While the equipment was certainly not lacking, the will to do anything was curiously absent. I was raring to go, but we immediately decamped to the pub. Thus fortified, we made a start. Sort of.
‘Shall we start?’ I asked.
‘Nah. Let’s get wrecked first.’
And so it began. It was to be two years of madness, and yet we still managed to pull off some decent music, plus some variable gigs, although secretly we quite liked it that way.
The immediate task at hand was to get wrecked, so I went back to the pub and had a third pint. When I returned, the wreckage had already started. Although I’d been in a band called Speed, I had no idea that there was a drug called speed until a couple of years later. There was a light white crusting on the tip of Chris’s nose. He was unusually active, being as he was fairly languid under control conditions.
Paul, on the other hand, was carefully rolling one of several joints using resin crushed atop tobacco removed from a Marlboro cigarette. This, plus a new echo machine, made for pleasant interludes of overlapping feedback that went on for several minutes.
Barry, or Thunderstick, as he had named himself, was wearing a blue boiler suit. As the engine room of the band on the drums, he didn’t seem to be his usual bouncy self. This, I discovered, was because he had washed down a handful of downers with his pint. After half an hour or so, we launched into a number: stoned guitar, speeding bass and a drummer on downers periodically losing consciousness and threatening to fall off his drum stool backwards. Fortunately there was a wall behind that prevented this, and which meant he would suddenly wake up and thrash his kit much faster, as if to make up for lost time.
I did a bit of singing. Three pints, I thought, is not enough.
In the midst of this quick, quick, slow and stoned routine, the door opened and in walked what I thought might either be a travelling salesman or a minicab driver. He stood and watched. I have never liked being watched in rehearsals. I don’t even like being watched by people I know, truth be told. Rehearsals are where you can screw up and feel safe to experiment.
Now he started tapping his foot and nodding his head, pursing his lips in the way that people who know absolutely zero about music do. He thought he was important, but he was just irritating.
We stopped, but not all at the same time. It took a while for Thunderstick to realise and slowly collapse onto his tom-toms, fast asleep.
‘Hello, can I help?’ I offered.
‘Ah, yes. I’m Glyn. Alistair sent me down to have a listen. You know, see how it’s going.’
He had quite a strong South African accent, and I was right: he was a minicab driver. The Alistair he referred to was Alistair Primrose of Ramkup Management, Samson’s manager.
‘We’re just knocking it on the head,’ Paul announced.
Short but sweet, the first rehearsal ended up back in the pub. Glyn had a cash float and we figured we may as well convert cash into food and beer. After an hour or so we went back to retrieve Thunderstick, and found him on the roof staring at the sun with his eyes closed. He was in no state to walk so we all sat on the roof while Chris and Paul smoked a lot more joints. We waited for our respective chemical states to stabilise so we could go home.
I found communication as I would normally understand it quite arduous with people who were out of their gourds. It’s difficult enough when you are straight. I resolved to adapt. That’s what evolution is for, I reasoned. If the mountain wouldn’t move in my general direction, then I would jolly well find out what all the fun was about and clamber aboard.
Day two of rehearsals was looming large, and I was sure that eventually we would play something in tune that started or finished in time. And, dear reader, that’s exactly what happened. So there. Samson did have a record deal and they had produced an album as a three-piece with Paul on lead vocals. The album was ready to be released, but the slight technical hitch was the addition of a fourth member, for whom no useful purpose could be assigned on the record.
The record label was an independent one, Laser Records, and the album was called Survivors, featuring a kindergarten bad-taste painted sleeve with the band standing atop a mound of dead rock stars. On the credits were instructions to ‘play loud when wrecked’, and it was certainly advice that we heeded for the next couple of years.
It’s safe to say that almost every mishap, catastrophe and legal disaster that could befall a band happened to us over the next two years. We were sued, injuncted, arrested, on the run for various offences and utterly misunderstood by everyone except our own mothers.
The management were all accountants or company secretaries, and their skill set was recruiting accountants and financial personnel. They had offices on the top floor of a building in Blackfriars, wore suits and were drunk for 50 per cent of the day as part of their job description. There was some money they had obtained from a mystery backer, and that funded their foray into music. The other group they managed were the UK Subs, a hardcore punk band led by the evergreen Charlie Harper.
I received a pay cheque, £30 a week – in fact it was an advance, so just a loan really. It was thought great sport to fill in my first cheque payable to ‘Bruce Bruce’, as they had tied themselves in knots one drunken evening trying to remember the ‘Bruces’ Monty Python sketch.
I wasn’t very amused because I couldn’t cash the cheque and I had to eat.
‘Bruce Bruce’ then went down the slippery slope of acceptance as my stage name, something I was not entirely happy with. I thought it pretty stupid, really. Although not nearly as daft as the name of the movement that I had suddenly been co-opted into, unaware as I was of its existence.
The New Wave of British Heavy Metal was cooked up as a musical movement during a boozy lunchtime session involving journalists from Sounds magazine. Fed up with being seen as the idiot brother of the New Musical Express, they decided to fight back with a new wave of their own. It was a preposterous title, shortened to the equally incomprehensible NWOBHM, pronounced ‘Newobbum’. The bands involved suddenly found themselves in a national music paper, to their great surprise in some cases.
The NWOBHM was nothing of the sort. It was an ‘old wave’ that had been ignored by the mainstream media in favour of punk, which, with its Vivienne Westwood fashion links and faux-class-war rhetoric, was more palatable to journalists who had aspirations beyond mere music.
The bands that inspired this NWOBHM were solidly traditional and, in the main, still going strong. To read contemporary music criticism you could be forgiven for thinking that rock music had ceased to exist in 1979. Far from it. Judas Priest, Motörhead, the Scorpions and various offshoots of Deep Purple were all selling out theatres and arenas, in spite of the media attention lavished elsewhere.
In Samson I was suddenly a member of the NWOBHM. Alistair Primrose claimed to have invented the roadshow that feted the movement. ‘Dear boy,’ he would say in his high-pitched country-reverend voice, ‘we’re going on a Heavy Metal Crusade.’
Two of my earliest shows with Samson were Heavy Metal Crusades, and they were eye openers. At a half-empty Surrey University I sat and watched Saxon do their stuff. I hadn’t seen them or heard much of them before. They came from Barnsley, not a million inches from Worksop, and had a biker-boogie sort of sound, with epic overtones of Vikings, crusades and subsequently plummeting Boeing 747s.
Biff Byford, the singer, produced a large knife on stage, which he brandished triumphantly during one song. I watched with great interest as he tried to hurl it into the wooden stage, where it would embed itself menacingly. Except it didn’t. It bounced off and clattered all about the floor. Bending over and picking it up to try again did not improve the situation, and even though it did end up stuck in the wood eventually, the drama had rather vanished.
Note to self: when things go wrong on stage either ignore and move on, or make a meal out of it and create its own narrative within the performance. Oh, well.
Samson nearly always headlined at Heavy Metal Crusades,
mainly because our management paid for the shows. And thus the world discovered Barry’s alter ego, Thunderstick. The key to the persona of Thunderstick was not just Barry’s adoration of Kiss, but also of bands like the Residents and Devo, strange bedfellows as far as image went. Going round to Barry’s house was like being in a surreal suburban Kiss encounter group. The first realisation was that the plywood units you were sitting on all contained old 12-inch guitar speakers, and were all connected to industrial-size amplifiers, which in turn were connected to the turntable, and on it, of course, was Kiss. As the cushions hoisted your bottom upward, his Alsatian dog would run into the room, bite its tail and run around in manic circles. As the walls of the terraced house began to crumble under the onslaught, Barry’s wife would bring tea and biscuits, seemingly oblivious to the trench warfare going on beneath the furniture. Going round to Barry’s was a seismic event.
Samson’s intent was similar, and to achieve it we intended to blow things up and set fire to everything. Thunderstick took his Kiss-inspired concussive living room and tried to achieve the same effect in clubs. The character of Thunderstick was entirely separate from the band, and that’s where the problem arose. Fee Waybill of the Tubes was part of a theatrical performance-art group that happened to play rock music. Barry would have loved that to be the case with Samson, but it was only the case for himself.
Paul in particular never engaged with it in any meaningful sense, and I think audiences saw it as a gimmick rather than an artistic endeavour. The Yorkshire Ripper didn’t help much either. Gimp masks were not the flavour of the month.
Another Heavy Metal Crusade was at the Music Machine in Camden. Samson stood a bit of a chance in our south-east London stomping ground but, this far from home, in spite of a masked Thunderstick adorning various magazine covers, the audience was, to say the least, a bit sparse.
Still, we set about setting the place on fire – something we were about to do more literally. At the Music Machine I was introduced to our pyromaniac-in-chief Scotty. He was, as his name suggests, not English, and he was roadie, driver and blower-up of things. He laid mortar charges, set off confetti cannons and taped incendiaries to pieces of masonry, which were hopefully incombustible.
At first our gigs were few and far between. In 1979, after a few Heavy Metal Crusade road shows, we had only one gig between us and world domination. The album Survivors had a release date in the autumn, but there was no tour. We had an agent. I phoned him and decided he was useless. I was back to being entertainment officer again, with a telephone and a list of promoters, but at least I had a single, ‘Mr Rock ’n’ Roll’, and a supply of cheap shirts to send out as promo items. I cold-called and bullshitted for England once more.
‘Oh yeah, and a HUGE light show – and pyro. Front cover of . . .’
Blah, blah, blah.
It took three weeks of hard work but I booked us a 20-date UK headline tour. I phoned our agent and told him he was a lazy shit. He sacked himself.
Life goes in circles. The next domino to fall was a pitifully short 20-minute opening slot for Ian Gillan, featuring Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic clone Randy California as special guest. Gillan had returned to his metal roots after a few years of jazz rock, and the effect was transformational. Ian’s bass player, the sumo-sized John McCoy, had also played on and produced the Survivors album.
This was the first time I had ever set foot on a big stage, with a real crowd who actually wanted us to be there. Plus I was able to watch my childhood hero doing his stuff every night.
It was not quite what I expected. Which is to say, I had no idea what to expect. Ian was having vocal problems. That was obvious to me and quite a few others. Something had happened to his upper register, and the scream with a vibrato the depth of the Grand Canyon had been laid low. The purity had been replaced by a gruff rasp, and some nights I could hardly bear to watch. What I found incredible, though, was his undimmed self-belief, best summed up by ‘look ’em in the eyes and mean it’.
At the end of the show he walked on with his guitar for a cover of ‘Lucille’. He was strumming away, looking very uncomfortable, it must be said. Lead vocalists seldom look comfortable wearing a plank, especially so when it’s hoisted up to nipple level. ‘Lucille’ would suddenly stop, and Ian would punch out some strange a cappella bluesy incantation, beautifully in time and in tune, but incomprehensible.
I stood on the sound desk every night trying to make out what he sang.
‘I can’t hear the guitar,’ I’d say.
‘It’s not switched on.’
‘Oh.’ I thought for a moment. ‘What’s he saying at the end?’
‘No fucking idea. He’s pissed and just says random shit.’
Not only was he standing there with virtually no voice while randomly strumming a nipple-high electric guitar, but he faced off 3,000 people with every syllable hung on by a variety of drunken Glaswegians: ‘Who far gits on the soul. Phara wooorgh . . . gits inda backa macar . . . yeah!’
Ian impressed me not just because he had one of the greatest rock voices of all time, but because he had courage. Here was a showman and a trouper. He didn’t leap around; he spoke between songs with a quiet humour, or menace, if required, which is best summed up in one of his lyrics: ‘He’s got style. Got a reputation, no one dares to question.’
Except for me. I door-stepped him after a show, during the load out. He had a bottle of Bell’s whisky in one hand and a Rothmans cigarette in the other.
‘Er, hi,’ I started. ‘How is it with your voice on these long shows. Are you okay?’
He looked at me, then at the bottle and his cigarette, then back at me.
‘Ulcers. Got some ulcers,’ he said. He glanced back at the Bell’s whisky. ‘Sorts ’em right out.’
And with that, he turned away. I felt touched he’d even bothered to reply, but I was genuinely worried for him. The voice is a precious instrument, an emotional instrument. There is nothing between you and your audience. There is no guitar plank to hide behind, no giant stack of keyboards, no battery of tom-toms. There is nothing and no one to blame except yourself, and an audience will murder you and dance on your grave in a heartbeat if you let them.
Survivors came out and did okay, not brilliantly, but the tour and the press were fantastic. We got front covers of national music magazines, but, of course, it was all about Thunderstick. I was credited with backing vocals and guitar on the album. All absolute rubbish. I was nothing to do with it and all the songs were in the wrong key for me. My voice was barely getting warmed up singing them.
We set about a new album with the prospect of a new record label, Gem Records, distributed by RCA and with some real funding. Incredibly, I had not been in a recording studio since ‘Dracula’.
We parked ourselves back in the Greenwich studios to write, but this time we could stare out at the river through the panoramic window without a minicab driver to disturb our endeavours. The time spent in the library at King Edward VII School ripping pages of Norse legends out of books came in handy after all, and ‘Hammerhead’ came into being. ‘If I Had a Hammer’ was already taken as a title, and Afro-Caribbean it certainly wasn’t. There was such a profusion of different influences on the album that it’s amazing we wrote anything coherent, but actually it works as a sort of period piece.
In no particular order we were throwing Rainbow, Journey, Devo, Kiss, Deep Purple and Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac plus ZZ Top into a blender. ‘Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, for the ingredients of our cauldron.’ Whatever Shakespeare was smoking, we smoked an awful lot more of it during that album.
I screamed and shrieked, harmonised and crooned. Thunderstick broke milk bottles and we recorded it. Paul tracked, double-tracked and echoed his way around the songs. John McCoy, our producer, would watch, sporting a top-knot and smoking a firework-sized joint. ‘Yeah, man,’ he’d say. ‘It’s fucking mad.’
Indeed it was. The walls of Ian Gillan’s Kingsway Studios in Holborn, where we recorded th
e album, were covered with gold, silver and platinum records. I had never laid eyes on such artefacts and would peer wide-eyed into the grooves, waiting for each indentation to reveal its secrets and stories. Deep Purple were there, of course, but there was also the disc for the original soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar. All a bit jaw-dropping for a 21-year-old. I quickly moved my gaze, lest I should be decreed uncool by my bandmates for showing too much interest and enthusiasm.
We finished the album and played it back several times, easily convinced of our own genius. It was called Head On, a name dreamt up by the label. The cover featured a gimpish executioner clutching an axe, which formed a rather tenuous visual pun with the title.
We’d all been imbibing in the Newman Arms, the pub above the studio, before returning several pints later for one last self-congratulatory moment. We lounged on the well-worn sofas that lined the back of the control room. The recording engineer was celebrating the mix by sprinkling some rather aromatic concoction onto our standard Marlboro Man tobacco-hybrid joints. At that moment in walked Ian Gillan, hair down to his waist, vintage Rolls-Royce in the underground car park and rock god in every sense of the word.
The engineer offered a joint. Ian waved it away as he sat down and rested his chin on top of the mixing desk: ‘Nah, mate. I’ll just stick to an oily.’ (Oily rag equals fag equals cigarette, for our American brethren.) He looked around the room. ‘Well, let’s have a listen,’ he said.
I heard my 21-year-old self ripping off most of Ian’s phraseology in the vain hope of licking his vocal boots. I was passed a joint and took a few puffs. I was nervous, watching my hero listen to my version of himself. He waved his hand and McCoy paused the playback. ‘Who’s the singer?’ Gillan asked.
Obviously he had no recollection of the upstart who had the temerity to question his vocal prowess at the Carlisle Market Hall a few months earlier. I elevated my hand feebly. ‘Err, me,’ I said.
‘Cool vocals. Great screams,’ he said casually.
I realised at that moment that I suddenly and very urgently wanted to vomit. It wasn’t something he said; it was the something I’d smoked on top of four pints in the Newman Arms. I’m still not sure what temple balls are, but I can tell you they disagreed with me. I opened my mouth to reply and just managed to get out ‘Thank you – I have to go’ as I almost ran out of the control room and into the toilets. My head fell into the porcelain bowl and, with the soundtrack of the new Samson album playing down the hallway, I threw up for the foreseeable future.
What Does This Button Do? Page 8
