Frank Skinner Autobiography

by Frank Skinner

  Then we sang the song at the BBC Sports Review of the Year for 1996. Dave and me turned up for the rehearsal in the afternoon and then we had time to kill before the real event that evening, so Jimmy Hill, a man we had both watched on the telly since we were kids, invited us back to his hotel room. We ordered chips on room service, took our shoes off, and all three of us sat up on Jimmy’s bed with our plates on our laps and watched Chelsea versus Southampton on Sky, with Jimmy doing analysis and expert comment throughout.

  Finally, there was a Hillsborough Justice Concert at Anfield. That was the last time I sang ‘Three Lions’ live. It seemed fitting that it was at Anfield, where Ian and me had gone on that first night, and, would you believe it, Dave couldn’t make it this time either, because he was on tour. I sang the song live in front of 35,500 fans, not all that well, if the truth be told. That’s because I’m not a particularly good singer. Dave is one of the worst singers I’ve ever heard. Just think of all the great singers and bands that never had a number one record. It’s very unfair, isn’t it?

  In 1998, we brought out ‘Three Lions ’98’. Essentially the same song but with different lyrics, and with the ’96 Wembley crowd joining in on the ‘It’s coming home’ bit, which always gets the hairs going on the back of my neck. ‘Three Lions ’98’ was at number one for three weeks, and we did Top of the Pops, which we missed out on with the original song, and there was another brilliant video with us all looking much slimmer. But, to be honest, I wish we hadn’t bothered. Respect to everyone who bought the ’98 version, but ‘Three Lions’ was all about a specific moment in time: one hot summer in ’96 when England suddenly started playing like winners again, and the crowd had their own, specially written party piece so they could provide the perfect soundtrack.

  I’m on page three of the Sun today. A lot of people have had to get their tits out to achieve that, but all I had to do was have an argument with my girlfriend. Well, several arguments with my girlfriend. The headline says, ‘Let’s be Frank . . . it’s over’, and then, as a sub-heading, ‘Rows split Skinner and lover Caroline’. Now, you may have picked up on the fact that there have been a few problems, but you know I’d have told you if we’d split up. You’ve become my confidante, for goodness’ sake. We do argue, though. You know that thing about ‘Jack Spratt would eat no fat, his wife would eat no lean.’ It’s seen as an image of team-work in a relationship: ‘The two of them together, they licked the platter clean.’ Nice. The thing is with Caroline and me, if I ate no fat, she’d say, ‘Oh, well that’s typical of you isn’t it? You’re too bloody good to eat fat, I suppose. Of course, you couldn’t tell me that before I cooked it.’ If she ate no lean, I’d be saying, ‘I can’t fuckin’ believe that. You’d eat dog shit rather than agree with me on anything. Still, it’s alright for you to eat just fat, I mean you don’t have to worry about the health thing, what with your heart being made of granite.’ So it goes on.

  I remember reading somewhere that the poet Milton believed one should be able to divorce one’s wife merely by saying, ‘I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee.’ I wonder if my neighbours thought we were performing a twenty-first-century version of this ritual when Caroline stood in the hallway at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning and shouted, with some fervour, ‘Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.’ I once screamed at her, mid-argument, ‘Your trouble is the only person you’re in love with is Caroline Feraday. In fact, that’s the only thing we’ve got in common.’ She continued her point, but I interrupted with ‘Oh, come on, you’ve got to admit, that was a good line.’ She nodded her encouragement, as if worried about losing her arguing-momentum, and then carried on and on. Great legs, though.

  Oh, come on, my mom and dad fought all the time but they still loved each other. Caroline is a gorgeous, bright, interesting, funny woman. And she can cook. And it was her who suggested that I include the sex-in-the-toilet bit in the ‘jamming with the Stones’ section. How supportive is that? Our only problem is we can’t go twenty-four hours without an argument. I was raised on Andy Capp, what d’you expect?

  Incidentally, the article was written by a journo called Dominic Mohan who, it’s a small world, also did the first kiss-and-tell thing with my ex-wife. That Dominic, he’s been with me, man and boy, through all my trials and tribulations. Maybe he should have written the book. He says in the piece that Caroline has ‘decided to move out of Frank’s £1 million flat in North London’. Caroline sent me an e-mail this morning that said, ‘The people in our block will be thrilled when they read that their flats have trebled in price. But not half as thrilled as they’ll be when they hear that I’m moving out.’ I wrote back to her to say that when I get back there I expect to find nine ‘For Sale’ signs and a large pile of industrial ear-plugs by the bins. So we’re laughing about it. Her main worry was that she thought she looked a bit rough in the Sun’s picture of us. She should have seen the lion.

  Anyway, that’s how famous I am.

  You know how I’m always going on about those butterfly-crushing moments when seemingly innocent things can have massive repercussions? Well, what about this. It could be said that Johnny Cash made me an alcoholic. When I was fourteen, my dad took me to my first-ever gig. It was Johnny Cash at the Birmingham Odeon, with Carl Perkins as support. I was chuffed because both of these were Elvis’s work-colleagues at Sun Records, and I really liked Cash’s voice. Nowadays, I also like Johnny Cash because, all through my career, I’ve tried to come up with a catchphrase and I haven’t managed to find one since ‘saft as a bottle of pop’. Which is alright, but not the sort of thing you could open a chat show with. But then I would have said the same thing about David Frost’s ‘Hello, good evening and welcome’. You never can tell what’s going to catch on, can you? And then, if you do find a catchphrase, what’s to stop someone else from nicking it? This is where Johnny Cash’s catchphrase, ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash’, comes into its own. Anyway, I’m rambling. I saw Johnny Cash and he was great. I was telling my brother Terry about this and he said that he knew a bloke who did a great Johnny Cash impression, and a particularly fine Roy Orbison one as well. Orbison was another ex-stablemate of The King’s, so I was intrigued. This singer performed regularly at a pub in Smethwick. Of course, if it was in a pub, I couldn’t go, could I? Terry said that he didn’t see why not. I was fourteen and it was about time I ‘wet my whistle’, but it was probably best not to mention it to our mom and dad.

  So, the following week, off we went. We nipped in a pub on the way ‘for a quick one’, so it was sounding like we were going to have more than one. Blimey! I was a bit nervous but also quite excited about the Johnny Cash man. I wore a black plastic jacket that was pretending to be a black leather jacket, chosen because it looked a bit like the one Elvis wore for his 1968 Comeback Special. My hair was greased back and I could, in dim light, probably pass for about twelve. Terry was twenty-six. I had a brown and mild. Not that I really knew what that meant, but Terry felt that it was quite sweet and would suit my schoolboy palate. I tried to drink it like a man, but the fact that I held the glass with two hands slightly detracted from this. I liked being in a pub, though. Considering I was four years under the legal drinking-age and talking in an unnaturally deep voice, I felt very much at home. It saddens me to write this now. I haven’t had a drink since September 24th, 1986, and I’ve never really managed to find anything to replace it.

  Though I’ve never had an onstage catchphrase, I have many little catchphrases that I use in everyday life. If anyone at work says to me, ‘Are you happy with that, Frank?’, which they do quite a lot, I always reply, ‘I haven’t been happy since September 1986.’

  I like pubs. If you’re a non-drinker, a pub is an alien place. You don’t have the right to be there. When I was drinking I used to get seriously pissed-off if I was stuck at the bar behind someone who was dallying over half a Vimto. ‘Get out of my way, lightweight,’ I’d be thinking or, later in the evening, saying. Still, as Richard the Third said, I go before my hors
e to market.

  In 1971, I was yet to learn all this. We drank up. Terry had had two, and we set off to see the man. Musical entertainment in pubs in the West Midlands, and indeed throughout the country, is, of course, in the main, shit. I saw a guy at Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds Social Club, Smethwick, who was doing karaoke before there was karaoke. He had backing tapes of lots of pop standards and he sang along. He even left gaps so that he could do a bit of banter in between the songs. At one point he said, ‘And who could forget the magic of Mr Buddy Holly?’ and then sang ‘I’m a Believer’ by the Monkees, thus answering his own question.

  On another occasion, in the late eighties, I went to a club in Birmingham, and a singer came on in a blue velvet suit, red patent-leather shoes and a tight curly perm. He went straight into that old Andy Williams classic that goes ‘You’re just too good to be true. Can’t take my eyes off of you . . .’ Now it’s a lovely song, but what you have to remember is the bit in the middle, after the big brass riff, that goes ‘Oh, pretty baby . . .’ and so on. Now, that is a big fucking note, and if you want a hope in hell of hitting it, you have to start the song way down deep to give yourself a bit of a run-up. This guy had started high. I mean, too high. He had nowhere to go. All through the verses, there was a terrible tension in the air. I think the crowd, all white hair and bri-nylon, was genuinely concerned for his welfare. You could hear muttered phrases like ‘He’ll never make it’, ‘He’s gonna do himself a mischief’, and ‘Someone should stop it before it’s too late’.

  Finally, we reached the brass riff. The crowd was on the edge of their seats. I actually saw an old woman cover her mouth with both hands, preparing, I presume, to stifle a scream. Only the man in red patent-leather shoes seemed oblivious to the forthcoming carnage. With rhythmic certainty, like the clock in High Noon, the last few blasts of brass were sounded, ‘Barum-ba-ba-baaaaaa’. This was it. Suddenly, with no warning, the singer thrust his microphone straight at the terrified crowd, and they, myself included, all bleated out an ‘Oh, pretty baby’ that would have sent a sharp pain through the ears of dogs some three streets away. And it wasn’t even as if it was a gag. I’m sure the singer always thrust out the mike at that point, but with a sense of ‘I’m a great showman’ rather than a sense of ‘Chew on that, you bastards’. Judging by his general demeanour, the thought that he, personally, might not have been able to make that note would never have crossed his mind.

  Anyway, Terry and me finally got to the second pub and settled ourselves down near to the tiny stage, with me facing the prospect of my second brown and mild. If truth be told, I would have killed for a dandelion and burdock, but I had a vague sense of ‘rites of passage’, and I didn’t want to let myself down. I guess there was an audience of about twenty people in the room, which quickly became an audience of about seventeen because three of them got on stage and started playing instruments. Despite the fact that the drummer, a fat bloke in a pink shirt, looked as bored as I’d ever seen anybody look, I was getting excited.

  Then the Man in Black appeared and made his way to the stage. As he grasped the microphone, he said, in an accent which suggested he came from the same part of America as Little Beaver, ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.’ One woman called ‘Hooray!’ and my theory about that catchphrase lay broken and discarded on the empty dance-floor. The band played ‘I Walk the Line’. To my ears, I have to say, he sounded pretty good, and his Roy Orbison was even better. I remember being impressed by the fact that he had put on dark glasses for the Orbison section of the show. It was an early lesson in the importance of attention to detail. The seventeen people clapped and cheered throughout and the woman who had shouted ‘Hooray’ did it again when he growled during ‘Pretty Woman’.

  After the show, the singer mingled with the crowd, which I thought was a nice gesture but, looking back, was almost certainly an example of someone trying desperately to get laid. Terry called him over at one point and said he had liked the show. ‘He’s a bit young, isn’t he?’ the singer said, looking at me. Ignoring this, Terry said, ‘He’s seen Johnny Cash live.’ The singer seemed a little dejected by this news. He looked down at the floor and then back at us. ‘I don’t know why you brought him here then,’ he said, and walked away. This was a lesson even more instructive than the sunglasses: if you meet a big fish in a little pool, never, ever mention the existence of the big pool. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that at fourteen I’d had my first taste of what it’s like to face resentment because, through no fault of my own, I was seen as a representative of a glamorous outside world. I always bring this to mind when I make a guest appearance on Channel Five.

  Terry, however, didn’t like the singer’s attitude. We sat and watched, me on my third pint, Terry on about his seventh, as the big fish danced with a woman who had hair like Harpo Marx. ‘I bet he’s never had intercourse in his life,’ Terry said, a bit too loudly. I took a boy-sized swig from my glass, nodded briefly, and then looked longingly towards a bottle of Tizer behind the bar. ‘How are you getting on with women?’ Terry said to me. I froze. Maybe he’d forgotten I was fourteen, or, more alarmingly, maybe he had an active sex life when he was fourteen and I was about to prove a terrible disappointment.

  I was obsessed with girls but there had been no really close encounters at that stage. Some of the girls at school were very saucy. On one occasion, when me and a couple of mates were sitting at the back desk in the physics lab, four of the girls, sitting at the desk directly in front, spent the whole lesson with their dresses pulled right up their backs so we could see their knickers. It was forty minutes of pure joy.

  British Bullsnog was far behind me now. We had a game called the Nervous Test. One of us lads would approach a girl, put our hands on her hips and ask, ‘Are you nervous?’ The reply was always no. Then the hands would move to the waist, and the question and answer were repeated. Finally, we’d arrive at the breasts, the girl would giggle and push you off. Except on one occasion, when I did the test with a girl called Jayne. When I put my hands on her breasts, she just smiled. We were both thirteen. ‘Are you nervous?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Oh!’ I said. I paused. I’d never got to this stage before and didn’t know where the game went from here. What I really needed was a manual. In fact I had two ‘manuals’ when I got home, but let’s not dwell on that. I looked at Jayne and she, still smiling, looked at me. By now, my hands had been on her breasts for about thirty seconds. My finger joints were starting to stiffen. (You can do the next gag yourselves.) ‘Are you sure you’re not nervous?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I’m really not,’ she said. And now, finally, I came into my own. But I was wearing dark trousers so no one noticed. No, sorry, look, it’s very hard for me (I didn’t mean that one) to write about something like this without doing nob-jokes. This, like everything else in the book, is a true story but it’s starting to sound like a routine. That might be because a lot of my routines are true as well. However, I’m trying to tell you about Jayne and the nob-jokes are getting in the way. But, a nob-joke to me, as Samuel Johnson said of Shakespeare’s compulsion to pun or ‘quibble’, is the Cleopatra for which I lose my world and am happy to lose it.

  Anyway, I looked at Jayne and she looked at me. By now I had been holding her breasts so long I feared I was starting to restrict their growth. I had to do something. If we stood like this much longer, the smaller kids would start climbing on us. She raised her eyebrows, encouraging me to speak. It worked. ‘And you’re definitely not . . .’ She shook her head. ‘OK . . . right . . . well, thank you very much.’ I released her from my grip and shuffled off. When I looked back, she was still standing there, smiling.

  But this kind of stuff would be small beer to Terry and, as far as I could see, SMALL beers were not really his thing. The question was still hanging there. ‘Well, y’know . . .’ I began.

  ‘The thing with women,’ proclaimed Terry who, to my great relief, had interrupted me, ‘is that if you’re nice to them, they�
��ll treat you like shit.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I muttered, ‘you can say that again.’ And, of course, he did. About seven times. He began to reminisce about his youth. He told me that if he turned up for a date and he was on time, he’d nip off for a drink or just walk around the block, so that the girl was facing the disappointment of him not turning up at all. Then, when he showed his face, she’d be really grateful that he’d made it and be putty in his hands. He would arrange to meet on street corners or outside shops to make the wait that bit more unpleasant for them. He would even, he told me, turn up but hide from the girl, have a real good look at the surrounding area, and then go home. The next day he would track her down (we didn’t really mix with people who had phones) and ask her what happened. She’d say she was there, Terry would say he was as well, prove it by describing something significant, and then she, unexpectedly freed from the pain of rejection, would be his for the taking. Terry, I should point out, was much better-looking than me. I nodded sagely throughout, and listened to the master. Then, when the brown and mild made me braver, I switched the conversation to football and I was able to join in and contribute my own opinions.

  This was the life, sitting in a pub, drinking too much, and philosophising about women and football. I could get a taste for this. All thanks to Johnny Cash.

  I had a chat with the publisher today. He said the book is brilliant and anyone who didn’t enjoy reading it must be an idiot. No he didn’t. I was just trying to put pressure on you. I think he quite likes it so far and he made a few points which I thought I’d share with you.

  Firstly, there’s more stuff about my dad than my mom. Well, my mom was the loving, selfless, gentle type, and also, she didn’t drink, so I guess if she chose to hang out with a loud, beer-guzzling wildman, she must have been OK with him claiming centre-stage most of the time. Mind you, she could be really funny. I was never sure if it was intentional, but she’s had me in tears, many a time. Once, I was doing a crossword in the Daily Mirror, and reading the clues out loud. One of them was ‘Type of penguin’, ten letters. I could see my mom thinking it over. ‘Mmmmm . . .’ she said, ‘I can only think of them black and white ‘uns.’ I laughed for two days.