Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (17 page)

Is This the Real Life?

T
o offset the idea that my life in the mid-seventies was some ever-spinning pandemonium of chatter and chance, I can tell you that the image from the period that I conjure up with most yearning is that of sitting alone, late at night in my bedroom, listening repeatedly to Mike Oldfield’s
Ommadawn
while reading for the first time
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
. (Today that same mystical piece remains the most played item on my iPod, tripping through my headphones almost daily as I journey to and from the BBC. Scrabble on the Nintendo DS though, has replaced C.S. Lewis.)

I had also discovered Lenny Bruce, and for a while became quite overwhelmed by his words and life story. Never one to burn with either righteous anger or social indignation, I can’t now fathom just why it was Lenny so obsessed me. True, my appetite for comedy had always been on a par with my crackpot absorption in rock music, twin vines snaking around my brain-stem with fresh wonders continually revealing themselves. Galton and Simpson, Norman Wisdom, Peanuts by Schulz,
Mad
magazine, Harvey Comics, Spike Milligan and Peter Cook – these were as much my sixties deities as the Beach Boys and Dusty Springfield. (Only the Beatles stood without equivalent peer.)

In contrast to my music, I found possessing comedy, learning and examining it, much more difficult. It was never enough for me to just sit and watch Bob Hope, Will Hay, the Marx Brothers, or even
Rising Damp
whenever they came on to the TV. No, I would have to tape the show on to an audiocassette (video recordings still being a few years away yet). In fact, I remember having a dream one night about owning a machine that really could capture the TV picture and feeling lousy when I awoke and had to accept no such machine would ever or could ever exist. For now, the clumsy hand-held mic from my little Philips cassette recorder would have to do. This being the age of one television set per household, I would tell whoever else was in the room when I was taping that they had to be quiet throughout it. ‘Pissing cheek,’ my mum would protest. ‘We’ve all gotta be quiet again because of your bleedin’ Monty Whatsit programme.’ Even my dad would rumble, ‘Oh, if you’re going to balls about with that again, I’m going upstairs.’ Once our dog blew off during a taping of
The Likely Lads
and I had to furiously pantomime like an Edwardian actor-manager to stifle the extreme reactions of those in the room to this ghastly emission. The contract of total silence, strangely, did not extend to myself. I still have a small green BASF-brand cassette tape on to which I preserved the Python ‘Spam’ sketch, complete with my own incoherent and high-pitched wails of helpless hysteria obliterating many of the key lines. At one point you can even hear my sister Sharon risking expulsion from the room by saying, ‘Are you all right? What’s so funny?’

However, come ’75 it was Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, but most of all Lenny Bruce – dead some nine years by then – that I felt the greatest comic bond to. And it was far and away Bruce who would be the hardest to sell to my circle. I could always find someone to go with me to the pictures for repeated viewings of gigantic masterpieces like
Love and Death
,
Prisoner of Second Avenue
and
Young Frankenstein
, and I once persuaded a whole group of us to sit through Peter Bogdanovich’s magnificent
What’s Up Doc?
three times in one day. Most friends were equally happy to loaf in my bedroom listening alongside me to my growing collection of TV tapes or new comedy LPs like Python’s
Matching Tie and Handkerchief
. But nobody seemed to ‘get’ or, more probably, have the patience for the dense pioneering shtick of Lenny Bruce. I couldn’t get enough. Though his recordings were deleted and rare, I tracked them all down. I bought the few books and biographies about him and even travelled to Brighton alone late one night to watch a midnight screening of the barely seen documentary
Lenny Bruce Without Tears
. One weekend I sat on my bed and wrote out in longhand every single word he uttered on the
three disc
set
Live at the Curran Theatre
. (I’d set out to do a similar tribute to Hope and Crosby some years earlier with my audiotape of
Road to Morocco
, but ran out of paper around reel three.) Perhaps my greatest act of devotion came when the Off-Broadway play
Lenny
, starring Marty Brill, arrived for a short season in the West End at the Criterion Theatre. I saw it fourteen times. Some nights there would be only myself and a thin smattering of other devotees peppering the barren stalls. Inevitably one evening I sneaked in my cassette player and recorded Marty’s entire gut-wrenching performance. It turned out to be an appalling, distorted and distant reproduction, but I listened to it over and over again.

This mania for experiencing things repeatedly, to be part of it and learn each line and mannerism by rote, had manifested itself at an early age. Apparently, when I was five, following a seismic viewing of Jerry Lewis in
The Nutty Professor
at the Regal Old Kent Road, I sat bawling in my seat and refused to leave the theatre even after the lights had come back up again. My brother and sister threatened to leave me there, or call the police, arguing that we had to go because ‘the man’ wanted to lock up, but I was inconsolable. ‘There might be a bit more! It might come back on again!’ I didn’t know it for certain just then, but indeed it would ‘come back on again’. Up until the 1980s, films would show in ‘continuous performance’ and you could plonk yourself down in your seat at midday and watch a movie over and over again until the last bus beckoned. It was also completely normal to show up at your local fleapit and stroll in halfway through a film. Picking up the plot threads – or asking a nearby stranger what was going on – you would then watch the entire thing round again until you got to the bit where you had first walked in. I simply couldn’t count how many films of the period I’ve experienced, and enjoyed, despite having watched the last half first.

I rarely saw anything I enjoyed less than a dozen times.
The Jungle Book
,
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
,
Butch Cassidy
,
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
,
A Clockwork Orange
,
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
– I
willed
myself to be part of them and hoped that by constantly showing up I would sooner or later be added to the closing credits. My record attendance for a film is
American Graffiti
, which I saw exactly twenty times. For a play it’s
Jesus Christ Superstar
which I sat through a total of twelve times, often fighting through the banner-waving Festival of Light protestors outside the Palace Theatre in order to take my regular seat.

When it came to the relentless amount of rock concerts I attended, I was helpless to prolong any imagined involvement. When the last encore was over and the house lights would devastatingly rise, that was that. The mesmerizing communal spell cast on that single occasion would break and be gone
forever
with no DVD, no simulcast, no Internet forum on which to trade clips and prolong the discussion. Thank you and goodnight. Seeing a band back then was all lightning no bottle, all magic no daylight and it’s strange how having absolutely no record of something so personally precious is proving the only true way of keeping the sensations alive.

Throughout all of these distractions, passions, obsessions and sideshows, the experience I seemed least interested in was any unfolding narrative of my own. I had absolutely no plan at all beyond working in the shop – and why would I? I was smack-dab in the flow of a buzzing scene and earning, one way or another, absolute bundles. Ah! Here comes Freddie Mercury!

Is This Just Fantasy?

I
’ve never been fond of those stories in autobiographies that lead you through some yarn without ever telling you who the protagonist is until the very end, when they say ‘. . . one day our Saturday boy got the sack from the glue factory and told me he was going to try and make it in the movies instead. We all laughed and said he’d never amount to anything. Sometimes I wonder what became of him. By the way – his name was STEVEN SPIELBERG!’ I mistrust that style and, anyway, you are usually in no doubt who the big reveal is going to be from the moment the section starts. So let’s say up front that the group in this next bit is Queen.

One quiet afternoon all four members of the group came tumbling into the shop, excited, babbling and I think a little drunk. Their record label EMI was about five minutes away from One Stop and they were holding advance test pressings of their very first LP that they had obviously just taken receipt of.

‘We want you to play our record in your shop. Constantly! You can be first!’

I suppose it would have been Freddie leading the charge here, but I have no clear memory of it because, frankly, we had no idea who they were.

The album was presented to me on two thick, one-sided acetates on to whose blank labels one of them, let’s say Roger Taylor, began helpfully copying down the track titles from a typed sheet with his biro. All the while the others were rattling off self-promoting phrases about how massive they were going to become. I, always the politest of audiences, made appropriate noises in return and congratulated the band on their anticipated global success. But manager John, who could be a frosty old wasp when he chose, drifted out from his office area and cut through the party with a loaded, ‘I’m sorry, can we help you?’

‘Yes, you can,’ briskly responded my presumed Freddie. ‘You can fucking play this and nothing else for the next six weeks. We’re Queen and when it’s released you won’t be able to fucking stock enough of this.’

‘Really?’ John drawled back in a tone plainly designed to hose down their raging brio. ‘Can I hear it?’ Taking one of the discs, he replaced what was already playing through the shop’s speakers – I’m guessing something by Al Green – and rather archly put the needle on to track one of this allegedly momentous debut. The opening song was called ‘Keep Yourself Alive’. It’s still one of the few Queen records I quite like. John responded less charitably. He let it play for about a minute, all the time staring intently at the floor as if in solemn judgement. Freddie Mercury lustily sang along to his own vocal in an attempt to clinch the decision. Then John calmly took the player’s arm back off the disc.

‘Hate it,’ he said, putting lots of breath into the H.

‘You’re fucking joking!’ said Freddie, or possibly Brian May.

‘Hate. It,’ repeated my manager and entered into a sullen stare-off with the group. Then another thrust. ‘You sound like Deep Purple or something. Can’t bear all that.’ Then he turned to me. ‘Danny, you like rock. Was
that
any good?’

Oh, don’t do this to me, John.

‘I thought it was, y’know . . .
rocky
. Bit like Stray, and I like Stray.’

‘Stray!’ exploded presumed Freddie. ‘Stray! Stray are a fucking pub band! We are going to be bigger than fucking Led Zeppelin!’

‘Fuck you,’ said maybe John Deacon.

‘Well, fuck you,’ said John the Manager.

Then everyone but me said Fuck you for a bit.

Leaving their record on the counter, the group beat a swift and noisy retreat with one of them – I recall some blond hair here, so let’s say Roger – yanking a handful of sleeves from the racks and letting them spill all over our floor. In a final gesture, Freddie stood at the door and bellowed out into a bemused South Molton Street, ‘Attention, shoppers! If you have a scintilla of taste, you will never buy a thing in this dreadful shop!’ Then they were gone.

John, who enjoyed both style and drama, turned to me with a pixie-ish smile lighting up his eyes. ‘Did you hear that? I
like
him. That was funny.
Dreadful
record though . . .’

He wafted back to his lair and it was then that I noticed a carrier bag that the group must have abandoned in the furore. It contained three short black cotton kimonos with what seemed to be Japanese script printed in bright red on the arms and back. We kept them for a while, but nobody came to claim them and so I began to wear one most days in the shop. After a week or so, Robert Forrest, the soigné assistant manager of Brown’s, the most fashionable clothing store in London and located directly opposite One Stop, saw me in it. ‘Oh, Denise!’ he cooed – my name was usually feminized by John’s crowd into any girl’s name that began with a D – ‘you are getting so fucking bold, dear. Do you know what that says?’ I didn’t. ‘It’s just
plastered
with the word
Queen
, darling – I mean, it’s so obvious, I didn’t think you needed to advertise . . .’

I thought this new revelation made the kimonos even better and I started wearing them out around Bermondsey – normally over black linen flares and T-shirt and with my white leather stack heels that had black snakeskin bands running through the platform soles. Every girl would ask what the exotic Japanese characters meant and would squeal with delight when I told them. ‘But you’re not, are you?’ they would ask. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure . . .’ came my plaintive response, and almost without exception they would help me find out by the end of the night. Incidentally, a two-disc acetate of Queen’s first album with handwritten labels plus those first promotional tie-ins would today be worth thousands on eBay. We threw the records out when the LP proper was delivered (it sold steadily but not spectacularly) and I’m pretty sure my pair of Queen kimonos ended their camp existence torn into common household dusters and kept under the sink at Debnams Road. At the time of writing, Stray are still touring.

As if my giddy libido didn’t have enough outlets and aliases, around 1975 I became a fully fledged toy-boy. What with most of the men in South Molton Street being as gay as a French horn there was something of a surfeit of under-attended women who loved to be part of the gay party scene but would have no chance of securing a sleeping partner once the last record had been played in popular clubs like Rod’s, Country Cousin or The Sombrero. In the main, these women were fabulously wealthy, often heiresses or at least titled, terrific fun but always prone to sitting on the edge of that emotional collapse that marks a high-flying young socialite. These were by no means bored middle-aged suburban divorcées – they were well-schooled Chelsea types in their mid to late twenties who to me, still in my teens, seemed fantastically mature. And, cliché though it is, they
loved
my accent. They also got to love many of my mates’ accents too and would hold huge themed ‘such-fun’ parties to which they would make me promise to invite some of my more rugged friends. ‘Is Lenny coming? The one who is building Bond Street station?’ they would trill breathlessly, enquiring about an old school buddy whom they’d seen in full building site regalia when he dropped in at the shop. ‘Tell him he has to come! Tell him to come straight from work!’ would urge another deb. Naturally we knew exactly what the game was here, although if I had asked Lenny to come to a do in Kensington wearing his filthy site jeans, unshaven and with two hundredweight of brick dust about his person he would have said, quite correctly, that no fucking Hooray Henrietta was worth it. That said, many of my mates would drop more than their natural number of ‘h’s and ‘g’s when growling into Stephie or Katie or Miranda’s ear, and happily lay on the cor-blimey brickie lifestyle double thick, according to taste.