Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (24 page)

‘I’ve been here ten days and I haven’t been paid yet,’ I said.

‘You want to get
paid
?’

‘Yes, I’m supposed to get fifteen pounds pocket money.’

‘Oh, forget that,’ she said. ‘You just go in the kitchen and help yourself.’

‘But I can’t put food from the kitchen in the car.’

‘You don’t need petrol. You go to Benny’s garage.’ She gave me the address of a garage and that was the end of my quest for payment. I never saw a penny of the fee I’d been promised and I wouldn’t ever have spoken to Benny had I not made a massive faux pas.

I used to do a routine in which I sat in a cot dressed as a baby, sucking a massive dummy and wearing a giant nappy. On my belly, which hung over my nappy, I wrote ‘Empty’ with a felt-tip pen. The act wasn’t particularly sophisticated – I’d walk around the stage, making baby noises – but I knew I had it down to a fine art and that it hit a nerve because the audience would cry tears of laughter.

I unveiled my baby act on my first Saturday night at the Pescatora. On every other night, the crowd was predominantly British tourists, but Saturday was the big Maltese night out. There were a few laughs, but they soon gave way to a deadly silence.

‘Benny wants to speak to you,’ Basso hissed from behind his bass guitar as I headed off stage.

‘Oh right, I’ll ask him for my fifteen fucking quid.’

Benny was standing in the shadows backstage.

‘Roy,’ he said in a thick accent. ‘I watch your act. Is very funny but I am asking you to take out the routine with the baby.’

‘Why?’

‘Is insult to Maltese people to show skin. I have lots of complaints about it.’

‘Oh …’

‘Very funny – I understand English ways. But
you
have to understand Maltese ways and we don’t allow skin, especially in view of public …’

That was all he said to me, but he gave the band a right rollicking. They were told they should have told me, but it just
hadn’t dawned on any of them to say I could do the baby act any time but Saturday night.

A week after I arrived back in Redcar from Malta, Brian booked me into Blackhall Colliery Working Men’s Club. I was standing at the bar when one of the stewards came up to me.

‘Now then’, he said.

‘OK?’ I replied.

‘No, I am
not
OK. You spoilt my holiday.’

‘I spoilt your
holiday
?’

‘Yeah. I took my wife and kids to Malta for a holiday. On the second night we went out to this restaurant and you walked on stage. And you took the piss out of the North-East.’

‘I am a comedian. That’s what I do.’

‘But you said there was that much muck and filth and dust and coal and slag and shit in Teesside, you could see a red light in the distance and it got clearer and clearer. And then you realised it was the end of your cigarette.’

‘Yeah. It’s a joke.’

‘Not to me it isn’t. Not to me – I protect the North-East.’ And he droned on interminably about the North-East until I’d had enough and interrupted him.

‘I spoilt your holiday?’ I said. ‘You went with Thomas Cook or some other travel company for a fortnight’s holiday in Malta that cost you an arm and a leg and I spoilt it because I cracked jokes about the North-East?’

‘Aye. That’s right.’

‘As far as I am concerned, you’ve the brains of a fucking thalidomide fucking wasp with piles and you want putting down.’ It was an insult I used a lot in those days. Most of the time, it made whoever I directed it at laugh. But this time it didn’t work. As I walked away, the steward hit me with a bicycle chain that he must have kept behind the bar.

I went mad. I jumped on him. I thumped him. I kicked him.
I punched him. I hit him as hard as I could. He tried to fight back, but we were pulled apart by a couple of bouncers. ‘I will kill you,’ I shouted. ‘You fucking twat.’

I walked out and got in my van and left. I phoned Brian the next morning.

‘Boy, is it great to be back home,’ I said. ‘Don’t you
ever
book me into Blackhall Colliery again. I’m never going back there.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ Brian said. ‘I just had a call from Middlesbrough TUC Club. They want you.’

‘But I’ve just done it, Brian,’ I said, ‘just before I went to Malta. I’ll die on my arse, man. The same lads get in there all the time, the same football team, the same hairy-arsed scaffolders and welders. They’ll know my act.’

‘Well, they’re asking for you back. The comic hasn’t turned up and there’s a couple of strippers and the Great Enrico. They want you to fill in for the comic and it’s an extra fiver for you.’

We agreed to meet at the venue the next night. I got in my van and headed down to the TUC club on Longlands Road in Middlesbrough. I’d often joked about what TUC stood for – Ten Useless Cunts on the committee. When I arrived, Brian was waiting. The chairman told me the running order.

‘We’re putting the Great Enrico on first, then the strippers, then you’re doing your spot, then the strippers again, then Enrico, then you on last.’

As I sat in my dressing room, trying to think of different gags and openers that the crowd wouldn’t have heard the last time I played the TUC club, I didn’t give the Great Enrico much thought. I’d not heard of him before and I assumed he’d be a tenor.

Shortly before the show was due to start, a huge Scottish bloke with tattoos and curly hair walked in.

‘Where’s that fucking agent?’ he said in a thick Scottish accent.

‘This is “that fucking agent”,’ I said, pointing at Brian. ‘He’s called Brian and he bought you. He’s booked you off another agency.’

Enrico gave Brian a cursory nod, then busied himself getting his costume and props ready. While Enrico was rooting around in his bag, the club chairman came in looking for Enrico’s sheet music to give to the band. ‘Have you got your dots?’ he said.

‘I only need music to play me on and off,’ Enrico said. ‘
I
am a
magic
act.’

The chairman walked out, leaving Brian and me looking at each other with raised eyebrows. It seemed a bit odd, a big lad like Enrico being a magic act, but I’d seen stranger things in clubland. Fortunately, Enrico soon relaxed and I found he wasn’t quite so much the aggressive Scotsman that he’d first seemed. We cracked open a couple of cans of beer, I sat down on a tall basket that Enrico had brought into the dressing room and we chatted a bit until he was called on stage.

Tom on the organ and Bill on the drums played a fanfare as the concert chairman stepped up to the microphone. ‘Good evening, gentlemen …’ he said. Nobody paid a blind bit of notice. They continued drinking and talking as Enrico walked on stage.

‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘My name is Enrico. It’s nice to be here in the TUC Club in Middlesbrough. Has anyone got an apple?’

Silence.

‘I said: has anyone got an apple?’

Again, silence. Enrico was staring so hard at a bloke in the audience that I twigged that he must have planted an apple with him earlier.

‘Anyone got an
apple
?’ Enrico asked, quite clearly directing his question solely at the one bloke in the audience.

‘I’ve eaten it,’ the bloke said.

There were a few awkward giggles and all the lads who’d been ignoring Enrico suddenly took an interest.

‘You cunt, you’ve ate my fiver!’ Enrico said. ‘There was a fiver in that apple.’

That was it. The club erupted with laughter.

‘Has anyone got a tomato?’ Enrico said.

‘You know fucking well we haven’t,’ another bloke shouted out. ‘If we had, you’d have got it in the face five minutes ago!’

Enrico was getting all the laughs, but I wasn’t sure if they were laughing at him or with him.

‘I daren’t ask if anybody’s got my fucking orange,’ he said.

‘Aye, it’s here,’ someone shouted. And an orange flew through the air, hitting Enrico on the head. He was furious. I could see the steam rising inside him as he went through the rest of his act, trying to salvage his routine with some stupid one-liners when the audience was still laughing about the apple and the tomato. Towards the end, he dipped a torch in a wineglass containing some petrol and lit it. I’d seen strippers do a similar thing, running flaming torches over their bodies, pretending to burn themselves. But the Great Enrico was taking it a stage further. I could smell scorching. He was actually burning himself. Smoke was coming off his arm. This Scot was as hard as nails and he was out to prove it.

A balcony ran around the top of the TUC’s concert hall. Standing on the balcony was a big gang of lads who looked like they were out for trouble. One of them shouted down to Enrico.

‘Oi! Jock!’ he yelled. I saw Enrico wince at being called Jock. ‘Give us a light!’

Holding the wineglass of petrol in his hand, Enrico ambled over to the side of the stage near where the lad was standing on the balcony. He took a swig of the petrol and blew a long, roaring flame towards the balcony.

The head of the bloke on the balcony looked like it was on
fire. When the smoke cleared, he was standing absolutely still, his eyes the only white patches in his sooty black face. He looked like Al Jolson.

Enrico finished his act and walked off stage to a few claps, leaving me watching in the wings, wondering how I was going to top his act. It had been brilliant. If you could have bottled that routine, you would have made a fortune.

The strippers came on and I went back to the dressing room. Midway through me telling Enrico what a wonderful act he had, there was a bang on the door. I opened it to find the lad from the balcony standing there, smoke still rising off his hair.

‘I want a word with that cunt,’ he said.

‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘Well, he’s just getting changed.’

‘I want a word with him
now
.’

‘Could you just hang on a minute, he’s just putting his clothes on.’

Another five lads were standing behind the burnt lad. He must have talked them into giving Enrico a battering. I shut the door. ‘You’d better get out now,’ I said to Enrico. ‘There’s six big lads out there with that guy with the flame.’

‘Aye, it doesn’t matter.’

‘No, if I was you I’d go through
that
door now,’ I said, pointing at the rear exit. ‘Go through that door and down them stairs, get in your car and I’ll get Brian to send you your money.’

‘I’m not frightened.’

‘Look, these lads are fucking hard cases. They look like killers to me. So why don’t you just …’

‘No. It’s all right.’

The lads waiting outside the dressing room started banging hard on the door.

‘Hey!’ I shouted, opening the door. ‘Stop fucking banging on the door.’

‘I want to see that cunt.’

‘I know you do. Let him get fucking changed.’

Behind me I heard Enrico say quite clearly and slowly: ‘Let them in.’

‘Go on!’ said the lad with the smoking hair. ‘Let us in!’

‘I know what
he
said,’ I said. ‘But look,
I
don’t want any trouble. If you’re going to cause trouble, the club will get the police and I’m in the middle of this.’

‘We don’t want any trouble with you, Chubby,’ the lad said. ‘I just want that twat.’

‘It was just a bit of fun that went wrong. Enrico didn’t mean to burn you – but you do look like Sammy Davis Junior.’

The lad’s mates started giggling while the burnt lad twitched like Desperate Dan.

‘Let them in,’ Enrico said behind me.

So I opened the door fully. When I turned around, Enrico was standing bare-chested with a twenty-five-foot python wrapped around his neck, its head gripped in his hand.

‘I want a word with you,’ the burnt lad said.

‘Aye? What you want?’

‘Er …’ the burnt lad said, his voice suddenly reedy and nervous. ‘Is … is … that a real snake?’ In an instant he’d gone from threatening to kill Enrico to outright surrender.

‘Aye,’ Enrico said.

‘A real fucking snake?’

‘Aye.’

‘What’s it doing here?’ gulped the burnt lad.

‘It’s part of my act. Do you want to stroke it?’

‘No, no, no, you’re all right, mate. No, I’m all right, thanks.’ Walking towards the door, the burnt lad stopped just before leaving the dressing room and pointed at his face. ‘And by the way,
that
’s not fucking funny.’

As soon as the burnt lad had left the room, I asked Enrico: ‘Where was that snake?’

‘It was in the basket.’

‘You cunt, I’ve been sat on that fucking basket for the last twenty minutes. You could have told me there was a fucking snake in it!’

‘You’re not frightened, are you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I’m going in the other dressing room.’

After a few more months playing the North-East clubs I was back in Malta. I wanted to show Beryl, who I was living with at the time, the Pescatora and the other restaurants in which I had worked. About a dozen of us went in a group, including Marty Miller, who’d lent me the money for my first drum kit, his wife Sue, a Middlesbrough taxi driver called George and his wife Margaret. Also with us was a theatrical agent called Norman Wales, who smoked a pipe and worked for Brian Findlay, and Norman’s wife Louvane. Norman made us all laugh when he fell asleep on a deckchair one afternoon while the rest of us were swimming. He woke up after an hour to find that he’d fallen asleep with his hand on his chest, leaving a perfect white silhouette of his hand on his brown torso. His wife Lou was a lovely, clever woman who wore glasses and was a lot of fun.

Beryl and I spent many days with Norman and Lou, going to see the sights or swimming in the sea. Near the end of the fortnight’s holiday we decided to take the ferry to Gozo, a neighbouring island where the locals made beautiful lace cloths and handkerchiefs that we thought we’d buy as presents for friends and family at home. But storm clouds were gathering by the time we got to the ferry port and the sailings were cancelled for that day.

While we were driving back to the hotel, the car that Beryl and I had hired broke down. Beryl got into a car with Marty and Sue and I squeezed in with Norman, Lou, George and Margaret.

Not far from the hotel, as we were coming down a mountainside near Rabat, the heavens opened. Over the next two
hours, more than eighteen inches of rain fell on an island that usually got only twenty-four inches in a year. It rained so hard that we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces. The car had no windscreen wipers, so George pulled over to wait until the downpour subsided.