One good thing was that I was the oldest one there and I won. It was a cool feeling winning at Silverstone, live on telly, and getting the cup from Formula 1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone. Nigel Benn and Les Ferdinand are just lovely fellows, except when young Nigel would punch me in the arm jokingly. Owww! As welcome as a blow job from a saber-toothed tiger. Man, it hurt. Les Ferdinand is impossibly handsome and impossibly fit. All the girls were cool and the guys, Gary Numan and Nick Moran—it was a fun time.
I don’t mean to blow smoke up anyone’s arse, but these two guys, Eddie and David, left an impression on me. They were normal blokes; they were fun. They meant what they said and they said what they meant—not a habit shared by many sportsmen these days. They were handsome, rich, and could probably shag every girl on the planet (and Eddie has certainly tried), but they are gentlemen and they are as “fast as fuck.”
Chapter 80
Geordie
STARTING A BAND IN A LOUSY YEAR
1976—what a lousy year for me, and for everybody who bought an English car. British Leyland were letting loose the dogs on the British public: Marinas, Allegros, the Wedge, even the tarted-up Triumph Dolomite.
But Red Robbo and Co. weren’t the only ones building crap cars (or, as often as not, not building them). New to British roads were the Ladas and the Polski Fiats, sixties cars made in the seventies in Poland and Ladania or something—Communist countries—and the northeast was full of them. Miners especially loved people to see them driving their Comrade cars. I loved the jokes: What’s the difference between a Lada and a sheep? It’s not half as embarrassing getting out the back of a sheep. Or: A guy went to a scrap yard and asked the man, “Do you have a windscreen for a Lada?” The man replied, “That seems a fair swap.” My next-door neighbor George had one, but he was a health inspector and a strong union member, of the “health through strength is the way forward” mentality.
Jaguars were breaking down more times than Dick Van Dyke’s accent. Everything in the U.K. was unreliable. AA men had even resorted to using Renault vans so that they had a chance of getting to you—well, at least before the Renaults rusted away under them. The Queen’s Jubilee was coming next year, and it didn’t feel like there was much to be jubilant about. Rovers looked and acted naff; there were ridiculous police cars, pale blue Allegros that looked like a parrot’s arse. We still only had three TV channels, and the telly stopped about eleven thirty p.m. There was nothing on during the day but The Mr Men Show. I should know. I was out of work and had to watch it.
Outside on my drive was a chocolate-brown 1968 VW Beetle, which I painted myself so’s the cops wouldn’t see all the bloody rust. I had no money, a pretty lousy marriage, two kids I adored (and still do), and nothing else. My mortgage payments were in the bowler-hatted-man-knocking-on-the-door-with-two-blokes-called-John category. There was danger in the air; something had to be done. A revolution, perhaps. Like-minded fellows in dire straits, such as myself, we could change Britain, give it a kick up the arse, make British cars great again, make our voices heard, march to London. Oh, hang on, the Jarrow boys tried that, got them absolutely nowhere. Perhaps I could become a brigand, light the torch of liberty—but I couldn’t, because I had no money. So I started a band instead.
Chapter 81
Fiat 500
A CAUTIONARY TALE
I had the Fiat 500 just at the tail end of Geordie. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It was lying in the back of Brian Gibson’s dad’s garage, a back-alley business right across from Newcastle City Hall. There were lots of those garages around then, run by men in filthy overalls, with some vacant-eyed Neanderthal under a car shouting, “I’m busy!” “Dodgy” was the word to describe these setups. Anyway, this Fiat looked bodily quite good, so I asked Brian’s dad to paint it and give it a good going-over, but he thought a good going-over meant painting it. (See what I mean? You’re beat before you start.)
It looked cool in orange, the only color he had cheap, but on the way home it broke down, wouldn’t start, took a crap, and stopped. There were no mobile phones then, and my carrier pigeon had run away from home, so I went to a phone box and told Mr. Gibson that I hadn’t even made it home. He came with a car, tied it to my front bumper with a rope, and drove off. It was wonderful, sitting there, watching the whole front of a Fiat 500 bouncing down the road while I and the rest of that piece of shit were stationary. I never bought another Fiat.
Chapter 82
Jaguar 2.8 Mk2
OWNING A CAR YOU CAN’T AFFORD
In the last year of the band Geordie, I bought a beautiful, pale-blue metallic, used Jag Mk2 with overdrive. God, what a beauty! I had to borrow the money from our management to buy it and was paying them back monthly. It was the first luxury car I had ever had. With red leather seats and a wood dashboard, it truly was the twelve-times table of cars.
The problem was that my heart had ruled my wallet and I really couldn’t afford to run it. I know we had three top-ten hits, but the truth is we weren’t seeing much of the money from them. We were on a paltry weekly salary. I remember one night at the BBC’s Shepherds Bush studios, after filming Top of the Pops (the U.K. equivalent of American Bandstand), it was about eight forty-five p.m. All the lads had gone ahead to their various ports of call in the car. I suddenly realized I had no transport and no money for a cab. I resigned myself to taking the bus back to shithole Hackney. As I was standing at the bus stop, Slade, who’d also been appearing on TOTP that day, drove past in their black Daimler.
I put my head down, and the rest of me went down with it. It was just too embarrassing—I knew I had to leave. I knew the band were going nowhere, so here I was, unemployed, with no cash, a mortgage to pay . . . sound familiar? I think every musician in the world’s said that, but bollocks, this is getting morbid! What to do next?
Chapter 83
Windshields
A CAREER BORN
Late ’76: I knew I had to get some money coming in. I circled the wagons, but the circle was getting smaller and smaller and there was a danger of them disappearing up my own arse. I checked one of the local rags, whose motto was: “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story,” or, “Headline first, truth later.” My dealings with them later bore that out. They did, however, have a jobs section, which, along with the crossword, were about the only accurate thing.
I saw an ad for a windshield fitter. I couldn’t go back to Parsons; it would have been too embarrassing after being on TV with Geordie. I thought it couldn’t be that difficult; I had been an engineering apprentice and a draftsman. On the plus side, I’d get to work with loads of cars. I knew there was something strange about it all when I phoned the number in the ad and a man called Peter said, “Okay, we’re holding interviews in the car park at Chester-le-Street service station on the A1M.” At the interview, I gave him the details of my previous work, missing out the Geordie years, and he looked puzzled, said I seemed a little overqualified, and signed me on. Funny thing was, he never asked me if I could fit a windscreen to a car.
So Peter saddled me with the cream of British workers, the “I’m all right, Jack” of the blue-collar nation. He put me in for the first week with a man called Norman, a henpecked, hate-filled bloke whose only aim was to make each job last as long as possible. Conversation was like talking to a trained turnip. He wore glasses with lenses imported from Zeiss in Germany, and he had teeth like the Thames floodgates, a smile that would see off Dracula. Other than that, he was a nice man. I asked him if he was married. He said he was and that his wife looked like a bulldog sucking a wasp. Hmm.
To start work, I had to drive from North Shields to Darlington, where the headquarters of Windshields Ltd., Northeastern Branch, was located. I needed the money. Two years earlier, I’d been playing at the London Palladium or the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Australia to thousands. But things hadn’t worked out. Still, at least nobody recognized me, because I’d taken to wearing a cap!!! Pulled tight over my eyes, so the truth is now out.
Darlington is a shithole designed by shitheads when they were in a really shitty mood. The people talk with a mixture of Yorkshire, Sunderland, Durham, and Seal accent, and that’s not half the story. The reason they’re not happy is because they’re right next door to a place called Hartlepool, and no, I’m not going to mention the monkey.
After a week of intensive training with Norman—“Take ya time, lad, ya don’t wanna make it look easy.” “But Norman, it is easy!”—I could do the work blindfolded with a pint in my hand. Then, after a couple more weeks, I was summoned to Peter’s office, up the wooden stairs of a cardboard office in a warehouse. “Well,” he said, “I like the cut of ya gib, m’boy, you’ve got what it takes to be a windshield fitter. I might even let you do sunroofs, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Broken windscreens are our means of survival. Remember, every car you see at the side of the road without getting called out is five pound in your pocket. I would like to present you, Brian Johnson, the keys to that Ford Transit, complete with orange flashing light. It came from our Oldham branch and it’s only got 85,000 miles on the clock.”
To me, it was everything: free ride, free gas, and even a CB radio with my own call sign, Whisky Oscar One One One—difficult to pronounce with a hangover. One of the other fitters advised me to buy a bag of gravel to lay down at roundabouts so people would get their screens broke from the guys in front. (In Britain, cars were fitted with toughened windscreens, which shattered when hit, usually into the faces of the passengers. Most European cars had the laminated ones that just cracked and were safer.) I wouldn’t do that though, because it was to break cars on purpose, a crap way of making money. The fitter was a good guy, though, a Liverpudlian who’d made his way to Darlington and then lost his map. (He was definitely dyslexic, a card-carrying member of the DNA, the National Association of Dyslexics. He was also an atheist insomniac and would lie awake all night wondering if there was a dog.)
The adventures at Windshields were great: lonely nights at Scotch Corner, rain and wind whipping around you as you tried to put in, on your own, a windscreen for a Volvo or Scania truck. The windscreens were about ten feet wide and nearly three feet high, and it was cold as hell standing on top of your Transit getting the bugger in. But I really did enjoy helping people out. I felt I was a medic for motors and trucks. Kidding aside, I really had more fun in that year and a bit than I can remember.
One time I was called out to a car that had both front and rear screens broken. I rushed there and found the driver sitting in the boot, legs dangling over the edge, drunk as a newt. He was drinking miniature bottles of whisky, for he was a whisky salesman. “Are you okay, mate?” I asked. “Okay? Okay? Oh, fucking bastard boy, no. I’ve just shit my pants and its starting to dry.” “That’s gonna itch,” I replied. “What happened?” “F-f-f-f-fuckin’ big pheasant through the front screen, right past my head and out the fucking back. Never seen anything like it!” Neither had I. I told him, “Listen, mate, here’s my newspaper. Why don’t you wipe your backside whilst I’m fixing this Cortina Mk4. He still wasn’t back when I’d finished, so I went to look for him. As he pulled up his pants, I asked, “What took you so long?” He said, “Listen, mate, when the bird came through I was scared. I mean, I really shat myself. I had to start wiping from the back of the neck.” On top of the £40 he owed me, he gave me what samples he had left and some Lithuanian whisky that tasted of plums.
Every day was different. I worked on some boring and some fabulous cars. Ferraris—the nearest I’d ever get to one, Aston Martins, Jags, BMWs, and Porsches. I even had to do a Rolls-Royce. What a bastard that was! There was at least a hundred screws to take out of the dash to get to the windscreen. Still, I did it and probably lost the company a fortune, as it took a day and a half.
I knew the job couldn’t last long: you had to be on call through the night once every three days and it was getting in the way of my music. So I had to leave, which was a shame, but I thought I’d start my own company, and North-East Vinyls was born.
Chapter 84
The Dog’s Dangly Bits
HOW TO PASS TIME ON THE ROAD
Touring in a band can get a little boring, with only two hours of intense excitement every other night. To help relieve this, I have my favorite mags with me at all times, Classic Sports Car, Motor Sport, and Thoroughbred and Classic Cars. I’ve bought every one of them, every month, since 1980, and have built up a collection at home, housed in its own huge sideboard in my office. I love the ads in ’em, I love the wording. Stanley Mann’s Bentley ads are just lovely. For example:
1931 BLOWER BENTLEY LE MANS.
SUPERB ORIGINAL.
FULLY REBUILT TO THE DOG’S DANGLY BITS SPECIFICATIONS.
I love that stuff. I feel I know most of the guys in there, I’ve seen their names so many times. The ads themselves are more like motor-car menus, lists of luscious Lagondas, fistfuls of Ferraris, masses of Mercedes, boatloads of Bentleys, racks of Rollers. It takes your breath away how many beautiful old and new cars are out there. The prices tend to loosen your fillings a little, too! I’ve just seen a Bugatti for sale at 2,750,000 euro. Holy shit! You couldn’t even have sex in it, never mind park it. Who are the people who own these cars, where do they live? I guess I should say good luck to ’em, but I can’t, because most of them hide these beauties away and only pull them out for some Concourse of Elegance now and again. Then there are the real dudes who race their cars at the Donnington Festival of Speed and other similar events. Those guys are my heroes, because when they race, they are still bangin’ doors and takin’ numbers. The guys who drive across continents in rallies—I salute you, I salute you all!
The truth is, all these magazines are written and researched so well you can actually read them from cover to cover. I usually have a napkin tucked into the top of my T-shirt to stop me salivating onto the pages. To car nuts, these are horn mags, stick mags, something to get a boner over. Whenever I’m stuck at an airport, on a long bus ride, or sitting next to a shower-curtain salesman from Ohio on a plane, I whip out my trusty mag and put a serious, concerned look on my face.
“Oh, hey, is that an Austin Martin?”
“No! It’s pronounced Aston. ASTON!”
“Yeah, that’s what I said. Austin Martin.”
“Die, you bastard. Just fuck off and die!”
If the car magazine doesn’t shut them up, I pull out my secret weapon: Viz. This usually has most Americans shaking their heads: Sid the Sexist, Eight Ace, Biffa Bacon, Raffles, the Gentleman Thug, Slappa Tasha, Fat Slags, Cockney Wanker.
Them: “I don’t get it.”
Me: “And you never will, bonny lad. You never will.”
Chapter 85
Lincoln Continental
SAFE OPERATING SPEED: 0
The first car I bought in America was what every boy whose first car was a Ford Popular would buy: a Lincoln Continental. I think Jeremy Clarkson said it had a safe operating speed of 4 mph. He was way off. Standing still is the correct answer. But, oh my, the size of the thing! It was huge. It had more seats than the local cinema in Dunston. The plastic chrome was a wonder to behold—there was nothing really metal in this car, or wood; I think even the glass was plastic. I had it for a year; it was six years old when I bought it. I knew I had to get rid of it when little niggly things started, like the roof lining coming completely off whilst I was driving, making me look like I was wearing a burka without eyeholes. I was doing about seventy at the time. Memories of that whisky salesman came flooding back, and I didn’t have a newspaper.
Chapter 86
The Benefits of Driving in France
SIAMESE TWINS WALK INTO A PUB
Two brothers, aged about thirty, were Siamese twins. They were joined at the hip, but they were happy enough. They went to their local pub for a pint and the landlord said, “Hey lads, the usual?”
“Yes, please,” they said as one.
“Well, boys, it’s July. You getting ready for your holidays?”
�
�Oh yeah! Can’t wait!” was the response.
“Where you going this year?”
“Oh, we’re off on a driving holiday in France. You know, we just rent a car and drive.”
The barman looked at them and smiled. “Lads, every year I ask the same question. Every year you go to France. Why?”
The twin on the right said, “It’s the only chance he gets to drive!”
Chapter 87
Sexy French Cars
I’M-FRENCH-AND-FUCK-YOU ATTITUDE
In England, French cars have been with us longer than you might think: Bugatti, Citroën, and Renault since before the war. The Citroën Light 15 was the Maigret of motor cars, used by the Gestapo, the Resistance, and the prewar English banker. They were brilliantly forward-thinking cars. I still think they’re sexy, that push-me-pull-you gear stick and the I’m-French-and-fuck-you attitude. Anyway, you look at this car and it’s beautiful, and I’m amazed you can still buy them as cheaply as you can. They were still building them in England until the mid-fifties. Renault is another manufacturer that built an “I am French, eat merde” type of car, whatever it was. The French cars were, well, so fuckin’ French, and that’s cool: Gauloise ciggies; berets; women that were chic, gorgeous, shaggable, leggy, marriable, slender, and got better as they got older, just like fabulous wines and cheeses; and their bread and their brandy. Aha, that’s why French cars are what they are: SEX. Well, you have to start with the basics, and I do believe sexy was where they started.
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