The Living Years

by Mike Rutherford

  Apparently I spent the night before the wedding at a bar called the Speakeasy, drinking Southern Comfort. I got so drunk I couldn’t get the key in the door and ended up slumped on the doorstep until Angie found me the next morning.

  I should have realized that the Egyptian honeymoon might not have been as romantic as I’d hoped when I secretly booked the holiday. (Death on the Nile hadn’t even been shot in Luxor at this point.) The Savoy Hotel didn’t live up to its name as we climbed the fire-exit steps to our room, which smelt dank and damp. The single rusty, wrought iron beds with the lumpy looking mattresses didn’t look very appealing either. As for the en suite, the loo was a hole in the floor with an overhead shower. I realised if I didn’t take urgent action this marriage might never be consummated. After frantic calls home to our tour travel agent we booked into the Winter Palace Hotel, which had been ‘full up’. They now managed to give us the most magnificent suite overlooking the Nile. Things were looking up, and I booked a romantic fishing-boat experience down the Nile that evening. We’d catch our own fish and have them cooked in front of us as the sun set. Angie ended up with dysentery. Her view, for the rest of the holiday, was the black-and-white-tile floor in the bathroom. Meanwhile, I was walking around the streets of Luxor in the long kaftan I’d bought in the souk, open toe sandals, my long hair and beard. I thought I was being followed because they hadn’t seen many tourists before. When the name Jesus was being banded about I then realized I had my very own disciples. Mum knew it was only a matter of time.

  * * *

  Getting married was one landmark, buying my first house was another. It was in Courtnell Street in Notting Hill Gate, which wasn’t the area it is now. Courtnell Street itself was okay but the street behind it was a war zone for local drug dealers. I had £4,000 in the bank and got a mortgage – God knows how – for £25,000.

  More than anything else I had achieved, it was buying a house that impressed Dad. He hadn’t owned a house until he was fifty and a father of two: I was twenty-seven. For my parents it validated their support and I think it was also a relief to them in terms of the innuendo that they’d had to take from aunts and cousins: ‘Poor Mikey, what a shame after that education.’ ‘When’s Mike going to get a proper job?’ My parents would always defend me, ‘Oh no, he’s artistic’, but I think they had to be quite strong to keep up the impression that they weren’t bothered.

  I think Dad was also proud about my ability to do little things around the house like change a fuse. For all his engineering training he could just about change a light bulb but change a plug? No chance. Domestic life was another world to him. When Mum, Nicky and I used to stay at Morris Lodge while Dad was still working at Hawker Siddeley, Mum would always leave him a list of instructions: get the coal in (a job we all hated); feed the dog (the dog got proper meat, never canned and, being a spaniel, would always get its ears pegged behind its head with a clothes peg before it ate to stop them getting in the gravy). We came back after one holiday and Dad told us that he’d been getting his dinner and the dog’s one night and realized it’d been a toss-up which one looked most appetizing.

  After a life in official quarters being attended to by a batman, household chores must have been quite bizarre for my father. Neither he nor my mother ever really got into domestic life: both of their homes, Far Hills and Hill Cottage, stayed exactly as they were when they moved in. ‘Homes’ isn’t even the right word: wherever they lived, there was always a sense of transience about the place. Maybe that’s why one of my first jobs after we’d moved into Courtnell Street was to repaint. I knew Angie and I wouldn’t be there forever but I was still going to make it ours.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1977 was the year of punk: it was everywhere. Or it was supposed to be. When you’re on tour for seven months out of twelve – as we were that year – quite a lot things pass you by. As far as I was concerned punk was one of those things: I didn’t feel I was really around for it.

  Phil’s line about punk was always ‘shaking the tree’: seeing which old bands dropped off and disappeared when you gave them a bit of a shove. Inasmuch as it affected me, I felt the same. I knew punk was in part a reaction to bands like us – the big and grand – and I did like the DIY ethos it brought back. It reminded me of how we’d started in Brian Roberts’s attic in the Easter holidays. But I also felt that if you were good enough, what had you got to worry about? And I felt we were good enough. Plus I liked what we were doing as a band.

  Wind & Wuthering was recorded in three weeks while we were staying in a little dormer-windowed house in the Netherlands. This house was in the middle of nowhere and we’d have breakfast in the morning, drive the fifteen minutes to the Relight Studio, shut the door and come out at midnight, by which time the few bars there were had closed. You can get a lot done in three weeks when it’s like that.

  I’d read Wuthering Heights at school and I’d always enjoyed English as a subject, but I was too busy resenting Charterhouse to really take it in. Tony was the fan and Wind & Wuthering is one of his favourite albums: it’s a very feminine album and to me it also felt a bit like treading water after the excitement and challenge of proving ourselves with A Trick of the Tail.

  There were highlights: ‘Blood on the Rooftops’, which Phil wrote with Steve, was one of Steve’s best songs, and ‘Afterglow’, which was Tony’s, was a big highpoint on stage. We’d have a huge arc of magenta lights behind the drum riser going out into the crowd.

  My main contributions were ‘Your Own Special Way’ and ‘Eleventh Earl of Mar’, which began with some quite grandiose chords that had given me an image of the Scottish highlands. The lyrics were inspired by a story I’d found about a near uprising among the old Scottish clans.

  I knew we’d suffer a bit lyrically without Pete. When you were writing words you’d often be tied by the music to a certain area – but both Tony and I still tended to gravitate towards science-fiction and fantasy-type stories and didn’t have the edge of reality that Pete always had. Even when he was at his most quirky, there’d be a harder edge to Pete’s lyrics and he’d ground them more in human life and human emotions.

  My lyrics mostly fell somewhere between those of Phil and Tony: Phil’s were very simple and Tony’s were . . . complicated. Tony never did understand how to make words flow. His words are the reason why he’ll never write a hit single, although sometimes you have to admire his bravery: he’s the only person who could ever get away with writing a lyric about double glazing and nylon sheets and have Phil make it work.

  But at the time we didn’t really allow ourselves to have any of these thoughts: it would have been too depressing. Neither Tony nor I look back very often – we both tend to operate in the now. And as the years went by we got better at lyric writing too, although long after we were able to be more honest about the quality of each other’s songwriting, we still wouldn’t comment on the words. We probably should have done, but it was one area where we were all still a little too sensitive.

  ‘Your Own Special Way’, which was a love song to Angie, had a simple, straightforward lyric and was a bit of an emotional breakthrough for me. Rolling Stone even called it ‘a first-rate pop song’, but then they never did like us. In 1971 they’d called us a ‘new contender for the coveted British weirdo-rock championship’ and, five years later, I still didn’t particularly enjoy being condescended to by them.

  Reviews and the music press in general changed with punk: that was one of the effects it was impossible to miss. When we’d first begun it was quite a friendly scene. The papers might ignore you but they didn’t really knock you: there was too much good that was going on with English music at the time for them to feel the need. But with punk the NME in particular got very angry and aggressive.

  I never believe people who say, ‘I don’t care about the reviews.’ Of course they care. We all want to be loved, it’s human nature. But it was Phil who took our press most seriously. He’d ring up journalists sometimes and defend himself, which
I always told him was the one thing you should never do.

  However, reviews always mattered less to me than what was happening in the real world. There was one journalist in Toronto who hated us. For years he gave us bad reviews, but the worse they got the bigger we became. That’s what I loved about live music: the reaction and feedback from the crowd was spontaneous and natural.

  The fact that our success came through live work was one of the things which made us different from the bands that came afterwards. We were popular not because we’d had a hit single (we hadn’t, really) or because we’d been on MTV (which didn’t exist yet) but because our small cult audience had now become a big cult audience. As soon as we got famous, the initial small cult then felt left behind – as always happens – but the vast majority of the following we’d built weren’t going to go away whatever we did.

  But it was when we flew out on Concorde to play Brazil in May 1977 that we knew we’d reached the next level.

  * * *

  Concorde had only begun commercial flights in 1976 so not only were we one of the first big bands to play South America, we were also probably the quickest to get there.

  We weren’t quite sure what playing Brazil actually entailed, but the problems began even before we got there. The Brazilian currency, the cruzeiro, was totally worthless in the wider world and there were endless transatlantic phone calls between Tony Smith and the Brazilian promoters, Globo, who finally came up with the brilliant solution of paying us in coffee beans. At that point Tony Smith decided to get on a plane himself.

  Payment wasn’t the only issue: Tony had heard various stories about the monopoly Globo had over record companies and their ability to impound equipment if things weren’t going their way. Given that we had a gruelling European tour ahead of us, Tony wanted a cast-iron guarantee that our equipment would have safe passage out of the country as soon as our shows finished. Globo kept stalling but Tony wasn’t backing down and insisted on meeting the Globo boss. The Globo boss kept insisting he wasn’t available. It was cat and mouse for a while but finally Tony secured a meeting. He was picked up at his hotel by a couple of heavies in a limo who immediately headed for the hills. Naturally Tony started to get a bit hot under the collar once they’d left the main road for a dirt track – he loved Genesis but I don’t think he was quite ready to put his life on the line. When the limo finally pulled up outside a huge mansion on the top of a mountain, miles away from anywhere, he was already picturing the gun that was about to be put to his head.

  As it turned out, the head of Globo was like someone from The Sopranos: ‘Tony! How ya doin’?’ He was even from Chicago, although the effect was spoiled a bit by the fact that he was seriously vertically challenged (something even his wingmen couldn’t hide). But Tony got his signature on the dotted line and we all thought the fee sounded quite substantial, too – until we realized we were expected to play our three-hour set to 20,000 people not once, but twice a day.

  It got worse: as soon as we arrived I managed to get severe food poisoning. I was so sick I could hardly leave the bathroom let alone manage six hours on stage but cancelling was out of the question. Bodyguards were the norm in Brazil but even they might not have been able to protect us from 20,000 unhappy punters with typically fiery South American temperaments, all of whom, I imagined, would be glad of any excuse for a riot.

  I thought that if I had a show to do, I would do it, even if I fainted in the process. Which I did. Naturally, the band played on.

  In the end the only solution was to get a doctor to sit at the side of the stage with a couple of syringes and every so often during the set he’d haul me off and jab me in the backside, which is how I discovered I was allergic to the anti-nausea drug, Maxolon. (The problem was that it was like a mega-dose of speed: I couldn’t stand still and played double time so the band couldn’t keep up.)

  Tony finally called Angie in the UK. She was three months pregnant with Kate and was enduring her own throwing up sessions so couldn’t face coming to Brazil. He told her that it was quite serious and that she should jump on Concorde the following day as it still looked as though I wasn’t getting any better.

  Angie hadn’t really given Brazil or Concorde for that matter a second thought as she’d been so preoccupied with her own issues. When she did finally board the plane it dawned on her that when it broke the sound barrier there would be a G-force sensation. I think she clung on white-knuckled for a while, waiting for the impact only to be told by the cabin crew that they’d been through the sound barrier half an hour before. The other thing that panicked her was when the captain announced they’d be landing in Dakar in twenty minutes. (She thought he meant Dhaka, Bangladesh, and had got on the wrong plane, with no currency.) After the refuelling in Dakar I’m not sure how much she loved Genesis. Especially when she arrived. The allergy to Maxolon had been detected and I was on another drug, which had kicked in immediately. I was looking a lot better than her by the time of her arrival.

  So much so that I suggested we went to the beach with the others. She sat there quietly while I went out to body surf. Suddenly a large wave threw me back into the sea, and I felt I was in a washing machine and couldn’t get out. Every time I came up for air, arms flailing, another wave would take me back down. To this day Angie says she just thought I was having a good time and just waved back at me.

  * * *

  Despite supersonic transatlantic flights, keeping in contact in the mid-seventies wasn’t easy. If you were phoning from the States it meant booking a call through and the connection was always terrible. I usually forgot the time difference and called Angie at 3 a.m. while I was with the band backstage, drinking, laughing and generally having a piss up. That never went down well.

  With my parents some of the gaps in communication were bridged by tour books: spiral-bound records of the hotels we were staying at, the venues we were playing and all kinds of other information that were put together by the tour manager. These were given to families and crew each time we went out on the road. Mum used to love getting the tour book out each morning. She’d sit down at the breakfast table in Farnham and read it over her toast and marmalade: ‘Oh, that’s nice! Mikey’s in Boise, Idaho today!’

  But for me showing my parents my touring schedule was also one of the ways I could try to get them to understand what my life was like now.

  I was very conscious of trying to prove to my father that it was going okay, even if sometimes I wasn’t sure that it was, and so when Angie and I went over to Farnham I would usually bring along a list of the shows we were playing.

  Dad would pour Angie and me a glass of white wine. It’d be the same bottle he’d opened the last time we were there, and then put back on the sideboard. (My parents didn’t drink wine: that generation liked their spirits too much.) Then we’d sit down and look at the tour books and he’d say things like, ‘A lot of travelling involved there’, or, ‘A lot of logistics’, but I don’t know how much it meant to him really. Ironic to think that, as a teenager, I didn’t want him to understand me. Here I was a few years later, wishing he could.

  Nevertheless, I felt that looking through our schedule with him was one way of showing him not just the progress we were making, but also the similarities between his world in the Navy and mine as a musician – similarities I was beginning to notice more and more. I showed him photos of us on stage, too: I didn’t know about hurrah cruises at this point but I felt that he instinctively understood about presentation, the need to put on an impressive display, and that was very much what we were doing with our live shows.

  * * *

  In June 1977 we played Earls Court with a lighting rig consisting of forty-eight jumbo-jet landing lights – a very original look at the time. It was a weird experience for me because I knew Earls Court well from being taken there by Dad to see the Royal Tournament when I was little.

  The annual Royal Tournament began in 1880 in Islington and then moved to Olympia and that’s where Dad had commanded the C
hatham Field Gun Crew in the 1930s. The competition was taken very seriously in the Navy:

  Two crews and a maintenance staff went into training early in the year. They had their own training areas and accommodation and were treated as very much an elite with special diets, medical attention, physical training and so on as no one in the barracks wished to occur the odium of the adversely affecting their performance.

  By the time I was born and my father was Commander of Whale Island, the Royal Tournament had moved to Earls Court. Dad’s role was now less active:

  I had to take Royal Box duties and ensure that the distinguished incumbent knew when to acknowledge the innumerable salutes from the arena . . . I reacted to the sounds and smells of crews in training and in action like an old war horse to the sound of the trumpet.

  It was almost as nostalgic for me being back at Earls Court, except where I’d been used to seeing the backstage area divided up into straw-lined stables full of Army horses, there were now six crew buses, ten lorries and backstage catering. And whereas the merchandise stalls had been arranged with displays of toy tanks and tin soldiers (Dad always used to buy me a set of these), they were now selling T-shirts and fluorescent green plastic necklaces. I shut my eyes and opened them and my brain wasn’t quite able to process it, especially as Earls Court in 1977 was full of red, white and blue bunting for the Queen’s jubilee. It took a second to work out which decade I was in.

  I felt our light show, with those jumbo-jet landing lights, was increasingly taking over from what Pete had done with his stories. It never really occurred to me to miss his mystique because we were still painting pictures, setting a scene, creating an atmosphere, only with lights not words. In particular ‘Los Endos’, the song with which we ended our set, was a huge peak musically and visually, especially with two drum kits on stage so that Phil could go back and play drums alongside our new drummer, Chester Thompson.