Grumpy Old Rock Star: and Other Wondrous Stories (10 page)

Chris replied, ‘I’m going to go to my room and lie on the bed.’

‘I’m going to lie by the pool,’ said Jon.

Then Deal-a-Day piped up: ‘. . . And I’m going to go and lie on the phone.’

Right, introduction over, back to the Middle Ages.

Well, 1975.

Picture the scene. I’m in a meeting with Harvey Goldsmith, the most famous promoter and agent in the history of rock ’n’ roll, and Deal-a-Day Lane in his Notting Hill Gate office. We are discussing the dozens of ideas I’ve had about how to perform
King Arthur
live.

‘OK, so I’m thinking a castle, horses, knights, Middle Ages costumes, at Wembley Empire Pool . . .’

‘It’s going to cost a fortune, Rick,’ winced Deal-a-Day. ‘We should at least do it at the Royal Albert Hall.’

‘I don’t want to do it at the Albert Hall, the acoustics are rubbish and, besides, I can’t build a castle in the Royal Albert Hall. I want to do it at Wembley.’

‘You can’t do it at Wembley, Rick,’ said Harvey.

‘Why not?’

I can vividly remember Brian’s smug face as Harvey replied, ‘Because the dates you want are right before
Holiday on Ice
and it takes three weeks for them to install and then freeze the ice rink, so there’s just no way we can do it.’

I was not to be deterred.

‘Well, I’ll do it on ice, then . . .’

‘Rick, don’t be bloody ridiculous, it ain’t gonna happen . . . now go and think about the Royal Albert Hall.’

I did think about it . . . and dismissed it. I came out of the office, jumped in my car and drove straight to Fleet Street, parked
by Farringdon Road, walked round to Red Lion Square and into the Red Lion pub. Chris Welch, the editor of
Melody Maker
, was there.

As we lifted the first pint, I said, ‘Chris, I’ve got an exclusive for you. I’m doing
King Arthur
, full symphony orchestra, English Chamber Choir, a male-voice choir . . .’

‘Blimey, Rick, that’s pretty ambitious . . .’

‘. . . And a full band . . .’

‘Crikey . . .’

‘. . . In a castle . . .’

‘Right . . . anything else?

‘. . . On ice.’

I was making it up as I went along, to be brutally honest, sitting there telling Chris about all these grand designs for a full medieval pageant, horses, knights, the lot – it all sounded brilliant, not least because it was the first time I’d heard it too. He asked how we’d set up the PA if I was in the middle and I said I would ship in a Clair Brothers PA from America, as they would be skilled in rigging for such a concert and nobody in the UK was capable of doing it at that time. The PA would be hung and suspended in the middle, in netting, for surround sound.

‘Rick, this is front page! Can I run it?’

‘You’re welcome to it – help yourself.’

Two days later, when
Melody Maker
hit the news-stands, Deal-a-Day Lane phoned me up and referred to me using a very brief and specific gynaecological word. Once I’d denied being that, he said, ‘What the hell have you done, Rick?’

‘Well, it’s more about what I’m going to do, Brian . . .
King Arthur
on ice.’

I was really pleased with myself. But then I went to a meeting at the management office and they told me what it was going to cost.

It was not going to be cheap.

In fact, it was disastrous and even with sell-out performances it was going to cost me a lot more money to put the show on than it was ever going to make. Remember, this was before the days of sponsorship, before TV bought pay-per-view concert rights in advance, before videos and DVDs of shows helped subsidise tours. It would all have to be funded through ticket sales. Deal-a-Day sat me down with the accountant, David Moss, a lovely man who said, ‘Rick, if you sell out three nights at Wembley Empire Pool you will lose this amount of money.’ And he pointed at what appeared to be someone’s phone number on a scrap of paper.

‘It’s not too late to call it off,’ Brian said hopefully.

‘No, no, no! We can’t call it off. By the way, I think it’s going to cost more than that. We haven’t budgeted correctly for the ice skaters.’

Believe it or not, I actually knew a little bit about ice skating and was therefore aware that most top skaters lived in Eastern Europe and Australia so we’d have to fly them in and put them up somewhere for the duration of the shows. So we did the figures again and all agreed on the amount I was set to lose. It was similar to the national debt of Paraguay.

You will recall how worried I was when I realised there was still a KGB uniform in my suitcase as I sat in Igor’s security office in Russia. Looking at the colossal loss I stood to make on
King Arthur on Ice
was the exact opposite feeling. I was reading about

9.8 on the ‘Don’t-Give-a-Toss-o-Meter’ by this point. ‘If it’s going to be done, it should be done properly. Decision made, chaps.
King Arthur on Ice
it is!’

Building the set was like being involved in one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. We started to get the castle built first and I spent hours and hours in meetings with carpenters and builders, explaining about ramparts and how they would need to accommodate the orchestra and the choirs. At the same time,
we’d shipped in the skaters and were rehearsing them like crazy. I was loving every minute.

Meanwhile, the media were all over the idea. They were particularly interested in my having said there’d be horses involved.

On ice.

‘Are you definitely saying you are going to have horses on ice, Rick?’

‘Absolutely, it’s going to be fantastic. There will be a lot of horses.’

By the time we got to three days before the three performances, all the tickets had sold out but the RSPCA, an organisation for the prevention of cruelty to animals and even Brent Council were mercilessly interrogating me about the possible dangers to these horses.

I calmly explained that we’d created these special stables outside Wembley, down by the artists’ parking area, and that everything was in order. I then invited about fifty of the world’s biggest newspapers and magazines down to show them these horses. The RSPCA and Brent Council representatives were there too, plus protesters ready to spit feathers when we unveiled the animals.

Except they weren’t
actual
horses, were they?

I’d never said that.

I’d just said there’d be ‘horses’. In this particular case, they were men on hobby horses. Skating round through dry ice so you could only see their top halves. To be fair, there wasn’t one journalist who didn’t laugh when these dozen or so blokes on pantomime steeds trotted out. Even the RSPCA people laughed, because they saw the funny side and were just glad it wasn’t an issue. The only people who didn’t laugh were the ones from Brent Council, who were just slightly left of Stalin. They didn’t like it one bit.

Come the actual performances, I absolutely loved every second.

There are two defining moments from the
King Arthur on Ice
shows that stick in my mind. Firstly, the nuns. The opening night had gone brilliantly. At the end of the first half, we had about a dozen female skaters dancing around in a Charleston style: it was really very striking, a great little taster for the second half. When they’d finished, I used to say to the band, ‘Hey, guys, what do you think of that?’ and they’d hold up score cards with 9s and 8s on them. Then I’d say, ‘And what do you say to working for me for nothing?’ At which point they’d flip the cards over to spell out the word ‘Bollocks’. The audience loved it and it was all good fun.

On the second night, however, I hadn’t really looked around the audience before I got to this section. I was just introducing the ‘score cards sketch’ when my eyes fell upon the seating block nearest to where the cards would be held aloft . . . it was full of nuns. There must have been 200 nuns sitting there, all pristine and proper.

Right on time, but with a sinking feeling in my stomach, I asked for the scores and the band duly held up some 9s and some 8s. The nuns all chuckled and a few polite handclaps rippled across the ice from their seats. I had no intention of making the joke about working for nothing but, unfortunately, the band didn’t know that and just wanted to hit their cue.

Which they did, beautifully.

Bollocks.

The nuns howled with laughter!

The second defining moment of
King Arthur on Ice
was on the last night. Before the show, Tony Burdfield came to me and said, ‘Rick, do you know you’re one skater short? One of them is off sick.’

I wasn’t too bothered. ‘That’s all right, Tony, there’s that many of them . . .’

‘Yes, but Rick . . .’

‘Tony, no one will notice, don’t worry.’

‘OK, Rick, I’m just letting you know . . .’

The show was going along swimmingly until we came to a piece called ‘The Last Battle’. It was a fantastic sight, I have to say, all these magnificent skaters dressed as knights with their wooden swords, an incredible light show, dry ice everywhere, it was remarkable. Out of the dry ice these horses’ heads were visible, twenty-five on each side of the rink facing off for the final climactic battle. They would then skate around and face each other in pairs, where they would have a choreographed sword fight before simultaneously ‘killing’ each other and disappearing beneath the dry ice.

Just as ‘The Last Battle’ commenced, the penny dropped as to why Tony was worried about having a skater off sick. He was one of the knights which meant we had an odd number, twenty-four on one side and twenty-five on the other. The consequences were dawning on me too late, however; the knights were swirling around the rink majestically and then, bang on schedule, paired up to commence their sword fights and finish each other off.

Except of course for the one odd skater who was floating around aimlessly, looking for someone to kill and be killed himself. He was out of luck. His intended target – the missing knight – was at home in bed with gastroenteritis.

By now, the orchestra, the band, the choirs, the lighting crew, everyone had twigged. I remember David Measham, the conductor, looking at me and I just mouthed, ‘Keep going, keep going!’

By now, the audience were starting to do the maths too so, as the numbers of knights dwindled, all eyes were on this lone warrior. The poor sod was skating around on his own, trying desperately to look like it was all planned. Eventually, of course, there was no one left but him and so for about a minute he skated around the rink, the whole of Wembley Empire Pool looking at him in anticipation. It felt like an eternity.

How he thought to do what he did next I will never know. But it was pure genius.

He simply stopped, plunged his sword into himself and committed suicide.

Genius.

It was a work of art.

King Arthur on Ice
was one of the best times of my life. I loved every single minute: the preparation, the rehearsals, the music, the performances, everything. I would give my right arm to do it all again. It has gone down in rock ’n’ roll folklore as one of the most extravagant shows of all time. In the countless polls that magazines like
Q
run every year, it nearly always comes out in the top three in both the ‘Best Live Show’ and the ‘Biggest Folly’ sections. I don’t care about the latter, it was amazing. We were pioneering. This wasn’t a 3-D hologram castle, we built the bloody thing out of wood. It wasn’t special effects, it was all human-led, real life in front of your eyes. As far as I know, it was the first time a hung PA had been used in the UK. In many ways, those three nights on ice were very innovative. There is nothing to beat what I call a ‘human spectacular’ where everything that is going on is created by people – musicians, singers, actors, dancers and so on.

Everyone who took part in
King Arthur on Ice
has a story to tell.

A few years back, I spoke to the skating superstar Robin Cousins about the show and he was telling me that the technology has advanced so much that we could now do so much more: the ice doesn’t need to be flat, they can freeze a rink much, much faster and you can even tour these shows. America would have been perfect because they have ice hockey stadiums absolutely everywhere; Eastern Europe likewise, albeit only once the Wall had come down. But back when I did it, the logistics meant it simply
wasn’t a show that could stand on its own two feet (or skates), even selling 15,000 tickets every night. So, sadly, we only ever did those three nights; I’ve performed
King Arthur
all over the world but only ever three times on ice.

Of course, as the money men had predicted, I lost a fortune across those three nights. But within eighteen months the
King Arthur
album had sold an extra 10 million copies.

Absolutely priceless.

When a musician tours, he or she needs insurance. It’s not just for their own health cover, it also deals with what might happen if 10,000 people get to a show having paid for tickets and the show is cancelled for one reason or another. Insurers know the rock world isn’t the safest of places to issue premiums, but there are several risk-takers who deal with this kind of business.

When it came to taking
King Arthur
to America (without the ice extravaganza), I could understand why insurers weren’t beating a path to my door to cover me. I was only in my mid-twenties and had already had two heart attacks. I was under strict medical advice to stop smoking and drinking, both of which I patently wasn’t doing. I was on tablets that were like little capsules of TNT and were designed to pretty much blow up your veins if you felt chest pains to allow any clot to pass through. And, finally, I was about to fly out to perform several highly demanding and lengthy shows across numerous American states, all the time inhabiting the far-from-healthy world of rock ’n’ roll.

I was expecting a pretty horrid premium.

In fact, not one single insurer would touch me with a bargepole.