Dancing in the Darkness (9 page)

I
n every joke there is an element of truth. And if you repeat a joke too many times, it simply becomes more and more true. This chapter looks at the consequences of that kind of behaviour – when you adopt a mannerism or expression in jest and then find it gradually becoming a genuine part of your personality.

I remember making that mistake with racism, thinking it was OK to use the word ‘nigger’ ironically – till I got thrown out of a minicab by a driver from Sierra Leone who couldn’t help overhearing me and ‘missed’ the irony. That’s the trouble with irony and comedy in general: real life is always liable to catch up and hijack the gag.

When your head’s stuck deep in a snowdrift, it’s hard to know your arse from your elbow. The more the media coined us cock rockers, the more we behaved like real-life cocks, because the snowdrift of fame had hijacked our gag and was somehow transforming what began as a joke into a reality.

Let’s begin with our drummer, Ed Graham, whose finest moments were on airplanes. I’ll explain. One time, we were all hungover, boarding an early-morning American Airlines flight from Toronto to New York. After a night in the former’s infamous burlesque den – The Bovine Sex Lounge – we were all silently mourning the death of the night before. Towards the rear of our funeral cortege, tour manager Moz solemnly escorted The Darkness drummer – eyes and face like road maps and a slapped arse respectively – into Business Class.

There, sat next to Justin, he was free again to misbehave. After a night on vodka, sambucas and gack, he ordered one of those harmless-looking miniature wine bottles. Half a dozen later, I advised him to try something solid and he grudgingly ordered a bag of salted peanuts. I suppose that makes me partly responsible for what happened next.

It took only a mouthful of said nuts before Ed lurched forward in a choking fit. Perhaps the
preemptive
burp should have been a warning sign, but none of us was prepared for the sight of Mr Graham literally puking his guts up over the
unfortunate couple in front. It was undoubtedly disgusting but, you’d have to say, utterly avoidable. The respectable and well-dressed Canadian wife of the pair appeared to be in a state of shock and was trembling with anger, drenched as she and her husband were in a rock drummer’s vomit.

As the stewardess tried to clean her up with tissues and mineral water, she kept mumbling deliriously about how ‘dangerous’ it was. I remember that struck me as an odd choice of word. ‘Dirty’, ‘disgusting’, ‘devilish’ even – but ‘dangerous’? It was the only time I’ve ever seen someone covered in sick taking the moral high ground. Ed slurred his apologies, claiming that he’d just choked on the peanuts and that it was all ‘a meshtake’ (no shit, Sherlock), before we told him to shut up and act like he was ill.

I seem to recall there was a threat of legal action (the poor couple soon got wind of which famous band the culprit belonged to) before they probably realised it wasn’t worth it for the price of two Business Class tickets, the dry-cleaning bill and a bottle of decent shampoo. Theoretically, anyone could be sick, after all.

Soon, more clichéd rock star antics were reported in the
Sunday Sport
, beneath the headline:
‘I Made Darkness Rockers Hard!’ It could go down in history as the first-ever
Sunday Sport
story to actually contain a grain of truth, and related to an incident that occurred when a group of us visited Birmingham’s red-light district one rainy afternoon. It was my idea, I’ll admit.

The opportunist dancer, whose less-
than-ethereal
countenance graced half a page in the rag, related how ‘Bassist Frankie pulled the funniest faces as I gyrated for his pleasure’, adding that Dan Hawkins had tried to scrounge a ‘private dance’ at half the price. But Dan wasn’t even there and the faces
he
pulled when I showed him the piece were very definitely un-funny

One of our crew was the culprit: he’d impersonated our guitarist, thinking the dancer in question would be delighted to entertain a celebrity at 50% discount. He’d haggled her down from
£
20 to
£
10, forcing the
Sunday Sport
to reveal how ‘Dan’ had been a real tightwad. The real Dan Hawkins was furious. And to make matters worse, he was one of those prudish guys with a real downer on lap-dancing clubs or anything overtly lewd – not to mention being madly in love with his new girlfriend, Lucy, at the time. You had to feel at least a bit of sympathy for him.

Afterwards, our manager, Sue Whitehouse, tried to blame it all on me – like I was a naughty schoolboy. If she’d been disappointed at our lack of originality, I may have agreed with her and perhaps even apologised, but no way was I going to say sorry for having a drink and enjoying an erotic dance recital.

It wasn’t all roses for Justin either. As well as being our manager, Sue was also his girlfriend, and his excesses invariably surfaced when she was absent. During one such hiatus, he completely lost it on a Japan Air flight returning from Tokyo to London after a week-long bender in the midst of the intensive, but hardly demanding, ‘promo’
*
part of our ongoing attempt to crack the Japanese market. He’d split with her again. They always managed to carry on their roles in the band when this happened, but clearly it took its toll.

You can buy anything in Japanese toy shops. Justin chose a full-body one-piece human microphone costume. It was surprisingly realistic – the microphone head had a grill that allowed the wearer to see out, and there were no holes for the
arms or legs; in short, an inspired work of comic ingenuity. On the flight home, Justin became our in-flight microphone impersonator.

At first, the timid Japanese stewardesses were a little too polite in dealing with him. He’d been drinking solidly for a week and the effects were there for all to see. Eventually, when he was leaning against the exit-door handle, dribbling at the mouth and gibbering uncontrollably, a pair of them finally steered him to his seat. He then promptly fell asleep, began to snore, and pissed himself, soiling the beloved costume. Being Japanese, it’s hard to tell if the designer of this unfortunate outfit would have taken umbrage or smiled sagely at this golden tribute to his handiwork.

I
t’s unwise to base your music taste on numerology. If I had, then I’d be a devoted Sum 41 fan by now, because my older brother’s favourite band of all time are Level 42 while my younger is still fixated on UB40. (Stranger still, when this book is due to be published those will be our precise ages, and in that order – 40, 41 and 42.) Our worlds collided in a similarly coincidental fashion when they required a ‘name’ band to entertain two (anonymous) Russian oligarchs along with certain Hollywood A-listers and a bunch of models on a super-yacht in St Tropez during the summer of 2004.

My brothers were raking it in as Jim’ll Fix
It-style
party organisers for the jet set – namely the Russian
nouveau riche
, who were still in the first flush of being flush. (In other words, they knew the
price of everything and the value of nothing.) The seemingly innocuous plate-smashing parties on the island of Mykonos, the privately arranged bullfights in Ecuador and skiing trips to Whistler in Canada. The changing scenery made no odds. High-class hookers and class A chemicals may be expensive but our oligarchs were still pigs at a trough. They’re not called filthy rich for nothing.

In reality, by this time The Darkness had peaked and people were starting to get a bit sick of us, but the very wealthy live in a bubble, so they weren’t to know that. They simply wanted something big to happen at one of their parties and we happened to be big. At least, that’s what my brothers told them. Centuries of Tsarist autocracy, decades of Communist dictatorships, years of ‘perestroika’ anticlimax, and now 45 minutes from Britain’s finest purveyors of pub rock – you could almost call it ‘Crime And Punishment’, if like me you had a penchant for tiresome literary references.

Our manager Sue widened her eyes when I put it to her. Who wouldn’t? We were set to make over a quarter of a million pounds with all expenses paid – a private jet from Luton Airport (with Louis Cristal champagne, a lobster buffet and smoking on board), production costs covered and a couple of
days’ holiday on the super-yacht for the band to ‘unwind’. We agreed it would be mad to turn the gig down, though homeboy Dan wouldn’t stop muttering about the Russian mafia and how he’d prefer to spend the time with his girlfriend.

The day before departure, Sue and the band suddenly did an about-turn without explaining why. None of them took my calls, except for Ed, and he didn’t have a clue what was going on.

My brothers had been let down at the last minute and were set to lose a lot of money. I put it down to a fear of gangsters, plus variations on a theme of ‘Frankie
must
be taking a backhander from his brothers’. The first case looked like classic knee-jerk paranoia – ‘They’re Russian guys with a lot of money so they must be dangerous, surely?’ In the second case, it seemed they were ‘projecting’ somewhat: i.e. ‘How could Frankie
not
be taking a backhander from his brothers?’ Both reactions were nonsense, of course – there were no gangsters and no backhanders.

Yet fate decreed it would be a momentous occasion for my older brother, Tim. After
last-minute
rescheduling, apologies to oligarchs, fruitless negotiations with Simple Minds and the re-booking of luxury private jets, he managed to
locate and book his childhood heroes, Level 42. It was beyond surreal but strangely gratifying to imagine my brothers – along with certain Hollywood A-listers and the aforementioned oligarchs – enjoying the eighties cod-funk atrocities of Mark King and his chums on a
super-yacht
down St Tropez way.

In the end, everyone was happy – except for me. It was the principle that rankled. That’s one of the countless hazards regarding French blood: that knee-jerk Gallic sense of injustice rears its righteous head at the most inappropriate moments. With the perceived betrayal of my family members – and the accompanying mistrust and paranoia – it was all I could do not to lose my faith in reconstituted eighties hair metal.

I
n January 2004, we played the Big Day Out. According to Wikipedia, ‘The Big Day Out (BDO) is an annual music festival that tours Australia and New Zealand which originated in Sydney in 1992.’ We were looking forward to it, as most bands we’d talked to reckoned it was the most fun you could possibly have on tour: the crowds were enthusiastic, there were plenty of in-between dates to visit the beach, and the girls were reckoned to be ‘the easiest in the world’ – though I still preferred the ‘catch me if you can’ variety, if truth be told.

Unfortunately, by the time we arrived our antipodal fantasies had soured slightly, and for that we only had ourselves to blame. The Aussie press had picked up on our motor-mouthed rants against The Kings Of Leon and The Strokes, and were stirring things up. Of course, bands don’t always get on with each other, a bit like prom girls in a
high-school
beauty pageant or pussy cats in a pet-shop display box – they’re all desperate to be picked out and petted to prove they’re cuter than the rest.

It’s true we gave the impression of being brattish and proud of it. The defence would argue we were just having fun. The prosecution, however, would have had us down as spiteful and ungracious. It was inevitably going to catch up with us eventually. Still, in the first few days we had a great time, bonding with The Dandy Warhols over a shared love of ping pong, kissing each other’s arses and getting heroically shit-faced.

In Brisbane, I came off stage with the mother of all hangovers. The rest of the band and crew drifted back to the hotel. It was a long hot Gold Coast afternoon as I mooched around the backstage area slurping at ice-cold piña coladas from Hospitality.

Two members of New Yorkers The Strokes were heading towards me. We hadn’t yet met, but I’d always been intrigued by the blank-canvas aspect of their personas. Give or take a silly moustache and pirate headband, I was a bit of a blank canvas myself. But what was going on here? My excitement grew as I noticed how animated they
were, a pair of Strokes with their very own security guy in tow.

It was the drummer and singer. ‘Hey, man, we need to talk to you about shit,’ said Fab, the drummer, famous at the time for dating Drew Barrymore. ‘We hear you’ve been dissing us in the papers. What the fuck’s your problem, man?’

Vague insecurities began to engulf me – a cynic’s karmic desserts, no doubt.

Then the singer, Julian Casablancas piped up: ‘Yeah, where do you get off on that shit, man? Where we come from respect is important; we don’t just go ripping into other bands for no reason. You guys are just gay fucking metal anyway.’ There was a real Italian meatballs vibe coming through. Nevertheless, the stroke of pain tore my heart and opened my jaws slightly, in readiness for a reply.

When once accused of being drunk by an upset hostess, Winston Churchill replied words to the effect of, ‘I may well be drunk but you, madam, are ugly and I will be sober in the morning.’ How could I possibly live up to that? Instead, I feigned ignorance: ‘OK, guys, maybe someone in my band did slag you off in print, but it wasn’t me personally, so what can I do about it? Anyway, I thought you lot invented free speech?’ 

Julian eyeballed me aggressively, while Fab seemed to be practising at ‘bursting for the toilet’ in a Lee Strasberg method actor’s workshop, before finally signing off with a volley of insults. Now it was just the singer, an embarrassed-looking security man and myself. Casablancas glared at me derisively, snorted and shook his head in exasperation, before flouncing off as well, security in tow. I was delighted to have finally found myself in a scene from a
Godfather
movie.

A couple of roadies had overseen the confrontation and the festival gossip machine soon went into overdrive – everyone kept coming up and asking what had
really
happened. There wasn’t much to tell – The Strokes were young, temperamental and full of hot Italian blood. At least, they acted like they were. However, just like those trigger-happy New York Italians from the movies, beneath all the jive there was an underlying sense of honour. The following day, drummer Fab marched right into our dressing room, as we prepared for showtime, and, in front of the whole band, apologised sincerely – with good grace and no little humility. He knew it was wrong for three guys to gang up on one. The two of us then enjoyed a sloppy hug – meaning that I hugged the
guy who was sleeping with Drew Barrymore, practically making me
ET
.

Around this time, we all kind of ditched the siege-mentality mindset that had previously helped forge us together as a band. It was time for a change. The rest of the tour was all about doing our own thing: hanging out side-stage for The Strokes and The Kings Of Leon (Ed), ordering banana smoothies from room service (me), frolicking on the beach with the road crew (Dan) and ducking into toilet cubicles with a certain renowned heavy metal drummer who must remain nameless (Justin).