Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (20 page)

Club audiences were conservative and lazy. It was understandable that after a week’s long, hard graft, they didn’t want anything too taxing on a Friday or Saturday night, but it meant that our comedy had to be obvious and simple.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, tell us one we know,’ they’d shout if we told them a joke they hadn’t heard before.

New material had to be introduced subtly and in small doses to give it time to sink into their work-sapped and drink-addled heads. Even a silly gag such as ‘My father’s a psychopath – he rides his bike on the pavement’ could be too much. It was just one simple line, but they didn’t want to have to think about it. They wanted their jokes on silver plates with all the trimmings and that meant explaining each line of it to them, explaining why we were telling the joke, explaining who the people were in the joke and explaining when and why the punchline came up.

And there was something odd about the mentality of club audiences. The most easygoing and generous of people would change into mean-spirited, stingy, awkward bastards the moment they sat down in those stuffy, smoky rooms, bought their raffle tickets and lined up their drinks beside their bingo cards and fag packets. If an act walked on stage, put a rubber tyre around its neck and set it on fire, burning itself to death in front of the crowd, at the end of the night the audience would complain that two weeks previously it had a bloke on who burnt himself to death a lot quicker.

No matter how hard and long we worked, the audience was always ungrateful. Often it was from resentment and I’d hear the same old lines trotted out again and again when I met the punters in the bar or the toilets.

‘I have to work down the pit all day for the money you’re on,’ they’d say.

‘Well, there’s the drums, there’s the piano, there’s a guitar,’ I’d say, pointing at our instruments. ‘You go and fucking do it.’
Sometimes it would lead to trouble; sometimes I’d get away with it.

The northern club circuit was a miserable place to make a living, but fortunately I had George and Mick as accomplices. The two to three years I played with them in Alcock & Brown were some of the best I’ve ever had in show business. Very little of it was down to the clubs, their audiences or the club committees, the sanctimonious attitude of many of which could be summed up by the motto of the CIU (Club and Institute Union) clubs:
Recreation hand in hand with Education and Temperance
. Most of our good times arose out of our scrapes and experiences dealing with the clubs and the little despots that ran them.

Within every working-class neighbourhood, each community formed its own club. The steelworkers, the miners, the fishermen, the Labour Party members and the Conservatives – each group of men wanted to socialise only with their own type and so in any district you’d have half a dozen clubs. Big cities such as Sheffield would have three or four massive clubs just in the one street. And even in small neighbourhoods there would be several clubs dotted around. In Grangetown there was the Working Men’s Club, the British Legion Club, the Old British Legion Club, St Mary’s Club, Grangetown & District Social Club, Dorman’s Athletic Club, The Transport Club and The Unity Club. Most of these clubs would have a concert room with enough space for 300 to 500 people. The largest clubs seated from 1,200 to 1,600 punters, while the smaller clubs would seat eighty to a hundred. The bigger clubs got the better acts, but there weren’t enough artists to go around, so we’d play each club four or five times a year.

Until the early 1980s, just about every entertainer spent part of their career in clubland, many of them serving their apprenticeship and making their names on the northern club circuit.
Household names such as Marti Caine, Larry Grayson, Billy Connolly and Bernard Manning were born in the clubs of the Midlands, the North and Scotland. When they were on the bill, the queues would stretch right around the corner.

Even superstars such as the Beatles and Elton John paid their dues in the clubs and the clubs of the North-East were a fertile spawning ground for many big acts. I first saw Sting play at a club behind the Lion Inn, a pub on the highest point of the North Yorkshire Moors. Playing bass in a band called Last Exit, he was going by his real name of Gordon Sumner in those days, but he had a great voice and even then anyone could see he’d go far.

I first met David Coverdale when he was working in a men’s clothes shop by day and singing in Redcar clubs and pubs in the evenings with a band called Rivers Invitation. I knew him quite well and bumped into him outside the Wimpy Bar one day. I asked him how he was.

‘Eh, Roy. Not so bad, mate,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got owt for a coffee, have ya?’

Dave hadn’t eaten for a couple of days and was always scrounging food and drink off his friends. On this occasion, my sister Barbara was just passing by across the road, so I shouted to her to lend us a couple of bob and we went into the Wimpy for a drink and a bun.

The next time I saw Dave, he’d joined Deep Purple and had just got back from Sweden, where the band had sent their new lead singer to have his cock-eye straightened. Suddenly it wasn’t ‘Eh, Roy’ any more but ‘Man’ and ‘Hey, cool, mother, lay it down, man.’ Now, Mick, George and I used to wear loon pants, cravats and flower chains and we’d all had our hair permed like Kevin Keegan – we looked like three lollipops – but this was different. We’d kept our Teesside accents, whereas Dave had bought into the hippie vibe lock, stock and barrel. He’d become one of them. One of the beautiful people

The Bay City Rollers also started out as a club act. The night that they were number one in the charts, they were on at a club in Redcar – and all because of the sheer bloody-mindedness that was the hallmark of most club committees. The Rollers had asked if they could be bought out of their contract because they were number one in the charts and because they had a big tour coming up. But the committee said no. They’d booked the Rollers and paid for the Rollers, so they were bloody well getting the Rollers.

Club committee members were the type of people who worked diligently all day, quiet as a mouse. Then, every evening, they’d go down to the club, pin a little badge to their lapel and turn into little Hitlers. It didn’t take a degree in psychology to work out why they were so unpleasant. All day, at work, the little committee member would have been ordered about by his foreman. Then, at home, he’d have been bossed about by his wife. But when he walked in that club, he was on the committee and that little badge should have said ‘God’ because now it was
his
turn to boss people around. And so he took it out on anybody who crossed his radar, especially the acts.

‘You
will
put that
there
. You
won’t
put that
there
,’ he’d snap. ‘We want no blue stuff. We want no filth. We want three half-hour spots and make the first one twenty minutes and the last one forty minutes.’ Those were the kind of demands and skewed logic we came to expect from club chairmen.

The bigger clubs had full-time committee members who drew a wage off the club and who through sheer greed ended clubland in the mid-1980s by refusing to scale back their wage demands when the audiences got smaller. Clubland went to the wall because it couldn’t afford to support all the committee members’ expenses.

The best clubs were those run as commercial concerns by an
entrepreneur – places like the Frontier Club in Batley, a little block of old-style Las Vegas in a West Yorkshire street of second-hand car dealerships and theme bars. The owners of these independent clubs could be just as ruthless as the chairmen of working men’s clubs – there’s a sign backstage at the Frontier that says: ‘One-hour set plus the encore, please. Short show = short pay’ – but they respected the acts as fellow professionals. The problem with working men’s and social clubs was that they were run by amateurs who regarded professional entertainers as crooks who wanted to rip them off.

If there was one thing that united club chairmen, it was that they were awkward bastards to a man. In twenty years of playing the clubs, I never met a chairman who wanted to be helpful or cooperative. They just weren’t nice people.

In those early days, it was up to the club chairman whether we got paid or not. If they didn’t like our act or if we misbehaved in any way, the chairman would come into our dressing room and tell us we were getting ‘paid off’. It meant we weren’t getting a penny. Even if the audience had roared with approval and called for encores, the club chairman was the judge and jury. It was up to him to decide if we deserved our fee.

As Alcock & Brown we had an act that, while it wasn’t good enough to sell out at the Palladium in London, was certainly a good clubland act. Most of it had evolved from the routines we’d developed with The Nuts, so there were a couple of parodies of adverts, a few silly songs and some gags based on props we brought on stage. We’d round off the evening with a couple of well-known hits to get the audience dancing.

Even the very best of clubland acts could have a bad night because few ever entertained people who had bought tickets specifically to see them. The punters had gone to the club for a pint, a fag, the bingo and the raffle. They could not have cared
less who was on stage and they didn’t realise it had taken us eight hours to get to the club and that we needed to earn our fee to put petrol in our van and to pay for our lodgings that night. Thinking we were earning a fortune, they’d moan at us for the couple of shillings it cost them to get into the club and wouldn’t realise that we often didn’t have a penny to scratch our arses with.

An agent had booked us on a tour of clubs in North Wales that was typical of our experiences in those days. On the first night, the club chairman said we were rubbish and we were paid off. The second night, they gave us half our money, which paid for fish and chips and some petrol. We didn’t work the third night. The fourth night went well and we were paid in full. And so it continued. By the end of the week, we’d played eight shows, but had picked up our full fee only twice. Nevertheless, we were convinced that we’d earn our full fee of fifty quid on the last night, which would be enough to get us home, so we spent our last pennies on a few drinks. But when it came to the last show we didn’t get paid, so George was forced to beg the petrol money off Alan Earle, his boss at the Guitarzan shop in Slaggy Island, where he did a bit of part-time work.

Having often not earned a penny all week and been insulted or belittled by a club chairman, I found it difficult not to lose my temper when we were pushed into a corner. Lashing out was always a mistake because as soon as any of us lost our cool, we were the bad bastards.

Playing a social club in the North-East one evening, we were nearing the end of our act. We were playing ‘You Never Can Tell’ by Chuck Berry and everybody was up dancing. Full of beer, they were having a great time, shouting ‘More! More! More!’ for an encore. It was eleven o’clock and we’d been on stage since eight, so we looked at the concert chairman. He held up his finger to signal one more tune. We crashed into ‘Rock Around The
Clock’ by Bill Haley and his Comets, the crowd whooped with joy, we played the last verse and chorus a second time and then finished with a big flourish.

‘That’s it, ladies and gentlemen,’ I said as the house lights came on. ‘Goodnight, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve been a great crowd. Please don’t forget your coats and handbags …’

Up in the dressing room, we were taking off our shirts and jackets when the chairman came in. ‘Right, get the gear off the stage. Come on, lads, hurry up. It’s a lock-up club. We have to go home.’

‘Can you just give us a chance to just to get our gear off?’ I said.

‘Don’t be fucking answering me back. Just get your kit off stage.’

‘Whoa, whoa. I’ve got a son older than you. Don’t you talk to me like that.’

‘Get the kit off or I’ll get it off for you.’

‘You touch any of them drums, them guitars, them amps, them speakers, and you’re in a lot of trouble, mate.’

‘Get the kit off
now
,’ the chairman said. ‘Or I’ll get the police.’

‘We’d better get the kit, Roy …’ Mick said.

‘No, just stay here,’ I said. ‘We’ve only been off stage for five minutes.’

Sure enough, two coppers turned up. ‘Have you got a problem, mate?’ one of them said.

‘No, we haven’t,’ I said. ‘We’ve just finished. We’ve gone over the time, people were late drinking in the club when they shouldn’t be and that twat there—’

‘There’s no need for that language,’ the copper interrupted.

‘—just told us to get the kit off the stage and we haven’t even had time to put our stuff in our bags yet. We
will
get the kit off the stage, no doubt about that.’

With five committee members looking on, their chests puffed out and their hands behind their backs, we dismantled our kit and carried it out, taking our time to do it carefully.

‘You’re being awkward. You
will
be arrested,’ the chairman said. ‘You’re trespassing.’

I put down the drum I was carrying. ‘Do you know, mate, not only will we never come back to this club again, but you’ll need more than the police. You’ll need the fucking army if you don’t shut your mouth ’cos I’ll smack you in it.’

We finished loading the van, got in, drove around the corner to the roundabout, went right around it and came back. We waited around the corner from the club until I saw the chairman go back inside. Grabbing a brick off the ground, I ran over to the chairman’s car and hurled the brick through its windscreen. Served the cheeky bastard right.

Another time, we arrived late at a club at which there were three flights of stairs up to the concert room. As usual, I was the spokesman and I had to tell the chairman we’d had a flat tyre.

‘Not another flat tyre,’ he said.

‘No, we only had the one.’

‘I hear this from you bands all the time when you are late. Can’t you get here on time?’ He was standing with his left arm raised, totally for the benefit of the crowd. I could see the audience were looking at the chairman holding his watch out in front of himself, thinking: Good old Arthur, there he is, looking at his watch and giving the band a hard time.