That Close

by Suggs

Needless to say Clive was in one of the fitter groups and had prepared properly and I spent most of the trip looking at the back of his head. My training for the Thailand trip consisted of running up and down the beach on arrival, twice, and having a couple of well-earned cold beers the night before we set off. Ah, but the pain, ultimately so rewarding, darlings, the overwhelming feeling of achievement as you’re waved on past the drinks stop that everyone else has had a nice break at, and already left. The thrill of pulling up at some delightful hilltop restaurant for lunch, just as everyone else is pulling away with bananas in their gobs. And who could possibly forget the joy of arriving at the hotel so late, that some of the party are already up doing stretching exercises for the following days ride.

  With my Thai experience in mind, I set about preparing myself with a little more than my usual rigour for a trip Clive and I had been planning for some time. A week-long cycle from my house in Salento round the southernmost tip of Italy.

  It was decided that we would go in September, when the weather would be a little cooler and the roads would be quieter. The party was, Clive, Sam (my next-door neighbour) and my cousin Hector. We all met at some god-unearthly hour at Stansted, but it meant that we were at the house in time for lunch: I toasted up a bit of bruschetta, rubbed it with garlic, on went the tomatoes, Parmesan, basil and olive oil. A glass of red wine and we were flying.

  Humanity restored, Sam was keen to have a look at the bikes. Earlier in the year I’d spoken to Ricardo, one of my Italian neighbours about our forthcoming trip; he’d laughed at the idea that we would pay to hire bikes. He told me he would borrow some on our behalf and leave them in the shed behind the house. I hadn’t stipulated what kind of bikes – racing, road or mountain – so we weren’t sure what we were going to get, maybe a mixture. Well, you can say that again.

  The first bike Sam appeared with out of the shed was an old iron-framed post office job, covered in cobwebs with a basket on the front. The next one was more promising, a proper racing bike, but the only problem was that, on closer inspection, the seat was jammed right down on the frame, at its lowest position. Next came a kid’s mountain bike with tyres like a tractor’s, which were flat. Lastly, the pièce de résistance, a pink girl’s bike resplendent in Barbie livery.

  ‘That can’t be it surely?’ Sam went back in. ‘Well, unless one of you fancies riding this?’ He came back out pushing an old lawnmower. Looking at the state of the bikes, that didn’t seem like such a preposterous idea. I phoned Ricardo, who seemed vaguely put out at the suggestion these bikes might not be perfect for a seven-day cycle trip. ‘That black bike was my grandad’s, he rode that every day of his life. And the pink one, that’s brand-new. I bought that for my niece. It cost forty euros!’ More to the point, the bicycle hire shop was closed for the winter, as does pretty much everything else in Salento. My fellow riders looked on expectantly. I put the phone down.

  It was only when we were pumping the tractor tyres on the mountain bike the following morning that we discovered the only bike that looked vaguely fit for purpose actually had a square back wheel. I wasn’t sure we’d make one day’s cycling, never mind a week, but in the spirit of the great British explorers of yore off we set. It only seemed fair to draw lots to see who got what bike, and then swap them round every day.

  It was a beautiful sunny morning, and I can’t say we weren’t laughing as we headed off down the coast, looking like a troupe Billy Smart would have been proud of. I’d got the racer, which was a lovely smooth roller, but the saddle position meant my knees were up round my chin, Hector had the mountain bike, which was going up and down at the back like a clown’s car. Sam had Il Postino with the three gears and his kit in the basket. Clive was top boy, in full Lycra, riding the Barbie machine.

  First stop was Dentoni’s, the best coffee bar and ice-cream parlour in the whole of Salento, probably the world, in my reckoning. People come for miles to eat Signor Dentoni’s cakes and ice cream, and drink his coffee. He has thirty different flavours of ice cream displayed in an enormous cabinet, with the main ingredient displayed on the top. The barrista, Maxi, can make coffee in fifty-two different ways, one for every week of the year. He has a mirror above the coffee machine, so without even turning round he will have your coffee of choice on the go as you arrive at the counter.

  But the killer, the reason Dentoni’s knocks all its competitors into a cocked snoop, are the cornetti; miraculously light croissants filled with hot custard. In the summer it gets so busy they employ a raffle-ticket system in which you wait for your number to come up on an LED screen. A ripple of approval as CCTV coverage turns to the white-clad bakers in the basement, filling the dumb waiter with another load of steaming cornetti. One summer Signor Dentoni took me down to see the kitchen. At the height of the season he employs forty people, churning, baking and piping. Willy Wonka’s for adults.

  We drank our coffee, slurped our cornetti and hit the road. Easy Rider eat your heart out. The first bit of road was long and straight and headed right off along the clifftop. We were aiming for Porto Badisco, which doesn’t actually have a disco, but has one of my favourite restaurants, the one that serves ricci, when in season. It’s run by a fisherman and his family and is only open in the summer.

  On the way to Porto Badisco we passed Ricardo’s summer business, his campsite, and swung in to say hello. It was midday and Ricardo was swinging in his hammock, the back of his hand draped over his eyes and a glass of wine dangling at his side. Over the summer period, he always complains of being ‘molto stanco’, basically knackered, from all the work he has to do at the campsite. Which, whenever I visit, seems to consist of chatting up birds, drinking, riding his horses and pretending to play his mechanical karaoke piano whilst singing at the top of his voice late into the night. Wafting his fingers over the self-playing keyboard he croons romantic Italian ballads to a bevy of attentive northern Italian ladies who come to the site every year. He once quite seriously asked me to form a band with him.

  Ricardo looked up and leapt down from his hammock in his lurid orange kaftan and black Prada socks, his black eyes flashing. I’d had a number of run-ins with him over the years, but I liked him. A row to Ricardo was like water off a duck’s back. He’d worked hard since he was a kid, and like so many southern Italians, ended up having to go abroad for work. He’d been from Austria to Libya, labouring and roadbuilding, and now in his sixties had created his own little fiefdom down by the sea.

  ‘Ow ar u, amico?’ He strode towards me, arms aloft. He was about five foot eight and had the physique of a middleweight boxer. He looked after himself, rode his horses every day and taught the tango by night. But it was the bedroom tango that brought the chunky northern Italian women back every year.

  ‘You, Sax,’ as he called me, ‘are the maestro of the musical spettacolo,’ he once explained, ‘I am the master of the mattress spectacular, ha ha ha!’ He then went on in grisly detail to list all the functions he required of the different women in his life, making parallels with his horses. Some were for racing, some for jumping, some for a slow trot and some just to talk to and pat. Not sure who was right for dressage.

  Most of my Italian friends were horrified by him, understandably. To them he was a dreadful old cliché of all that was wrong with the world’s perception of the Italian male. He made Berlusconi seem positively enlightened. He was of course a huge fan, and Berlusconi could do no wrong.

  His schlong stowed back in its sarong, Ricardo led us to a big trestle table in the pinewood. Paolo, his trusted second in command, was already firing up the barbecue, and before we had a chance to say anything our places were being set and three bottles of vino locale were opened on our table. Salads arrived, roast fish arrived, more vinos collapsos arrived, coffee and grappa arrived, and then Ricardo appeared through the trees, riding a huge white stallion and blowing a trumpet. Followed by a gaggle of giggling Japanese girls blowing plastic trumpets.

  We were more than slightly wobbly when we got back on our bike
s, and it was executively decided that we would be slightly less adventurous in our day’s travels than we had anticipated that morning. We’d stop at the spa town of Santa Cesarea Terme, about an hour’s further cycle. We flew past Porto Badisco, and a girl with black spiky hair cutting sea urchins on the roadside from a big ceramic sink, in the late-afternoon sunshine. It was glorious, with the sparkling blue Adriatic on our left, and ahead the ribbon-like coastline heading down the misty peninsula.

  It was all downhill and we were flying, full of joie de vivre and vino locale. My cousin Hector at the front, legs sticking out, going up and down riding the mountain bike like a road drill. Somewhere at the back of my somewhat befuddled mind a voice was reminding me that what goes up, etc., and vice versa. It was steep and we really were going some when we passed a group of serious-looking cyclists, on some serious-looking bikes, puffing up the other side of the road. We waved but they didn’t wave back, and then I remembered what we were riding. We must have looked like escapees from the local asylum.

  Santa Cesarea is built on a huge steaming lake of volcanic mud, and has two or three extraordinary Moroccan-style hotels which have mined down through their basements and into the stuff. Old people chuck themselves into the sulphurous pong in order to cure themselves of arthritic ailments, which apparently it does. We found a reasonable hotel, had some dinner and played cards in the lobby with a lot of old people and the smell of the devil.

  The group were up with a steely determination the following morning to make up the time we’d lost the previous day. I was relieved to exchange the racing bike, with the saddle like a wooden razor blade, for the relative comfort of the mountain bike. Relieved, that was, until we hit the first hill out of town, and what had taken us twenty minutes to freewheel down the previous afternoon was gonna take us a good couple of hours to cycle up. It was the order of the holiday, the temptation to cycle down to some beautiful bay for a dip in the sea tempered by the fact we’d have to effing well come back up again.

  We stopped at a small clifftop village for lunch, panini and a beer, no time for anything grander. The owner asked us where we were cycling to, having seen our clobber, and was impressed when I explained our trip. Well, impressed until he came outside to wave us off. There were four stray dogs asleep under the tree our crazy collection of machines was resting on. Clive was first off on the racer, Sam next on the Barbie machine, Hector on the post office job and me at the rear, waving behind me at the bar owner and bobbing up and down on my square back wheel.

  As we pulled away one of the dogs woke and began to bark. The others joined in and they started to chase us. They were the usual funny old mixture of mongrels you often see sitting about in Salento villages. One of them was three-legged and was snapping at my wonky back wheel. The faster I went the faster he went too. I couldn’t shake him off. As we reached the outskirts of town all but the three-legged mutt had given up the chase and slunk back to the shade of their tree. I’d overtaken Clive on a long straight road and swung to the left, so Clive flew past and the three-legged one went with him. The sight of Clive on the low-slung racing bike, lashing out with one leg as he disappeared off down the dusty road with a three-legged dog snapping at his back wheel, is one I shall never forget.

  We eventually made it to Leuca, the furthermost tip and land’s end, which is a pretty uneventful out-of-season seaside resort, and headed back up the coast for Gallipoli. Gallipoli is like a mini-Venice, a jewel set in the extraordinarily blue Mediterranean sea, an island that you reach by a small causeway. We pulled up our bikes at an old bar, which turned out to be the local fishermen’s club. It was dark inside but the welcome was friendly for the ciclisti inglese. We had a much needed cold beer and made enquiries as to where we might stay. I don’t know if it was the state of us or the bikes, but they took pity on us to the point that one of the fishermen suggested we could stay in his house. I explained that that was very kind but we were just looking for a small hotel. One was duly found, we had a shower and headed out.

  The sun was setting and we found a lovely restaurant overlooking the sea. After a delicious dinner of grilled orate (sea bream), we headed off to a bar where there was music. When we arrived people were playing guitars and tambourines in the traditional pizzicato style. After a couple of hours (and drinks) I announced I was a bit of a singer myself, and joined in on a couple of numbers, accompanying myself on the spoons. I then tried to explain Clive’s role as the producer of all Madness’s records, plus ones by Dexys Midnight Runners and Elvis Costello, and that he could also play the guitar. He was duly handed one, and I think that in the confusion of my pidgin Italian our hosts thought I was saying he was Elvis Costello. He has the same glasses and is a jolly good songwriter himself, but he’s nay Elvis.

  They were already starting to look suspicious as he began to strum, and I realised that in the thirty-odd years I’ve known Clive, we’d never learnt a song we could play together. He didn’t know how to play the music to any Madness songs and I couldn’t remember the words to any of his. We had a manful go at ‘Shipbuilding’, in which Clive was struggling to remember his own tune. Ironically, Elvis Costello had written the words, and I couldn’t remember more than half a dozen of them. After three goes, and a really shit attempt at ‘My Girl,’ we were asked to leave, they obviously thought we were taking the piss. It was with some embarrassment that we left the bar with our tails between our legs and shuffled off back to our hotel. Fifty-odd hit records between the pair of us.

  The countryside and the days flew past, but on the last day we were still a bit behind schedule, and were cutting it a bit fine in order to get back to the house before nightfall, when we hit the beautiful medieval town of Galatina for lunch. It was decided once again that we would go for the sandwich option and get back on the road. It was a biggish town but there were no obvious signs of life, until we spotted a shopkeeper pulling down the shutters on his clothes shop. I asked him if there was a bar or somewhere we could get a bit of lunch. ‘Si, si, follow me,’ he said.

  We came to what looked like any other of the small houses we’d already passed, just in time to meet four rather jolly businessmen stumbling out of the door. He ushered us inside. There were two rooms, a kitchen on our right and a dining room on the left with one table on which was perched a giant television. Ubiquitous in all Italian restaurants is a giant blaring TV, only this one was broadcasting nothing more than green fuzz. A fat man in an apron stumbled out of the kitchen, and having established that we were English cyclists started giving us all big hugs. He showed us to the table and the four of us were seated around three sides of the sizzling and glaring green TV.

  I think he’d come to the unlikely conclusion we’d cycled all the way from England and proceeded to feed us as if we had. We had our backs to the kitchen and a stumbling and clattering began before the first dishes appeared over our shoulders. Deep-fried cheese and a selection of salamis. More clattering and clanging before deep-fried aubergine and Parma ham. It was slightly disconcerting being blasted by the green light and white noise, and never being quite sure what exotic plates were going to appear over our heads next. And appear they did, pasta pomodoro, grilled fish, grilled vegetables, horse stew, it was endless, and I genuinely felt I was going to explode. Then the cheese board arrived.

  The wine was flowing and Clive was getting right into it. Ice cream and cakes followed and Sam, who’d had to step outside for a break from the sensory overload, reappeared in time for coffee and grappa. I can’t say it wasn’t a relief to stand and get away from the hissing green-eyed gogglebox, but standing was proving a smidge difficult. We’d certainly had a bit more than the planned sandwich.

  We paid our genial host, who was still trying to ply us with more grappa, and staggered out into the sunlight. We were just heading round the corner for our bikes, when the owner called after us. Sam was almost running away at this point. The owner puffed down the hill and presented us each with a bottle of wine, as if we needed it, for our journey.r />
  But it was with a certain gaiety that we cycled out of town through the deserted streets and into the countryside. A gaiety that lasted precisely one hour before we hit the long straight road home and dehydration, accumulated tiredness and extremely sore arses kicked in. We were strung down the road at quarter-mile intervals by the time we got to the house. The sun was going down and we were knackered.

  The following morning, sharing cappuccinos and custard croissants, the pain was forgotten and we were all just laughing and reminiscing happily about our adventures. The crazy bikes, the hills, overcoming the distance itself, and throughout all the trials and tribulations we’d got along really well. A feeling of elation and achievement abounded. At the airport bar, enjoying a cold beer, we were still laughing and joking at our ridiculous adventures and enthusiastically started discussing doing something similar the following year. My cousin Hector looked at us all one by one, put down his beer, and said, ‘No.’

  THE BACK OF CLIVE’S HEAD

  Yeah, I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at the back of Clive Langer’s head. Cycling apart, as he’s been the producer of our records for over thirty years, I hate to think quite what percentage of that time was spent lying on a sofa at the back of some recording studio or other, staring at the back of Clive’s head. Weird really to think of it, over all those years, I’ve probably spent more time looking at the back of his head than the front. His black hair slowly turning from black to grey down the decades as he sat huddled over various mixing desks listening to a playback or recording of one of the hundreds of tracks we’ve recorded together.

  The first time I spent any time looking at the back of his head was in a tiny little eight-track studio in Stoke Newington called Pathway. Clive had managed to get the attention of Rob Dickins, who at the time was the head of Warner Brothers publishing. Rob had championed Deaf School in his days as a record company executive and was an old friend of Clive’s.