The bigger clubs had full-time committee members who drew a wage off the club and who through sheer greed ended clubland in the mid-1980s by refusing to scale back their wage demands when the audiences got smaller. Clubland went to the wall because it couldn’t afford to support all the committee members’ expenses.
The best clubs were those run as commercial concerns by an entrepreneur – places like the Frontier Club in Batley, a little block of old-style Las Vegas in a West Yorkshire street of second-hand car dealerships and theme bars. The owners of these independent clubs could be just as ruthless as the chairmen of working men’s clubs – there’s a sign backstage at the Frontier that says: ‘One-hour set plus the encore, please. Short show = short pay’ – but they respected the acts as fellow professionals. The problem with working men’s and social clubs was that they were run by amateurs who regarded professional entertainers as crooks who wanted to rip them off.
If there was one thing that united club chairmen, it was that they were awkward bastards to a man. In twenty years of playing the clubs, I never met a chairman who wanted to be helpful or cooperative. They just weren’t nice people.
In those early days, it was up to the club chairman whether we got paid or not. If they didn’t like our act or if we misbehaved in any way, the chairman would come into our dressing room and tell us we were getting ‘paid off’. It meant we weren’t getting a penny. Even if the audience had roared with approval and called for encores, the club chairman was the judge and jury. It was up to him to decide if we deserved our fee.
As Alcock & Brown we had an act that, while it wasn’t good enough to sell out at the Palladium in London, was certainly a good clubland act. Most of it had evolved from the routines we’d developed with The Nuts, so there were a couple of parodies of adverts, a few silly songs and some gags based on props we brought on stage. We’d round off the evening with a couple of well-known hits to get the audience dancing.
Even the very best of clubland acts could have a bad night because few ever entertained people who had bought tickets specifically to see them. The punters had gone to the club for a pint, a fag, the bingo and the raffle. They could not have cared less who was on stage and they didn’t realise it had taken us eight hours to get to the club and that we needed to earn our fee to put petrol in our van and to pay for our lodgings that night. Thinking we were earning a fortune, they’d moan at us for the couple of shillings it cost them to get into the club and wouldn’t realise that we often didn’t have a penny to scratch our arses with.
An agent had booked us on a tour of clubs in North Wales that was typical of our experiences in those days. On the first night, the club chairman said we were rubbish and we were paid off. The second night, they gave us half our money, which paid for fish and chips and some petrol. We didn’t work the third night. The fourth night went well and we were paid in full. And so it continued. By the end of the week, we’d played eight shows, but had picked up our full fee only twice. Nevertheless, we were convinced that we’d earn our full fee of fifty quid on the last night, which would be enough to get us home, so we spent our last pennies on a few drinks. But when it came to the last show we didn’t get paid, so George was forced to beg the petrol money off Alan Earle, his boss at the Guitarzan shop in Slaggy Island, where he did a bit of part-time work.
Having often not earned a penny all week and been insulted or belittled by a club chairman, I found it difficult not to lose my temper when we were pushed into a corner. Lashing out was always a mistake because as soon as any of us lost our cool, we were the bad bastards.
Playing a social club in the North-East one evening, we were nearing the end of our act. We were playing ‘You Never Can Tell’ by Chuck Berry and everybody was up dancing. Full of beer, they were having a great time, shouting ‘More! More! More!’ for an encore. It was eleven o’clock and we’d been on stage since eight, so we looked at the concert chairman. He held up his finger to signal one more tune. We crashed into ‘Rock Around The Clock’ by Bill Haley and his Comets, the crowd whooped with joy, we played the last verse and chorus a second time and then finished with a big flourish.
‘That’s it, ladies and gentlemen,’ I said as the house lights came on. ‘Goodnight, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve been a great crowd. Please don’t forget your coats and handbags …’
Up in the dressing room, we were taking off our shirts and jackets when the chairman came in. ‘Right, get the gear off the stage. Come on, lads, hurry up. It’s a lock-up club. We have to go home.’
‘Can you just give us a chance to just to get our gear off?’ I said.
‘Don’t be fucking answering me back. Just get your kit off stage.’
‘Whoa, whoa. I’ve got a son older than you. Don’t you talk to me like that.’
‘Get the kit off or I’ll get it off for you.’
‘You touch any of them drums, them guitars, them amps, them speakers, and you’re in a lot of trouble, mate.’
‘Get the kit off now,’ the chairman said. ‘Or I’ll get the police.’
‘We’d better get the kit, Roy …’ Mick said.
‘No, just stay here,’ I said. ‘We’ve only been off stage for five minutes.’
Sure enough, two coppers turned up. ‘Have you got a problem, mate?’ one of them said.
‘No, we haven’t,’ I said. ‘We’ve just finished. We’ve gone over the time, people were late drinking in the club when they shouldn’t be and that twat there—’
‘There’s no need for that language,’ the copper interrupted.
‘—just told us to get the kit off the stage and we haven’t even had time to put our stuff in our bags yet. We will get the kit off the stage, no doubt about that.’
With five committee members looking on, their chests puffed out and their hands behind their backs, we dismantled our kit and carried it out, taking our time to do it carefully.
‘You’re being awkward. You will be arrested,’ the chairman said. ‘You’re trespassing.’
I put down the drum I was carrying. ‘Do you know, mate, not only will we never come back to this club again, but you’ll need more than the police. You’ll need the fucking army if you don’t shut your mouth ’cos I’ll smack you in it.’
We finished loading the van, got in, drove around the corner to the roundabout, went right around it and came back. We waited around the corner from the club until I saw the chairman go back inside. Grabbing a brick off the ground, I ran over to the chairman’s car and hurled the brick through its windscreen. Served the cheeky bastard right.
Another time, we arrived late at a club at which there were three flights of stairs up to the concert room. As usual, I was the spokesman and I had to tell the chairman we’d had a flat tyre.
‘Not another flat tyre,’ he said.
‘No, we only had the one.’
‘I hear this from you bands all the time when you are late. Can’t you get here on time?’ He was standing with his left arm raised, totally for the benefit of the crowd. I could see the audience were looking at the chairman holding his watch out in front of himself, thinking: Good old Arthur, there he is, looking at his watch and giving the band a hard time.
‘Do you see what time it is here?’ the chairman said, pointing at his watch. ‘You were on at eight o’clock.’
‘Well, how are we doing?’
‘What do you mean, how are we doing?’
‘If we were on at eight o’clock, how are we doing?’
‘Is that supposed to be funny?’
‘Well, I thought it was funny.’
The chairman paced the stage while we were setting up our gear, tut-tutting and humming louder and louder. It was obvious to me that his wife had just bought him a new watch and that he wanted an opportunity to show it off. And throughout it all, I could see the audience watching the chairman’s antics: Aye, Arthur will pay them off, you know. He’ll pay them off. He won’t have this, you know.
As I tightened the screws on my drum kit
, I called over to the chairman. ‘Will you do us a favour, mate? Will you stop walking up and down, looking at your watch? You are making us look cunts.’
‘You should have been here at eight o’clock.’
It was too much. I took the stanchion that attached my cow-bell to my drum kit and walked over to the chairman.
‘Can I have a look at that watch?’
The chairman proudly held it out in front of me, revelling in making the point that it was nearly half past eight.
BAP! I hit the watch cleanly with a single stroke. I could have hit him on the knuckles. I could have hit him on the arm. But I didn’t. I hit the watch smack in the middle. And it just disintegrated.
The chairman looked straight at me. ‘My wife bought me that watch.’
‘Well, she’ll have to get you another fucker, won’t she?’
‘Will she?’
‘Yes. And you’ll have to ring the agent and get another band, because we are fucking off home.’
The lads looked at me. ‘Get the gear off,’ I said.
‘But it’s taken us half an hour to carry all the gear up the stairs …’
‘Get the gear off the stage. We’re fucking off. Or you are playing without a drummer.’ Again, my temperament could only take so much.
But it wasn’t always an awkward chairman that caused us problems. The audience could be just as troublesome and would think nowt of throwing a pint of beer over us if they thought we were no good. After one soaking too many, I had an idea. The next time we walked on stage, instead of my usual attire of a checked or tartan suit, I was dressed in a suit made of beer towels. ‘Throw all the beer you like,’ I said. ‘I’m ready for it.’
We were playing a club in a village just outside Sunderland when a fight broke out between a stag party of about twenty lads and another dozen or so locals. I tried to calm it down from the stage but nobody took a blind bit of notice of me, so I walked off. I’d got back to the dressing room when I realised that my two prize Bose speakers, which were small but very powerful, were still on stage.
Standing at the side of the stage, I shouted: ‘George, mind them speakers.’
George grabbed the speakers and inched through the crowd, fists and glasses flying all around him as he made his way to the dressing room.
‘How are we going to get out?’ I said.
‘We’ll get out the window,’ Mick suggested.
George went first, sliding easily through the opening and dropping down into the car park outside. ‘You’re all right,’ he shouted.
I went feet first and got my arse through the window, but then came to a sudden stop. ‘My bollocks are caught in the catch, you bastard,’ I shouted.
I couldn’t see the floor outside, so George shouted: ‘Just push yourself.’
I dropped onto a car, leaving a massive dent in the bonnet. George and Mick couldn’t speak, they were laughing so much as we jumped in the van and sped off.
If it wasn’t for the pranks and high jinks – and Mick and George’s easygoing humour – I wouldn’t have been able to put up with petty club chairmen and hostile audiences. We had a well-rehearsed revenge repertoire for the worst clubs. Most clubs had a bingo machine. Usually it was a simple glass box on four legs with a fan in the bottom and a set of table-tennis balls with numbers painted on them inside it. Someone on the club committee would start the bingo by switching on the fan. The balls would blow around the box until one got caught in a little chute. A small metal prong at the top of the chute stopped the ball from escaping, holding it in place until the bingo-caller removed it and announced the number. If we really had the hump with a club, we’d bend the wire prong. As soon as the fan was switched on, the balls would fly out of the chute and they wouldn’t be able to play bingo until they’d collected them all.
A lot of the time we relied on basic spontaneity to relieve the tension of a bloody-minded audience or chairman. At Black Hill Social Club at Consett, our act was going down like a knackered lift. Nobody was laughing.
‘There’s nothing like a good act,’ I said. ‘And we’re nothing like a good act.’
Instead of a laugh or some applause, I heard a click and then a whirring sound. I looked around. The electric stage curtains were closing on us. The bastard chairman was shutting them.
Thinking on my feet, I jumped in front of the curtains just as they came together and closed behind me.
‘I think your chairman wants me off the stage here,’ I said, ‘but as far as I’m—’
Silence. The bastard had switched the microphone off.
‘It doesn’t bother me,’ I yelled and started shouting the rest of our act. But there was no point. No one in the audience was laughing and I had to give in. I walked off stage.
At another small club where hardly any of the audience were listening to us, I asked Mick if he had any matches. He passed me a lighter and I walked out into the audience to where an old bloke was reading the newspaper, his feet up on a chair and his newspaper held up to obscure his view of the stage. I crept up to him, ducking beneath the bottom of his newspaper. I lit it. For a second or two, he didn’t realise it was on fire. Then the flames caught and the paper went up in his fingers. Jumping to his feet, he shouted abuse. ‘You big stupid fucking bastard!’ His sudden exit from the club got the biggest laugh of the evening.
Often the laughs came when our act went wrong. The Alcock & Brown act relied on a lot of stage props and one of our best was a talking bucket. We’d put the bucket on a table with a curtain around its legs and get our roadie to hide beneath the table, operating the bucket.
It all went swimmingly until we took on a new roadie. His name was Derek, but we called him Spotty Muldoon because he was always covered in spots and because he wore a grey RAF greatcoat that was so big (and he was so thin) that he could turn around in it without the coat changing direction.
George explained the routine to Spotty Muldoon. At the end of each chorus of ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love With You’ I’d turn to George and Mick to ask if they were all right. At that point, Spotty Muldoon would have to pull a string under the table to make the lid of the bucket lift up like a big mouth to say: ‘Yeah, I’m all right.’ It always got a big laugh.
‘How will the audience hear me?’ Spotty said.
‘We’ll give you a microphone below the table,’ Mick said. We reached the point in the act where I sang the song. ‘You all right?’ I said at the end of the first chorus.
The top of the lid rose up, then clanked down without saying anything.
I sang the last line of the chorus and asked the question again. ‘Are you all right?’
Silence and no movement from the lid.
‘I said: are you all right?’
‘And I said: the fucking string’s snapped,’ Spotty bellowed over the PA. The whole club cracked up. Mick, George and I couldn’t carry on for laughing. We tried to play the next verse, but our fingers wouldn’t play the instruments.
At another venue, it was the support act that provided the laughs. We were on with two strippers and an act that I’d been asked to introduce. I met him in the slips at the side of the stage. He was shaking with nerves.
‘What are you called?’ I asked. Raving Rupert, he said.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Raving Rupert,’ I announced over the PA.
The music started. Running on stage, Raving Rupert caught one of the girl dancers with his guitar, banged her on the head and knocked her over. He tripped over his guitar lead and caught his head on the microphone. Then, as he cleared his throat and tried to pull himself together, he leant forward to speak into the microphone and knocked his nose on it. Before he could say a word, his nose began to bleed, the audience started to laugh at him and he had to leave the stage. The biggest laugh came, however, as we walked on.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Raving Rupert, my arse. You mean Clumsy Fucking Rupert.’ The place erupted.
One of Mick’s many virtues was that he w
as a good mechanic. At first, we used a red Morris Minor van to cart our gear to gigs, stuffing all our equipment – guitars, amps, a drum kit and a PA system – in the back. Two of us would push the door shut while the other one locked it. Then Mick brought along an old Transit that he’d repaired. It was falling to bits, with a red toffee paper stuck over a light bulb in place of the glass on one of the brake lights. It didn’t last long.
Our next band van was a Bedford. We packed it up one afternoon, ready for a gig in Darlington that evening. When it came to leaving at five o’clock, the van wouldn’t start and I started panicking. We had to be at the club by seven o’clock.
‘I know what’s happened,’ Mick said, opening the bonnet. Standing beside him, I peered into the engine. Everything looked OK until I noticed two big thick red books, larger and wider than phone directories, wedged either side of the engine.
‘The engine mountings snapped,’ Mick said. ‘Them books are keeping the engine level, but it’s slipped down a bit.’
‘Where’ve you got them from?’
‘The library,’ Mick said. And then he started laughing. ‘They’re not due back for another week.’
‘Well, we’d better get this gig done, then.’
Mick fiddled around for a bit. There were a couple of grunts and swear words, then he emerged from under the bonnet with a smile on his face.
‘That should have done it,’ he said as he fired up the engine. It made some stomach-churning noises on the way to Darlington, but we made it to the club on time.
As in the days of The Nuts and the Four Man Band, we rarely insured or taxed our vans. We just couldn’t afford it. And when the money for petrol ran out, we’d wait until midnight, drive onto a caravan site, cut off the engine and glide towards a car, remove the fuel cap, siphon out some petrol, then scarper as fast as we could. At one campsite, Ronnie, our driver at the time, swallowed the petrol. ‘Don’t have a cigarette,’ I said. ‘Your arse will blow up and you’ll get home before we do.’ But running out of petrol was the least of our worries. We broke down so many times, Beryl thought I was having an affair with the AA man.
Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Page 16
