It’s a strange feeling when you go from listening to, following and looking up to someone, to sharing a bill with him. I felt like I should have been standing in the audience.
Johansen’s band was made up of a gang of New York Italians who looked like what the Murray Hill gang back in Cleveland wished they did: suave, stylish and cool, as opposed to thuggish, out of shape and menacing. They all had perfectly sculpted quiffs, and there was a lot of hairdryer action backstage. Pete especially was enamored with them. He wanted to take his place in it but you got the impression that he didn’t quite believe it himself, like it was a blag on his part. I didn’t notice it much at the time, though. I was too busy feeling out of my depth myself. I never really thought I could pull it off—I just did what I had to do. All I knew for sure was that I was in love with the process. Not in love with the stage like an actor, but like a vagrant who finds a nook at the side to hide in and crash out for the night.
Anything that made me self-conscious horrified me: publicity, press, cameras—even fans, eventually. I figured out that confidence was a bluff. In fact, everything was a bluff expect the actual music. As long as everyone else thinks you know what you’re doing, you’re practically home free. As far as self-esteem and all the New Age psychobabble stuff, I didn’t worry about that. I read the Bhagavad Gita and knew that all that ego and self-esteem stuff was a load of hooey anyway.
I liked that I could buy some cool clothes, new boots and a good guitar. I loved taking my songs to the band and having them transformed. I knew I loved singing, but it took me a long time to feel like I owned it. But I knew it owned me and always had.
The feeling of being at home overrode the rest, and that feeling came with a guitar slung over my shoulder while standing in front of a microphone. Home at last.
The onset of being recognized in public was as squirm-making as I’d expected. I wanted it all, but I didn’t know what to do with it. You take the bitter with the sweet, but it’s still hard to swallow; like sucking the sugar coating off a pill but not being able to spit it out, and having to keep sucking indefinitely.
I knew to stay in the middle, keep my head down, not let anything get too big—the middle way. You can see it with a guitar tuner when the needle’s not bouncing into the red: stay in the middle. I even asked someone once how to remember which side of the road to drive on, and he said, “Just make sure you’re always in the middle.”
One day, a guy on the Underground platform kept staring at me. I rounded on him in my usual manner and said, “You see something you like?” But instead of backing off and walking on down the platform, he said, “Oooooh. Superstar!” He recognized me and I hadn’t seen it coming. What was I supposed to do? Smile and wink? Sign his train ticket? I turned and walked off, feeling like a twat.
I couldn’t be aggressive before someone else got aggressive anymore. I never saw that coming. For the rest of my life I would never see it coming.
We did gigs around the UK, but I didn’t look forward to shows at first—if anything I hoped something might prevent them, like a meteorite dropping on the venue. I was just scared, stage fright, the same stuff everyone suffers from.
They say that if you’re not a bundle of nerves the show won’t be good, but I hated the nerves. The feeling inevitably, however, was a bit of a turn-on. Any personal insecurities were compensated for when I saw my magnificent band take off around me: “Look, everybody—look what I found!”
The shows happened and people liked us. The band was magic one night, but inconsistent and shit the next. I never knew what to expect. But that’s what’s good about a show—the unpredictability. It’s sex, after all.
It was all new to us, being in a band and traveling around—what each of us had always dreamed of. All I had to do was sing. Talk about a scam! Nothing to learn. I was part of the crew; I belonged there. I was part of the happening, just like the girl in the second row—the girl that I always was.
We played a lot of student places, university dates. My love of the Johnny Moped “I Hate Students” tape stayed in my head, and every time we did one of those venues I would berate students just for the hell of it. I could see people walking out in disgust, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s funny how you say things onstage even after you promise yourself you won’t. The more I’d tell myself not to say something, the worse it got. The band didn’t like it either, but I couldn’t stop. I was eventually telling entire audiences to “Go fuck yourselves!” whenever I’d smell a burger van.
The hotels were basic, often with no phones in the rooms, but we didn’t care about stuff like that. In England the meaning of “basic” was a law unto itself. Jimmy went down to the front desk in Wales one night and asked if he could get a Coke. The woman at the desk acted like she’d never heard anything so preposterous in all her life: “At this hour? A Coca-Cola? You can’t do that!”
“You can’t do that!” in a singsong Welsh accent became a band catchphrase. Every band had catchphrases.
Pete told me about a cool reggae band playing down the Rock Garden in Covent Garden. It was a small club and looked even smaller because the band had eight people onstage. Pete was right—they were great. I made my way backstage to see if they’d be interested in touring with us. The sax player seemed to be the most approachable in this tight unit that had a family vibe about it, very exclusive.
I introduced myself and asked in an apologetic sort of way if they’d be interested in supporting my band. They weren’t signed so it was a long shot, but worth pursuing. I couldn’t understand a word any of them said in their insane Birmingham accents, but they agreed, and the band who called themselves UB40, a reference to the British welfare system, came along on our first major tour and became like brothers.
A favorite story of Pete, Martin and Jimmy’s, which I heard repeated often, was the Bobby Moore story. The iconic footballer Moore—Captain of England—tore his shorts during a game and someone ran onto the pitch with another pair while the team gathered around so he could change into them. From the stands as the hushed crowd waited for him to emerge, one Hereford voice rose up over the pitch with a mighty “BARE-ASSED BOBBY IN YA?”
“Bare-assed Bobby In-ya?” I heard that phrase every day for a year and it never failed to induce juvenile sniggering and hilarity in the others.
We got to one hotel, where every room had a speaker on the wall playing muzak, which was impossible to turn off. There was a knock on my door as I battled to find the nonexistent volume control.
“Here to fix the speaker!” said a gruff workman’s voice. It was Jimmy. He marched in, wrestled with the offending speaker and finally yanked it off the wall, leaving a tangle of wires dangling, then walked out and on to the next room to “fix the speaker”; he went on down the hall like that until it all went quiet.
When Jimmy started hyperventilating with laughter, he made a high-pitched sound like that of a young girl weeping. He had absolutely no control of himself unless he had a guitar in his hands. If I were to clear my throat or so much as hint that it might be the wrong time or place to let rip with a blaring fart, it would only make it worse. I was excluded from a lot of the schoolboy humor, and was thankful for that.
One of the more embarrassing nights was in a tiny restaurant in Paris. The chef had worked for Jacques Brel on his boat, and was very proud of it. Jimmy farted so loudly it stunned everyone, just as a Jacques Brel song came on and the chef was serving us. We were all of us mortified, especially producer Chris Thomas who was present, and a friend of the chef, who was very sensitive about his beloved and recently deceased Brel. It was obvious that we were all appalled by Jimmy’s behavior, which only inspired him. He was so drunk and encouraged by our attempts to ignore him that he rounded the evening off by wearing an ice-cream cone on his head as the rest of us slunk out ashamed, leaving him to his farting and snerking.
You especially didn’t want to share a flight with Jimmy. After a few drinks he couldn’t keep his hands off a stewardess. “Gee’
s a go on yer mams, love!” he’d say, as I hid behind the in-flight entertainment guide.
Passing a guy on crutches while driving was another thing you’d hope to avoid. Jimmy couldn’t drive but would roll down the window of the car I was driving and shout at the top of his lungs like a Herefordian farmer, “Get out the road, ya bloody git!” sending the poor guy flying.
He was like the obnoxious little brother you were loath to take anywhere. Good at math though.
One night, after sharing the bill on a show with them, we had a dinner with Dave Hill’s other band, Strangeways, from Wakefield. (Wakefield produced another medieval-sounding northern accent.) I overheard someone inquire if anyone had “picked up dry cleaning? Any brass in pocket?”
I thought that was a good line.
—
“Stop Your Sobbing” got some airplay and we did Top of the Pops, the biggest music show in Britain. Everyone—mums, dads, granddads, dogs, kids and budgerigars—watched it every week, gathered round the TV: a national tradition.
You got all sorts on Top of the Pops—the occasional jewel, but more often than not some pretty dodgy stuff. (Now, that was a time you’d wish there were stylists.)
In the UK, everybody listened to the same music as there were only a few radio stations. I was still amazed every time I went into a pub and saw blue-haired old dears inadvertently listening to the Stones on the jukebox. It was an “all for one, one for all” mentality. When Marianne Faithfull got busted naked, wrapped in a fur blanket with—allegedly—a Mars Bar up her flue, it was front-page news in all the tabloids.
You wouldn’t see that in the Akron Beacon Journal.
Getting on Top of the Pops was the sign that you’d “made it”—well, you’d made it onto Top of the Pops. I don’t think it counted for anything else, a few more sales the next week, but did it a career make? Who knows, but it was the only chart show there was.
And we did a few kids’ shows, including Tiswas, where bands regularly got a cream pie in the face. The presenter, Chris Tarrant, pushed one in my face, and it was a stinging surprise to find out they used shaving foam, not whipped cream. It was all in my eyes, burning, and live on television, so I couldn’t react.
Another big show in the UK was The Kenny Everett Video Show. Kenny was a camp DJ who specialized in being outrageous. We all got dressed up in kooky gear for that, I don’t know why, but we went along with it. I held my guitar back to front and had my hair up in some dumb bun, and was dressed in sci-fi gear. Jimmy wore a gay-boy leather cap with a harness of chains and no shirt, exposing his pasty and, frankly, flabby stomach and hairy blond chest. As he walked past the camera crew someone called out, “That reminds me, I must remember to pick up some lard on the way home.”
That become another band catchphrase of sorts: “I must remember to pick up some lard on the way home.” Yeah, I heard that a lot.
The idea of trying to be sexy was repellent to me, something I’d never deliberately do. Certainly not after one time in Biba’s Rainbow Room a few years before, at an Ann Peebles show. That night, I was wearing a rubber skirt from SEX with a pair of fishnets and suspenders under it. I liked that prostitute look, real in-your-face punk, like the New York Dolls, a bit glam. One of Mott the Hoople was at the bar and kept buying me drinks—probably because of the rubber gear. I’d never turn down a drink.
After about five or six shots of Southern Comfort I passed out in a cubicle in the ladies. I was so sick I couldn’t pull my leg into my own cubicle, so anyone going into the next stall had to step around it and sit on the can with my leg in between their feet, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t move it. I already knew about those goddamn rubber skirts from my time as a cocktail waitress at the Last Moving Picture Show in Cleveland, but I wore it anyway. The hotter you get, the tighter it gets, which is just what you don’t want when you have to throw up. I finally managed to drag myself up the toilet bowl and, with a great effort, got the rubber tubing down around my ankles so I could pass out again in relative comfort.
After the venue closed, a big, fat cleaning woman found me and hoisted me up to a standing position. It took ages for her to get the skirt up over my sweaty thighs and stomach. How embarrassing—painful, too. Why anyone would wear bondage gear for pleasure, I never could fathom. I guess that’s why they call them perverts.
I never tried to dress sexy after that. Fuck that. Over-the-knee boots was the limit. You know, if Iggy would wear it, I would. (Although if anyone could pull off a rubber skirt, it would be him. But I digress…)
The romance between Pete and me had turned bad, as indeed involvement within the ranks always does—something to be avoided in a band like a bad haircut. Our thing had got underway early on and was a total violation of every code in the book. But how do you stop it? Who can? Nobody I’ve ever met.
You see a girl in a band out there? Any money she’s having a secret affair with the sound mixer. There’s always something going on, and with the girls so outnumbered…well, do the math.
We were dismantling it and dealing with it—a nightmare to do while having to work together, especially with me as the boss. And I was the boss, no messing. That was the one thing I really was good at. I always knew what was right for the music. I never doubted it. That was my main, possibly my only strong point—natural instinct. But laying down the law to the guy you’re breaking up with is not something that guy is going to like. Too bad, buddy boy.
I was my own worst enemy, but we were all getting wrecked—it’s practically in the job description. If you were still standing and could play your instrument, that was all that mattered.
I wouldn’t allow any photos to be taken of me on my own, even though as the singer, which implies “sex symbol,” it was expected. But I held my ground. The Pretenders were the four of us, and I was pathologically insistent that we be perceived as such. I hadn’t spent all that time resisting walking the plank on my own to botch it up now.
One magazine did get me alone on its cover by cropping the rest of the band out of the picture. I saw it on the newsstand, a big picture of my face on Time Out, and went into a black mood that lasted the whole week the magazine was out. No one could talk to me.
There was already friction. When “Stop Your Sobbing” came out, the B-side, “The Wait,” got a lot of notice, which was good because we were more of a rock band than “Sobbing” suggested. Plus, it was a good example of my songwriting, along with Jimmy’s superlative guitar playing and our sloppy-but-tight rhythm section. But, as could have been predicted, when people saw Pete’s name on the credit next to mine they assumed that he wrote the music and I wrote the words. I felt publicly humiliated—it really stung.
It had taken me a long time to figure out how to write a song, long hours alone in a room with a guitar. Pete had never written a song in his life. I was bummed. Jimmy was right about giving away song credits, but the damage was done. My songs weren’t well crafted; I knew that. They didn’t have traditional choruses or whatever they were meant to have, but I had something unique. Now people assumed I was just the singer/lyricist and that one of the guys was the musical director.
I felt more degraded than when I’d been bounced around a room and roughed up by a bunch of speed-crazed bikers. Much more. Pete had been adamant, and I felt like I’d been emotionally blackmailed, wanting to please him rather than have him reject me. Well, it was too late to do anything about it, and Pete was only too happy to bask in his new status.
He was already showing certain weaknesses of character, exasperated by the imbalance of power, which was inherently in my favor. He had started out by being the life and soul of the party, always up for anything, always a good laugh. Everyone loved him, especially me. He’d accept any challenge.
One day, I dared him to put Tiger Balm under his foreskin and he did it! Who else would try that? (He never did it again, though.)
All the things we saw happening to other bands were now happening to us. It took us by surprise. The “overnight
” success; having to explain ourselves to the press, where we were open to be judged, even laughed at—same as we’d so often laughed at others. And the in-band resentments: only a few months in and we were already living the clichés of the trade.
There was a lot to take on board once we got on the radio and people started to know us. You see a guitar hero or front man—a giant of authority onstage, but put him on television, ask a question and he becomes an inarticulate, bumbling know-nothing trying to hide at the back of the class. Les idiots savants.
But for the most part we were riding the crest of the wave, and we all felt good. The negative aspects were relatively small. The irony, as is commonly the case with bands, was that we were raging drug abusers but perceived as “wholesome” because of our poptastic, melodic records.
We spent a lot of time kicking table legs, choking on beans on toast, bent double with laughter at motorway stops. I liked being on the inside with these Herefordians, with their stories and shared history. We were having more fun than any of us had ever had before.
You could never get bigheaded about success, not in England. In general, unlike in the States, people were very up front about their dislike of anyone getting successful. One lovely spring morning, when I was walking through Soho, feeling enlivened by the joys of the season, I passed a dustman who shouted loud enough for the whole street to hear, “The Pretenders are crap!”
—
Nick Lowe wasn’t up for doing our album; he was just too busy. We never had an A&R man. I don’t know why, we just didn’t. Usually there was someone from the record company to advise and steer a band. Maybe someone at the top thought we were managing okay without it—I was okay without it.
I called Chris Thomas, who’d produced the Spedding stuff I sang on. He agreed to produce us. I never thought to listen to a person’s work to decide if they were right for the job. If I knew them personally and liked the vibe, I’d go with it. It had worked so far. Not that Thomas didn’t have immaculate credentials and then some. I just knew I could hang out with him.
Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629) Page 23
