by Suggs
Anyway, back in the studio the soundtrack to Absolute Beginners was well under way. There were songs being written and recorded by Ray Davies and Paul Weller, and the film was being made by Palace Pictures, a successful English production house. It was gonna be a big deal. I’d completely forgotten about it when the receptionist called to say she had a Julien Temple on the phone. I had read and loved the book, all smoky jazz, Soho and exotic West London characters, but I still didn’t feel ready to act. Julien was persistent. ‘At the very least come down and meet the rest of the team.’
Palace Pictures had an office in Dean Street in Soho, right next to the French House. It was a lovely spring day and Soho was looking at its best. Mayfair looks like Mayfair whatever time of day or night you happen to be there, the same is true of most of the rest of London, but Soho has distinct patterns, its different micro-seasons changing through the day, and into the night.
My favourite bit is between two and four in the afternoon, in-between lunch and the end of work, before the office workers and tourist drinkers are piling about the streets. Mid-afternoon is a time for theatre actors, writers, directors, painters, club owners, nutters, etc., to while away a few hours in the company of like-minded souls, before the serious business of the night descends. The French is one of the few old-school Soho pubs where you can be guaranteed a decent conversation in the wee small hours of the afternoon.
So, it was with a certain feeling of conviviality that I strode up the stairs to their office on the third floor. It was explained to me that the film would be set in West London, and in and around Soho. It would include many of the things I love: the cosmopolitan nature of the place, the impossible-to-find-twice drinking dens, jazz and rhythm and blues. The whole film was like a prequel to the mod scene that would burst out of London in the sixties. There was clear enthusiasm for the project and my involvement in it, so I left agreeing to take a small screen test to see if: A, I liked it and B, more importantly, I could do it.
Two weeks later I was back in their offices, this time with the lead actress to act out one scene from the script. All the parts had been cast, except for the main character. Things were getting tight as filming was due to be under way in a matter of weeks. They filmed my little audition and I was nervous, but I felt I did OK. The dust had barely settled when it was announced, unbeknownst to me, that I was to meet the choreographer. Whereupon I was whisked to a dance studio near Gower Street. The film had a lot of dance sequences. The meeting, it turned out, was to be a dance audition. I liked dancing but I certainly hadn’t had any formal training. I was nervous and somewhat self-conscious when I entered the mirrored dance studio.
‘OK,’ said the Japanese choreographer, putting on a Modern Jazz Quartet record and squatting on his haunches. ‘Just show me what you can do.’ I looked round the room. The producer, director and a few assistants with clipboards were staring at me intently. ‘See what I can do.’ Right. I felt like I did as a fourteen-year-old when the lights came on at the end of a school disco. I was sweating. Sod it, I thought, in for a penny and all that. I went into a free-form routine, just skipping about and throwing shapes.
I’d been round the room a couple of times and I was starting to run out of ideas, but I kept going, spinning and starjumping. After what seemed an eternity he turned off the music.
‘Yeah, yeah, like it. Great, but what I want you to do now is the same, some more leaping, but jump higher, higher, high as you can!’ He became quite animated and started twirling and jumping around with his arms in the air. ‘Just jump … jump! High as you can!’ He gesticulated skyward. So I did, jumping and leaping round the room. Like we used to do at primary school, pretending to be wood sprites. ‘Higher, higher!’ he exhorted. What! I was going as high as I could. ‘Come on, higher!’ I took one last Valentinoesque leap and landed awkwardly on my big toe. I knew it wasn’t good. It was obvious I’d done some damage. But the adrenalin kept me hobbling through a couple more routines and thankfully the session came to an end. He thanked me, the assistants politely applauded, and I limped out of the studio.
I rang Anne.
‘How did it go?’
‘Mmm, not great.’
‘Where are you?’
‘In a call box’
‘Where?’
‘The Middlesex Hospital.’ My whole foot was in plaster. I’d broken my big toe. Fate had taken a decisive and sympathetic hand in allaying my fears about acting, and the film rolled on without me.
By the time I was offered a part in The Tall Guy, I’d done a few bits of acting in Press Gang and The Final Frame and found that I enjoyed it. The film was written by Richard Curtis and was to star Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson. In fact I’d done a bit with Richard before, because he and Ben Elton had written a TV series for Madness – it seemed like a great idea at the time, that Madness would become the surreal and slightly darker descendants of The Monkees. The plot revolved around the idea that Margaret Thatcher had been discovered to be a Martian and had been returned to her home planet. In a snap election the band had been voted in on the premise that we would give free sweets to kids and beer to adults.
Not a bad manifesto, eh? I was to play the Prime Minister and the rest of the band the Cabinet. It was very funny, and in fact recently I found some scripts and discovered that a few of the sketches went on to crop up in later episodes of The Young Ones, which we’d already appeared in. ‘You hum it, I’ll smash your face in.’ And, bizarrely, some beer commercial.
Unfortunately the BBC, in their great wisdom, decided it would be fine to film the pilot in a café in Camden. Not exactly the House of Commons. It was great fun to film and it turned out well, but the Good Fair Café was a rather difficult location to try and engender the majesty of Parliament. Funny as it was, it was deemed by the BBC as too expensive to replicate Westminster for a funny old band from Camden Town.
The script for The Tall Guy duly arrived. It was to be directed by Mel Smith and was about a comedian living in Camden Town. I was excited and when I found my part, it read: ‘Suggs sings “It Must Be Love” and is duly blown up!’ It was to become a theme.
My next brush with Hollywood came some years later. I got a call asking whether I would like to write the theme tune for a Hollywood blockbuster starring Sean Connery, Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman. What! This was an out-of-the-box winner. Getting a song into a film like that would virtually guarantee me a worldwide hit. A whole new career opened up in front of me – writing music for films.
I came up with a lovely up-tempo ska number with a dynamic brass section called ‘I Am A Man’. I wrote my Grammy acceptance speech and booked myself in to have all my teeth capped. In the cinema I was surprised not to hear my song played over the opening sequence. As the final credits rolled in the now empty cinema I did hear it. Albeit for ten seconds. Until it was drowned out by the cleaner, hoovering round my feet.
Still, The Avengers garnered a whole plethora of nominations and one major award … at the 19th Golden Raspberries – it picked up the trophy for Worst Remake or Sequel, and nominations for: Worst Picture; Worst Director; Worst Actor (Ralph Fiennes); Worst Actress (Uma Thurman); Worst Screen Couple (Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman); Worst Supporting Actor (Sean Connery); Worst Screenplay. In the end, never mind the big hit, I was just happy to come out of it unmentioned.
I was just about to give up on Hollywood when finally the perfect job came along. My agent rang.
‘Do you fancy doing some acting? Starring in The Edge of Love, a romantic movie set in the Blitz with Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley?’
Any reticence about acting evaporated. ‘What? Do I? Course I do.’
‘I’ll send you the script and you can have a read before you say yes.’
‘Yes, I’ll have a read of the script. Just tell them yes.’
They wanted me to play Al Bowlly, the legendary forties crooner. I’d get to act and sing with the delightful Misses Miller and Knightley. This was it. This is the big one. Forget The Tall
Guy. Forget The Avengers. This is the real deal. Maybe there’d even be a scene where the gorgeous Miss Miller succumbs to the irresistible charms of the suave, well-dressed lounge singer. Maybe they both do! Picture the scene. The focus softens as all three move to the boudoir …
Well, you can imagine the eagerness with which I ploughed through the script trying to find my, er, bit … Ah! Here it is:
‘Al Bowlly steps on stage at the Café de Paris and sings “Hang Out The Stars In …” A bomb drops through the roof killing everyone.’
REDIFFUSION
I kind of fell into TV completely by chance. I was in the process of making this solo record and I got a call asking me to host a music show for a newfangled broadcaster. Who could have known how big satellite broadcasting was going to become? At the time there were two fierce rivals, Sky TV and British Satellite Broadcasting. Sky TV, as we all know, is now a household name. Well, you can guess which one I was on the phone to. But BSB, as it was known, had a secret weapon in the technological race to dominate the airwaves. Yes! The Squarial! Who can forget it? Who wouldn’t want a piece of that space-age bling on their roofs? Well, as it turned out, not many.
The show was really good fun. It mainly showed videos, but I also had guests on. I remember sometimes I’d get some young bands that I knew so little about that I’d actually swap chairs and make them interview me. But one night I did have Anthony Wilson, George Best and Mark E. Smith on, and we all just took the crew down the pub. I was in the managing director’s office when the first three weeks’ audience viewing figures came in. Four.
Literally four people watching it at any given moment. I once left my chair empty for ten minutes to see if anyone noticed. Nobody did. But knowing that no one was watching did give me the advantage of being able to learn how to become a television presenter, and a certain freedom which I took hold of.
By that time I had been called up by Channel 5 – someone there had seen the programme, God knows how. ‘We need somebody to guide us through the intricacies of later Victorian steam engine restoration, someone who’s going to appeal to the front-room engineer and geek.’ I know, the singer of Madness! It seemed a strange casting choice, going from a TV music show to hosting a programme which involved me standing in a field, wielding a giant rusty spanner, enthusing about the restoration of a broken-down combine harvester. I couldn’t even put up a shelf!
But perversely I started to enjoy it. I met some very interesting characters, went to a lot of interesting places, but it was sad to see the demise of so much of the great British days of engineering. The last spring-makers, the last boiler-makers, indeed the last manufacturers of hovercrafts.
My next TV job – talk about the sublime to the ridiculous, or vice versa – was a Saturday night show called Night Fever, which was basically a karaoke show where the audience was divided between the boys and the girls. And blimey, even that simple device had everyone screaming like lunatics.
There were two teams of five ‘celebrities’, again boys versus girls, soap-opera actors, pop stars, people from various TV shows, and the idea was that you would see people singing who you wouldn’t imagine could sing, and some who couldn’t. There was a competition, in which I awarded points according to a fairly spurious system, helped along by the Pop Monkey, the unforgettable Pop Monkey. Every week we’d have a band of some sort or another, but sometimes it was a bit of a struggle.
I remember one time we got The Three Tops, another time we managed to get one Weathergirl, as the other one had got stuck in a shopping trolley. She’d been pushed in one down the corridor by the producer and couldn’t get out again. We also had the last surviving Drifter.
But who could forget Bernie Clifton? Yes, Bernie turned up one time, you know, the fella riding the out-of-control ostrich, with his pretend legs flying around. Well, Bernie turned up to the studio in a car on his own. The producer said, ‘’Ere, Bernie, where’s the ostrich?’ Bernie said, ‘Oh, that? The ostrich? I’ve moved on, that’s my old act, I don’t do that any more, I’m more stand-up, these days.’ The producer said, ‘Bernie, I booked you and an ostrich. No ostrich, no fucking fee.’ Well, Bernie looked up, defiant for a second, before saying, ‘All right, I’ll go and get him out of the boot.’
It was an enormous amount of fun, Night Fever, and we ended up on a beach in Malaga. Wave your Magalufers! The only slight technical hitch was that, as it was a karaoke show, people had to be able to read the words to be able to sing along, but LED screens don’t function very successfully in broad sunlight, so we ended up having a karaoke show in which people just made the words up as they went along. This wasn’t too much of a problem as the show was recorded at midday, just as 2,000 kids were tipping out onto the beach from an all night rave-up.
The great tragedy was, the last thing we heard was that the next series was going to be shot in Costa Rica, on the beach, between the rum and the cigar factories. As is the way with these things, Channel 5 was taken over by a new director, and he had other ideas, and the show was dropped. But they were great days, happy, ridiculous days.
THINGS THAT GO BANG IN THE NIGHT
I met The Farm through an old pal of mine from Liverpool called Kevin, in the twilight of the Liquidator Studios, and at a point in my life when I really didn’t know what I was going to do next. And in walked this gang of Scousers wearing these tweed jackets and deerstalker hats and a variety of trainers very rarely seen in this country that had been ‘acquired’ in various trips around Europe with Liverpool Football Club. I liked them immediately; their swagger and style reminded me a bit of ourselves when we were younger, and they had some great songs.
They were good lads; they were a laugh. I helped them record a song called ‘Hearts and Minds’ which John Peel cottoned on to. And they also produced a football fanzine called The End, which was hilarious, it was a kind of precursor to Viz. An amazing sense of humour, ahead of its time, extracting ruthless fun from the pretentions of what was going to become the Premier League. Great cartoons and great writing.
I kept in touch with them over the years and then they came into a bit of money in Liverpool and started an independent record label called Produce. They remembered some work I’d done with them previously, and with the demise of my own band I was very happy to give them a bit of advice.
My idea for a ‘Shit Joke’ series. Unfortunately The End had already come to an end at this point
The idea of being in a studio with a band, and working on their music, seemed to be a bit of light relief from the intensity of the last few years. So I helped them produce the album Spartacus, which included the big hit ‘All Together Now’. Things were going really well for the band. They had another hit with ‘Groovy Train’, which, along with their first success ‘Stepping Stone’, made it three hits in a row as well as a number one album.
The success culminated in their being offered a tour of America with Big Audio Dynamite. The tour was to start with a five-night residency at a big club in New York. I went there with the editor of Loaded, James Brown, just at the time that all that laddish stuff was becoming popular. Having been anathema for years football was becoming vaguely trendy. Up to that point you’d be embarrassed to mention you were a football fan in certain circles. At dinner parties, people would drop their knives and forks, fall backwards off their chairs.
The first night The Farm were going down great. I was standing at the back of the hall and the gig was going brilliantly. There was ecstasy … in the air. Let’s just say we were all having a bit too much fun, when the headline act, BAD, came on, I found myself dancing on the mixing desk in my socks making what I thought were crucial adjustments to the sound. I was just trying to get a bit more out of the bottom end when I lost my footing and the faders shot to max. There was an almighty bang and we were plunged into silence, which obviously no one was particularly pleased about. All this while Kevin, who was the co-manager of The Farm, stood beside me, lobbing the contents of the complimentary backstage fruit basket at
the headline act. The following night when we turned up, we were rather flattered to find photographs of ourselves pinned to the stage door, and I thought, Aye aye, no need for backstage passes, here, Kev, in we go! But we were somewhat shocked to be manhandled out of the entrance to the club by two bouncers, and told that we weren’t welcome. We’d been banned from our own gig. The writing was on the wall. It was at that precise moment that I realised I might not really be cut out for management.
We had a bit of a night of it, drowned our sorrows, let’s put it that way. Next morning Kevin announced, as we sat red-eyed in someone or other’s room, that he remembered we had an appointment to go and see an executive from a big American record label who’d suddenly shown a bit of interest in the band. I said, ‘Look, I’m just done in, I can’t go, you’ll have to go on your own’.
Kevin disappeared for an hour and a half and came back looking quite dishevelled, with a hat on the side of his head. I said, ‘How did it go?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I think it went brilliantly … but sort of twenty minutes into the conversation the record company executive turned into a giant clucking chicken, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying, and the worst bit of it is, he offered The Farm a deal, but I can’t remember if he offered us $100,000 or $1 million.’
I sat up. ‘Kevin, even in my current state I know there’s a huge amount of difference between 100,000 and a million.’ He said, ‘Well, what do you think I should do? Do you think I should ring him up?’ I said, ‘Of course not. What do you think’ll happen if you ring up and go was that a 100,000 or was that a million?!!’ To their great fortune it turned out it was a million, but at that point I’d already decided that my managing days were over. I really needed to get back into making music again, up there amongst the flying fruit.
Which I did with the help of Mike Barson and the legendary producers Sly and Robbie. I had a big hit at this time with the Simon and Garfunkel song ‘Cecilia’ and on Top of the Pops I was introduced by the guest presenter, the world champion boxer Chris Eubank, who looked nervously into the autocue before uttering the immortal lines, ‘It’th the thenthational Thuggth, at number thixth, with “Thethilia”!’
