They didn’t care when you got there, idiot. They didn’t even care if you got there. How could we not see that?
I take my time returning to London Street.
* * *
Indefatigable Ken’s been working the phones from home. Alice Cooper’s producer Bob Ezrin has heard of the Hollywood Brats and wants a meeting with Ken. Trouble is, Ezrin is in Toronto and Ken’s in penury. We empty the pillowcase of the last of the Camden quids and Ken flies out of Heathrow.
Nimbus 9 Productions
39 Hazelton Ave.
Toronto, Ontario
Bob Ezrin
Response?
No*
After this final debacle Ken decides he’s had enough. He has a wife and child to look after. Reluctantly (so he says), he bows out.
II
Brady’s got a brand-new band and he’s been beating his gums together around town, yapping about how good they are. They’re playing the Marquee so Cas and I pop in for a look. I am now considered so boring and ineffectual even the Marquee lets me in again. Now it’s us who are the music police, standing at the back, arms crossed, waiting to be impressed or, as in this case, not.
I understand they’re called Violent Lunch. Like a menu item at a caff in Kilburn. They’re going nowhere.
Actually, we suffered a bit of trepidation coming in, wondering what the Dublin defector was up to, but in the end we needn’t have worried. The band doesn’t even qualify as rubbish. More like aural wallpaper. A less-than-ordinary, plodding four-piece playing Chuck Berry and Frankie Miller retreads; a suburban pub-level outfit at best.
And Brady, what’s that you’re wearing, lad? He’s in a pair of trousers that look like something Gary Glitter would put on when he’s washing his wigs. Also, he looks weird. He is gaunt, pasty, and cadaver-like. And not in a cute young Vogue-model way.
Turns out he’s on smack. And not in a cute young Vogue-model way.
Backstage in the dressing room at the Marquee, Brady shows us how he gets his kicks these days. Or maybe he doesn’t care who is watching, or possibly he doesn’t know we are even there. Anyway, it’s clear he ain’t getting his kicks on Route 66 anymore. He takes a dirty, sweaty scarf in his teeth, wraps it around his upper arm, and pulls tight. Some rat-boy creature is, meanwhile, holding a cigarette lighter under a piece of foil containing what looks like a small pile of crusted brown sugar and baking soda. The flame soon turns it into a cesspool of brown liquid. This is heroin and cocaine: a speedball.
The murky liquid is sucked up into a filthy, blood-specked syringe by yet another twitching mutant who then approaches Brady and searches his pale, scarred, skinny arm for a suitable vein. Then, upon finding just the right blood vessel, he pushes it in, squeezes home the joy juice, and walks away, leaving the spike dangling.
Brady gasps, his eyes roll up under his lids, and he falls backward onto the floor with his arms outstretched, head lolling back and forth, moaning.
Now, that looks like fun. Casino and I say “toodle-oo” and leave. Nobody cares, nobody notices. We’re getting a lot of that these days.
We appear to be out of allies and options. Now that the pillowcase money is long gone the two of us spend our days in London Street playing Dean Martin’s Greatest Hits over and over, and using my putter to smack golf balls across the carpet into a shot glass. Over and over.
One fateful morning, Casino decides to take the tapes to Norway to see what damage he can do there. I don’t hold out much hope for what I see as a kamikaze mission, but I wave a hanky from the control tower and wish him banzai as he flies off to his date with destiny at Pearl Fjord. A day that will live in infamy.
* * *
A lonesome week without my pal crawls by. It is a week filled with wandering the streets of London, cadging dodgy lunches from even dodgier cults, and enduring the endless, unavoidable sonic torture of “Mandy,” by Barry Manilow, and “If,” by Telly “Kojak” Savalas, as they duel for the number-one spot in this most wretched of wretched pop charts. Dog days, indeed.
And then, finally, on a Tuesday afternoon, as I’m trying to work out the chords to “Return to Me” by Dino, Casino returns to me, bursting through the door with news that is absolutely staggering. The Hollywood Brats have a record deal with Mercury Records, Norway.
Cas hands over £62.50, my half of the £125 advance, and we immediately head out to the Sussex Arms to invest it in many rounds of celebratory suds.
So, what happened in Norway? The usual and then the startlingly unusual happened. Casino initially met with the anticipated wall of disapproval, the usual “No” at every stop. And then at Mercury/Phonogram, during a meeting with the strikingly prescient gentleman of fine breeding and obvious good taste, the honorable Audun Tylden, he met with the absurdly unusual, a resounding “Ja.”
According to Casino, Audun Tylden cranked up the tape machine, heard the first fifteen bars of “Tumble With Me,” turned to Cas, and yelled, “I love it!” or, actually, “Jeg elsker det!”
This is stunning news, great news, unbelievable news. The Hollywood Brats finally have a record deal. There’s just one slight snag.
The Hollywood Brats no longer exist.
III
We don’t have a band. Three-fifths of us—rats, perhaps—have long since left leaking, listing HMS Brats. Well, Lou’s not a rat, I suppose. He’s in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and word has it that the girl in Clapham has joined him. I know that because one afternoon I called her number, 622-1339, thinking that, even though it’s south of the river, I’d go down there and offer to throw a quick one into her. But her mum answered and said she’d gone to Canada.
Lou ultimately went back to find a real life. Can’t blame him. It must be said that he hung in there to the bitter end, which he then kindly left to us.
Derek? What about him? He was always the hired hand, and at fifty nicker a week he was earning five times what the rest of us were. We tried to accept him, but we could never get over the fact that he originally turned us down and only came aboard when things were rosy, with contracts and TVs and Olympic and fab gear and whatnot. He never adopted the lifestyle, philosophy, and culture of the Brats. An okay bass player, a renowned swordsman, and a good sense of humor, but he could never shake the tag of “opportunist.” As Brady always said, “There are only four Hollywood Brats.”
Which brings us to Eunan Seamus Brady. A piece of tame, lumpen clay, a mild milquetoast pretend-Keith that even soppy Love Affair instructed to look away from the camera at a stone prison wall. And he did. Or, then again, perhaps he didn’t. Maybe he was genuinely looking at the prison wall, thinking, If I play my cards right, I’ll be behind one of those one day.
Casino and I had taken him and shaken him, cursed, coerced, and rehearsed him until he had finally started to act like a guitar man the world might take seriously. We’d whipped him into stage form, taught him to sing, taught him to walk and talk like a Hollywood Brat.
We’d teed him up, freed him up, licensed him to let loose in London Town, kick them trash cans down, rip off them Rolls-Royce aerials. Good boy. Have a beer.
We had fried his fingers and beaten him to red pulp in the studio, made him do take after take, and dropped him into solos a dozen times over four bars to create those effortless-seeming, biting, flowing guitar tracks.
We had invented him.
We’d almost electrocuted him.
Hell, we even christened the boy.
And what does he do?
He quits, buys a Hayman, and injects speedballs.
So what do we do? Mercury Records are crying out for artwork, photos, liner notes, and we’re sitting on a sofa in London Street, the last two left, bereft. How can we pull this off? We’re not Sonny & Cher.
It’s not brilliant, but this is what we come up with. We decide to be Andrew Matheson & the Brats. This solution allows some scope for forming a new band. Th
us, Casino sets up a photo shoot with his old pal Tony the Italian. On a rainy night in Soho we choose a suitably sleazy street, Rupert Court, full of strip joints and clip joints. I’m wearing a thirties hat, aviator shades, a red-and-white striped top, and ever so slightly tatty formal tails, white silk scarf, white shoes. Anonymous. Could be anybody. But it ain’t.
For the back cover we throw in live shots and a couple of other random photos. A quick call to Ken and, once he recovers from the shock of us having garnered a record deal, he agrees to pen some liner notes.
I suggest to Casino that we call the album “Grown Up Wrong,” after the title of a song on the 12 x 5 album by the Stones. He said yeah (bom-doo-be-doo-bom-bom), he said yeah.
Next day, the piano player and I are scoffing the full English at Bela’s greasy spoon in Fulham Broadway. On a stool in a corner in a stack of old newspapers I find a beat-up, dog-eared Batman comic. I haven’t read a Batman comic since I was a lad, and even back then all those caped crusaders weren’t really my cup of tea. I was more of a Beano, Lone Ranger, Classics Illustrated type of lad. But this is Wednesday, not Thursday, and there’s no music press. Casino is reading last night’s Evening Standard, but who wants yesterday’s papers?
I flick through the pages of the comic but my heart’s just not in this Gotham wheeze. Batman has a great set of wheels, but what else? A suspect relationship with Robin, who makes Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen seem like a positively suave career man. In fact, the only thing Batman’s got that I covet, other than the car, is his mansion. This place, complete with butler, is just the kind of digs I intend to, one day, stride about in, whacking a riding crop against my leather boots and terrorizing the servants. Not to mention rogering the more comely of them. Batman’s mansion even has a great name, Wayne Manor.
Ultimately, there were three bass players on the Hollywood Brats album. By the end of breakfast Casino and I agree that Wayne Manor is their name.
IV
Next, we take the tapes (the nicked tapes; the tapes that were hours away from being taped over by those wisest of wise guys) on the bus to Phonogram Studios on Stanhope Place, Marble Arch, where Mercury Records have set up a session for us to sequence the record: “Chez Maximes” first, “Sick On You” last, and so on. Also, I’ve got an idea I want to try.
“Ain’t We Got Fun?” is a song from the twenties. The lyrics denote a life wherein not much is right with the world—no money, rent’s due, that sort of thing—but despite it all, baby, ain’t we got fun? It seems a perfect motif for the Brats, not to mention Casino and me at this strange juncture in our lives. I want it to lead off the album, played dead simple, a one-finger, kitten-on-the-keys sort of thing. Just eight bars, but at the end I want a jagged, fractured note. A fractured note that hints, dear listener, that maybe this is a ruse, a con, a Burmese tiger pit. Maybe we ain’t got fun after all. Maybe you should just brace yourself. Then—wham!—straight into “Chez Maximes.”
I want it on the outro, too. At the end of “Sick On You,” right after the last piece of falling sheet-metal sky and cough-choke chaos, I want that piano to incongruously reappear, monotonous, eerie, and echoing as it slinks off into the ether, dragging your battered preconceptions behind it. Anyway, some rubbish like that.
Cas says, “Okay.”
Phonogram Studios, grand piano, lights dim, Casino leaning over the keyboard, right forefinger poised. I hit the talk-back button and remind him of the mission. Twelve notes, repeat, then mess up the last one, please. Got it? Of course I’ve got it. Simple? Couldn’t be simpler. Fine. Roll tape. Tape rolling.
Take one. Just one slight problem: he can’t do it. Take two. Uh, let’s take it again. Take three. He still can’t do it. His tempo is perfect, his feel is perfect, but his plinking finger just refuses to hit that bad note at the end. The engineers look at me nervously. They’ve only known us for forty-three minutes. It occurs to me that there’s a good chance they might think we’re slightly drunk interlopers who’ve wandered in off the street and are having a laugh. After all, Phonogram Studios costs hundreds of quid an hour, and there’s a guy out in the studio, giggling quietly and playing a Bösendorfer grand piano with one finger.
And screwing it up.
I, however, do not panic. I’ve heard Casino hit a thousand duff notes before, so I know that if he really concentrates he can screw that note up royally.
I go out into the studio, where he and I have a two-minute laugh disguised as a consultation, after which I return to the control room and tell two wide-eyed engineers to roll tape for take four. Casino, summoning all of the inspirational ghosts of his former piano teachers, finally hits the required fractured note, the note that we hope will introduce the Hollywood Brats to the ears of the world.
Afterward, following the sequencing of the tracks, while sitting in the Sussex Arms knocking back a polite one, we can’t help wonder, for the umpteenth time, why, after relying so heavily on “Melinda Lee” for so long, after it rescued us in all those dodgy situations, did we not record the damned song? A mystery, wrapped in a conundrum, stuck through with voodoo pins.
Anyway, next morning, we put the photos and fiction together with the tapes in a brown box and send it to Mercury Records.
* * *
A month of hopeful boredom later, a box duly arrived at 17 London Street, Paddington. We opened it and there it was, Grown Up Wrong on Mercury Records. Five copies. We examined the front and back covers, devouring every word. We remarked on the dozy pencil-and-eraser school motif that the art department, obviously leaning on the Grown Up Wrong aspect, came up with.
We stared at the label and saw the Matheson-Steel writing credit in actual print under the song titles. There it was. We were real writers. It says so. We saw “Southern Belles,” our first song, written a thousand lifetimes ago, and “Sick On You,” the most troublesome of our compositions. It was there on the label. Real.
We took the vinyl out of the inner sleeve, held it at an angle to the light, and stared in wonder at the black plastic width of each song. There it all was, deep in those mysterious grooves, the noise that was the Hollywood Brats. That’s what “Chez Maximes” looked like and “Tumble with Me” and “Drowning Sorrows” and all the rest. It was wondrous.
I put on the black leather jacket that I had bought at Kensington Market with twenty-two quid of my advance money and we strolled down the street for a pint.
This was the first time we had walked down London Street as recording artists, and back in the bedsit we had black vinyl on a Mercury label to prove it. And we didn’t know it then, walking down London Street to the Sussex Arms, walking with unstoppable smiles yanking our lower faces apart, walking two feet off the pavement past the derelict down there on his cardboard carpet with his plastic snifter of Brut. We didn’t know it then but that was it. That moment on London Street was the pinnacle, because nothing else happened. The record was released in Norway and did not unduly drain Norske wallets. In fact, it went utterly unnoticed. There was no marketing budget. We didn’t even know what marketing was. The record was never advertised. It was never reviewed in print. It was never played on the radio. It came and went, shyly, politely, anonymously, with a minimum of fuss. The antithesis of the Hollywood Brats.
We were informed three months later that, before it died its meek death, it had sold precisely five-hundred-and-sixty-three copies. Five-hundred-and-sixty-three people bought the Hollywood Brats album. Five-hundred-and-sixty-three wonderful people.
* * *
I got sick, sick, sick, sick to death of having long hair, so I gave Ken a call. When he first hit swinging London, long before he became a music bizzer with Immediate Records, Ken was a hairdresser of some renown. So he came over with his blades and a three-quarters-full bottle of vodka. We had a laugh and, while we listened to the Shangri-Las’ Greatest Hits, he chopped my locks off, doing his customary, flamboyant Warren-Beatty-in-Shampoo performance.
&nbs
p; Afterward, I stared at the mirror and a pale Elvis in Clambake stared back at me.
The Hollywood Brats were dead.
EPILOGUE
I
Months later, following the unseemly plummet and Technicolor splat of the Hollywood Brats, Casino and I had only just about scraped ourselves off the pavement. But still, our collective soul (recently redeemed from Sad Sack’s hockshop) was cracked and leaking heartbreak fluid.
The two of us were lounging horizontally, cheap limbs draped over cheaper furniture, drinking schnapps freshly nicked from a shop in Holloway, watching Match of the Day on telly. And then, right at that juncture, right at that moment when these weird happenings are most required, a tentative but insistent knock came on the door two flights below.
We tried to ignore it but it became less tentative and more insistent so, reluctantly, Cas got off the couch and looked out the window. On the street below were two hippy types (massive hair, trouser flares flapping proudly in the draft of the passing traffic) staring beseechingly up and waving. Soft-hearted Cas looked at them kindly for a moment and then shouted, “Fuck off,” closed the curtains, and came back to the Arsenal–Leeds match.
We didn’t check but, since there was no further knocking and yelping, off they presumably had fucked.
Annoyingly, though, they repeated the process, same time, the next night. So, giving them two points for persistence, Cas clomped down three flights of stairs and, without opening the door, lifted up the letter-box flap and once again suggested that off was the desired direction in which they should still fuck, and posthaste, if you don’t mind. Once again, they duly, though reluctantly, did. Only this time, with no football on our black-and-white telly to distract us, they had got our attention. Just who were these two coves?
The next night these longhairs reappeared, but this time with a handwritten sign that said “PLEASE?” Given the sign and the imploring looks on the faces of the two hairy hopefuls, we wilted. Also, we were bored, curious, and in need of light entertainment, so we thought what the hell and let them in.
Sick On You Page 32
