World in My Eyes: The Autobiography

by Richard Blade

  He thrust the jagged glass hard at my face. I reacted spontaneously. I raised my right arm and swept it across my body, right to left to protect myself. Whether I was too fast or too slow I still haven’t decided but I stopped the bottle with my arm. It didn’t hit my face but instead ripped through my jacket’s sleeve and sliced open a four-inch gash on my wrist just an inch from my main artery. But at that moment with the surprise, the fear and the adrenalin pumping I didn’t even feel the cut.

  Instead the impact from my arm sent the bottle flying from his hand and he stepped back momentarily. That was his big mistake. He gave me a three-foot space in which to move. In my left hand I still had my nunchucks.

  Just as I had practiced a hundred times while doing my katas on the empty dance floors I raised the fighting sticks up high and in the same continuous move flipped them hard downwards. That was it, the fight was over. I opened a huge cut through his right eyebrow and crushed the bridge of his nose.

  He was still down when the police and ambulance arrived to ironically take both of us, victim and assailant, to hospital. I had fourteen stitches in my wrist to close up the wound and till this day still have a four-inch scar running down the inside of my right forearm. He was not quite as lucky as I was told his forehead and nose would carry a very visible scar for many years to come.

  Sadly, the ambush and fight should never have happened. It was my attacker’s brother who had been transported to hospital the previous Saturday and he had come looking for revenge against the DJ who had put him there. What he didn’t know was that IDEA DJs changed on the first of every month and the person he thought was responsible was long gone to another town and another club. He just knew I was the DJ and mistakenly thought that I was the one he was looking for. For my remaining three weeks in Herning the doormen walked me to my car every night and I must say I was glad of the escort.

  AUTOBAHN

  The Longest Day, January 1, 1976. “Godt Nytar” was still ringing in my ears as the manager and doormen went with me to my car at 4am on New Year’s Day. It had been a wild New Year’s Eve at the club in Herning and perhaps their busiest Wednesday night ever. The manager stood with me at the car and wanted to talk for a while. He told me that the club was really fun in the summer and I should definitely come back. I didn’t want to be rude but I had to get going.

  Waiting for me was a trek like none I had ever done before; I had to drive the length of Jutland, right through Germany and get to Kreuzlingen in Switzerland in time to go on stage by 8pm That gave me just less than sixteen hours to cover three countries and nearly 1,200 kilometers. Couple that with the fact that this was the dead of winter and snow and ice were everywhere and it made for a daunting journey.

  Fortunately the night was clear; no rain, sleet or snow was falling. But I had to get going. One handshake later and I was on my way. I had been planning this trip for a month. I had water, sandwiches and—most importantly—a stack of TDK C90 cassettes that I had put together to keep me company. With the opening notes of Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” blaring from my speakers I shifted the car into gear and sped south. Within two hours I was passing Handewitt, Germany and Denmark disappeared in my rear-view mirror. Soon speed limit signs were gone and I was on the autobahn.

  Europe was forever shaped by World War II and nowhere is there more evidence of this than on the German autobahns. Arguably the greatest highways in the world, they were designed for a secret, sinister purpose: to move divisions of armored tank columns across Germany to invade the neighboring countries. Initially started in 1929 as a jobs project, to create employment for the German people who were suffering terribly from the Great Depression, their peaceful purpose changed in 1933 when Hitler rose to power.

  As undisputed leader of the Third Reich he saw another use for them, one that would aide him in his goals of conquest and destruction.

  For the next eleven years until the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, Der Fuhrer ordered a construction plan for the autobahns that is almost unmatched in the history of our planet. At first they were built by Germans desperately needing to work but as the economy recovered and Hitler’s iron grip on his country tightened he realized that it would be more cost-effective to build this network of high-speed roads using slave labor.

  As part of his “ultimate solution” hundreds of thousands of imprisoned Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals were loaded onto trains and brought to these work sites and forced to toil night and day to build this massive transportation infrastructure. Most died during the project due to the inhumane conditions and many of those were entombed where they fell in an unmarked grave of concrete and tarmac. These highways, constructed by a river of human blood, crisscross Germany to this day.

  And now I hurtled down the autobahn, tracing the path of the retreating Panzer tank convoys fleeing south to protect their homeland as the war neared its bloody climax. I sped past Hamburg, then Hanover. The next major city was Frankfurt, four hours away. I was now more than five hours into my drive, and apart for a stop for gas and the bathroom, I hadn’t taken a break. But I could feel the weight of my tiredness catching up with me.

  I’d been going for two days straight, including that crazy New Year’s Eve party but if I could just keep my eyes open everything would be good. Frankie Valli’s heavenly falsetto floated from my car speakers as “Who Loves You (Pretty Baby)” was next up on my cassette. Good. This one always gets me going. I cranked the volume, wishing it went up to eleven, and sang along with The Four Seasons. I was flying now.

  Dad had helped me pick out a great little car. Whatever measurement you used; miles or kilometers, this German autobahn was being gobbled up by four Michelin tires and a motor made in Cheshire, England. I relaxed into the rhythm of the road, letting the music power me on. Track after track played as my odometer racked up the distance traveled.

  I remember being puzzled, I wasn’t sure what song it was but it had a strange tempo; a fast cuh, cuh, cuh, cuh followed by a loud toot, toot. I didn’t recognize it but it repeated again. Cuh, cuh, cuh, cuh—toot, toot. Did I put this on the cassette? Could you dance to it? I woke up as the toot, toot became a continuous blast on an air horn.

  The deafening klaxon jolted me out of my sleep and I found myself in a waking nightmare, speeding out of control at more than 100 miles per hour with my tires thumping out an unholy beat as they pounded over the raised cats’ eyes that marked the lane dividers. I was drifting into the path of an eighteen-wheeler that was thundering towards me, desperately blasting its air horn to get my attention before the massive big-rig smashed into me and reduced the car to scrap metal and its fatigued driver to road kill.

  Even as I wrenched the steering wheel hard to the right to avoid the catastrophic collision my car violently rocked sideways as the wind from the hurtling juggernaut hit and shook me like a cat shakes a mouse. My little Vauxhall Viva bounced wildly towards the hard shoulder and I could feel the rear wheels sliding as I braked hard while struggling to straighten out the careening vehicle. I finally got the car under control and my heart raced at the realization of what my exhaustion could have caused.

  My car filled with the acrid stench of burning rubber so I rolled my window down and the freezing January air roared in shocking me awake. How long had I been asleep; a second, a minute? It had almost been a lifetime.

  I wrapped a sweater around my chest to keep warm but left the window down so that the icy chill blowing across my face and head would keep me from dozing off again. Only another two hours to Frankfurt. Then it would be on to Heidelberg, Stuttgart and finally Kreuzlingen. Switzerland here I come.

  Kreuzlingen is set on one of Europe’s most picturesque lakes, the Bodensee. It is a border town, walk down the narrow main street and you pass a small hut with an armed, uniformed guard in it. You’ve just entered Konstanz, Germany!

  Suddenly I was in exactly the opposite situation of the one I’d encountered in Helsingor. The stringent Swiss drinking laws meant that my c
lub, The Green Apple, closed at midnight. So as the clock struck twelve the club would empty and the intoxicated dancers would stagger their way from the bosom of Swiss hospitality to the anxiously waiting arms of the German club owners.

  Every evening it resembled a scene from Night of the Living Dead as the border’s floodlights illuminated hundreds of drunken Swiss kids as they weaved and lurched like zombies stumbling their way down the short road that led from one country to another.

  Lena was from Konstanz. She was one of the bartenders at the club and was drop-dead gorgeous. But no one ever went near her. She seemed to have walls around her that were higher and stronger than the ones that divided her country’s capital 400 miles away. One quiet night she opened up to me, we started talking and hit it off. The next morning we woke up together in my room above the club and I asked if she wanted to grab breakfast. She said that might not be a good idea. She had a boyfriend and didn’t think that people should see us together.

  Rocking the crowd in Switzerland

  I asked where he was; I’d been at the club for nearly three weeks and had never seen anyone with her. She explained that he was away, training in the Bavarian mountains.

  “Training? For what?” I asked.

  “The altitude is good for him. He’s got a big fight coming up. He’s a middleweight boxer.”

  Lena was lovely, but now I knew why no one ever even attempted to flirt with her. I just hoped that her boyfriend’s training would last at least another ten days because after that I was out of there. I dreaded him coming back early because I would have made a lousy sparring partner for a seventy-two-kilo German pro boxer.

  IDEA had clubs across Europe and Alan Lawrie was a great booking agent but not so hot on routing a tour. My next gig sent me backwards over a hundred miles to Basel. This was a much bigger city but also unique as it sits on the crossroads of three countries and tourists can visit “the border triangle” and literally step from one country to the next. France, Germany and Switzerland all meet up here so it’s a great way to impress your friends by telling them that you visited all three countries in one day—or truthfully, in three steps!

  Happy Night was the name of the disco in Basel and they loved their English DJs so much that the booth was a hollowed-out London taxi—one of the famous “black cabs.”

  The management were not content with only the DJ entertaining the crowd; twice a night I would have to stop the music for a show. One performance would be a stripper and the second, a magician. The magic acts rotated in and out; sometimes card tricks and mind reading with the audience, sometimes fire breathing and other weeks a knife thrower with his scantily clad assistant strapped to the “Wheel o’ Death.” And if you’ve ever seen knife throwing up close, you know it’s terrifying. There’s nothing fake about it and twice during my month at Happy Night I watched as a knife flew close enough to the scantily clad assistant’s body to draw blood. No wonder the audience gasps!

  My room in Basel was just that, a room. It was cramped and had a bed that had seen plenty of use. As the incoming DJ you learned to shake out the sheets before you lay down just in case they hadn’t been washed well enough to get rid of any creepy crawlies that the previous DJ might have left behind. The room was directly above the club and had probably been a former office. My clues to that origin were two empty file cabinets that were jammed in the corner because it was probably easier to just leave them there than to lug them down the stairs. Those metal cabinets were the only decoration in the entire room. No pictures of the town square or the river or cats playing cards, just four blank walls to comfort you during your stay.

  Several of the DJs, evidently rife with boredom, had written on the walls in ballpoint pen. Some of the words were warnings, “Stay away from Susie, she has the clap” or “Buy your beer in Germany. It’s cheaper.” But one caught my eye. It said, “Radio. You can sing along with it, but you can never be on it.”

  I would find myself going back to that sad graffiti day after day. I could feel the despair of the person who had written it flowing through those words. Like most of the club DJs I wanted to get on the radio but again and again had found it to be a “closed shop.” But I was not giving up—ever! Whoever had scribbled this on the wall had obviously resigned themselves to failure. The more I stared at this hopeless phrase the more I could feel the determination building within me. There had to be a way to break in, there had to be.

  On my last day at Happy Night I knew I could not leave without replying to that haunting negativity. I would not let it win. Nine words to answer it kept ringing through my head and on that final morning I scrawled them out on the wall right below the phrase. The next DJ following me would now read:

  Radio. You can sing along with it, but you can never be on it. Then one day you can sing-along with me.

  I stopped and added two more words—Dick Sheppard.

  That was the moment I signed a contract with myself.

  As my time in Basel drew to a close I readied myself for another journey. As I mentioned, Alan was fantastic at getting the gigs but not at planning how to get from club A to club B. He’d sent me backwards to Basel, now I had to drive due east 850 kilometers to Vienna, Austria, passing Kreuzlingen on the way. Nine more non-stop hours in the car. I was definitely becoming Dick Sheppard, road dog.

  VIENNA CALLING

  Winter had not yet surrendered to spring, and snow still clung to the ground as I pulled my car up to Magic Discotheque in Vienna with just minutes to spare. I would unpack later; right now I had to get to work.

  The club was situated in Volksgarten, on the grounds of Hofburg Pal-ace. It was in the center of Austria’s capital and the most important club in the city. I’d been told it was big but the description didn’t prepare me for just how huge it was. Inside the main building there were several dance floors that held more than 2,000 people. The side walls had massive powered sliders that in the warm summer months pushed them open to a vast exterior area that could accommodate another 4,000 party-goers.

  The sound system was tri-amped with Earthquake bass bins and the lighting was state of the art with sweeping overhead Par cans and neon wall displays. I had a dry-ice fog machine at my disposal and a confetti cannon. Magic was a forerunner of the mega clubs that were starting to appear in Ibiza and Mallorca and would then spread across the world to London, New York and Las Vegas.

  As I entered the club there were already people inside enjoying the cheap drink deals that were part of the Austrian version of “happy hour.” The DJ booth was located right next to the main bar and after assessing the gear I unloaded my records and plugged in my microphone. I changed into my white suit which I always liked to wear on the first night in a new club to make an impression, came back out, put on a mid-tempo song to start the evening and looked around to absorb the ambience.

  Taxi at the bar at Magic, Vienna, March 1976

  The theme running throughout Magic was pink velvet. Everything was covered in that fabric and even the roof had thousands of pink stalactites hanging down. It was funky but somehow it worked and with all the plush material acting as acoustic baffles by absorbing any stray echoes from the loud speakers the club sounded amazing. I knew right away that this would be the perfect setup to showcase some of my favorite bass-heavy tracks like Brass Construction’s “Movin’” and Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star” and that as the night wore on and the drinks kicked I could get this club going off big-time. But there was one other thing that caught my eye.

  Sitting at the bar, surrounded by her friends, was a vision in white. She almost looked too pretty to be real. An overhead spotlight hit her from behind and lit up her platinum-blond, shoulder-length hair like a halo. Holy shit, I thought, she was so worth that drive. I caught her eye and smiled. I turned away to cue up the next song, thinking that I was going to go right over to her and say hello but as I turned back around she was standing there on the stairs to the DJ booth.

  “I’m Taxi,” she said simply.


  So many lines rushed through my head but they were all cheesy or rude, so instead I replied, “Great name. I’m Dick.”

  It was Taxi’s turn to smile. She took one step back and looked me up and down. “That’s not right. Du bist nicht dick.”

  My knowledge of the German language was limited to just a few words and phrases but from what Taxi said I picked out a couple that I recognized. Du is you, bist means is, nicht is not and dick is my name. She was saying I wasn’t who I said I was.

  I leant forward. “Really, I am Dick. Look, this is me.” I pointed to the poster advertising my month at Magic that was pinned on the wall of the DJ booth. The picture on the poster looked just like me; hell, I was even wearing the same suit.

  She laughed. “Yes, that is you. But du bist nicht dick.” She stepped forward and put her hands on my waist. Dick in German means fat. You are not fat.”

  Oh great. I was hoping to learn a little German but to find out in my first impromptu lesson that my name has a specific meaning in that language was certainly not what I was hoping for. Kids across Vienna would see the flyers that read “Dick Sheppard” and would want to come and party with the chubby DJ. Just wonderful.

  Taxi’s hands lingered on my waist for a few more seconds, perhaps a little longer than they should have. The message was clear. I looked into her eyes, “How long are you going to be here tonight?” I asked.

  She held my gaze and said without hesitation, “Until you finish.” I knew the game was on.

  As they locked the doors of the club behind us, Taxi and I climbed into my car and she directed me to the address of my apartment on Mariahilfer Strasse. It was easy to find as Mariahilfer Strasse is one of the busiest streets in the city. It’s the Viennese equivalent of Oxford Street in London or 5th Avenue in New York.

  We climbed the stairs of this classic seventeenth-century building lugging my bags and unlocked the massive door. I was hoping the room wouldn’t embarrass me and turn out to be yet another converted janitor’s closet. I didn’t have to worry. It was a full one-bedroom apartment with separate sitting area, bathroom, kitchen and bedroom. The floors were hardwood and the ceilings were high with ornate crown molding. It was awesome.