It's Not What You Think

by Chris Evans

  8 Trinkets

  7 The lighting in department stores—it makes my eyes sting

  6 The recurring dream where my head keeps falling off

  5 People who don’t like animals

  4 My friend who doesn’t ‘get’ music

  3 My own heartbeat

  2 Anyone else’s heartbeat

  1 Hospitals

  I was screaming and begging for the surgeon to stop what he was doing, pleading with him to relent. I had been transferred to the operating theatre where I was now being worked upon. Things are never as simple as you want them to be, are they?

  It transpired that as a result of my injury my fingers needed to be rebroken as they had originally been broken ‘the wrong way’. I was informed of this shocking development soon after I was admitted to the accident and emergency department. I was told it would be impossible for my fingers to be set in their current state, not an uncommon occurrence apparently. Maybe not uncommon to the medical profession but it was ‘news just in’ to me—as was the local anaesthetic that had since been hastily administered.

  The anaesthetic needed to numb the affected area had to be injected directly into the bones of my right hand. I cannot describe how painful this was and there was not one but four syringes in total! For some reason two of the syringes also had to be left in the bone during the next part of the process, which meant they were left dangling out of my skin and were currently swaying up and down like over-laden branches on an apple tree.

  Everything in place, it was now the surgeon’s job to do the re-breaking. This basically consisted of him taking up a black rubber hammer and smashing it down on to my hand for all he was worth.

  ‘I’m going to hit you as hard as I can to hopefully get this done first time without having to rain subsequent needless blows down upon you. What I am trying to do can actually be achieved with just one accurate “adjustment”.’

  Excuse me, but since when has hitting someone with a hammer been referred to as an adjustment? This gentleman’s little speech though well- meaning was doing nothing to allay my anxiety—not that he had finished yet.

  ‘Now, young man, the anaesthetic should have taken effect but there is still a chance you might feel something.’

  Feel something! He wasn’t kidding, I felt every ‘bloody’ thing. It was as if I’d never been near a syringe in my life. Whatever had been in those things, they needed to triple the dose, at least.

  After ‘more than one’ concerted attempt to ‘adjust’ my mashed-up digits, during which the attending nurses had grimaced and flinched with every whack, the action finally came to a halt: the surgeon had indeed ceased to hammer me. After wiping his brow and nodding his head decisively in a ‘job well done’ kind of way, he retreated to wherever it is surgeons go after benevolently bashing up the hands of little boys.

  The trauma abating, my central nervous system had instructed me that it was now safe to downgrade my screaming to something less harrowing, a little less cowardly. Accordingly I did so—firstly to a respectable sobbing before fading seamlessly to a feeble whimper.

  After a few minutes, and several sympathetic smiles from a couple of foxy nurses, which I happily acknowledged with the raising of a conciliatory ‘Don’t-worry-I’ll-be-alright’ Ferris Bueller-type eyebrow, milking the situation for all it was worth, I began to compose myself on the way back to regaining full heroic status. But once again all was not as I thought.

  The surgeon returned.

  ‘I’m sorry but that doesn’t appear to have worked, we’re going to have to go again.’

  Ex-squeeze me? Baking powder?

  ‘What did he just say?’

  ‘We’re going to have to go again!’

  Surely I was hearing things, he couldn’t have just said what I thought he’d said. But yes, alas, it was true.

  ‘The local anaesthetic was not strong enough,’ he went on. I could have told him that for free!

  ‘The reason we went with the local at first is because its use does not require us to have prior written permission from a guardian as it is of little risk.’

  ‘Or effectiveness,’ I wanted to add but thought better of it.

  ‘We will now have to give you a general anaesthetic, which means putting you under. Of course for this we will need someone to come in and sign the consent forms.’

  He smiled a half smile—at least he tried. He then turned to walk away but there was something else. He came back and gestured. I drew closer, he had a secret to share with me.

  ‘Oh by the way,’ he whispered, ‘I presume we are all sticking to your story on the accident report of how you fell on to your hand in the playground and not the fact that you more likely punched some other boy in a bout of fisticuffs. That’s the usual way a person comes to sustain this type of injury.’

  Suddenly I began to warm to this guy. Not only had he just used the phrase ‘fisticuffs’—a phrase I’d never heard in real life before—but he was letting me know the score here, the way the land lay. Alright, he may have already put me through a miniature hell, and was about to ‘go again’ in his words, but I couldn’t help feeling that he was offering to cut me a deal. The less fuss I made over the last failed ‘rebreaking’ attempt when my mum came in, the less she needed to know about the ‘more accurate’ reason for the injury.

  ‘Er…yes, thank you,’ I replied, happy to comply.

  I had been well and truly rumbled by the doc and although he was poised to set about hitting me with that bloody hammer again, I had to admit—he was one of the good guys.

  Top 10 Things I Remember from School Lessons

  10 Tectonic plates

  9 π

  8 Iron filings

  7 The binary scale

  6 British standard lettering

  5 Improper fractions

  4 Expansion of brackets

  3 Ripple tanks

  2 French idioms

  1 The angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence

  The last three years of my education at the comprehensive school hold the most lightness for me from my school days. Having said that, I didn’t learn much, not because the teachers at the comp weren’t as good as those at the grammar school; it was just that the comprehensive syllabus was a year or two behind that of the grammar schools and a lot of what they were doing I’d already been taught. The result of which was a further two years of classroom boredom for me and two years of frustration for my teachers.

  For ages I would be the first with my hand up to answer any questions they might ask but after a while they realised I’d learnt it all before and began to ignore me! It was hilarious—I would be there with my hand up and they would say things like, ‘Well, if nobody knows, let me explain.’

  When it came to final exam time, I did somehow manage to scrabble out eight lame but just about acceptable O-level grades, as well as a couple of GCSEs, whatever they were.

  Bizarrely as it turned out and very much against my better judgement (but when has that ever stopped me?), I actually decided to stay on for the sixth form. Here’s a boy who couldn’t wait to get out of the education system and all of a sudden he wants more. What a strange individual, but of course I had my reasons. They were mainly to do with a gap in the market I had spotted and the only way to capitalise on it was from remaining on the inside.

  For most of my years at school I had been bemused by many things, none more than the phenomenon of the school tuck shop. Both my senior schools had such a thing and both were equally hopelessly out of touch with their clientele.

  The tuck shop at my comprehensive school was run by members of the PTA—good wives and loyal mothers who had a bit of spare time on their hands and wanted to do something to help the school, absolutely nothing wrong with that. The problem, however, was that they stocked what they thought the kids liked, or what they should like, not what the kids actually did like. I remember there was one item of confectionary that I had never seen in a real sweet shop. It was as if they’d h
ad it specially commissioned by the boring biccie factory.

  Where there’s a problem there’s an opportunity (in Chinese the word for both is the same, which explains a lot!) and by this time, via my work at Ralph’s, I had good connections with the local wholesalers. I had recently also become the owner of a motorcycle, so I decided to swing into action and set up an alternative sweet emporium for my fellow students.

  From day one I had it nailed. I was supplying all the latest favourites. Unlike the parents I did know what the kids wanted—after all I was still a kid myself: Refresher Chews, Wham Bars, Space Dust, the almighty Fizz Bombs, Jaw-Breakers, Sherbert Dabs, you name it, I had it…and if I didn’t I could guarantee to have it the next day. My USP was that I was also discounting my prices to beat the surrounding shops, as well as of course the good old school tuck shop which was quickly seeing business drop off. As a result I soon saw myself hauled up in front of the headmaster.

  It had come to Sir’s attention that I was operating a rival outlet to the official school sweet suppliers and that, as a result, their turnover was suffering, and consequently, so was the school fund—the sole beneficiary of any tuck shop profits.

  He went on to explain politely to me that this was not an acceptable practice and that he would very much appreciate it if I ceased to trade forthwith.

  ‘Damn’, I thought as I hadn’t considered the school fund angle. This was a reasonable point and one that had me temporarily stumped.

  I bought myself some thinking time by conveying to him my sympathy as well as trying to enlighten him as to the ticking time bomb that was the death knell of the tuck shop. I explained that the whole situation was a simple case of natural market forces at work and that the school tuck shop was way out of date and now way out of its depth. What I had precipitated was bound to happen sooner or later and was in fact already happening outside the school gates in the local newsagents.

  I knew I was treading on thin ice and that he was entirely justified in his initial request for me to close business but I couldn’t resist chancing my arm. I’d hatched a plan. I decided to offer to cut him a deal. I would carry on trading but I would raise my prices so as not to undercut anyone anywhere. I would then donate my new additional profit to the school fund. I also ventured that this may well turn out to be more than the school fund had ever received in the past as I was moving considerably more units than the tuck shop ever had.

  Now it was his turn to be stumped: on the face of it my offer, although admittedly audacious, was also entirely plausible.

  He paused for a moment before realising that this was a ridiculous conversation and one that he didn’t need to have. I was a pupil and he was the headmaster; this was his turf and I was trying to muscle in on it. He told me to close down immediately.

  Ultimately I had no problem with this—how could I? He was completely in the right and he was a nice man.

  So the funny kid with the guerrilla sweet stall packed up his belongings, bade his farewells and left town—out of business and out of the education system for ever.

  Part Two

  The Piccadilly Years

  Top 10 Best DJs I Have Ever Heard

  10 Mike Hollis (Radio Luxembourg, the great 208)

  9 Mike Reed (Breakfast Show Radio 1)

  8 Paul Locket (Piccadilly Radio)

  7 Cuddly Dave (Piccadilly Radio)

  6 Pete Baker (Piccadilly Radio)

  5 Bob Harris (Radio 1 and 2)

  4 Roger Scott (Radio 1 and 2)

  3 Alan Freeman (Radio 1 and 2)

  2 Steve Wright (Radio 1 and 2)

  1…read on

  My brother was a DJ. I knew this because he came home late most nights and had hefty black record cases with Roxy Music stickers on the side. He’s over ten years older than me. I was a mistake apparently—my mum was over forty when I arrived, very old for a new mother in those days. She says she travelled to the hospital to have me on the bus. I’m not sure if this is true but I’ve never liked buses since.

  My brother David was not so much my hero but I did think he was cool—the chief responsibility of an elder brother. I wanted to be like him, I even wanted my bedroom to smell like his, which was bloody awful come to think of it—the thought of that stench now makes me want to gag. What is that smell in older boys’ bedrooms? Is it the smell of ‘anxiety’ so to speak; and why on earth did I find it so alluring? Maybe it just smelt older and older is what all kids want to be.

  My brother seemed to be very happy with his life—something that always intrigued me until one Saturday morning when I found out perhaps why he was so content. I came downstairs and there was this gorgeous girl asleep on the sofa. She really was something else, dressed head to foot in a long, black, flowing lace dress with black stockings and black shoes—in fact everything about her was long except her hair, which was cropped short in a sexy chic kind of style. Long legs, long arms, a long neck, long fingers and long fingernails painted jet black. I didn’t know exactly how she’d come to be in our house but I did know she was an absolute babe.

  It transpired that David had met this goddess as a result of his job as DJ at the Carlton Club, a popular nightspot in Warrington town centre situated over the top of Woolies just off the high street.

  I made another mental note. Deejaying makes geeks more attractive to gorgeous women.

  Both my brother and I have always looked a bit geeky although David did have a cool Fifties thing going on as a kid. Here’s a pic.

  Other than him taking me to my first-ever rock concert—ELO, the Out of The Blue tour when I was thirteen, for which I will be eternally grateful—and what a ‘two’ nights that was,* David and I never did much together and we’ve never done much since. As with my sister; we all sort of live through Mum. We are a decent family but not a close family, something that isn’t helped by the fact that we all live miles apart: my sister Diane is in Yorkshire, whilst David currently lives in Australia and before that New Zealand for close to the last twenty years.

  That said, however, it was definitely ‘our Dave’, as we call him, who set me off on the road to playing records and talking in between them as a way of earning a living.

  Emulating my big brother deejaying in night clubs was a cool enough goal for me to aspire to as it was, but we were about to behold a whole new world of record-spinning possibilities as the explosion of independent commercial radio was just around the corner.

  * * *

  *David organised a trip through his work for a coach load of peeps to go and see ELO. He asked me did I want to go, to which the answer was of course yes. I had never been to any kind of live event before and ELO were my favourite band apart from The Beatles. The order has since swapped and if I had to die listening to one or the other—it would be ELO…probably ‘Sweet Talkin’ Woman’. We set off from St Helens but it was such a cold night the coach literally froze to a halt on the M6. We had to be properly rescued from the motorway along with hundreds of other people who had suffered the same fate; it was minus ten degrees or something ridiculous. As we had no way of getting home so we all slept on the floor of a local pub. I had never even been in a pub before, nor had I ever had whisky, which the landlady dished out free of charge. ‘Come on you need this,’ she urged me. It turned out that so many fans had failed to get to the concert that night the band put on an extra show a couple of nights later with all unused tickets still valid. The gig was truly amazing and to this date by far the best gig I have ever been to. Thank you brother. x.

  Top 10 First Commercial Radio Stations in the UK

  10 Radio Forth (22 May 1975)

  9 Radio City (21 October 1974)

  8 Radio Hallam (Sheffield) (1 October 1974)

  7 Swansea Sound (30 September 1974)

  6 Metro (15 July 1974)

  5 Piccadilly (2 April 1974)

  4 BRMB (19 December 1974)

  3 Clyde (31 December 1973)

  2 Capital (16 October 1973)

  1 LBC (London Broadcasting Comp
any) (8 October 1973)

  Where we lived commercial radio took on the form of the magnificent Piccadilly Radio, broadcast live from Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. ‘Piccadilly 261…on the medium wave,’ sang the jingle. It was funky, it was new, it had adverts and a jazzy coloured logo, which you could send off for in carsticker form—something we all did even though most of us didn’t have a car and ended up sticking them on our bedroom windows.

  This was a radio station where everything was groovier than anything that had been groovy before. It was our Sixties, it was all about the music and the people who played it. There were lots more records per hour, the voices weren’t as posh and plummy as on the BBC and there was more laughing. There were phone-ins where more people from around our area were able to get on the air. A girl from my class called Julia got to be on for a whole hour once, choosing her favourite records. I asked her to go out with me off the back of her appearance.

  Piccadilly Radio knew exactly who it was and what it was about. It was a new voice for a new generation. It was about the North West and everyone who lived there. This deep-seated identity was its strength and one that the station would articulate whenever it could via hundreds of outside broadcasts.

  I remember when I was still a snotty-nosed little kid and Piccadilly came to Warrington town centre and did a whole show from the window of Dixons electrical store one Saturday afternoon—nothing in particular happened but to me it was amazing…it was the most exciting thing that Warrington had seen since Keith Chegwin had brought the Swap Shop Swaperama to the old market square. I’d never seen a rock star or been to a football match, but I had seen the DJ that I listened to on the radio in the mornings, live in the shop window on a Saturday afternoon. It was almost more than I could bear. These guys were the coolest cowboys in town and I wanted to be one of them.

  From then on I was hooked.

  Did I listen to the radio underneath the bedclothes at night? Yes I did, in fact one of the shows I listened to was called just that—UTBC—Underneath The Bed Clothes with Cuddly Dave.