by Jon Ronson
FRANK
THE TRUE STORY THAT INSPIRED THE MOVIE
JON RONSON
PICADOR
To Stevie Lee
Frank, the movie.
One day in 2005 I was in the park with my little boy when my phone rang.
‘Hello?’ I said.
‘HELLO!’ yelled Frank Sidebottom.
‘ . . . Frank?’ I said.
‘OH YES,’ said Frank Sidebottom.
We hadn’t spoken in fifteen years.
‘It’s been so long,’ I said.
Between 1987 and 1990 I was the keyboard player in the Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey Big Band. Frank wore a big fake head with a cartoon face painted on it – two wide bug eyes staring, red lips frozen into a permanent half-smile, very smooth hair. Nobody outside his inner circle knew his true identity. This became the subject of feverish speculation during his zenith years. His voice, slightly muffled under the head, was disguised too – cartoonish and nasal, as if he was a man-child pretending to be a nightclub comic. Our act involved us doing amateurish plinkety-plonk cover versions of pop classics such as ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ and ‘We Are The Champions’. Frank was all a little wrong, like a comedian you’d invent in a dream – funny but not funny, meticulous and detailed but repetitive, innocent but nightmarish in a certain light. We rode relatively high. Then it all went wrong.
And now Frank was on the phone. He was ready to stage a comeback. Maybe I could help by writing an article about my time in the band? I said of course I would. When I got home from the park I tried to remember our lives back then.
***
Frank Sidebottom.
In 1987 I was twenty and a student at the Polytechnic of Central London. I was living in a squat in a huge decrepit townhouse in Highbury, North London. The students who rented proper rooms ended up miles away in places like Turnham Green, while the squatters lived for free in salubrious places like Islington and Bloomsbury. It was an otherworldly life. You could find yourself squatting in some abandoned mansion with ballrooms and chandeliers. One group lived for a while in the Libyan Embassy in St James’s Square. A staff member had shot out of the window at an anti-Gaddafi protest and a policewoman had been killed. The Embassy staff fled and the squatters moved in.
Most of the squatters were sweet-natured, but sometimes you’d find yourself living with chaotic people who were too frenzied for the mainstream world. In Highbury I’d stand in the kitchen doorway and watch a man called Shep smash all the crockery every time Arsenal lost. He’d grab cereal dishes from the sink and hurl them in a rage across the room, his dreadlocked hair tumbling into his face like he was some kind of disturbed Highland Games competitor or a Dothraki from Game of Thrones.
‘He is SO mentally ill!’ I’d think with excitement as I stood in the doorway. Arsenal were destined to lose 25 per cent of their games in the 1987/1988 season, finishing sixth. Shep was a terrifying Grandstand football-score service. We were in for a tumultuous time in the communal kitchen.
One time Shep noticed me staring at him. ‘What?’ he yelled at me. I didn’t say anything. I felt like a cinema audience watching an adventure movie, emotionally engaged only in the shallowest way. I was just delighted to not be living in Cardiff any more.
In Cardiff, where I had grown up, I’d been bullied every day: blindfolded and stripped and thrown into the playground, etc. It was the sort of childhood a journalist ought to have – forced to the margins, identifying with the put-upon, mistrustful of the powerful and unwelcome by them anyway.
I dreamed about becoming a songwriter. My handicap was that I didn’t have any imagination. I could only write songs about things that were happening right in front of me. Like ‘Drunk Tramps’, a song I wrote about some drunk tramps I saw being ignored by businessmen:
Drunk tramps
Ignored by businessmen
They walk right past you
Don’t even see you
But you’re the special ones!
With pain but hope in your eyes
Drunk tramps
I did make some money busking on my portable Casio keyboard. There was one song I played fantastically well. It was a twelve-bar blues in C. It was literally the only song I knew how to play. For busking this was fine – nobody stayed around long enough to become aware of my limitations. But one day a man approached me and said he ran a wine bar in Guildford, south-west of London, and did I want to play a set at his club?
‘That sounds great,’ I said.
I caught the train to Guildford and found the wine bar. I set up my keyboard and played my song. The owner turned to his bar staff and gave them a look to say, ‘See?’
After ten minutes I stopped. There was a lot of applause. Then I played my song again but slower. Then I played it again, but back at the original speed. Someone shouted, ‘Play a different song.’
I looked at the crowd. They were evidently puzzled. And irritated. A fake pianist had entered their world and was banging away at the keys, a young man being odd and dysfunctional on the makeshift stage, presumably unaware not just of what was required of a wine-bar pianist but of how to be an adult human in general. Panicked, I hurriedly invented something – an unsatisfactory improvisation around my song. The owner asked me to stop and go home.
***
I went to comedy shows. I’d creep backstage and stand there, looking at the comedians. I saw Paul Merton and John Dowie try and out-funny each other in a gloomy underground dressing room at a club in Edinburgh. Paul Merton made a joke. John Dowie responded with something funnier, then Paul Merton said something funnier still, and so on. Everyone was laughing but it was tense and disturbing, like the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter.
Backstage at a different club the comedian Mark Thomas stalked angrily over to me.
‘You always just stand there,’ he said. ‘When are you going to do something?’
So I decided to try. I put myself forward in the student union election to become the college entertainments officer.
It was to be a year’s sabbatical. I’d be in charge of two venues – a basement bar on Bolsover Street in Central London and a big dining hall around the corner on New Cavendish Street. I’d have a budget to put on discos on Fridays and concerts on Saturdays and comedy on Tuesdays. Then after a year I’d return to finish my degree. Nobody stood against me. It was a one-horse race. I was elected.
The entertainment office was on the top floor of the Student Union – a 1960s building in Bolsover Street. I’d sit in the corner, the social secretary elect learning the ropes from his predecessor. I took it all in – how he negotiated fees, dealt with the roadies and the bar staff, even what he said when he answered the phone. He said, ‘Ents.’
He warned me that the big music-booking agents tended to see the likes of us as easy prey. If anyone would book their terrible bands it would be us. History would prove this right. I did book their terrible bands.
One day I was sitting in the office when the telephone rang. I was alone. My predecessor was off dealing with some issue. I wasn’t supposed to answer the phone. But it kept ringing. Finally I picked it up.
‘Ents,’ I said.
There was a silence. ‘What?’ the voice said.
‘ . . . Ents?’ I said.
‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘I thought you said Ants. Jesus! OK. So Frank’s playing at your bar tonight and our keyboard player can’t make it and so we’re going to have to cancel unless you know any keyboard players.’
I cleared my throat. ‘I play keyboards,’ I said.
‘Well you’re in!’ the man shouted.
I glanced at the receiver. ‘But I don’t kno
w any of your songs,’ I said.
‘Wait a minute,’ the man said.
I heard muffled voices. He came back to the phone. ‘Can you play C, F and G?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well, you’re in!’ he said.
The man on the phone said I should meet them at the soundcheck at 5pm. He added that his name was Mike, and Frank’s real name was Chris. Then he hung up.
I looked at the receiver.
I arrived at the bar at exactly 5pm. The place was dingy even in daytime – we were deep in a basement – and empty except for a few men fiddling with equipment some distance away across the sticky carpet near the stage.
‘Hello?’ I called.
The men turned. I scrutinized their faces. In the three hours since the phone call I’d learnt a little about Frank. Frank Sidebottom – how he wore a big fake head on stage and there was much speculation about his real identity. Some thought he might be the alter ego of a celebrity, possibly Midge Ure, the lead singer of the band Ultravox, who had just had a huge hit with the New Romantic song ‘Vienna’, and was known to be a big Frank Sidebottom fan. Which of these men looking at me might be Frank? And how would I know? If I looked closely would there be some kind of facial indication?
I took a step closer. And then I became aware of another figure kneeling in the shadows, his back to me. He began to turn. I let out a gasp. Two huge eyes were staring intently at me, painted onto a great, imposing fake head, lips slightly parted as if mildly surprised. Why was he wearing the fake head when there was nobody there to see it except for his own band? Did he wear it all the time? Did he never take it off?
‘Hello, Chris,’ I said. ‘I’m Jon.’
Silence.
‘Hello . . . Chris?’ I said again.
He said nothing.
‘Hello . . . Frank?’ I tried.
‘HELLO!’ he yelled.
Another of the men came bounding over to me. ‘You’re Jon,’ he said. I recognized his voice from the telephone. ‘I’m Mike Doherty. Thank you for standing in at such short notice.’
‘So,’ I said. ‘Maybe we could run through the songs? Or . . . ?’
Frank’s face stared at me.
‘Frank?’ Mike said.
‘OH YES?’
‘Can you teach Jon the songs?’ he said.
At this Frank raised his hands to his head and began to prise it off, turning slightly away from me, almost as an act of modesty, like he was shyly undressing. I thought I saw a flash of something under there, some contraption attached to his face which he seemed to quickly remove, but I wasn’t sure that had happened at all. It was all so fast and discreetly done.
‘Hello, Jon,’ said the man underneath. He had a nice, ordinary face.
‘Hello . . . Chris?’ I said.
Chris gave me a sheepish smile, as if to say he was sorry that I had to endure all the weirdness of the past few minutes but it was out of his hands. He took me to a corner and patiently taught me the songs. I picked them up pretty quickly. They were indeed comprised almost entirely of C, F and G. There were one or two other notes, but certainly not the full range. They were mostly cover versions of Queen and Beatles hits.
Frank’s songsheet.
Before I knew it the public had arrived, and we were onstage. As I played I watched it all – the band assiduously emulating with proper instruments the tinny pre-programmed sounds of a cheap, amateurish children’s Casio keyboard, the enraptured audience of about three hundred people, and Frank, the eerie cartoon character front-man, his facial expression immobile, his singing voice a high-pitched nasal twang. I marvelled at the mysterious train of creative thought that had somehow led to this place.
Frank Sidebottom and Jon Ronson.
Towards the end of the show Frank introduced the band. ‘On drums . . . Mike Doherty.’ There was a cheer. ‘On guitar . . . Rick Sarko. On bass . . . Patrick Gallagher.’ He left me until last. ‘On keyboards . . . Jon Ronson.’ But something unexpected happened. Every other band member had been given a cheer of basically the same volume. But the cheer I received was very noticeably quieter. I was baffled. What had I done wrong? A room full of strangers had for some reason made a unanimous negative determination about me on what seemed the scantest information.
And then, suddenly, I understood. The laissez-faire manner in which I’d been invited to perform in the band that night wasn’t the whole story – there had been some furtive professionalism at work. Concerned that I didn’t know any of the songs they had at some point decided to turn my volume down to practically zero and position me so far to the edge of the stage that most people in the audience didn’t even know there was a keyboard player in the band.
That night I trudged home feeling confused.
‘Why did they even bother inviting me if they were going to do that?’ I thought.
Life went back to normal. A year passed. Then Mike Doherty telephoned me and asked me if I wanted to be in Frank’s band full time, and so I immediately told my college I was quitting. Being on the road with a band versus sitting in a lecture theatre learning about structuralism? It was a no-brainer. I moved to Manchester.
Jon Ronson and Mike Doherty.
And there I was, in the passenger seat of a Transit van flying down the M6 in the middle of the night, squeezed between the door and Frank Sidebottom. Those were my happiest times – when Chris would mysteriously decide to just carry on being Frank. Nothing makes a young man feel more alive and on an adventure than speeding down a motorway at 2 a.m. next to a man wearing a big fake head. I’d furtively watch him as the lights made his cartoon face glow yellow and then black and then yellow again.
***
I am writing this twenty-six years later. A film I co-wrote, Frank, which is fictional but inspired by Frank and our time together, will soon be premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. A few days ago the music journalist Mick Middles sent me 30,000 words from his work-in-progress biography, Frank Sidebottom: Out of his Head. His book captures perfectly that ‘rarest of journeys’ when an onlooker got to see Chris turn into Frank – an ‘unsettling’ and ‘remarkable transformation’, he writes. ‘The moment the head is placed the change occurs. Not merely a change in attitude or outlook but a journey from one person to the other. I completely believe that Chris was born as two people.’ Middles likens Chris to transgender people trapped in the wrong body. Chris was wayward, prone to drink and drugs, but Frank was an ingénue, untouched by ‘emotional entanglements, myriad complexities of adulthood, betrayal, hurt, loss, death, fear, tax.’
One passage in Middles’ wonderful pages stopped me short. It described his March 2013 visit to Mike Doherty’s home. The last I’d heard of Mike he’d emigrated to Bangkok, where he’d made it big as a drummer and a tour manager in the Thai music scene, whatever that meant. But it turned out that he’d had a serious motorcycle crash and was now back in ‘Stockport’s unfashionable Cheadle Heath’, living with ‘an amiable cat, Bob.’ Forced into retirement, Mike had ‘set about, armed with only a felt tip pen, to completely transform every room in his house via a maze of complex designs, mostly intended to celebrate his time with Frank, Manchester music in general plus the odd nod to his beloved Manchester United.’ Middles describes the designs as having been ‘stenciled with great wit. I like to think, rather than an indication of a man with too much time on his hands, the flat is a true indication of a still-lively artistic mind . . . and talent!’
There in Cheadle Heath, Mike Doherty told Mick Middles why he’d invited me to join the band. Having no idea how I came across to people back then, it was a great compliment: ‘It was always difficult to get people to play in that band because there was absolutely no kudos,’ Mike told Mick Middles. ‘I mean, who the fuck wants to travel to Bradford or somewhere like that just to play plinkety piano? There is no artistic merit at all and you are hardly going to get any groupies, are you? So it had to be a certain kind of person . . . someone who has absolutely nothing to prove an
d understood Frank completely.’
I’m glad Mike Doherty saw me that way but it wasn’t true. My expectations for life back then were exceedingly low and being in Frank’s band provided me with more kudos than I’d imagined possible. Five hundred people in Bradford was a sea of faces stretching to the horizon. We may have had no artistic merit but we had the accoutrements – drums, leads, amps. We were very much sort of like a band.
But Mike was right about one thing. I got Frank completely. His comedy came from the juxtaposition between the parochialism of his ordinary life and the grandiosity of the songs he covered, like ‘Born in Timperley’ (to the tune of ‘Born in the USA’): ‘I go shopping in Timperley / They’ve got loads of shops / That’s where I do the shopping for my mum / Five pounds of potatoes and loads of chops.’
Frank was our Pee-wee Herman. He was silly, unpretentious, irresponsible, homemade. He aimed low. That’s why people loved him. He was a child in a northern town remaining assiduously immature in the face of adulthood.
Frank may have been a paean to ordinariness but Chris wasn’t ordinary. He was nothing like anyone I’d ever known. He wore a big fake head for very long stretches, for a start. And he was secretive about his home life. I knew he was married with children, but he wasn’t like any husband and father I’d experienced. My father ran a wholesale warehouse in Cardiff. He imported cutlery. He played bridge on Tuesdays and Thursdays and golf on Saturdays and watched TV the rest of the time. My father wasn’t a chaotic man. Chris was chaotic. Sometimes, on the way back from some gig, I’d become aware that we were taking a detour to some house somewhere with some women we somehow met along the way. There would be partying. In the van I’d listen to his stories, trying to understand him. He reminded me of George Bernard Shaw’s unreasonable man: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ Chris was the unreasonable man, except the world never did adapt to him and he never made any progress. Like when Frank was asked to support the boy band Bros at Wembley. There were 50,000 people in the crowd. This was a huge stage for Frank – his biggest ever, by about 49,500 people. It was really his chance to break through to the mainstream. But instead he chose to perform a series of terrible Bros cover versions for five minutes and was bottled off. The show’s promoter Harvey Goldsmith was glaring at him from the wings. Frank sauntered over to him and said, ‘I’m thinking of putting on a gig at the Timperley Labour Club. Do you have any tips?’
