade my relationship with Zoe.

Round about the time when every town had an Irish themed pub with pretend nicotine on the ceilings and wooden farm implements on the walls, I had a very brief career as a purveyor of Irish songs. Shortly after the charity gig at The Limelight (
circa
1994) an agent phoned me.

“I hear you’re out of retirement. I can fill your diary.”

“What with?”

“Irish music.”

“I’m not interested.”

“It’s £200 a night.”

So I phoned Terry Fox: a good all-rounder, who sang, played fiddle and penny whistle – all the Celtic stuff – and Fluff, an excellent violin player who later joined the reformed Incredible String Band. I had done Irish songs in folk clubs so I wasn’t working in the dark.

We did about eight gigs and hated it. The venues were awful and we didn’t really like the music. Neither did the punters! Really, the people wanted karaoke. At one dockside pub in Liverpool all the tables had tobacco tins on. No problem with that until you realized that the lids had been decorated with spent matches. This is something they do in jail to pass the time.

Some of the best gigs come spontaneously or unexpectedly. One I particularly remember was upstairs at the Civic Hall, Nantwich about 1996. Loraine Baker (ex Boat Band and now with Baker’s Fabulous Boys) was on double bass and Fluff was on fiddle. Andy Boote was playing acoustic guitar and I was playing electric guitar quietly. It was like an acoustic Skunk Band. There were various aspects: country rock from me, jazz from Andy and Celtic roots from Fluff. It just flowed.

I enjoyed performing with Jo Ann Kelly. She was an excellent slide guitarist and she didn’t half belt it out in her acoustic delta style. She was influenced by Memphis Minnie, Charley Patton, Bessie Smith and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Jo Ann in turn influenced other female blues singers. She jammed with Canned Heat but declined the invitation to join the band, forming instead The Blues Band in 1979 with her brother Dave Kelly, Paul Jones – ex Manfred Mann – and the original Fleetwood Mac bassist Bob Brunning.

Gary B. Goode and the Hot Rods were the resident band at Crewe’s mirror-balled Majestic Ballroom in the Sixties. They supported all the famous bands but the reason I admired them was because Keith Haines, my musical guru on the school bus, played for them. The kid who watched them then didn’t expect ever to play with them.

Fast forward thirty-odd years. Gary B. Goode and the Hot Rods did a couple of reunions for charity then decided to do one for themselves. Keith is committed to his own musical interests and will only play rock ‘n’ roll for charity, so they asked me to play guitar in place of him and this opportunity made me realise what strength Keith contributed to the band.

Talking about stories that span the decades I supported Peter Green at Bar Cuba in Macclesfield round about 2004. He was the founder of Fleetwood Mac who left in 1970 and an excellent blues-rock guitarist – admired by Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. BB King said of him: “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.”
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BB King once asked Fleetwood Mac to play “Albatross” and then they invited him up to play with them. I was struck by the number of hits Peter Green had written as song after song was played: “Black Magic Woman”, “Man Of The World”, “The Green Manalishi” as well as “Albatross”.

I went to his dressing room afterwards; the band members were all younger than Peter Green, as was his biographer. “Do you want a drink?” Peter asked. “Is the Pope a Catholic?” I replied. “Where’s the Jack Daniels?” asked Peter Green, who wasn’t drinking. “Say when.” “Next week,” I answered. Everyone laughed and the conversation flowed. Peter Green, who had sat in the audience, said he enjoyed my set. “You’ve seen it before in Manchester in the Sixties,” I replied. I had supported Fleetwood Mac at Alvaston Hall, Nantwich and at Manchester whilst I was at university. I went on to talk about a dressing room conversation I’d had with Jeremy Spencer, who had been playing fairly basic in E. I had shown him some open tuning techniques associated with the blues that not many people knew about at the time. There was a spark of recognition at this point and everyone agreed that I had triggered something in Peter Green’s memory but I don’t know what. As singer-songwriter and front man of Fleetwood Mac, extreme reaction to drugs had rendered him mentally incapable of remembering much of his earlier career and he was grateful to me for helping to restore something.

The second phase of Fleetwood Mac – the
Rumours
era – initiated by drummer Mick Fleetwood, is the Fleetwood Mac everyone knows but Peter Green is remarkable. Sadly enough, there were fewer people there to see him than to see me on that occasion.

The following week the biographer came to my shop: he had a Dobro to sell and wanted to know if I had any more Peter Green stories.

Parallel with the musical fecundity of the Skunk Band, my business was supplying sound systems for internationally famous bands all over England and Europe.

There’s a constant struggle to get correct information before a gig and payment after a gig. I had organized a sound system for a band at The George at Burslem. I’d been reassured that they were not a punk band but when I arrived with the equipment I found they were, indeed, a punk band and therefore the sound system was not adequate for their needs. At the end of the gig their manager Michael Dempsey was reluctant to pay. The argument took place in a kitchen and, incensed by the injustice of the situation and the fact that I had been misled, I picked up a meat cleaver and hauled it at the wooden work bench, close enough to the manager to make my point. He paid up.

In a similar vein I had two gigs booked in local Crewe and district hotels one New Year’s Eve. The second venue wanted me there just before the midnight festivities so it was a tight schedule. I finished the first gig and went to see the manager for my fee. The manager was arrogant and disrespectful: “Oh, I’m far too busy to deal with that now!” The exchange was taking place – once again – in the kitchen and I seized my moment – and a gravy boat. “How many of these puddings do you have spare?” I asked, waving the gravy boat in a menacing way. Then, to underline my point I poured gravy over one of the puddings awaiting delivery to table. He paid up.