Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (30 page)

Me: No!

JL: OK, great. Thanks.

Me: Anything else?

JL: Hello, England. OK?

There was more, but I think you’re getting the depth of the thing by now. As soon as we all sat down again at the next bar I wrote down everything I remembered from the giddy ninety-second exchange. The
NME
ran every word with even a front-page strap-line saying ‘Lennon Speaks!’ A couple of the dailies used bits too, adding that the ‘former Beatle’ looked content, well and happy – something I’d not included in my original copy but should have done.

Over the coming decades I would not only meet, individually, the three other Beatles but get nicely drunk with all of them. This is because, at any level of the media, as soon as you become able to in any way influence such events, you craftily begin to move H&E in order to sit down with people you have always dreamed of pallying around with. Look at dear old Ricky Gervais. You may attempt to convince those about you and even yourself that interviewing so-and-so is simply an interesting idea for an article, but secretly you are saying, ‘Jesus Christ, I’ve done it! I’m going to be in the same room with George Harrison! He’s going to really like me! He’ll see I’m not like all the other shallow hangers-on – and we will sit about laughing at how awful the rest of humanity is!’ Many’s the piece I’ve read where the journalist’s sniffy attitude toward a celebrity is chiefly born from disappointment that the celeb didn’t live up to the fantasy and stubbornly refused to become Best Friends For Ever.

Thus, it was for no other reason than I wanted to tell my sister about it that I trampled over the rest of the
NME
staff when Ringo Starr’s name came up in the editorial meeting. Now of course Ringo Starr is not some old bum looking for a bit of press. Certainly not; he never has been and he never could be described as such. Except at that time he was – how should I put this? – actually some old bum looking for a bit of press, but for a variety of reasons his record label never let him in on this awful secret. Ringo was deep into the worst period of his alcoholism and had recently released an ocean-going stinker of an album called
Stop and Smell the Roses
. Nobody cared, and only maniacs were going to buy it. You would also have to be the number one most blinded, craven, awestruck, embarrassing Beatles devotee on the planet to want to promote such a crock of shit as a credible piece of work to a cynical public. So off I went.

I met Ringo at eleven in the morning at a pub near his huge home in Surrey. He was clearly already half-cut and the publican required no instruction whatsoever before placing an enormous glass of white wine in his hand. ‘There you are, Richie,’ he said. We sat at a little round table in the pub and I asked him if he preferred Richie or Ringo during our exchanges. He didn’t answer, but gave a short amused snort of derision as though I’d just told him I could transmute straw into gold. He then leaned into the cassette recorder I had placed on the table and shouted, ‘The single is called WRACK MY BRAIN! “Wrack My Brain”, people!’ It was as if he thought we were going out live.

Now I had been told by the press office at RCA that I was to ‘spend the day’ with Ringo and so, after he’d finished shouting into my turned-off tape, I enquired if he wanted to begin the interview here or do it in one long stretch up at the house. With a perplexed expression bordering on sheer terror, he said, ‘At the house? You ain’t coming within a mile of the house, pal. This is it. You got half an hour to sell my record for me.’ Fair play to him, he giggled toward the end of the outburst.

Rattled and discombobulated, I turned on the tape and made to begin the Great Pow-wow. I hadn’t prepared notes or proper questions – I rarely do to this day – but I’m usually pretty good at getting a conversation going. Except, as I looked into his sozzled old eyeballs, I could plainly detect the message, ‘You dare ask me about the fucking Beatles.’ Indeed, I had been warned about this by the record company the day before but, I don’t know, I really wanted to meet Ringo Starr and thought it’d all be all right. Now, as he sat goggle-eyed, looking at me, all I could hear was the arctic wind blowing through my head. Luckily, he got in first.

‘So, what do you think of the album?’ he asked, with a hopelessly misplaced air of confidence about the venture.

I shifted in my seat. ‘Ringo. It’s a mess. You are obviously deeply unhappy with yourself right now and, frankly, it informs every aspect of your work. The world of music, that you once rightly commanded, has moved on beyond your control and this lazy, poorly written, shoddily played vanity album is riddled with bloated ego and substance abuse. You must realize that, were you not who you are, it would never have been released.
Stop and Smell the Roses
is a shambolic, unlistenable embarrassment that, even if your boot-licking entourage tell you otherwise, represents a true nadir in a once magnificent career.’

Is what I was thinking.

‘Oh, it’s great. A real fun collection.’

Is what I said.

The barman brought him over another hefty tumbler of Sauvignon. I hadn’t so much as touched my bottle of beer. It was to be a pretty dry half-hour. At one point I had to pretend to be interested in the different types of snare-drum skins he’d used during the sessions. I had no idea what he was talking about and merely laughed whenever he did. It did, of course, occur to me that this very process explained exactly how bad records came to be made by big stars.

I’ve met Ringo a few times over the years since then and always attempt to remind him we had a disastrous first encounter back in his drinking days. He laughs freely at the very words and will raise a hand: ‘Yes, well, I’m sure you can spare me the gory details. Half the world has got stories like that, I’m afraid.’

Diversion

I
began drinking at around fourteen. It was inevitable and not at all uncommon then to be served when visibly under-age. It all depended on how much of a piss artist the particular publican was or if they knew your family. Some cared, most didn’t. I’ve pretty much enjoyed every single drink I’ve ever had. In fact, I’ll qualify that. I’ve enjoyed every single drink I’ve ever had. I still drink today, very much like being nicely alight, and have a reputation for being a particularly good drunk, happy and loud, always pursuing the aim to be a terrific host. I don’t slur or get sloppy but have been known to attempt to play the trumpet or give small children twenty-pound notes. The worst you can say about me when I’m boozed is I will get waspish with those who don’t agree with me about the glories of UK Prog Rock 1968–74. I know a percentage of you will be reaching now for pen and paper – leastways the publisher’s email – to chide me for ignoring the dreadful effects of alcohol upon families and society; in return, I would suggest we hear plenty about that. It’s undoubtedly rotten, but shouldn’t quell into submission the countless number of us who go through life drinking extremely happily and not terrorizing the neighbours. Even as a teenager friends would say, ‘I’ve never seen you really pissed,’ which I’m pretty proud of, given that I have been precisely that, I would say, on average, about once a week since 1971. I don’t drink every day and have a wonderful gift of knowing exactly when enough’s enough. Indeed, the only time in my life I can remember being out-of-control legless was when I was about fifteen and in Tommy Hodges’ backyard one night when his parents were out. We had no booze, and no way of getting any when Tom remembered there had been a bottle of Sweet Martini in a cupboard in his mum and dad’s front room for as long as he could remember. (I’m aware the rest of this story pretty much writes itself.)

So we sat in his backyard among the R. Whites Cream Soda crates and bundles of sale-or-return copies of
Titbits
and
Reveille
– Tom’s parents ran a newsagents, remember – and drank a whole bottle of revolting Sweet Martini, straight up, from teacups, no ice. I can still taste it. When I stood up to go home I had, for the only time in my life, that sensation of disturbing momentum when the top half of your body is going at a different speed to your legs. The more I tried to make my legs catch up to the tilting upper reaches, the further my head and shoulders seemed to plough on ahead. Of course very soon down I went. Tom, meantime, equally stewed, simply stared at me lurching about with an accepting blank expression as if to say, ‘Ah. This is happening now. I’ll just watch then.’

I got up and immediately went down to the side like a windscreen wiper. I remember thinking, ‘Oh God! Drunk! THIS is drunk, eh? Easy now, Dan. Deep breath. Hold it together. You probably got away with the first two collapses as normal movement. One more fall and the world may suspect something.’

Having bounced out of Tom’s backyard, I was immediately faced with climbing the wall that separated our two homes. I put my two arms on to it and suddenly realized I had no idea how the action could possibly proceed. The sequence of events to get over this obstacle simply escaped me and I stood flat up against the bricks totally bamboozled as to what to do next. One leg, dimly trying to recall its role in the manoeuvre, wanly circled the air like a dreaming dog hoping to locate an itch. After around twenty minutes of this – quite possible a month – I decided I would have to walk home the long way around. I remember nothing about what would normally have been a two-minute journey, other than I went into our local chip shop and tried to serve myself. George, who ran the chip shop, patiently put me back on the right path and I toddled off with no meal but his giant salt pot stuffed into my wind-cheater pocket.

Blackie the dog let me in and I sat on the floor with him for a while, talking about this and that. Everyone else was in bed, but eventually a light came on on the landing upstairs and my mum padded down to see who I was talking to. She found me lying flat on my back by the telephone table in the passage. Not surprisingly, she asked me what I was doing. I told her I was having a rest.

Mum helped me up the stairs, quite rightly reproaching me for getting in such a state, and then left me in my bedroom to get undressed. Well, I must have thought that this whole ‘getting undressed’ thing was for squares, because I came to about ten minutes later still fully clothed and somehow on the Big Wheel at an unknown funfair. At least, that’s how my bedroom now presented itself. I have heard about ‘the spinning room’ phenomenon countless times over the years, but this remains my only experience of it. If you’ve never had it, I can’t say it’s something everyone should try. From what I read, it’s pretty much the Ryanair version of a full-blown LSD trip.

Then I started being sick, which, naturally, was the moment my dad decided to find out what all the noise was (I had apparently been wailing ‘Oh no, oh no!’ for several minutes). You will have already read that my dad was pretty good at dishing out faux-bollockings to me, but I can assure you he was even better at the real deal. During the administering of his fury he used the phrase, ‘I never want to fucking see you like this again.’ I am mildly proud to say that nobody ever has. (If we were using footnotes here, I might have to concede the occasion of the Inaugural
Smash Hits
Poll Winners Concert After Party at which, for the only time in my life, I had my drink spiked, but that will have to wait until Volume Two of these ramblings –
Going Off Alarming
.)

The morning after the debacle I awoke full of shame and loathing but with no hangover whatsoever. It was then I first began to realize that I would never truly get these notorious late invoices for a drinker’s pleasure. People say that I must do, but I can honestly attest that, though occasionally a little dyspeptic, I have never worn the full iron hat as described by others. This of course annoys the hell out of shockingly hungover fellow revellers the following day. My dad was equally convinced I would awake after my Night of the Sweet Martini with iron spikes in the eyes and with my skin hanging upon my bones like a second-hand suit. To this end he bounded into the bedroom next morning with a glass of water and a tin of Eno’s. Eno’s was a brand of something called ‘Fruit and Liver Salts’ – the market leader being Andrews – sold in all good chemists, and a fillip that Dad rated right up there with penicillin as one of the Great Medical Leaps Forward. ‘Boy,’ he said, heaping a huge dollop of the bright white powder into the glass, ‘every time I’ve been on the piss, this sorts me right out again. Drink it in one.’ I tried to tell him I didn’t need it, but every inch the gentle counsellor, he brushed this aside. ‘Fuck off and down it,’ he insisted. I did as he said and can honestly say I’ve taken inadvertent sea water into my lungs that was less traumatic. I followed up the gaseous gulp with a prolonged, basso-profundo burp like a stricken whale signalling its distress to the rest of the pod. ‘Better?’ he asked. Feeling as though I had just been forced to imbibe a Dickensian spittoon, I simply nodded with eyes closed and stuck my thumb up. ‘Always have plenty of Eno’s in,’ he said, retreating triumphantly. ‘Sets you up lovely for the next session. Now, hurry up and get dressed – I need you to help me with something . . .’

The ‘something’ Dad needed me to help with was assistance in ‘pretend burgling’ our neighbours’ house. I promise you, I had not planned to fracture the otherwise perfectly paced narrative of this book quite so spectacularly, but once you involve Dad in a tale, events tend to roll on and on and it’s impossible to close the Sweet Martini story without remembering that the day after that was the day I helped rob the Pinders’ house – at their own request.

Kim Pinder lived very close by Debnams Road and she was a full-on tall ship of a woman who had six noisy daughters and a husband who was as tired and thin as she was robust and fat. He was an honest, hard-working and timid man, whereas Kim was a powerhouse, a go-getter and very much aware of how things got done around the flats. Short of the necessary monies to take the family for a fortnight’s summer holiday at Ramsgate, Kim fell back on the always popular fund-raiser of having a fake break-in and claiming the insurance. Up until about the age of twelve I genuinely thought that our family simply had terrible luck with burglars. After about the tenth time persons unknown had apparently got in via an open window or the back door, I remember saying in good faith to my dad, ‘Why do they always pick on us?’ to which he replied, ‘Well, if you want to go on the fucking Norfolk Broads every year, then we’ll keep getting turned over.’ I was confused by this remark for about an hour or so until my brother explained its deeper meaning. As it sank in, I did a pretty good impression of the moment in
Pinocchio
when the Pleasure Island bad boys turn into jackasses. Anyway, Kim Pinder had just such a phantom break-in booked, but the problem she faced was that Ian, her husband, out and out did not approve of any kind of illegal activity. My dad put this down to him being ‘as silly as arseholes’, but I suppose, looking back, there is a certain nobility in such a stand. Therefore, if Kim’s house was to be ‘burgled’, it had to be done in such a way that Ian would be convinced it was totally genuine. So she asked my dad to make it look as real as possible while she and the family were all out for the day. It was for this task that I had been roused with the explosive Eno’s.