The Life of Lee

by Lee Evans

  As it was our very first gig, the booker at The Cave begrudgingly took a chance by letting us play there. He only shoe-horned us in after another band had cancelled at the last minute, catching us by surprise and allowing us no time at all to practise. We were lucky in a way. If the booker had known what we actually sounded like, he probably wouldn’t even have let us open our guitar cases, let alone open ‘Friday Night Is Band Night’ – which was held, coincidentally, on a Friday.

  Me on guitar!

  I reckon it must have been Bill’s relentless phone calls to the booker that somehow swayed it for us to play. Once Bill had the bloke at The Cave’s number, he was like a pike on the end of a fishing line – he wasn’t going to let go. He even called up impersonating an A&R man. I watched nervously, cringing as Bill got himself into character before making the all-important call to the club. Checking to make sure his mum had gone out, he kicked back on a chair next to the phone and sucked on a pencil so it might sound like a cigar down the line. With slight menace in his voice, he told the booker that he was calling from EMI and was advising the club to ‘Quickly book us – them …’ Then, knowing he had messed up, he got all frustrated with himself and began rambling angrily down the phone. ‘I mean them … Shit! Look, book us or else, right … Balls … Sorry, I didn’t mean us … Oh, freakin’ hell!’

  Struggling to keep control, Bill put his hand across the mouthpiece, looked over at me and wailed, ‘I think I’ve fucked up ’ere, Lee.’ Then he lifted his hand and shouted angrily, ‘Well, I ain’t Brian soddin’ Epstein.’ He proceeded to make his customary face, resembling an angry ape who had just been kicked in the bananas, calmed himself and started over.

  Still in manager mode, he explained to the booker that there was a real buzz about these boys, and they would, funnily enough, be free this Friday. ‘Well,’ continued Bill, beginning to relish his new role as a music industry big shot, ‘that is after shooting their video and finishing a brief, unplugged open-tuning session with The Clash.’ He wasn’t technically lying with that remark as his mum wouldn’t let us plug in. ‘And then there’s a bit of a jamming thing to cut a new groove disk with The Pistols. Luckily for you, they’ll be kicking around on Friday. But a word to the wise: be careful. If the fan club find out, then stick a helmet on.’

  Eventually, Bill wore the booker down. I think he got so frustrated with the constant calls that in the end he just gave in. But who cared? The Cave gave us a rare chance to play live. ‘I promise once you’ve seen us – er, them – play, you will never forget us – sorry, them.’ Bill put the phone down and both of us jumped around his living room with excitement. Then slowly it dawned on us: we had never played live, never had everything up and running like you would if you were actually a band. The only live playing we had done was in rich Alan’s garden shed. Basically, we were no better than your average set of garden tools.

  Bill would be proved right in what he said to that booker: the club wouldn’t forget us in hurry – but, unfortunately, for all the wrong reasons.

  I am a dreamer, an optimist – always have been. Back then, I naively believed, like most kids do who have a band, that our group would be huge. I thought that with our superb musical skills and the tremendous songs written in Bill’s bedroom, it was only a matter of time before the phone would ring and I’d be speaking to a record producer who had somehow been driving past and heard us playing in Alan the drummer’s back shed. Forget the fact that this would have been quite impossible as the shed was way too far from any road. The whole idea was, in fact, ridiculous, but I imagined it happening anyway because I really believed that somehow or other my natural inclination was to step on a stage – I just didn’t know how or why right then.

  However, my expectations of music-biz stardom did begin to fade somewhat during that fateful, all-important gig at The Cave when – out of nowhere – a giant brawl broke out all around us. It was fearsome; it swept the entire room like a wild fire of violence, ending up resembling one of those saloon free-for-alls you see in Westerns.

  But, I hasten to say, it didn’t dampen my spirits one bit; no, it only momentarily made me fear for my life and shit my new, tight Sta Prest trousers. As the fists flew, my main concern was to protect myself from the rain of flying glasses and beer cans by using my bass guitar as a sort of umbrella.

  That’s when everyone, including Bill, seemed to just disappear. I looked around and realized I was on my own on the stage. All I could see were bodies, fists, bottles and chairs, all being thrown and landing here, there and everywhere. The whole room was heaving with violence and mayhem. My first reaction was to save my bass. I thought, ‘If anything happens to that, Dad will kill me.’ Then it occurred to me: ‘Wait a minute, I’m going to die anyhow. So who cares?’

  After The Cave Catastrophe, as it came to be known, the next band practice was a much darker affair. There seemed an odd cloud of doubt hanging over rich Alan’s rehearsal shed. Things were different now, something was missing – well, Dave’s guitar, for one.

  Maybe Dad was right when he warned me about a career in music. I could hear his voice resounding over and over in my head: ‘You can’t just become a musician.’ Now I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to be a musician.

  My expectations had been well and truly dented. I knew ‘it’ wasn’t going to happen with that band – in fact, I didn’t even know what ‘it’ meant. They always say you learn something from your mistakes. Wait a minute. If that’s true, then how did ‘Chico Time’ get in the charts?

  Well, I did learn something from my ill-fated spell with The Anonymous Five, something I hadn’t really known before: that when I was on the stage, something changed inside of me. I felt better than I did when I was off it. I felt free. Even after all that violence started and everybody was running away, I stayed where I was. That was where I felt the safest, even as it was all going mad around me. I stood my ground because that’s where I believed I couldn’t get hurt. It’s ridiculous, I know, but it was the real world that I’d never quite been able to fathom, whereas I ‘got’ the stage. So I simply stayed where I was.

  I also learned that I thought differently from everybody else in the group. My work ethic and mental discipline were not the same as theirs. I couldn’t even add up at school, but in the band I had an innate ability to separate each instrument, rearrange them, organize them in my head; I could tell each member to play something so that it sounded better when played along to a certain drum beat or bass line. I felt in charge.

  Whether it was all the years of conditioning as a kid, sitting around theatres and clubs listening to music and watching performers, I wasn’t sure, but it certainly felt natural to me. That experience helped me find a role in this world that didn’t involve me feeling like an oddball, weird or excluded.

  Alas, whatever ‘it’ was, it would have to wait. I thought, ‘It may never happen.’ But there was no doubt that my fleeting encounter with the experience of being in front of an audience planted something in my head. It thrilled me like nothing else. I’d crossed a line. I didn’t know if it would ever come round again, but if it did, I’d be much better prepared the next time.

  One thing was certain. I had changed and I knew that I was no longer destined to be a failure. If Mrs Taylor had been there that night, I would have blown her away.

  19. The Art School Rebel

  The band had kept my over-active head busy for a while, but now it was time to get real, as they say. I had left school at sixteen with a tiny pea for a brain and no qualifications other than the basic teenage trait of growing a face full of inflamed acne the size of which could be seen from space and a huge headful of fuzzy hair which a woolly mammoth would look at enviously and say, ‘Wow!’

  All I had to show for my time at school was an O level in art, a subject I loved and was reasonably good at, so it looked as though the only prospect for me was to … if perhaps I could indulge myself for a moment, to artistically connect … t
o dig deep inside my soul and collaborate. With the end of the frigging dole queue.

  My art report – not too bad.

  Margaret Thatcher was at the helm and driving us all mad. She was laying people off with a king-sized trowel and selling Britain off like it was a bring-and-buy sale. The country was experiencing a depression more gloomy than the Christmas Day episode of EastEnders. Mass unemployment reigned – jobs were definitely thin on the ground – and Norman Tebbit was telling us to get on our bikes. If I could have afforded one, I would have done.

  I had no discernible talents apart from a good eye for drawing and painting – it was only the one eye, but it was a good one. Meanwhile, my school friends occupied themselves with fighting, smoking, dating and then shagging their hands. They say it was the growth of the thumb and the ability to grip objects that propelled man from his ancestral ape relative into the sophisticated race we are today. Need I explain what perpetuated that growth? The date is 4000 BC. We hear the echoes of frustration from a small cave entrance and just inside, lit by the flames of a burning fire, we see a hairy chunk of a man slapping himself in the groin area. ‘That’s nice … but if I could only grip it!’

  Anyway, while my mates were putting their newly formed thumbs to good use, I was at home, busy creating stuff. Painting, drawing, modelling, that sort of thing. So by the time I left school, I’d managed to accumulate quite a body of work that I could take along to show the guy wearing a polo neck who was going to interview me at Thurrock College of Art and Design.

  Art wasn’t something I was ever intending to do, but I eventually discovered it was the only option I had. Plus, I had become pretty competent at it, so I thought, ‘Why not? I’ve got nothing to lose.’

  On the way to the interview, sitting on the bus clutching my huge art folder packed with my paintings, I really did feel that I was wasting my time. They didn’t let people like me into art college. I was too rough around the edges. Art college was for the floppy-haired Hush-Puppy mob. You know, the ones that slope around all day wearing baggy jumpers and scruffy jeans; the ones that if you told one of them to piss off, they would simply tilt their head with interest, bring one arm across their diaphragm to support the elbow of their other arm so they could wave some pungent French cigarette inches from their lips and say in a pretentious turd-bag accent, ‘Yeaaah? When, like, you say “piss owff”, in what way do you actually mean “piss owff”?’ The sort of people who go home early as they have to spend the evening stroking their beards.

  Well, that’s exactly how I turned out after six months. Yep, I was a fully fledged, beard-stroking twat who wore floppy jumpers, had bushy hair, wore odd-coloured socks and talked as if I needed everything to be somehow profound and meaningful. I had, as they say, had the operation. I was a bona fide art student.

  When I first entered the art department of the huge college for my interview, I was immediately struck by the sheer array of art. The white-painted walls of the studio were filled with all types of work by the students, all at different stages of development. Some pieces hung around the walls, others sat there with bits missing, half finished. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. This, I said to myself, is me, this is what I want to do.

  I lumbered, mollified, across the studio and was beckoned over by a softly spoken hippy type, a good-looking man with long wavy blond hair and deep blue eyes, sitting at a large table. I unzipped my folder apathetically and laid my paintings out across the table before the man, who, it emerged, was Sam Benjamin, the head tutor conducting the interviews that day.

  I sat and waited for his reaction, never making full eye contact. I just hunched over, staring at the floor and wringing my hands so tightly my knuckles kept going white as the blood was forced out of them. I expected him to say something disparaging. I’d made the mistake of showing some of my paintings to friends once, and they didn’t get them at all. ‘What is it?’ they would whine. ‘It doesn’t look like anything I know.’

  Plus, I was very self-conscious about the fact that I might not look very ‘arty’. It had always been assumed on the council estate in Bristol and by the new friends I’d found in Billericay that art was something for the knobs and not us. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s how it was. The only way the kids I knew expressed themselves was through their fists. I should know, I’d been beaten up by some of the best punch-up artists around. That was why I decided to speak as little as possible to Mr Benjamin, assuming that as soon as I opened my mouth he would immediately put me in a certain, unflattering pigeonhole.

  So I just looked down and waited, but to my surprise Mr Benjamin’s complaints never came. I momentarily flicked a glance up towards him. My attitude was softening – Mr Benjamin had a gentle way about him. He was a Jesus lookalike, with a very relaxed manner. He sat there cross-legged, caressing his well-trimmed, greying beard with his thin, delicate fingers, gazing intently with no particular hurry about him, contemplating the pictures spread out across the table. Slowly he raised his head to speak. Because he had looked so deep in thought, it made what he was about to say all the more important. I bent forward to listen.

  He spoke in a calm, almost whispering voice. ‘This one here …’ He leaned over to point at a portrait I’d painted of my mum. It was one of my favourites but, of course, I assumed he wouldn’t like it – that’s why he’d picked it out. Whenever I painted, I always approached it with energy and excitement. I would set about the canvas with a real verve, constantly changing brushes and colours over the whole piece. For the particular work Mr Benjamin had chosen, I remembered I’d used a whole range of different hues, emphasizing my mum’s beautiful, warm green eyes with blues, pinks, aquamarines, purples and turquoises. Mr Benjamin continued, ‘Your use of colour …’

  ‘Oh?’ I shrugged. ‘Everybody always says that about my paintings. There’s too much colour and that’s why it doesn’t look how it’s meant to.’ I thought he was about to say the same.

  ‘Yes, but only an idiot would think that, right?’ Mr Benjamin interjected.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I can see that with your use of colour, you’re painting what you see. That’s important. Who cares what others think? I don’t. It’s about risk, right? I can see what you’re doing, I can see it, Lee.’

  My jaw dropped. I was astonished. Blimey, I thought, either this bloke gets it, or any moment now he’s going to burst out laughing, say he was joking and send me packing. But he didn’t. He just stood there, helped me pack up my paintings and said simply: ‘I’ll let you know formally in a couple of days. The clock-watchers who run this place force us to do all this paperwork lark to make it official. But I can tell you now, I love your work, Lee, and really hope you’ll come and study with us.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was glued to the seat – no one ever got my paintings! ‘What?’ I asked, trying hard to suppress my incredulity. ‘You don’t think it’s a bit mental?’

  ‘Yep!’ he chuckled. ‘That’s why I like it!’

  From that day on, I was bowled over by the openness and impartiality Mr Benjamin showed towards me. He seemed not to care at all about how I looked or the way I sounded – to him, none of that mattered. I got the impression the only thing that really mattered to him was what I had to give as an artist. He looked at it simply as a contribution, another idea, a way to reach a path to somewhere else. I could have entered the room on a space hopper in a Kojak cap, blowing ‘Who loves ya baby?’ on the bombardon and he wouldn’t have given a rat’s arse. How you actually don’t give a rat’s arse is something I have never really understood, but that’s a discussion for another day: ‘Hello, here is a rat, but the bit you ain’t getting is right there at the back.’ Anyway, what Mr Benjamin cared about much more was what I was trying to say through my art.

  I began attending art college full-time. I hated the early mornings – still half-asleep, I’d crawl on to the bus at the stop in Billericay with
my humungously large art folder. That was always a pain: whenever it was windy, you’d see me in the street looking like a man who was trying to parasail on dry land without a board. I’d shoot up the road, desperately trying to control the huge, flat, black case that threatened at any moment to whisk me into the air and away.

  If it wasn’t that, I’d be struggling to manoeuvre it up the aisle of the packed, steamy, morning bus. It always had an atmosphere of heavy drudgery. Its oh-no-another-day-at-work passengers all had zero patience, especially when nudged or poked by a passing duffel coat with fuzzy hair holding an oversized briefcase.

  As I heaved and huffed – with great physical effort – up the aisle of the bus to the nearest vacant seat, my art folder would usually attract attention from some of the different crowds of workers. At that moment, I would inevitably become the morning’s entertainment for some lunkhead at the back. ‘Someone run over your briefcase with a steamroller, mate?’ some weasel face would cry out. That was a real crowd-pleaser, eliciting great gales of laughter from the packed sardine-like top deck of desperately grey passengers. ‘Here he comes, the incredible shrinking man.’ Funny! Yeah, but not every freaking day.