Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (4 page)

‘I’m
not late, Frank. We’ve been heavy on the old sherbs for a few hours and I stopped off in the lobby for a gypsy’s kiss. Could have used yours, but some people are a bit funny about
that!’

It was here I swear I heard Frank Zappa growl. Literally growl. However, we knew everything was going to be all right. You see, Tom had brought Frank a present. Armed with this we were confident that before much longer we would all be swapping phone numbers, lacing daisies into each other’s hair and laughing about how incredible it was that we had all got off on the wrong foot. The gift was
that
good. You see, through the rock’n’roll grapevine, Tommy had learned that the last time Zappa was in London he’d seen a copy of
Time Out
magazine that featured his face on the cover, cleverly formed of thousands of tiny music notes. Apparently somebody had heard him say he considered it rather good. Acting upon this lead, Tommy had tracked down the original artwork and secured it. This, in terms of the volcanic mood in the room, was to be our get-out-of-jail-free card. Thinking about it, it’s a wonder we didn’t extend the gag and wind him up further, possibly burning an old tyre in his hotel suite fireplace, just so we could watch the thunderous reaction dissolve into a beaming grin when we handed him the painting.

Tom passed it across and Zappa unsheathed it from the stiffened cardboard holder.

‘What’s
this?’
monotoned the maestro coldly.

‘It’s
that thing,
Frank,’
said Tom.

‘Somebody
told us about you saw
it,’
I helpfully chipped in, losing grip on the mother tongue in my enthusiasm.

Frank Zappa gave a short baffled shake of his head and then looked back up to us like someone handed a summons on their wedding day.

‘It’s
that thing you saw, someone said, you
know,’
came Tommy again, by now selflessly protecting his sources lest they too might get dragged into in the looming bloodbath.

‘Ya
got
me,’
sighed our star with renewed weariness.
‘I
don’t know what this piece of shit
is.’

Monty, possibly drunker than we two, stepped in to clarify:
‘No
, not a piece of shit. Nothing like that. You said you really liked it and Tom got it. It’s yours – from
us.’

‘I
said
I
liked
this?’
spat Zappa with a disbelieving snort.
‘I
think you must be confusing me with
 . . . 
let’s say, a guy like Ted Nugent.
¹
I can do shit like this in my
sleep.’
And with that he threw the thing away, spinning it with such force that it cracked against the far wall.
‘Now
ask me some goddamn questions and let’s get this fucking thing
done.’

He was rude and we were stupidly drunk. I should have left it there. I
really
should have left it there. But we all go through a stage of believing that, if we could only spend five minutes with one of our heroes, we could show them that we are nothing like all the boss-eyed bumpkins they usually have to suffer and are in fact exactly the sort of down-to-earth great company they must be starved of in their rarefied fame bubble. We know their humour, interests and their speech patterns. We even know what bores them! In short, we
are their soul mates
 . . . 
all bar the trivial matter of never having met. In Zappa’s case, I had actually come close to that, sort of, back in December 1971. That was the night he was attacked onstage at London’s Rainbow Theatre and hurled into the orchestra pit by the jealous boyfriend of a super-fan. It was an assault that put him in hospital for nearly a year and came close to permanently crippling him. The gift of the painting might have failed, but this memory was going to be my
‘in’.

‘Frank,’
I said,
‘you
remember the night you got thrown off the stage by that
madman?’

He didn’t answer, but by the way his eyebrows shot up we may assume he did recall something of the night in question.

‘Well,’
I went on,
‘I
had a ticket for the show after that, only it got cancelled! I’ve still got it somewhere. All my friends went to the early show, but I thought the late one would be better so I got tickets for that. And of course there wasn’t one
 . . .’
I finished, or more accurately trailed off with a particularly weak half-smile.

The immediate lesson was, sometimes you really need to say words out loud to yourself in private before offering them up, simply to find if they have even a scintilla of collective worth. Having voiced this bunch, I was pretty sure they hadn’t.

There are some people – aunts, sympathetic partners, small children, et cetera – who will kindly overlook the paucity of an anecdote and nobly try to fill the ghastly dead air that ensues after one has laid such a conversational egg. You won’t be surprised to learn that Frank Zappa isn’t on that saintly list. He was quiet for a while, his clasped hands resting on crossed legs that were vibrating in agitation. Then, glaring at me with a cold rage, my hero spoke:

‘OK,
I need you to leave – and I mean right
now.’

In response to this I smiled at him vacantly like a hundred per cent half-wit.

‘And
that’s all there is to
it,’
he said.

And in that final sentence the two worlds of Frank & Fred collided.
‘And
that’s all there is to
it,’
was possibly my old man’s favourite phrase, used to double-underline any declaration and
regularly employed just in case his audience was under any illusion that he was opening the floor to a conversational counterpoint.

‘You’re
not going out in those fucking shoes – and that’s all there is to
it.’

‘We
are not watching
Monty
fucking
Python
– and that’s all there is to
it.’

‘You
are
coming out with us on Saturday to Aunt May’s – and that’s all there is fucking to
it.’

I often think a really strong Prime Minister would use the line at the despatch box:

‘We
are going to drop a fucking bomb on Finland – and that’s all there is to
it.’

The moment Frank Zappa said it to me I could visualize the old man sitting beside him, wearing an identical expression and turning to say,
‘See
what I mean about him, Frank? Silly as
arseholes.’

I left the hotel room as instructed. Monty and Tom say the atmosphere remained flatlined, despite their attempts to haul it out of the permafrost. The article, when it was published, made Zappa seem particularly sullen and difficult with no mention of the fiasco that had coloured his mood. Happily, among much of my day-to-day circle, offending the composer of
‘Peaches
en
Regalia’
carried slightly less weight than offending the real-life Percy the Tramp.

However – and to return to the point I think I was making – my dad’s indifferent reaction to my work changed when TV put me in the orbit of names he knew and situations he understood. While not exactly bursting with pride, he would sometimes obliquely enquire as to whether this unexpected boost to his reputation on the estate was worth getting used to.

‘This
telly
game,’
he’d ask as he drove me to work,
‘d’you
reckon you’ll stick it
out?’

I’d tell him I reckoned so, and he would pull a face as if to say,
‘I’d
get stuck in while you can, boy
 . . .’

Over those first couple of years, the extraordinary popularity of the
Six O’Clock Show
in London took everyone involved with it by complete surprise. Broadcast live virtually all year, it grabbed an
enormous audience every Friday evening. In terms of onscreen confidence and star pulling power, the show was more like a network Light Entertainment juggernaut than a vehicle for the featherweight end of local news. I became thoroughly identified with it in people’s minds, signifying as it did the start of many a working house-hold’s weekend, and I was very happy to go along with every bit of its broad-brush wide-eyed hoopla. This was easy street. This was plush. The rising amounts of money that LWT were throwing at me required but the flimsiest of workloads. Here’s how it went, year in, year out.

I couldn’t drive, so on Monday lunchtime my old man would pick me up in his motor and chauffeur me to what is now the ITV studios by the Thames. There I’d barrel through a raucous hour-long meeting, during which all the real makers of the show would outline their simple but inventive ideas for the short film reports around which that week’s show and guests would be hung. As noted, the atmosphere in the ideas room would be ebullient and competitive – if not quite up to the unforgiving standard of
NME
editorial meetings, where you really did need every bit of jousting armour your wits could muster. What they both had in common was that, once business was concluded and the dead had been buried, everyone went straight to the bar to guzzle down liquids as if an enormous asteroid had been sighted hurtling past the moon.

On any of the three days following these team meetings I would be required to front one of the selected reports, craftily adapted as they were from an original item spotted in one of the capital’s micro publications. It might be about rag-and-bone men. It might be about budgerigars. Eccentrics and their inventions was always a winner. Solid-gold subjects like nudists, improbable ghost sightings and ecclesiastical fashion shows became our staple fare. Quite often I was required to dress up and behave idiotically for a gag piece to camera, emerging from inside a wheelie bin or hanging on a bell-ringer’s rope. On location days, everybody involved enjoyed long lunches in good restaurants – all cheques picked up by LWT, of course – and all of us had a fair few again after the final shot. Sometimes well before it too.

Come Friday, the show would be staggered through once in a mid-afternoon rehearsal then boomed out at six o’clock absolutely live in front of an audience with a top-notch guest joining we regulars to chat breezily about events. By seven it was all done; the audience would applaud wildly and copious amounts of free food and drink would be forced upon everybody concerned.

This light, stress-free schedule was my entire week. So what did I do with the rest of my time? Well, fuck-all. Absolutely fuck-all.

Possibly because I couldn’t allow myself to believe that this nonsense would amount to anything, I may have been stockpiling my greater energies for some more tangible toil yet to reveal itself as my True Calling. I knew I was pretty slick at frothy TV, but who wouldn’t be? Competent showing off certainly didn’t feel like a particular skill or anything I could take elsewhere if they decided to hand me my hat – a prospect that didn’t unsettle me one iota. I was very aware that I simply lacked whatever determined, or maybe needy, gene it is that makes show-folk strive. Most new TV performers, having finally got their break, really, really don’t want to fuck it all up. After all, this was
‘it’,
the longed-for breakthrough signalling that their career was on the up at long last. The problem was, I didn’t come from a background where people had
‘careers’.
You went to work, you had various jobs at different times, but it was all in a jumble. It did not define you or plot your course in life – and thank God for that. All of us on the
Six O’Clock Show
felt extremely fortunate to varying degrees, but I felt lucky in a different way, like when you find money down the back of a couch or get into the pictures without paying. I certainly never regarded any of this folderol as
‘getting
my foot in the door’. What door? As far as I could see, I had arrived in Wonderland by accidentally popping up out of a loose manhole cover.

Had I been required to struggle a bit, or even had the tiniest hankering for the media lifestyle, I would have been completely absorbed in how well I was now doing and possibly gone round the bend in an orgy of self-love, like so many do in broadcasting. If I’m honest, I reckon I would have made a first-class media-mad person. We will meet examples of this potty breed as my story unfolds. On the many
occasions I got to observe them pout, rant and rave, I always suspected that, given a more insecure nature, a good excuse and a penchant for unhinging drugs, I could have given all them a right old run for their money. As it was, ever since quitting school without so much as an O-level to wave at the hard-knock life, employment had felt like extended lark. Even if it came to a halt in the next heartbeat, I would still have looked on it as an exhilarating suspension of real life. I imagine my wife would have said to me, in the normal years that followed my fleeting fame,
‘Do
you remember when you used to be on telly a
lot?’
and I’d say,
‘I
know!’
Following which the pair of us would crease up at the giddy memory of such a preposterous liberty.

Perhaps it is my passport for the years 1978–88 that best sums up my half-hearted commitment to whatever it was I felt I did for a living. In the space on the document marked
Occupation
were written the curious words
Music Writer
– and they were written in my own hand too. When I had filled out the form for this, my first proper hardback passport, I had been writing in fits and starts for the punk fanzine
Sniffin’
Glue
– a stapled-together amateur effort sold by myself and a few friends. The idea that I could put
‘Journalist’
down as my profession seemed hopelessly grand. So I put
‘music
writer’
and toddled off to the official offices in Petty France to hand in the forms, prepared, if called upon, to better explain my fuzzy old line of work. In the event, nobody was in the slightest bit interested in what I did. But when the little book was handed to me, there, under profession, my job was given as
‘musician’.
I stared at this for some time. Would it do? Did it matter? I figured it might. The reason for me applying for the thing in the first place was that my friend Stephen Saunders and I were selling everything we had to hop aboard Freddie Laker’s Sky Train – a new venture by which you could fly to New York for just £60. What if the notoriously cynical cops at US immigration read this
‘musician’
boast and asked me to prove how I made a crust? At worst they would hand me a saxophone and ask for a demonstration, at best they might casually ask what instrument I played – and you can’t answer
‘nothing’
to that one, unless you’re Yoko Ono. So right there outside the Passport Office I took a biro and crossed out
‘musician’
and wrote above it my original bluff of
‘music
writer’. I
had no idea that doing this was totally illegal. Basically it invalidates the entire document and makes you ineligible to travel anywhere, though I have to say that in the ten years I went around the world on it, only once was I ever questioned about the alteration. Arriving at Los Angeles to interview ex-Motown boss Berry Gordy – who by that time was running a peppy disco label called Solar – a guy at Customs asked if I actually wrote music,
‘Y’know,
like Beethoven’. I told him that I had changed the words myself and they were just a lie basically.
‘I
didn’t hear
that,’
he said, handing it back to me with a facial expression I have since come to know as
‘the
old skunk-eye’.