Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown

by Roy Chubby Brown

  ‘Your turn, I’m afraid, Roy. It’s always your turn.’

  The nurse would help the radiotherapist push the trolley into a large machine that looked like a body scanner. The heat would come on and I’d try to keep as still as possible until the buzzer sounded. It was like getting a tan on a sunbed. It was that boring and that mundane.

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Vasey?’ the nurse would say afterwards.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘Would you like to put your shoes back on?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes – I’ll bring some bread in tomorrow. Will you put it under the machine when I go under? I’d like some toast.’

  ‘You know, we’re going to miss you when you stop coming, Roy,’ the nurse said. ‘We’ll miss the crack.’

  For the first couple of weeks’ treatment I felt no real change. I couldn’t eat much anyway, so I stuck to my sloppy food and vitamin drinks. But in the third week I woke up to find that my neck was covered in purple and red blotches. It looked like I’d been beaten up or severely sunburned.

  Having been blessed with baby-face skin, I’ve always scoffed at anyone who said it was impossible to lie about your age because the skin on your neck would give the game away like the rings on a tree trunk. I’d look at women my age – they had saggy necks from the age of fifty – and they’d look at me and say I had the skin of someone twenty years younger. But now I really looked my fifty-seven years. The skin on my neck was as tired, mottled and saggy as an old sack.

  It wasn’t just the side effects of the radiation that were getting me down. I wasn’t sleeping well. At home after the radiotherapy, I’d lie down on my bed in the hope of sleeping. But as soon as I lay back the coughing started. It was one of those tickly coughs that never lets you rest. Irritating as hell and worse at night. I found it impossible to sleep, so I’d lie awake coughing and worrying.

  In the morning, I’d try to get out of bed, but the lack of sleep and the radiation made me tired and lethargic. I didn’t feel like doing anything, I had no energy and I couldn’t swallow. The one thing I wanted was a chip sandwich, but the only things I could eat were ice cream and soup. Not having eaten properly for weeks, the weight fell off me. I went from nineteen stone seven pounds to seventeen stone two pounds. I was chuffed about the weight loss. I just wish cancer hadn’t been on the end of it.

  I had a friend called Ronnie Aspery, an alto saxophone player in Back Door, a jazz fusion group. Ronnie went on to record for Warner Brothers, tour the world and perform with Keith Richards, Ronnie Scott, Status Quo and Chris Rea. He wrote music for films such as The Spy Who Loved Me, McVicar and Natural Born Killers and for television shows such as Baywatch, Friends, The Simpsons and Sesame Street. But in the early 1970s, Back Door was a local band with a cult following and a residency at the Starlight Club in Redcar and Ronnie would play with Colin Hodgkinson on bass and a drummer called Tony Hicks.

  Ronnie was a wonderful lad, a bit of an awkward sod but always funny. I was talking to Ronnie after watching him play one evening.

  ‘What you doing with yourself in the daytime?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve opened a little shop in Lord Street, selling second-hand instruments. Ukuleles, banjos, guitars, flutes, trumpets, saxophones. You know, anything. I’ve got a tuba in there. Keyboards, drums.’

  ‘Eh, that sounds great.’

  ‘I want to extend the stock range. You know, it’s only a small thing, but I want to get bigger.’

  As it happened, I’d been talking to somebody who walked salerooms. I used to love auctions, all that buzzing around looking for a bargain and the auctioneer’s spiel – ‘Twennyfive-twennyfivewho’ll-give-me-twennyfive … ah-thirtyfive-thirtyfive-give-me-thirty five … fortyfive-fortyfive-do-I-hear-fortyfive?’

  According to the bloke I’d met at the salerooms, the mucky bookshop opposite the Red Lion in Westdyke Road was closing down. I made a few enquiries, found out the rent was ten pounds a week and told Ronnie about it.

  ‘Did you say you liked to walk a saleroom?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. Love it.’

  ‘D’you think if I give you a float, you’d help us?’

  I gave up all my other daytime jobs and Ronnie and I became partners in Alley Cats, his shop. I did the legwork, Ronnie paid the rent on the shop and we shared the profits on anything that I bought in for him. I’d buy watches, clocks, wooden ladders, buckets, any old junk for a pound here or ten shillings there.

  After a month or so, Gerry Hartley, the manager of the Starlight Club, joined us as the third partner and we formed a tight team. I’d walk the salerooms, scouting for stuff for the shop. Then Gerry, the big boy with the cigar, would come in with a thick wad of cash and take over. He was that kind of person, the type that’s good at driving a hard bargain and sealing a deal.

  There were two flats above the shop, so I moved into one of them. It wasn’t very pleasant – the shop was near a road junction and there was no double glazing in those days – but I did it up and decorated the stairwell. There was always the noise of traffic, but it didn’t matter as the only time I went upstairs was to sleep.

  The turnover in the shop could be phenomenal. Situated less than a mile from Redcar racecourse, the shop would attract the lads coming back from the races with no money in their pockets. They’d flog us a watch or a camera for a couple of quid so they could have one last drink before heading home. And the luckier lads, who’d won at the races, would pass by, spot the watch or camera and buy it. I’d give one bloke a fiver for his watch, put it in the window and ten minutes later somebody else would buy it for twenty quid. We’d make fifteen pounds’ profit in no time.

  And occasionally we’d pick up something really valuable from the salerooms – although we also had our fair share of missed opportunities. On one occasion, an old lady sold us a figurine. She only wanted a fiver for it, so I put it in the window. Two days later, a lad called Brian bought it for ten quid. Only an hour or so after he’d bought it, another lad came in.

  ‘How much do you want for the figurine that was in the window?’ he said.

  ‘Sorry, mate, I’ve sold it.’

  ‘That’s a shame. I’ve been after a Queen Anne for ages.’

  ‘A Queen Anne? What’s that, then?’ We knew nothing about antiques and such things.

  ‘It’s a rare piece of porcelain.’

  ‘Oh, is it?’ I said. I ran around the corner to Bradley’s, a jeweller’s shop. Peter Bradley was a bit of a dab hand at antiques. He looked up the figurine in his catalogues. It was worth about five hundred pounds. I had only one thing to say – ‘Fucking hell!’ – as I legged it out of the shop to track down Brian and force another ninety quid out of him.

  About six months after we’d been in business, Ronnie’s jazz career took off. Back Door recorded its first album, played a few sell-out nights at Ronnie Scott’s Club in London and became a big thing. Ronnie departed for stardom, leaving Gerry and me to run Alley Cats. We split the profits down the middle and I started to make a decent living. I was still playing drums with The Nuts and with a bit of money coming in from the shop I could afford to move into a better flat, above a hairdresser’s. When they did a perm downstairs, the stink of the chemicals would make my bread turn up at the ends, but the flat was larger and more comfortable and I really had a sense that things were looking up.

  Gerry and I renovated the two flats above Alley Cats and rented one to Mick Boothby, the bass player from The Nuts, and the other to a woman called Beryl. Tall, with long dark hair, Beryl looked a lot like Sandie Shaw and had a little boy called Gary. I fancied her from the moment I set eyes on her.

  Beryl would come into the shop every now and then for a cup of tea and we’d have a laugh. ‘Is he bent?’ she’d ask about Gerry.

  ‘I think he’s either way, to be honest with you,’ I’d joke.

  Beryl told me she was working at Kings, a fish shop on the seafront. I’d pop in once in a w
hile and she’d give me a free wrap of fish and chips or pie and chips. Gradually, we got to know each other. I told her that I was a drummer with a pop group and that I’d split with my wife. She said she was separated from a lad called Ginger. I’d heard of Ginger, who had a hell of a reputation, and of Beryl’s brother, Billy Mundy, a Redcar lad I knew as a bit of a hard case. I invited Beryl along to a gig and bit by bit we got closer.

  I was in the shop one day when a ginger-haired bloke came in. ‘Is Beryl about?’ he demanded.

  ‘I think she’s at the shops.’

  ‘I’ll fucking teach her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll fucking teach her.’

  The penny dropped. I knew Beryl’s husband had red hair. ‘You’ll be Beryl’s husband, will you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’s she done? We don’t want any trouble here,’ I said.

  ‘This has got nowt to do with you.’

  ‘I’m renting these premises and Beryl is renting the flat above it. I told you, I want no trouble here.’

  Ginger went off on another rant, shouting that he would knock the living daylights out of Beryl. Just as he finished, Beryl walked by the front of the shop. Ginger ran out into the street, grabbed Beryl and tried to drag her into the shop. I couldn’t stand by and watch him do that, so I ran out after Ginger and hit him so hard he fell over.

  ‘You fucking bastard!’ he shouted as he tried to kick me.

  ‘You get your hands off her!’ I shouted.

  Beryl screamed. ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ she yelled. Little Gary, her son, was beside her, crying hysterically, and everyone in the street had stopped and turned around to see what was going on.

  Ginger lost his nerve, ran across the street and jumped in his van. As he drove off, I hurled a milk bottle at him. ‘If you ever come back here …’ I yelled as the bottle smashed the rear windscreen.

  A couple of days after that Beryl and I started going out. I never saw Ginger again, although Beryl would take little Gary over to him on Sundays. Beryl and I became a solid item. We were as good as married, although that didn’t stop me straying every now and then, but I was more committed to Beryl than I’d been to any previous woman.

  Around this time – the early 1970s – my cousin Lee and Davy Richardson got fed up with The Nuts and packed it in, leaving just the trio of Mick, George and me. I’d recently taken to wearing a First World War flying helmet as part of my stage outfit, so we decided to play on that and name ourselves after Captain John William Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, the British aviators who made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Part of the appeal of the name was our intention of tricking the audience into thinking they’d got a good deal because Alcock & Brown implied a duo. The three of us would walk on stage and announce ourselves as Micky Hall, George Cock and Roy Brown – and more often than not, it worked. The typical club audience member was not the brightest bulb in the room and we’d hear the collective sigh of recognition when they realised it was Hall, Cock and Brown instead of Alcock & Brown.

  Club audiences were conservative and lazy. It was understandable that after a week’s long, hard graft, they didn’t want anything too taxing on a Friday or Saturday night, but it meant that our comedy had to be obvious and simple.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, tell us one we know,’ they’d shout if we told them a joke they hadn’t heard before.

  New material had to be introduced subtly and in small doses to give it time to sink into their work-sapped and drink-addled heads. Even a silly gag such as ‘My father’s a psychopath – he rides his bike on the pavement’ could be too much. It was just one simple line, but they didn’t want to have to think about it. They wanted their jokes on silver plates with all the trimmings and that meant explaining each line of it to them, explaining why we were telling the joke, explaining who the people were in the joke and explaining when and why the punchline came up.

  And there was something odd about the mentality of club audiences. The most easygoing and generous of people would change into mean-spirited, stingy, awkward bastards the moment they sat down in those stuffy, smoky rooms, bought their raffle tickets and lined up their drinks beside their bingo cards and fag packets. If an act walked on stage, put a rubber tyre around its neck and set it on fire, burning itself to death in front of the crowd, at the end of the night the audience would complain that two weeks previously it had a bloke on who burnt himself to death a lot quicker.

  No matter how hard and long we worked, the audience was always ungrateful. Often it was from resentment and I’d hear the same old lines trotted out again and again when I met the punters in the bar or the toilets.

  ‘I have to work down the pit all day for the money you’re on,’ they’d say.

  ‘Well, there’s the drums, there’s the piano, there’s a guitar,’ I’d say, pointing at our instruments. ‘You go and fucking do it.’ Sometimes it would lead to trouble; sometimes I’d get away with it.

  The northern club circuit was a miserable place to make a living, but fortunately I had George and Mick as accomplices. The two to three years I played with them in Alcock & Brown were some of the best I’ve ever had in show business. Very little of it was down to the clubs, their audiences or the club committees, the sanctimonious attitude of many of which could be summed up by the motto of the CIU (Club and Institute Union) clubs: Recreation hand in hand with Education and Temperance. Most of our good times arose out of our scrapes and experiences dealing with the clubs and the little despots that ran them.

  Within every working-class neighbourhood, each community formed its own club. The steelworkers, the miners, the fishermen, the Labour Party members and the Conservatives – each group of men wanted to socialise only with their own type and so in any district you’d have half a dozen clubs. Big cities such as Sheffield would have three or four massive clubs just in the one street. And even in small neighbourhoods there would be several clubs dotted around. In Grangetown there was the Working Men’s Club, the British Legion Club, the Old British Legion Club, St Mary’s Club, Grangetown & District Social Club, Dorman’s Athletic Club, The Transport Club and The Unity Club. Most of these clubs would have a concert room with enough space for 300 to 500 people. The largest clubs seated from 1,200 to 1,600 punters, while the smaller clubs would seat eighty to a hundred. The bigger clubs got the better acts, but there weren’t enough artists to go around, so we’d play each club four or five times a year.

  Until the early 1980s, just about every entertainer spent part of their career in clubland, many of them serving their apprenticeship and making their names on the northern club circuit. Household names such as Marti Caine, Larry Grayson, Billy Connolly and Bernard Manning were born in the clubs of the Midlands, the North and Scotland. When they were on the bill, the queues would stretch right around the corner.

  Even superstars such as the Beatles and Elton John paid their dues in the clubs and the clubs of the North-East were a fertile spawning ground for many big acts. I first saw Sting play at a club behind the Lion Inn, a pub on the highest point of the North Yorkshire Moors. Playing bass in a band called Last Exit, he was going by his real name of Gordon Sumner in those days, but he had a great voice and even then anyone could see he’d go far.

  I first met David Coverdale when he was working in a men’s clothes shop by day and singing in Redcar clubs and pubs in the evenings with a band called Rivers Invitation. I knew him quite well and bumped into him outside the Wimpy Bar one day. I asked him how he was.

  ‘Eh, Roy. Not so bad, mate,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got owt for a coffee, have ya?’

  Dave hadn’t eaten for a couple of days and was always scrounging food and drink off his friends. On this occasion, my sister Barbara was just passing by across the road, so I shouted to her to lend us a couple of bob and we went into the Wimpy for a drink and a bun.

  The next time I saw Dave, he’d joined Deep Purple and had just got back from Sweden, where the
band had sent their new lead singer to have his cock-eye straightened. Suddenly it wasn’t ‘Eh, Roy’ any more but ‘Man’ and ‘Hey, cool, mother, lay it down, man.’ Now, Mick, George and I used to wear loon pants, cravats and flower chains and we’d all had our hair permed like Kevin Keegan – we looked like three lollipops – but this was different. We’d kept our Teesside accents, whereas Dave had bought into the hippie vibe lock, stock and barrel. He’d become one of them. One of the beautiful people

  The Bay City Rollers also started out as a club act. The night that they were number one in the charts, they were on at a club in Redcar – and all because of the sheer bloody-mindedness that was the hallmark of most club committees. The Rollers had asked if they could be bought out of their contract because they were number one in the charts and because they had a big tour coming up. But the committee said no. They’d booked the Rollers and paid for the Rollers, so they were bloody well getting the Rollers.

  Club committee members were the type of people who worked diligently all day, quiet as a mouse. Then, every evening, they’d go down to the club, pin a little badge to their lapel and turn into little Hitlers. It didn’t take a degree in psychology to work out why they were so unpleasant. All day, at work, the little committee member would have been ordered about by his foreman. Then, at home, he’d have been bossed about by his wife. But when he walked in that club, he was on the committee and that little badge should have said ‘God’ because now it was his turn to boss people around. And so he took it out on anybody who crossed his radar, especially the acts.

  ‘You will put that there. You won’t put that there,’ he’d snap. ‘We want no blue stuff. We want no filth. We want three half-hour spots and make the first one twenty minutes and the last one forty minutes.’ Those were the kind of demands and skewed logic we came to expect from club chairmen.