Frank Skinner Autobiography (30 page)

But Hughes and Johnson's was still doing my head in. I'd fucked up at school, I realised that now. My mind felt like Terry's owl, restricted and yearning for flight. I went to my mom and dad and asked them if they'd help me out financially if I quit work and went and did some O- and A-levels, full-time. My mom, understandably enough, pointed out that I'd never done any studying when I was at school so why should I start now? But my dad surprised me. He said everyone deserved a second chance, and if it was what I wanted to do, he'd help me as much as he could. So I did it. I turned my back on Hughes and Jack's, as it was known, and started my course at Warley College of Technology.

However, despite the fact that my mom and dad were bunging me a few bob, I had to supplement my earnings by doing some more factory work, this time as a labourer. Firstly, my mom got me a job at the glass factory where she worked. Her job was putting those glass slides they use on microscopes into little cardboard boxes, with a slice of foam-rubber to stop them moving about. She did this eight hours a day, five days a week. My job was to keep the women supplied with glass, tidy up, and do what I was fucking told. The worst bit was having to dump the scrap glass. I'd load a wheelbarrow up as high as I could, then tip it down a hole in the floor. I'd then run for cover, because as soon as the glass hit the skip several floors below, it would send up a massive cloud of glass-dust that, I suspected, wasn't that good for inhaling.

Then I worked at a local furniture factory, just around the corner from where Kevin Rowlands, the main man for Dexy's Midnight Runners, lived. My main job here was to smash up perfectly good tables, bookcases and three-piece suites and burn them in the furnace. Don't ask. I didn't. I quite liked this. I'd let my old vandalism skills get a bit rusty and this was a chance to sharpen them up a bit. In fact, I loved smashing and burning
so
much that I did what everyone thought was impossible and set the furnace on fire. Fire-engines were called and there was all sorts of commotion, and it wasn't even Carnival Day. I was taken off furnace-duty for good after that. It was at the furniture factory that I perfected the skill of eating my sandwiches while I worked so I'd have a whole lunch hour dedicated purely to boozing. I found that four pints of cider made the afternoon whiz past that little bit quicker. I worked with a bloke called Gary, who became a good mate. We'd spend the whole day talking about music, and he'd make me compilation tapes of his favourite acts, Iggy Pop, Velvet Underground and The Electric Chairs. It was the summer of ‘Come on, Eileen' and we'd often belt it out in the afternoons if there were no bosses about. I wonder if Kevin ever heard it in the distance.

At college I started, for the first time in my life, to actually do some work. I felt like I had to make the most of my second chance. I found that I really liked the English literature stuff, and even read one or two of the course books. Not the novels, of course. I preferred Coles Notes, the ‘handy study guides'. Coles Notes were like novels for people who had other stuff to do. And I had other stuff to do. I'd met a girl at college and we were spending lots of time together. If you ignored the fact that she was spotty, she looked a bit like a young Glenda Jackson. (Have you noticed that a lot of the people I've known looked like a version of somebody famous? Strange.) I had a real thing about Glenda Jackson. I used to have
The Music Lovers
on video and watched that scene with her on the train, over and over. Now, coincidentally, she represents my area of London in parliament. There can't be that many people who've had a wank to their local MP. (Now I'm going to get loads of letters from men who live in Kensington and Chelsea.)

I don't think I should name this girl, so I'll call her Glenda. Her and me got very physical but she drew the line at penetration. Of course, I didn't tell any of my friends this. I said we were banging away like a shit-house door in a gale, and tried hard to make this dream a reality. I really wanted a relationship that was like the movies, preferably
The Music Lovers
, but they always seemed to turn out weird. I was around Glenda's one night, snogging her on the settee. I had my arms inside her open shirt, and she had one arm around my waist, one in my lap, and was running her fingers through my hair, in a very sensual way. After about ten minutes of this, it began to dawn on me that what she was doing actually required three arms. I looked up and Glenda's Down's Syndrome sister, who I didn't even know existed, was playfully massaging my scalp. No disrespect to her, but after she was chucked out I had to sit down, have a couple of cans, and slowly pull myself together before I could laugh about it with Glenda.

Not long after, we went to a dance where I introduced her to my mate, Duck. Duck, on leave from the army, was something of a ladies' man. Now, in my experience, anyone who can be accurately described as a ‘ladies' man' can also always be accurately described as a complete cunt, but Duck was, surprisingly, quite a nice chap. (And I'd have to say, if pushed, that he looked like a cheeky version of Paul Reaney. Oh well, one for the football fans.) Nevertheless, nice chap or not, he made a play for Glenda that night. Perhaps I slightly blotted my own copy-book by getting up on stage when they played ‘The Stripper' and doing a very drunken striptease which culminated not only in a lot of unashamed nob-exposure but also in quite a lot of nob-stretching and wiggling as well.

You would have thought, would you not, that this would have made Glenda love me even more, but who can predict the whims of a woman. Duck whisked Glenda off her feet while I stretched and wiggled, and saw her the next night, behind my back. Having been tipped off by friends, I confronted him about this. He admitted everything and offered to let me hit him as hard as I liked, in the face, because, as he explained, ‘it will make us both feel better'. If Glenda had made me a similar offer I would have gone for it but I could not bring myself to hit a mate. So we shook hands and he bought me a couple of ciders. Then, after some banter, he said to me, in front of about ten mates, ‘Mind you, you could have told me she was a virgin. I got blood all over my brand-new sheepskin.' Much jeering and laughing followed. Duck had been away, in the army during the course of my lying so he just looked confused. What I couldn't achieve in three months, he had managed in an evening. ‘I must join another band,' I thought to myself.

A few weeks later, I was round my mate Nick's house when he stuck on a new album he'd just bought by an American band called The Ramones. When I heard the first track, ‘Blitzkrieg Bop', the hairs went up on the back of my neck. There and then, I decided I wanted to be in a punk band.

This was 1976 and punk was only just starting to filter through to the provinces. I used to read about it in
NME
every week, usually accompanied by a picture of Siouxie Sue in black PVC. Essentially, that was all I needed to know. Then I saw an advert in the Birmingham
Evening Mail
saying that a punk band was looking for a vocalist. I phoned the number and we arranged to meet in Yates' Wine Lodge on Corporation Street that coming Saturday night. The punk band were two brothers called Paul and Alan, a drummer and a guitarist. They suggested an immediate audition so we stepped out on to a busy Saturday night Corporation Street and I sang an a cappella, full-volume ‘Blitzkrieg Bop'. When I'd done my final ‘Hey ho, let's go', they smiled and offered me the job.

We rehearsed in a church hall in the Yardley area of Birmingham. One number involved me reading a passage from
The Black Panther Story
, a book about the villain who had done over that post office near Hughes and Jack's a few years before. The chosen passage described the Panther killing some innocent night-watchman at the nearby Dudley Freightliner depot. In court, the Panther claimed his shotgun had gone off accidentally, twice. As I read, in a punky, ranting-poet voice, the boys blasted out a punk-instrumental version of Roy C's ‘Shotgun Wedding'. One night it got so loud the neighbours complained and a police constable came knocking at the door. He decided to do the community-policing bit and got quite chatty. ‘Have you done many gigs?' he asked, thus demonstrating that he knew the lingo. Sadly, he pronounced ‘gigs' with a soft ‘g', and punk bands didn't really do ‘jigs'. Still, he was very nice, and didn't seem at all fazed by the fact that the drummer was wearing a Nazi uniform.

I started going to loads of punk gigs. ‘Anarchy in the UK' had just been released, and me and my mate, Fez, went to see the Sex Pistols in Bogart's, a poky little cellar-bar on New Street. Word had got round about the Pistols and the place was jammed. Paul and Alan were in there somewhere but Fez and me were not about to give up our spot at the bar to go and find them. We waited and waited but still no Pistols. Bogart's was only licensed till 10.30 and it was already nearly twenty past nine. Fez and me were resisting going for a piss because it was so hard to move, but eventually Fez gave in and disappeared to the bogs. It took him twenty minutes to get there and back.

I wasn't having any of that. I reached over the bar and managed to grab an empty lemonade bottle without being seen. In the crowd, it was easy to piss in it unnoticed, so I pissed till the bottle was full and then replaced it.

Shortly afterwards, a very big bloke with a moustache ordered a pint of lager and a glass of lemonade. Fez and me watched in silence as the barmaid picked up my bottle of piss and filled a lady's glass from it. One side-effect of heavy drinking is, of course, that your piss loses its normal yellowy colour and becomes clear. Tash-man passed the glass to his, I have to say very pretty, girlfriend, and she had a girl-sized swig. She turned up her nose, said something to Tashy, and then he took a swig as well. El Tasho turned to the barmaid and said, ‘This ain't lemonade. It's just warm water.' At which point the barmaid took a swig as well, and then offered it to a second barmaid for verification. The second barmaid agreed with the Tash-meister, and they opened another bottle. Fez and me were crying with laughter but we had to hold back in case Johnny Tash got suspicious. Was this, I asked Fez, what people meant by a night on the piss?

At ten, the Pistols finally showed. This was their original line-up, with Glenn Matlock on bass, rather than Sid Vicious. They were so loud in the small basement room that Fez and me put cigarette-ends in our ears to take the edge off the volume. A half-hour set and they were done. As they left the room I stood cheering wildly. Johnny Rotten grabbed my hand, shook it and said, ‘Thanks mate. They won't let us play anymore.' I know it's not very punk ethicish, but I was really thrilled that he'd spoken to me and shook my hand.

Twenty years later, we had him chucked off
Fantasy World Cup
during the commercial break because he was being such an arse. As soon as I got home after that incident, I put on the Pistols' ‘God save the Queen' to make sure it wasn't spoiled forever. It still sounded great.

The place to see punk in Birmingham was Barbarella's nightclub. I was down there most Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays for the punk nights. I saw The Clash, who were brilliant even though there was a bloke at the back, with long hair and glasses, who kept shouting, ‘Oh, why don't you play a diminished chord?' Incredibly, The Clash were supporting a local rock band called Suburban Studs, who had jumped on the punk bandwagon. They were so bad we had to ice them off, that is, throw handful after handful of ice-cubes at them until they went away.

I never got through these gigs sober and was often woken by a bouncer, standing over me as I sat, face flat on the bar-table. I'd look up and people would be sweeping up and washing glasses, and I'd creep out and stagger the four miles home. This was fine if I paced my drinking so that I was still conscious for the band, but sometimes I got it wrong. I slept through Billy Idol's Generation X two nights running. I didn't make it home at all the first night. I woke up at about 8.00 a.m. on a grass verge near the very busy Five Ways Roundabout. No passer-by had bothered to find out if I was alright. They probably thought I fell out of a fuckin' aeroplane.

Anyway, the punk band never really got past the rehearsal stage, so I drifted away. They stuck with it, became the Prefectz, and got quite a following on the punk circuit. The last time I saw Alan was in Barbarella's. Elvis had just died and he said he wasn't bothered. We never spoke again.

I was happy at college, and had made a lot of new friends. One of these, an albino kid called Smithy, like me had become obsessed with kung fu films. Bruce Lee, of course, was our hero, but we really liked the obscure films as well, stuff like
Deaf-mute Heroine
and
Kung Fu the Head-Crusher.
We'd spend hours reciting dialogue from the films and talking like we'd been badly dubbed. My mate Tim and me even went to a place that advertised itself as a School of Kung Fu to find out if we could get lessons. The bloke at the school told us that if he taught us, after six months, we'd not only be killing-machines but also ‘able to run to, say, Bristol, without getting out of breath'. Which, I suppose, would be perfect if you wanted to kill somebody in Bristol. We didn't sign up because he never looked at us throughout the conversation. Instead, he gazed into the mirror, blow-drying his hair.

I actually owned one of those kung fu stars, y'know, a flat metal star about five inches across, with razor-sharp edges for skimming at enemies. I got a mate from Hughes and Jack's to make one specially for me. He even put pretend Chinese writing on it and stuff. I used to go to Langley Park to practise my aim but a bloody dog ran off with it. Mind you, it was in his back at the time.

I made the last bit up. Honest.

I was the cabaret at the Waterstone's annual dinner last night. Waterstone's is, of course, one of the biggest booksellers in the country. Part of writing a book, I am discovering, is meeting a lot of people who sell books because then, for some reason, their shops will sell more of your book than they would have done if they hadn't met you. My publishers are very keen on this process, but I can't quite see it myself. The logic, I'm told, is that a manager of, say, Waterstone's in Leicester meets me, and a few months later when the book is about to come out, she sees a list of potential books to stock and thinks, ‘Oh, I've met him. I'll order loads of his book and put it on very prominent display and actually pressure customers into buying it by saying stuff like, “What's this you're getting?
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
? Why are you buying that? I've never met Louis de Carbonari, or whatever his stupid name is. You wanna buy that Frank Skinner book. I spoke to him for forty seconds in a London hotel. Wait there and I'll go get it for you.”'