The taxi dispatched us at the door of the Hotel Crystal. I saw the backpackers queuing at the desk and the woefully cramped lobby and snootily declared I wouldn’t stay.
“Don’t make a fuss, you stuck-up cunt,” said Matt as I asked the receptionist to book us a taxi to the Hilton. “It’s only a night,” he continued.
“We might pull,” I reasoned. He relented.
I’d hoped the band might be staying at the Hilton and asked if so when we arrived.
“No, but the England team were here,” said Melanie at the desk. England’s World Cup game against Sweden had been at the RheinEnergie Stadium where the gig would take place.
“I should like Mr Beckham’s suite,” I requested.
“He had a standard room.”
I paused. “I shall take the suite regardless.”
And so to bed to rest our weary bodies and my exhausted ego. After a quick hour’s sleep, the publicist and photographer arrived, sans luggage, to take us to the concert. The photographer presented us with a disposable camera to take snaps of us inside, having been informed, belatedly, that unauthorised photography is forbidden inside the venue. It seems the band’s management are sensitive about their fans being photographed. As the band’s age increases, so does that of their fans and the brand association is not a positive one. I must confess to being surprised by the control and neurosis present in these matters. It’s the Rolling Stones, for Christ’s sake. As omnipresent as the sky, worshipped across the globe for almost half a century. Surely they can afford to relax about their image? They are what they are, one would think. The objective truth, their continued brilliance, their catalogue of work, their longevity all suggest an established immovable force, above harmful critique.
As I upward sprung I saw I’d missed a bunch of nag-texts and whine-calls from the publicist and Matt. The meeting with Keith was at 6pm sharp and, obviously, you can’t keep a Stone waiting. I flitted about the suite applying mascara, chain-belts and all manner of cute appurtenances until I resembled a queasy, Goth tinker en route to a marriage proposal.
It makes me feel uneasy when I am unwittingly subjugated by great fame. When preparing to meet Tom Cruise I ruefully read the litany of caveats and conditions required to assure the “un-terview” passed without incident.
The photographer wanted to arrive early to photograph me with Stones fans. What struck me first was the distinctly familial feel to the environs. This was no Altamont, it was unlikely there’d be a stabbing here – I’d be shocked if anyone dropped litter. The stadium was ringed by stalls selling grub and the ubiquitous “Mick lip” logo, which adorned everything from T-shirts to plastic cups and gave the event the ambience of a trip to Thorpe Park or a Monster Truck rally. The publicist appeared all flustered efficiency and announced it was “quarter to Keef ” and, after she’d swaddled me in wristbands and lacquered me with passes, the three of us set off, leaving Matt to merrily scoff Teutonic yob nosh. Reaching Keith, it transpires, is like attaining enlightenment: you must pass through many levels and exercise great patience and detachment.
The hospitality area had been charmingly named Voodoo Lounge or the Snake-Eyed Buffet or something, and there I met Charlie Watts’s niece, Nikki, who served me banana yoghurt as the publicist went off to finalise the actual meet.
I’d become a little nervous now the meet was upon me. “He’s lovely,” Nikki assured me. The presence of Nikki and her pal Susie was a comfort. Both Essex girls, their bawdy humour and glottal stops gave me familiarity in this peculiar peripatetic rock mall. Noticing my pleb ticket, they said they’d arrange raised seats by the mixing desk, the gig’s Camelot. As I thanked them, the publicist returned with Jane Rose, Keith’s manager and a member of the Stones’ entourage for thirty years. An attractive American matriarch, she initially exhibited the prerequisite austerity that all powerful women in show business seem to have – necessary, I suspect, to protect their charges and their position. Also, a dedication beyond professional loyalty was evident in her and most of those I spoke with backstage. I hope it doesn’t seem grandiose to say it bordered on religious devotion, oddly discordant with the franchise feel surrounding the stadium. I was led through corridors and down stairs, like the bit in Spinal Tap, passing various refugees from the Sixties and exchanging a friendly nod with Ronnie Wood till we reached a vestibule where we were to wait.
“Keith is coming,” someone said. I then realised I simply had to go to the toilet. Before every exhilarating encounter, I ritually evacuate. Again, it makes me feel cleansed, light, literally unblocked; the thought, the very idea, of meeting him with full bowels seemed absurd, and someone took me, like a toddler, to the lavvy. It’s not just the defecation, some faecal fetishism; I like to have a moment alone to gather my thoughts, to focus. It’s the pertinent legacy from my time as a junky, when no appointment could be countenanced without a trip to a cubicle to heighten, or numb, my unreliable senses. Once solitary I began the rigmarole of unbuckling my numerous belts and peeling off my preposterously tight jeans, and then, at the least convenient juncture, came the cry, “Russell, Keith’s waiting for you!” Oh God.
I hastily completed, cleansed, and buckled my belts. I think there were four and one has to be twice wrapped around your waist. It was like applying lights to a Christmas tree under the glare of an atheist with a grudge.
“Hurry up!” Oh no. I dashed out. A fidgety minion held the door ajar. I made to leave but then remembered I was about to shake the hand of Keith Richards without due hygienic procedure. “I’ve got to wash my hands,” I said, darting to the sink. The forlorn lackey shook his head despairingly and I scrambled out the door after him while drying between my fingers with a paper towel. I still had the screwed-up towel in my wet hand as I blustered into the room where the photo that adorns the cover of that month’s OMM was to be shot.
And there he was. Actual Keith Richards. The Keith Richards. A man called Keith Richards. Cool and chuckling, twinkling and serene, devoid of the irritation apparent among the management and flunkies provoked by my toilet trip.
“Alright mate, I’m Russell.”
“Hey, man, I’m Keith.”
Sometimes listening to old Hancock tapes I think, that’s an old joke, before realising this was recorded in the Fifties and probably the first time anyone had commented on lumpy gravy. When Keith said “Hey, man,” it seared right through three decades of cliché, a comet of authenticity, from a time when everything seemed original.
What do you say to him that he’s not already heard? I resorted to pleasantries.
“You look ever so well, particularly after what happened.”
“That was nothing.”
I became friends once with this swami who looked at me with timeless eyes, a man uncluttered by hypocrisy, who knew that life had no meaning but to be beautiful and lived, with each breath, that ethos. This man came to mind in the company of Keith. I sense the reason he’s become an icon is because of an essential quality. Rock’n’roll, it seems, is not borrowed or learned or slung about his shoulders like his guitar, but emanating from his core.
“You’re a DJ?” he inquired.
“I’m a comedian, Keith.”
“Hey, me too.”
The photographer asked us to move closer together. Keith moved towards me, all warm.
“Can I photograph you with the guitars?” asked the photographer.
“Be easier with a camera,” joked Keith, taking one guitar from a stand and handing me another. A few more flashes and clicks before we were told, “OK! That’s enough!” And someone appeared to usher Keith off.
“See you later, man. Gotta go press some flesh. Enjoy the show.”
“Bye, Keith. Good luck with the gig. And the flesh-pressing,” I said, trying to lasso him with sycophancy as he ambled out the door.
It was dead brief, but it felt good. A hurried copulation. I felt elated. So off we went to rejoin Matt, who I knew would have spent the interim period getting drunk, and to see the Ro
lling Stones live in Cologne.
When they emerged with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, it was not with a roar but, rather, an echo that has perennially rung out since their birth in a crossfire hurricane. It seems churlish to chide them for not defying the passage of time. They are magnificent enough to suggest that some awful portraits must be lurking in their attics, and if they’re not as good as they were in the Sixties, neither is anyone else. They have not been replaced.
The final twenty-five minutes of hits constituted the best live performance I’ve ever seen and called to mind Lester Bangs’s famous review of Vegas Elvis when, although bloated, bejewelled and barbiturated, the King still had that voice and the power to make cocks harden and thighs tingle. Similarly, the Stones are the greatest rock’n’roll band there has ever been, and they’re still without equal.
After the gig we drove around Cologne and went to a few bars and asked people where we should hang out and inevitably found a brothel. The name has long left my memory but the inspirational concept will haunt me till my dying day: on the bottom floor was a lap-dancing club. Lap-dancing is a stupid idea, because it gets you as close to sex as is possible to imagine and then denies you it at all costs, so it’s actually the last thing that you should do. Women come and sit on your lap, they flirt with you, pretend the best they can that they are attracted to you, you give them some money, then they slide off and do that again with someone else, tease you to the precipice of something wonderful, then deny you it. It’s like going and watching other people taking drugs and then not using drugs yourself if you are a drug addict. Like me. Did I mention that?
Where this lap-dancing club differed was that once you’d been aroused beyond the junction at which you could legitimately hope to return, there was a brothel upstairs; the ravishing denizens of the lower floor led you up the wooden hill to Fuckfordshire like filthy Oompa-Loompas dragging away Willy Wonka’s failed candidates. One moment you’re being simmered to the point of ejaculation by a gorgeous transsexual, then, just when that desire is about to make you either publicly masturbate or become an avenging Whitechapel misogynist, the club’s staff lead you to the promised land, one flight up – literally a stairway to heaven. As Matt procrastinated and examined a dusty Bible in his brain my unblinking Shaggy sex-force cajoled him up the steps like Scooby Doo yanked onto a kinky ghost train.
Once ascended, you peruse the Lewis Carroll corridors eyeing the treats that lurk behind the doors – an advent calendar for pervs. Three different girls visited, it was a most indulgent night. There was a period when our heterosexuality became curiously entwined without breaching the conditions of that word, escapades conducted with the nimble fingers of a bomb disposal expert, avoiding homo-combustion in the carnal hurt locker; which to me is a disconcertingly appropriate name for a gay sauna. Not that Matt and I would ever go to a gay sauna as we are not gay, our three-somes were all conducted in a manly bonding way, like a fishing trip – but a fishing trip where two pals simultaneously have sex with their catch. I believe the term is spit-roasting which is actually a good way to cook a fish al fresco. If that sounds a bit misogynistic please consider that the metaphorical fish was fully consenting and happy, and we threw it back after and she swam off all content. Anyway, back in the German brothel. Naturally there were the ol’ tragic undertones, for example the last girl was really fatigued looking, and Matt was convinced she was a post-op transsexual. “I don’t think it is, Matt,” I said. He kept enquiring about it like Columbo badgering a suspect. “When did you have the operation?” There was a window and you could see a train track, there’s always some abject urban landscape to Nalls up my hedonism, due to the city setting. Suddenly the view from the window is pathos laden and begging for Morrissey to stick his oar in – “And when a train goes by it’s such a sad sound.”
The trains were going by and we were in this room. Those rooms are always lit by a single bare bulb, hanging there like a neon fissure lighting the ghastly anal cavity of a room.
I do have cause to question what it’s all about, those nights where I exhaust myself with it, where I just keep excavating more and more energy – you’d think it’d be enough, you’ve seen the concert, you’ve ejaculated a few times – I go home and still there’s more, it takes such a lot to lull me off to sleep.
That is again, I suppose, my unwillingness to relinquish the seamier side of life, in spite of achieving a modicum of fame, an attachment remains for the illicit and the intoxicating. I sometimes think, you’ve got this nice house, imagine if you had a lovely girlfriend. I don’t know how to utilise things properly. Again Morrissey has a view. “When you want to live, How do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to know?” WOohh Oooh Oh, WOoohOhho.
†
Chapter 9
Human Yoghurt
At the end of 2006 we made my first stand-up DVD, Russell Brand Live, at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire off the back of Edinburgh. My ascent from the depths was so rapid in retrospect that my memory has been bamboozled by the bends. Typically an event of that nature would be a real milestone, but actually the night of the record for me will go down as the point where my perpetually heightening hair finally reached a tipping point. It became bloody ridiculous, evidentially the extraordinary grooming of my vertical barnet had become an outlet for my addiction, as the incremental upward creep had got completely out of control like a game of “one potato, two potato” played by a pair of fiercely competitive simpletons.
Here, have a look at it. In fact look at this illustration which charts its growth over a six-month period.
I knew it was out of control, it was like when your parents show you Seventies wedding pictures – “What were you wearing – the lapels!? Look at your hair!” Except it was happening the next morning.
The Shepherd’s Bush Empire is a thousand-seater room and I’d only played a venue that size for the run at Edinburgh, which was just four gigs. This would be the first time I’d headlined a big gig in London. Everything was new. As an aficionado of comedy and a social shipwreck, comedy videos were hugely significant to my childhood and adolescence – Billy Connolly, the Mary Whitehouse Experience, Lenny Henry, Eddie Izzard, Ben Elton; all were consumed and studied. David Baddiel is astonished at my ability to recall incredibly obscure bits from his set, but the reason I can is because I was a lonely little nit and those videos were my friends. So making my debut DVD was hugely significant. Not as significant as my hair, obviously, but still important. The material in Shame, which was the name of the tour from which the DVD was derived, was largely about humiliation and embarrassment and titled after a catchphrase of my nan’s (Do nans have catchphrases? Of course they do). Throughout my life she would look at me forlornly, shake her head and say, “Shame, innit?” Not to me, but about me. Although superficially this may appear to be a casual condemnation of my being, I liked it. I also dissected many of the ridiculous tabloid articles and kiss and tells that had dishonestly chronicled my adventures in the public eye.
Now that my radio days, unlike my salad days (I am vegetarian) are over, I miss what I then took for granted – weekly contact with my audience and the opportunity to parry and redress the propaganda war that the tabloids inaugurated the day I dared to dive into the mainstream. The most obvious indication of this transition was the transfer of me, Matt and Trev’s rickety ol’ three men on a wireless 6 Music shambles to Europe’s most powerful radio levia-than, BBC Radio 2.
My Lady Macbeth-style ambition was a useful tool in slashing our way through the crusty old monarchy of red tape and, retrospectively, justifiable caution that stood in our path. As soon as we began on 6 Music I said, “Well, this is all well and good but don’t you think you should get on and kill Duncan (Wogan)?” Poor bloody Macbeth. Going from “I’m not sure, I quite like him really” to “Oh no! What have I done? There’s blood everywhere – here love, can you wash this out?” in a matter of days. Just to keep the fellatio flowing – I’d’ve stayed as a thane – whatever that is. It’s a d
amn good argument for steering clear of marriage.
I was badgering people, mostly Radio 2’s controller Lesley Douglas, beloved Lesley, a gorgeous matriarch, a warm woman who kept me beneath her petticoats like a pasty protégé, let me hang from her apron strings from the moment she first met me. She has nurtured, nourished and indulged me as any good woman should. Short of actually breastfeeding me I can’t see what more she could have done to hasten my development. Let me tell you I’ve been breastfed as an adult and it’s better – breast milk is wasted on babies – they’ve got nothing to compare it to, the ungrateful little berks. I knew a woman once, married she was, who’d pop over from time to time and share her infant’s creamy revenue with me, like I was a naughty jackdaw pinching creamy gold-top while it chilled on the doorstep. It was delicious – more savoury than traditional moo-cow milk – which before you condemn me is in itself a bloody odd thing to drink, and certainly the sexual element meant it was the snack you could eat between meals without ruining your sexual appetite. I felt not a flicker of guilt for this kinky act of cuckolding and tot-robbing as it were all such fun – she sprayed it everywhere – it was my own private foam party. But for one occasion of what I came to know as “dairy decadence” when the yummy mummy informed me that she’d eschewed feeding her child in order to register a surplus for this cheeky visit. Then I thought, “Is this moral? Can you ever justify stealing food from the mouth of a baby just to spice up yer sex life?” It turns out I could; after all, as I would’ve told the nipper had he had the facility for language – there’s no point crying over spilt milk. Anyway he wouldn’t have wanted to lap it up after where she’d been squirting it.
I connect well with women who are maternal, because I’m well practised at that relationship due to the intensity of the bond with me mum. The only child of a single mum, I shall forever be contextualised by unending uteral warmth. Perhaps it is a mother’s role to be taken for granted; the first face you ever see, constant source of nutrition and love. And as you grow beyond warring with their imperfection as a truculent youth you discover the truth of what they have bequeathed. I was ever a devotee to Philip Larkin’s sulky ode “This Be The Verse”, which begins with the lines “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” Now, though, as a man I see that my more admirable traits, my compassion, gentility and warmth, are all my mother’s inculcations. She who cannot pass a squirrel or a cat without imagining it a part of some Beatrix Potter world where a polite “hello” is a necessity. Often she’ll make an enquiry of an animal: “Are you alright?,” “What’s your name?” or, more bafflingly, “Is that your baby?” Clearly my mother requires no response but she instinctively acknowledges that me, you and the furry twerps that scuttle and yip are all just making our way through life. Humble symbols of something far greater, we all may just as well have a chat.
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