Alma Cogan (12 page)

By the autumn of ’57 I was the token female on a package that played more dance-halls and cinemas than theatres, and for one night only, and from which all the old-stagers, with the exception of a comedian-compère, had been expunged.

The band balladeers who I’d come up with had tended towards conventional notions of beefcake: cleft chins, square jaws, crinkly hair, boxy shoulders and trousers with zero crotch-definition. The boys of the chorus, on the other hand, inevitably tended towards the swish end of the spectrum: they were always a little light in the loafers.

The new breed of male on the pop packages that were being hastily slung together was hybridised from these two types, with the addition of a heavy US overlay (‘western’ shirts with lace-up fronts, nodding Tony Curtis quiffs, tight high-water pants that stopped several inches up the ankle).

A smattering of the Rons, Lens, Terrys and Harrys who had reinvented themselves as Jet or Rock or Deke or Ricky were familiar to me from La Caverne, The Condor and other clubs around the London scene: pretty-boy hustlers and actor/drifters who made up the shifting entourage of the leading managers and promoters and were in the pop racket as a career move, getting while the getting was good. They needed no lessons in how their hair should be puffed and tinctured or in how to pack their jeans.

Most of the fledgling idols and stage-struck musos, however, were pubescent lathe-turners, panel-beaters, spot-welders, abattoir attendants, hot-dog vendors and pub pot-boys, getting their first taste of showbiz.

‘I’m young, dumb and full of cum,’ the bassist or rhythm-guitarist for the Congars or the Krew-Kats or the Cameos announced as he climbed on board the bus on his first morning and, over the next few weeks, proceeded to prove it.

The buses reeked of sex. The bench seats at the back of the bus at the end of every tour used to be scabbed and caked with it. The
windows and chromium appointments were bloomed with it. The walls and ceiling seemed to be smeared with it. They were all cock-happy. It was like a contagion.

Because the cost of where they stayed at nights came out of their own pockets (and because it tied in with their new idea of themselves as rebel rockers), many of them chose to doss in the coach, parked in some municipal car-park or round the back of the hall.

At every stop there were the same eager mouths, arcade eyes and hungry hands swarming round the bodywork in a recognisable formation. Most mornings saw cheap-speed blondes frantically ratting their hair, applying spit-and-mascara and stuffing their knickers in their handbags before staggering off to work at the Market Café, C&A or the Co-Op. (Where they sluiced their sticky dumpling thighs, flaked the glueyness out of their intimate seams and gullies? Or opted perhaps to go through the day with the funk of bus sex clinging to them; to wear it on their fingers as a kind of trophy or memento and share it around with their workmates and customers? I was certainly curious and tempted sometimes to ask them.)

The newly-minted Shels and Troys, meanwhile, washed their underwear in the handbasins at transport cafés between gigs, then hung them to dry with their shirts and socks along the luggage-rack inside the bus in ludicrous parodies of what they had seen their mothers do on boxy verandas or in soot-streaked council-house gardens.

‘I got nipples on my titties big as the end of yo’ thumb/I got somethin tween my legs can make a dead man come …’ In the beginning, they used to sing this sort of stuff because they knew it made me uncomfortable. I used to go up front and talk to the driver when it was dirty-joke time. But then I learned to face it up.

The realisation that I was the only one present who knew a crotchet from a hatchet (if only just), who could tell a C-chord from a head of lettuce, heralded a switch in attitudes. I started to join in on the Lucille Bogen and Big Mama Thornton numbers. I
began to get attuned to an atmosphere which was a combination launderama, approved school, pleasure charabanc and knocking-shop.

There was the usual delinquent mooning and synchronised pissing and hurling half-pound bags of flour at passing traffic. Some of them acquired shotguns and would get the driver to stop at the edge of fields to let them shoot at bottles (and sometimes birds, though I didn’t want to know about that).

Dean Vance’s (of the Venturas) history – absentee mother, drunken father, a smoker by nine, a drinker at ten, first conviction at eleven years and nine months for wounding with intent; at fourteen charged with assault causing actual bodily harm; at fifteen with housebreaking and larceny – was extreme but not untypical.

I got it in bits at night as I painted black eye-liner and navy-blue mascara on his eyes and smoothed nacreous Max Factor factor-5 over his violent viridian face pustules and chest acne. He tended to dwell on the idea that his mother had been murdered, and there was nothing anybody could do about this preoccupation because nobody knew where she had gone when she suddenly disappeared from home with the off-licence takings. He spent much of his time on the bus working on a song about it – the Everly Brothers out of Leadbelly – which, to the best of my knowledge, never got finished.

Obviously this was a lot different to life on the road with Betty Kayes and her Pekinese, The Balcomes, Fun on a Revolving Ladder, Kay and Kimberley, Balancers Plastique, Winnie Atwell, Pat Hatton and Peggy, Tommy Wallis and Beryl and all the other mum-and-dad acts who I knew were still out there, still
tumm
ling
away.

I knew because I encountered them most nights when I put in at digs which, with their stuffed fox-terriers and formal ‘best’ parlours and moans about kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of kippers, were the pre-war world preserved.

All the talk, widespread at the time, about ‘modernisation’
and ‘affluence’ and ‘the crust of conventional life cracking from top to bottom’ went straight over their heads. They saw what was happening in the wider world as a parallel of what was happening in the business, which is to say: a fad, a freak of fashion, a flash in the pan.

(Many of the performers rehearsing for the 1956 Royal Performance wept openly when Van Parnell walked into the stalls of the Palladium late in the afternoon and announced that that night’s show had had to be cancelled owing to the grave international situation. At the time, though, nobody gave it any great significance.)

The Archie Rices were staying with what they knew, which was all they knew, and, as a consequence, were losing it. Unlike myself, I need hardly add, who was plugged into the new mood of youthful vitality and powie fifties optimism.

For me this found its most concrete form in the first solid-body ‘planks’ and ‘axes’; the Fender Stratocasters and Telecasters, Epiphone Coronets and Wilshires, the Gibson Les Pauls. With their futuristic shapes and colour-ways and textures – lemon yellow with gun-metal fleck, graphite with graphite mica – they seemed excitingly in step (what did I know?) with the new concrete environments of ring-roads, tower-blocks, transportels, expressways, sky-lounges, skylons and sputnik-style sportatoria.

My problem was that, although I was thinking 1959, image-wise I was marooned back in 1954.1 was locked into a persona that no amount of remoulding and remodelling and cosmetic rehab seemed able to break me free of.

My original style had been an outgrowth, a cartooning I suppose you would now have to say, of the New Look that came in a couple of years after the end of the war: hand-span waists, immense spreading skirts, bell dresses with warehousefuls of sequins, bugle-beads, tinsel, crackle-nylon and a lot of padding, pleating, stiffening, corseting and boning going on.

I was a work of conscious and total artifice. I wore long nails because I had stubby little hands. I wore high-heel shoes because I was short. I wore my hair big because my hair wouldn’t do
everything I wanted it to. I thought that part of whatever appeal I had lay in the fact that I looked totally artificial but was totally real.

This look reached its apotheosis on the occasion that I had to be physically swung into position like a Portaloo or section of partition-wall when the outfit I was wearing – a real ‘Hey Doris’ number consisting of a floor-length ostrich-feather cape over a dress of jet beads and chainmail – proved too monumental to make it onto the set any other way. I had reached a degree of
thingness
from which the time had obviously come to beat a retreat.

By the package tour era, I had slimmed my outline down almost to street proportions. I’d also updated the press-button-A ballads and cutesie-poo ditties from my usual programme to a style that seemed more in keeping with the younger trend.

They were developments that had my manager, among others, climbing the wall. ‘You’re still a terrific piece of merchandise,’ he’d remind me every time he came on the line. ‘The less you change, the longer it lasts. You know what I’m saying? You
know
what I’m saying.
Leave
it
alone
.’

But unfortunately my ear had been turned. Instead of a clear horizontal simplicity in the music, I was now hearing the potential for notes to be chopped up, jammed together, halved, augmented, twisted, stretched and dropped. Instead of a regular chugga-chugga pulse, I was learning new ways to bend, tease and subvert the regularity of the beat. Which was the beginning of my
tsuris
, as I should have known: the more I tried to break out and move from the old style to the next style, to introduce a more modern idiom, the more it went over like the proverbial turd in the punchbowl. To the point where I had to admit defeat and backtrack to the well-worn and familiar, the tried and tested. (More hits followed.)

I believed at the time of the package shows that my heightened awareness – I have to call it that – could be attributed solely to the new range of musical experiences I was being exposed to, the race music coming in on record from America, in particular.

But that alone couldn’t account for the soaring energy levels, the unusual alertness and receptivity, the unprecedented appetite for performing. Or for the dilated pupils, the popping nerves and the sense sometimes of being put in another dimension.

For that, I now know (though I didn’t then) I had the ‘nigger minstrels’, the black-and-white slimming capsules the boys on the bus were feeding me on a daily basis, to thank. The reason I was feeling so up for such a lot of the time – and so swimmy and strung-out for the remainder of it – was because I was staying permanently dosed on ups.

Now – today, I mean: November 20th, 1986, which happens to be a Thursday – I can experience the same speed-freak sensations merely by being back on the road, riding in a Rapide double-deck Shuttlelounge or Scenicruiser, with Sue or Sammy or Donna in the kitchen corner nursing a hangover and wrestling with the clingfilm and the sandwich-fillings she has raced round doing the last-minute buying for in a post-euphoric haze.

Having a doped dog in the bag planted between my feet whose unpredictable smells and movements could suddenly result in him being discovered gives that added extra urban topspin to the experience. I’ve been feeling out there ever since I got on. I’ve been feeling acid-blazed.

An hour ago it was sunny. The sun lit up the individual fibres of the pseudoplush on the seat-backs so that they seemed to be sensitive to every breath and vibration and swayed in the frazzled air in here like the fronds or stamens of anemones.

The wig worn by the black woman sitting in the seat in front was similarly ablaze with nylon filaments and fat perspiration-points, each one of which appeared to hold a perfect image of the shimmering, sun-bleached infinitised interior. The shaved pubic strips of velcro which anchor the head-rest slips bristled with a similar harsh black sheen.

It isn’t so apparent now that it has clouded over – the sky has a lowered, snowy look. But a while ago, every synthetic surface seemed to be animated with a jazzy streptococcal patina: the
window stanchions, the window sills, the tissue head-rests, the seat-surrounds, the drop-trays – all could be seen to be evenly, but variably, textured, like different skin-types examined minutely in a purpose-adapted light.

When she came round with the first in-coach refreshment service, about forty miles in, I saw that Sue herself was glittering with these semi-subliminal patterns or patinas, which were over-printed on the polyesters of her otherwise solid-coloured company-issue skirt, shirt and jacket.

The woman directly across the aisle has been weeping intermittently ever since she got on. She hasn’t looked up from the door-stop novel in her lap (a Virginia Andrews) for over an hour. She has been eating crisps and occasionally wiping her fingertips clean on the fibrous pages of the book.

A small Asian girl several rows in front is screaming in what at first was a nerve-jangling way, but has now become like a mantra. The elderly man with her, whom I take to be her grandfather, keeps repeating the same phrase – ‘How do you do, little lady? … How do you do, little lady?’ – in a desperate counterpoint.

I can see the title of a magazine article that somebody’s reading: ‘Ever So Crafty Main Meal Super Soups’. I can also see a complicated elastic-band device keeping a pair of glasses on a man’s face, and the headline ‘Nick Nick Jim Punched At Disco’.

(How do I know that this is a reference to the young Cockney comedian, Jim Davidson, when most of the time I have no access to a television, take no daily paper, and rarely listen to the radio?

(The answer, I suppose, is that I know in the same way that I knew immediately without thinking what Sue meant when I asked for a packet of peanuts from her tray and she said, ‘Wet or dry?’

(It’s in the air like the weather, and you can either duck it or let it wash all over you, coating you with that distinctive late-in-the-century patina.)

Moving along. The videos are located at the front and centre of the vehicle. So far they have shown the motorway playing itself
out in a melancholy way, as a wavering scribble on a screen, the trace-line of a dicky heart.

Now
The
Mannequin
– ‘a present-day fable of our time set in downtown Philadelphia’, you will remember – is being teed-up with trailers for
Police
Academy
4, Lethal
Weapon,
Who’s
That
Girl?
– ‘films that will fill your home with
quality
entertainment’ – and other offerings from Warner Home Video.