by Suggs
Woody was a good drummer we’d heard tell of around and about. He was a hippy from Camden, but not the sort of hippy who sits around doing nothing. He was the sort of hippy who had motorbike parts all over his flat, and he also had a terrific drum kit and style. Mark ‘Bedders’ Bedford, a smart good-looking kid from Highbury who was graphic designing for a shop called Blind Alley in Camden and was the best bass player I’d heard at the time. What with that and Chris with his reggae chop glam rock, Lee’s unmistakable and raspy sax, Mike’s defining keyboards with his fingers flying up and down that Vox Continental, Chas Smash singing and dancing up a storm, everything was starting to connect.
I remember halfway through the show Lee had a raffle for some rare 45s – they were rare, and they were also scratched and knackered. But it all added to the theatre, as Lee has done so many times over the years. Also rumour had it that in the audience to see us that night was a band called Deaf School. We loved Deaf School. They were brilliant and theatrical and had a huge influence on us. Each member of their band had a distinct and a bizarre character. The singer, Enrico Cadillac, looked as if he’d stepped out of a Humphrey Bogart movie. The guitarist was Cliff Hanger (Clive Langer), and their keyboard player, the Reverend Max Ripple, dressed as a vicar who stopped their show halfway through to deliver a sermon on the dangers of celery – something I’ve carried with me ever since.
Fingers flying across the Vox Continental
The band member I most had my eye on was the delightful Miss Bette Bright, who dressed as a different Hollywood starlet every night. And to think they were in the audience to see us!
The gig was brilliant, but unfortunately towards the end of the show I put my foot through the monitor in front of me. Cost of repair, the princely sum of forty quid. Our total fee!
But John, being the chap he was, gave us a tenner from his own pocket, on top of our fee, so we could at least join our pals in a celebratory post-gig drink. I thought the gig went great, and I was particularly pleased with my own performance when after the show, backstage, I was sauntering in the direction of the beautiful Miss Bette Bright just in time to overhear her say ‘I thought the band were great, but the singer’s not all that …’ Well, I may not have had it all, but I had enough ‘that’ for her to want to go out with me. By this time I was eighteen and things were really starting to happen. I was in a band that was getting somewhere and I had a date lined up with a pop star.
The Hope was like our HQ, and we pretty much knew everyone. One night a strange-looking gang of fellas burst in through the doors of the Hope. All smart suits and Frank Sinatra pork-pie hats. They looked a bit like us, seven of them. They took one look round and filed back out again. What was that? About half an hour later they reappeared, carrying guitar cases and a drum kit. They were a band. They were from Coventry. We were intrigued.
When we heard they were going on, we piled downstairs. The next thing, a fella with really bad teeth shouts, ‘All right London, we’re The Specials!’ Within seconds of the first chords of their opening song ‘Gangsters’, they’re jumping up and down like lunatics. One of them is blowing holes in the ceiling with a starting pistol. They’re brilliant!, they’re playing ska, and they’re from Coventry. I didn’t know whether to feel jealous, or vindicated, that we’d been on to something after all.
After their energetic and fantastic turbo-fuelled set, there was real excitement in the air. A very rare thing that I had only experienced once before, in the Roxy. A real feeling something was happening and that we just happened to be right in the middle of it. Upstairs I got chatting to the bloke with the bad teeth. He introduced himself as Jerry Dammers. Coventry was in the middle of nowhere as far as we were concerned. We’d barely been out of London at this point.
They looked like us and had created their own little scene by taking the dormant sounds of sixties and seventies Jamaican music, ska and rocksteady, and making it their own. No one else seemed to have realised what a fertile vein that music was, and how potent it was live. But we were suddenly aware that we were not alone.
The music had always been in the firmament of British youth culture – from the Prince Buster, Laurel Aitken, Derek Morgan, Skatalites days, through to the joyous sounds of Desmond Dekker, Bob and Marcia, Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, Dave and Ansell Collins, Dandy, John Holt, culminating with the ubiquitous Tighten Up albums and our recent obsession, Linton Kwesi Johnson. It was a musical form that historically had been looked down upon by the British musical intelligentsia. Music that yobbos in Mecca ballrooms danced, and fought, to on a Saturday night.
As far as they were concerned, it had very little real musical merit. Simplistic and repetitive when compared with the complex and indulged world of rock. The music’s vigour and subtle infinities of rhythm passed them by. But not us, it was great music to dance to and the attitude, humour and style of them original rude boys sat very well with us, round our way. The style, stance and swagger. If I had a puff I didn’t want to just sit round in a circle on the floor of my mate’s flat trying to work out what Roger Waters was on about, or marvel at the dexterity of a fifteen-minute-long guitar solo. I wanted to hear one of them hypnotic, melodic, pumping bass lines booming and get on my feet and do some of that old moon stomping.
*
American R & B and sixties soul were produced in a similar way, lowly paid house bands grooving away like baddies turning out track after track that would liven up a Friday night dance for people who’d been working hard all week and wanted to let off some steam on the dance floor. Sometimes turning out five or six tracks a day with various vocalists coming and going. If the singer didn’t make the session the track would immediately be transformed into an instrumental, with one or other of the cats taking a solo, but tracks that never traversed the optimum three-minute line. There was no time for indulgence, it was teamwork.
There’s a great documentary about the Funk Brothers, Motown’s house band, called Standing in the Shadows of Motown, that illustrates this perfectly. A number of mostly jazz players would congregate in the Motown studios. The equipment was set permanently, literally, drum kit nailed to the floor, everything ready to go as soon as you walked in the door. They would play for eight, ten hours a day, creating some of the greatest recordings ever made, incredible tune after incredible tune, and just paid by the hour.
The Skatalites’ story is not dissimilar, but more of that later. We were working people and it was an attitude we liked, and aspired to ourselves. Music without ego, music made for and from the people.
Me and Jerry were having a good chat on many collectively held interests, especially where music and fashion were concerned. But after a while it became apparent that Jerry’s main preoccupation was finding somewhere to kip for the night. In those days the best chance you had of finding somewhere decent to stay was pulling a bird after a gig. But with those teeth! He ended up kipping on my mum’s sofa.
We stayed up late into the night, chatting and drinking beer. He told me it was his idea to get some of the better musicians from local reggae and punk bands and fuse the two. Up-tempo ska was the obvious outcome. I told him about our band and dug out a cassette we’d recently made in Mike’s bedroom, and put it on my mum’s music centre. It was almost inaudible, and halfway through burst into Lee practising his sax. Jerry didn’t seem deeply impressed. But after another beer or two, he told me he had a dream to start his own record label. A British Motown, no less. A stable of like-minded bands that would create the sound of young Britain.
‘Don’t you think that’s a smidge optimistic, Jerry, seeing as you’ve just played to forty people in a pub basement?’
‘It’s gonna be called 2 Tone.’
‘What, after your teeth, Jerry?’
‘Ha Ha, I’m serious,’ he said, opening his professional-looking briefcase. An orange and a copy of the Melody Maker fell out. ‘D’you wanna sign to my label?’
‘What with, Jerry? You haven’t even got a pen.’
Who c
ould have known we would have our first hit – ‘The Prince’ – with Jerry’s 2 Tone label and take part in the historic 2 Tone tour with The Specials, Selector and later Dexys Midnight Runners, that would roar across the country like wildfire.
SWANKY DAYS!
My first proper date with Bette Bright was to accompany her to the film premiere of the Alternative Miss World. Which is exactly what it was. While the models of the world paraded on Miss World on the box, the artist Andrew Logan had organised an alternative on Clapham Common. I was to meet Anne at the infamous clothes shop Swanky Modes in Camden Town.
The shop was in the middle of a pub that they rented from Truman’s. When I say the middle, it occupied a bow window on the corner of Royal College Street and Camden Road, with The Eagle pub running down both sides. The main entrance to the public bar was on Camden Road, and the door to the slightly more expensive saloon bar was on Royal College Street. The shop occupied four floors – the workshop in the basement, shop on the ground floor, living room and kitchen/bathroom on the first and two bedrooms on the top. One of which Anne was renting.
Anne had bought a lot of clothes from Swanky’s in her Deaf School days and had got to know the four rather extraordinary girls who ran it. Es, Willy, Judy and Mel, and the Saturday girls, Michelle and Jane. They were all real characters and an enormous amount of fun. Mel was also going out with Clive Langer, who I was just getting to know.
Swanky Modes made some really great gear and, considering they were doing it all themselves, were starting to make a real name for themselves around town. Helmut Newton had done a fantastic shoot of their clobber for the ultra-cool Nova magazine. They did a great line in skin-tight lycra dresses, one of which Anne was wearing when she first caught my eye as Bette Bright in Deaf School. These dresses had recently made the headlines when the Sun bought a halter-neck version only to photograph the model with the dress back to front.
I was to meet Anne in the public bar of The Eagle. I stood at the bar with a pint of light and bitter, feeling somewhat foolish in a black stetson and ground-length black coat. The theme for this year’s Alternative Miss World was country and western. The wiry guvnor, Aiden, didn’t bat an eyelid, polishing glasses in his string vest and open white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He’d seen enough cowboys in his boozer. One time the guitarist from Tom Robinson’s band, Danny Kustow, rode his motorbike right up to the bar. Aiden just looked up and asked him what he wanted to drink. But if there was any trouble, the white shirt would fly off and he’d be over the bar in a flash.
The room was lit by two dangling light bulbs, one illuminating the pool table and the other, the bar. The floor was bare, dotted with a few stools filled with regulars watching the pool players. The carpet didn’t start until you got halfway down the corridor, past the new-fangled space invaders machine to the saloon.
The fella standing next to me was wearing a Crombie with a Jam badge on the lapel. I liked The Jam and we got chatting. His name was Moorsey, he was an Arsenal fan. His mate Big Tel came in and I knew him, he ran a stall in Berwick Street market although he seemed to spend a fair amount of his time playing cards on a stack of crates.
Next in was Clive Langer and the other swanky girls’ boyfriends, Ted, Nick and Melvin. All done up, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids. Drinks were duly ordered. Next thing the saloon doors burst open to reveal five psychedelic Dolly Partons, all yeehaaing and shooting their guns. Resplendent in blonde wigs that would have made Louis XIV blush, white cowboy hats and boots and enormous silver conical bras. One of the regulars dropped his pint. Aiden just laughed; he knew the girls. I was stunned. A stretch limo pulled up and we all piled in and headed up west. When we got to the Leicester Square Odeon it looked like every crazy in town had turned up. Lee Bowery with a molten green candle dripping down his head. Divine, yes the Divine who ate the dog turd in that John Waters’ film, in a skin-tight silver sequin dress. There were trannies of every shape and size. It was a scene that would have made the Colony Club clientele seem positively conservative. I’d seen a bit in my eighteen-odd years in the metropolis but this was something else. The film was an absolute hoot and after a round or two of after-show drinks Anne and I danced the night away in a nearby disco.
My time at Swanky Modes was made of very happy days indeed. It was a vibrant and exciting place with all sorts coming and going day and night. The Wag Club was in its pomp and the world seemed to be inhabitated by larger-than-life characters like its owner, Chris Sullivan. I’d only recently left Mum’s flat and had been squatting around and about. I was very happy to share the upstairs room with Anne. But I would go home for a bath, as theirs was in the kitchen and it had no door. Sometimes coming back late after a gig and not wanting to wake everyone by ringing the house phone, I’d climb up the drainpipe outside the pub and gain entry via the first-floor window.
One time after a particularly long evening I was up the drainpipe and pulling down the top half of the sash window when I put my size nine DM foot through the bottom pane, only to discover Mel’s eight-year-old-son, Ben, had decided to sleep in the living room. The smashing glass sent him running for his life.
There was music on day and night, and I remember some real momentous records blasting out of the upstairs stereo: Donna Summer’s ‘State of Independence’, Blondie’s Parallel Lines, Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime’, The Jacksons’ ‘Can You Feel It’, and Michael Jackson’s ‘Off the Wall’. John Lennon’s Double Fantasy, Rumours, ‘The Killing Moon’, New Boots and Panties!! and all the post-punk British stuff.
Clive had made a great solo record with The Boxes, which included Mike Barson’s brother Ben. Anne was in the process of making a great solo record as Bette Bright, there was music flying all over the gaff.
There were still a lot of independent record labels around and people were always arriving with hot new biscuits. Parties pretty much every night, with as I say, all sorts knocking about. I remember coming home one night to discover Billy Idol in the kitchen chatting up Anne. He was very shortly chatting down the stairs and out the door. The night went on and as usual we were all dancing about in the living room. It wasn’t a big room and was dominated by a 1930s three-piece suite.
Mel suddenly announced that she was sick of the collapsed and uncomfortable sofa, so Clive and I decided to do something about it. We opened the window and heaved it out, watching it explode into a ball of splinters, dust and moths all over the pavement. Mel of course discovered some years later, when somebody was asking her about the two remaining chairs, that with the sofa the suite was worth a small fortune.
Clive and his partner, Alan Winstanley, were starting to become successful producers in their own right. He’d bought himself a black VW Golf, top of the range. I bought myself a white PX 200 Vespa, I remember one night we raced back across the Westway from Nick Lowe’s studio in Hammersmith. The VW had a terrific sound system and whenever Clive came back from the studio with a new track I’d sit in the car with him while he played it full blast. I’ll never forget hearing his and Alan’s mix of Teardrop Explodes’ ‘Reward’. The brass sounded like it could take down the walls of Jericho, and I remember thinking it was the best track I’d ever heard. It was a very exciting time, Madness were starting to get somewhere and me and Clive were constantly listening to, or sitting in The Eagle and talking about, music.
In Camden Town I’ll meet you by the Underground,
In Camden Town we’ll walk there as the sun goes down,
In Camden Town.
FOUR WHEELS
The biggest priority for any band, having acquired a few instruments and learnt roughly how to play them, is transport. Having got to that point via Mike’s bedroom, the church hall in Crouch End and the dentist’s basement on Finchley Road, we were ready to hit the road, albeit local roads to some local pubs. Lee and Mike both bought ex-GPO Morris Minor vans. Rough and ready, sturdy and a bit eccentric. A bit like the band.
Me, Mike and Lee were working for a gardening compan
y in Finchley at the time, for which the van was perfect. We’d turn up in the morning and get a list of addresses and jobs for the day, load up with mowers, hedge trimmers and tools, and then head straight to the café at Apex Corner for a leisurely breakfast.
In the summer it was the perfect job, Mike driving, me with my feet on the dashboard, no one breathing down our necks, out in the fresh air, and as long as the work was done by the end of the day everybody was happy. We weren’t by any means trained gardeners, and the jobs we got were mostly just maintenance. Mowing lawns, cutting hedges, pruning bushes and trees. A lot of the work was for big houses in Hampstead, some huge ones with vast gardens, often second homes with owners who very rarely seemed to be in. The work was sometimes hard but we rarely had too many jobs in one day, and it was mostly simple stuff. Debates between Mike and myself, as we stood in front of an overgrown bed, would sometimes rage long into the afternoon, as we tried to work out what were plants and what were weeds. If in doubt I always went on the assumption, not always correct, that if it had a flower it was a plant.
‘Well, it’s got flowers, it must be a plant.’
‘Yeah, but daisies got flowers and we don’t leave them on the lawn.’ In the end we’d trust to pot luck and just try and leave the beds looking roughly organised.
One time I was mowing this huge garden, which was more like a field than a lawn, and it obviously hadn’t been cut for some time. The grass was ankle-high and dotted in big dog turds – the owners had two Alsatians. It was a hot day and I was somewhat hungover. The smell of liquidised turds through the mower nearly made me puke. I walked off to get my breath back and made the executive decision that for the moment I would mow round the turds, and deal with them later. The grass was long, which meant a lot of to-ing and fro-ing emptying the mower. The whole thing ended up taking about two hours. I was knackered and sweating, but I’d done it.
