“Three years, Monty, and I’ve only got fourteen thousand miles on it. Why?”
“Oh, a magnificent motor carriage has just arrived at the dealership,” Monty replied.
“Mmmmm,” I said.
“Would you like to know what it is?”
“No, Monty, I wouldn’t.”
“Good! Well, it’s a Rolls-Royce Phantom with only eight hundred miles on it, barely a year old. I sold it to a lady in Palm Beach just under a year ago and it hasn’t even been farted in.”
“How do you know?” I asked him.
“I’ve met the woman. It’s too big for her. I could do a deal with the Bentley and this beautiful black velvet David of motorcars could be yours.” I could feel the hook going in.
“Listen, oh rock-’n’-rolling one,” Monty went on. “Why don’t I send it down on the trailer and you can test-drive it?”
“No, no, Monty. Don’t do that. Monty! Monty!” The bugger had hung up. I rang back.
Receptionist: “Hello, this is Orlando Bentley, Rolls-Royce. How may I direct your call?”
Me: “Monty Patterson, please.”
Receptionist: “Oh, are you Mr. Johnson?”
Me: “Yes, I am.”
Receptionist: “Well, he says to tell you that he’s not in. Bye.” Bugger. I knew the thing was already on its way. Forty-five minutes later, the doorbell rang.
“Hi, Chuck from Rolls-Royce.” Now, I know it’s a three-hour drive from Orlando. That meant the car had already been on the road for two hours when Monty called me. I went out to the front drive. Chuck was already opening the back door of the trailer. All I could see was this black shadowy thing the size of a humpback whale. He let it out slowly into the sunshine. It wasn’t black, it was black velvet. It was stunning. I was floored. Everything started to go north on me. Nipples, willy, corners of mouth, hair . . . while the jaw went south. It was a proper Rolls-Royce. Not the 1970s–2000 ones. It was just like the ones I saw as a kid. Huge buggers.
“Here are the keys, Mr. Johnson. Take it for a spin.” I got in. It was the tits. It was perfect. Lalique interior lights, suicide back doors. It was posh as fuck. My arse was going like a squirrel eating nuts. I pressed the starter button, and 2.5 tons of hand-built sex, with a 7.2 BMW engine with twelve funnels of fun took off and got me to 60 mph in about five and a bit seconds. Mine, all mine. I slobbered. I got back to my house.
“Well, Mr. Johnson, whaddya think?”
“Mine, all mine.” I picked up the phone.
Receptionist: “Hello, Orlando . . .”
Me: “Get me that bugger Patterson!”
Receptionist: “Of course, sir!”
Monty: “Hey, Brian, my friend . . .”
Me: “Monty, you sneaky rotten bastard. You camel-humping four-flusher, you—”
Monty: “So you want it, don’t you?”
Me: “ ’Course I want it.” The deal was done over the phone. Chuck loaded the Bentley up. There was a tear in my eye and in my wallet when he left. But there in the driveway was my Rolls. So I wasn’t going to be lying on my deathbed saying, “I wish I’d bought a Rolls.” Even the great God of motorcars, Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson, said it was fab. So there you go.
I had only had the car a week when the phone call came in: “Hey, Brian, we’ll need you for rehearsals in Philly next week.” Bollocks! Since then I’ve only driven it once, and it was early 2008, and—shit!—the Black Ice tour didn’t finish until August 2010. Fate can be a bit of a bastard at times.
Chapter 32
My First Race Meet
FINDING THE AUTODROME
In a land called Dunston many years ago, three friends, Brian Johnson, George Beveridge, and Ronnie Swaddle, decided to go and watch a motor race. Now, that was like finding a bishop at a bar mitzvah in the northeast of England. After much searching, we found that there was a race at Croft Autodrome at one p.m. on Sunday. Great! It would certainly spice Sunday up. You see, I hate Sundays. It’s the day before you go back to work, it’s the premature end of the weekend, it’s bath night, it’s Sunday Night at the Bloody London Palladium, it’s “I’ve set the alarm for 5:30 a.m.” night. But this weekend, we were going to the races in my trusty Ford Popular.
The trouble was, I hadn’t passed my driving test yet, but I was dying to drive somewhere far away. It would be an adventure. My dad was working overtime that weekend, so I could slip off my learner plates and bugger off. Croft was at least thirty-five miles away. Wow! That meant putting more than one gallon in the car. I’d never done that before, so we had a whip-round. We woke to black skies, which is normal up there in the Geordie foothills. I picked up George and Ronnie. We filled up the tank with three gallons of gas—I’d never seen a guy pump for that long. (They didn’t have self-service pumps then.) The gas gauge was up to half-full—something else I’d never seen before. Right, lads, check food.
George: “I’ve got two teacakes with jam and a stottie cake with ham and pease pudding.”
Ronnie: “I’ve got cheese and onion, and one and a half mince pies, because I’ve already eaten a bit. Oh, and a flask of tea.”
This was going brilliant. I had six of my mother’s famous homemade doughnuts and a couple of Spam-and-beetroot sandwiches, because my ma was Italian and couldn’t quite figure out what went with what. (Rhubarb and corned beef was a particular favorite of mine.)
“Who’s got the map?” I asked. The look on their faces was like one of those Japanese red-arse monkeys when they’re sitting in the hot springs—or Roger Moore showing “anger” in a Bond movie. It told me we didn’t have one. “It’s near Middlesborough, or Darlington. Or Catterick or something,” said the Swaddle. Not so brilliant. Here we were on our first real trip, with no idea how to get there. Ronnie ran back into the house and asked his dad, and came out with directions and off we went.
The names of some of the villages and hamlets we passed through are just great: Middleton Tyas, Yafforth, Snape, Kirkbymoorside, and, my personal favorite, Ainderby Quemhow. Yup, it exists. It’s on the B6267, right next to Berryhills. None of them beats the daddy of them all, in Northumbria. It’s called Once Brewed and it’s about half a mile down the road from Twice Brewed, named by a Cromwellian general. He wanted his beer brewed twice so he moved his headquarters from Once Brewed. No, I’m not taking the piss. It’s true! Christ, I’m off on a tangerine again—back to the story.
As we headed south, it started to rain, good old-fashioned sideways-windy stuff. The Ford Popular had only one windscreen wiper (the deluxe model, the Prefect, had two), which worked on a kind of vacuum power off the thingy in the carb stuff. The thing is, the more power you needed, the more you put your foot on the accelerator, the slower the wiper moved. I couldn’t see much of anything. We suddenly went over a rather large bump about the size of a dinosaur’s arse.
“What the hell was that?” I said.
George looked out the back window. “You’ve just driven over a roundabout.”
Oh my God, I hadn’t even seen it coming. This driving stuff wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. The rain was still lashing down and we were lost—I mean “you couldn’t find your dick in ten degrees below” kind of lost.
There were no signs for Croft Autodrome. No arrows to point the way. Nothing to get you there until we spotted some old hangars and drove down this old concrete road to where a soaked woman was selling tickets to get in. But there was nothing to get into, just vast swathes of grass and concrete runways. We could have driven ’round ourselves. There were no pits, just oil drums to denote the corners. This was not what we’d had in mind.
Five cars started the race, all MG TCs, and they weren’t very fast or noisy. They would pass us, then we’d stand there wet and miserable for a few minutes, and then they’d pass us again. It was like watching snails shag. We decided to head for home, if we could find it, before my dad got home from work.
We got back into the “Pop” and the windows misted up. I mean, it looked like a heavy fog, and no amount
of wiping did any good. “We’ll have to drive with the windows open to let the air in.” Well, with the wiper doing its impersonation of Errol Flynn’s dick, we moved cautiously forward, my head out the window, like the pilot of a Sopwith Camel coming in to land. Shit! We’ll never get home at this speed. My dad’s gonna kill me if he finds out I’ve been out without a qualified driver in the car. My goose’ll be cooked, my sausage sliced, my provisional license lost forever. We got back at seven thirty, the six-volt headlights hardly making a dent in the rain and gloom. I dropped off the lads and headed for the retribution waiting at home. When I got there, I knocked on the front door, because I still didn’t have a key. My old man opened it.
“Where you been?” he asked.
I looked him in the eye and said, “I’ve been at George’s house all day listening to music, Dad.”
He looked over my shoulder at the car, which was covered in mud from the track, and said, “Did you learn ya lesson?”
I looked down and sighed. “Yes, Dad.”
“Go on, get a cup of tea.”
He was a cool dude.
Chapter 33
Austin A35
A SMILING PREGNANT SNAIL
Just before I joined Geordie, I bought an Austin A35, basically because it was cheap and nobody else wanted it. It was black, and the registration was POB 96. So they nicknamed me POB, in Geordie. My daughter Kala married a Geordie lad called Pob many years later. Friggin’ spooky, eh?
This car resembled a pregnant snail with a smile on its face. It was tiny and powerless and a tad embarrassing to be seen in, but it had two doors, very little rust, and a real MOT. You see, MOTs were a constant source of worry to the lads I knew. Most of us had old bangers, and there was always something needed fixing to pass “the test.” A tax disc fashioned out of a Brown Ale label was a good trick to keep you on the road. My insurance was on the cusp of being legal. Lenny, the insurance bloke, got me the cheapest third-party-only insurance—third party only if the first and second party are not in the vicinity of the accident, or the third party is the thief that pinches it. Well, I was all right there. Nobody was gonna nick this car, because they’d get caught by a policeman on foot.
The sound of the engine on this thing always amazed me. It was unique. It sounded a bit like a truffle pig eating a plate of jelly. The thing is—it kept going. And I still miss the little bugger.
I remember taking a trip to a stately home with a mate and his wife. Now, Billy’s wife was a charming girl from Hartlepool who worked in a rope factory in Wallsend, but she wasn’t all bad (apart from looking bored at everything around her). I mean, she never drank her pint all in one go, she always farted out loud so that you knew it was her, and she had a laugh like a hyena getting its balls chewed off by a not-very-hungry lion. She did have some culture, though I suspect that was the yogurt in the fridge. She had a beehive hairdo, which was a little out of date in 1970. She sat in the back, where the roof line was very low, and her platinum thatch now looked like it was attached to the roof. But she hadn’t noticed. Should I say something? Well, Billy didn’t look bothered, so I didn’t. It wasn’t until she got out of the car that the full damage was revealed. Her armor-like hairspray had kept everything in place, but her hive was now shaped like an Austin A35 roof lining, and she still didn’t know.
I bit my lip. Billy still didn’t notice, even though people were pissing themselves. At last she went to the toilet. I heard the scream. She came out, lips back in a rictus grin, eyes just slits, claws out. She shuffled penguin-like up to Billy (knickers ’round her ankles—I didn’t realize she was an Elvis fan) and fetched him one right across the chops, followed by a testicular backhand that woulda done Boris Becker proud. “You friggin’ bastard, I’ll twat you when I get home.”
The drive home was fun. Billy was getting smacked every couple of minutes: “Twat!” Then, bang!
“C’mon now, guys. Take it easy.”
“And you can piss off an’ all, you little twit,” she said.
Finally I got them home to North Shields. She stormed out of the car and tottered on her high-heeled white kinky boots to the front door.
“Please can I come back with you?” Billy begged, and like a good friend, I said, “Piss off! She’ll only come and get you again.”
So Billy got out of the car, head down, knowing what he was in for. Now I knew why Billy worked more overtime that anyone else.
Fun days apart, the little car at least got me to work on time and was reliable, even though I got passed by the double-decker bus on the Coast Road.
Chapter 34
Malcolm Young
OCCUPATION: WORLD’S GREATEST RIFFMEISTER
Malcolm Young bought a brand-new Jaguar in 1992 and didn’t sell it till 2006. Okay, there’s nothing wrong with that, but he didn’t buy anything else, either. He doesn’t really give a shit about motorcars, he’s the James May of rock ’n’ roll. Then again, he’s had the same guitar since 1974.
He just bought a 2008 Nissan people-carrier. (I mean, what else could they carry?) He likes it a lot. I wouldn’t worry so much, but this is the lad who wrote riffs like “Highway to Hell” and “Shook Me All Night Long” and loads of other great shit.
Which throws out the window all my theories about rock ’n’ roll and cars. Christ on a bike, how could he do this to me?
But the Lord visited Mal the other day and He did say unto him, “Malcolm, you must go unto the light and speak with your spirit within, that spirit being Jonna.”
And lo and befuckinghold, he did!
“Hey, Jonna, that Bentley Continental looks nice. I might buy one.”
I looked at him like I’d just farted. He looked at me like he was just going to. My heart raced and my shoes unlaced. Was this it? The breakthrough? Mal, my Mal, was becoming a born-again motorist. I sang:
(To the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers”)
Onward Saabs and Audis,
Chryslers, Jags, and Fords,
Ferrari, Maseratis,
Morgans, Fiats, Cords,
Bentley Continental, Bee Em Double U’s,
Lamborghini Muiras, Aston Martins, too.
Mal is actually thinking
Of buying a new car.
I bet my bottom dollar
It’s a Jaguar.
You know, there’s a song in there somewhere. Oh shit, I missed out Mercedes and a load of others.
Then Mal said, “Ah, we’re too busy right now. I think I’ll wait till the tour finishes in a year and a half.”
Busy, too fuckin’ busy! I’ve got to help this lad out.
* * *
P.S.: Dear Mal, I take no responsibility for what happened on this page. It was my hand what done it—Brian.
Chapter 35
Günther
IF A MARINE WERE ON STEROIDS AND DRIVING
Although you’ll have never heard of him, Günther is a very well-known driver in rock ’n’ roll circles. He owns and operates the biggest tour-car company in Europe. He always has the latest Beemers, Mercs, and Audis. At first, I was the only one that would travel with him, because he was so fast, 150 mph average speed, but it didn’t matter to me, he was so good. There’s nothin’ like havin’ a glass of wine and a cheese and ham sandwich whilst going pukka-style speeds. I was later joined by that ne’er-do-well bass player of ours, Cliff Williams, who’s a bit of a chicken when it comes to goin’ fast. Cliff and I have traveled thousands of miles with Günther.
Günther has a German-style haircut, i.e., like a marine on steroids, a square jaw, piercing blue eyes, and he never turns ’round while he’s driving, which a lot of other drivers do, scaring the shit out of you in the process. His eyes are glued to the road, while me and Cliff would be laughing and giggling in the back, the smell of the lords’ lettuce wafting around him affecting him not a jot. Meanwhile, we just went faster and faster, especially on the night drives.
The new Audi RS8 was his particular favorite on the 2000 tour, and it was a great car. Unf
ortunately, Cliff and I were too stoned and drunk to realize, cars all seem the same when you’re sitting in the back. I wonder if anyone will do a backseat-passenger car review, with all the nuances and clever clichés used in today’s media.
We knew we were always safe with Günther. Even when, heading east, he had that look of a Panzer officer invading Poland.
Once, when Cliff said to me after three hours’ driving, “ ’Ere, Jonna, I’ve spilled me liter bottle of Glenfiddich,” we thought, “Oh shit, this car’s brand-new.” We got on our hands and knees and felt the carpet. It was bone-dry, and the words from Cliff, or should I say “vowel movement,” were “Oh fuck, I’ve drunk it.” On hearing this, Günther stopped the car, opened the boot, and produced another bottle. Cliff was so happy he got out of the car to have one of his five-minute roadside pees, which is hilarious, because he tends to shrug his shoulders a lot and talks to his dick, and when he’s finished, he doesn’t so much shake as wrestle the thing back into his pants.
That night ended fabulously when we arrived in a French town, at about four thirty in the morning. A crowd of about two hundred kids was waiting for us. Günther opened the door and we spilled out the same door, giggling and laughing, onto the road. The crowd went crazy—this was just what was expected.
That’s when Günther had just told us the only joke he could remember. He said you must always remember: the bigger the German, the smaller the swimsuit. I still laugh at it.
Chapter 36
My Brother, Maurice
CAR RATS IN ARMS
Maurice was the brother with the name my mother wanted. “Maurice Chevalier was so ’andsome,” she would say in her lovely Italian accent. Maurice was the first in the family to “go on the road.” He was a car rat as well; he still is mentally retarded, in an “I don’t know what to buy next” way. He lives happily in Whickham, with his two children, a Porsche convertible, and a 1965 Karmann Ghia—I think one of the prettiest little VWs. His two human children, Mark and Michael, are helplessly like their dad and uncle: car crazy. They say we don’t have branches on our family tree, just wing mirrors. When we gather at pubs, we tend to look more like an assembly line than a family.
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