Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie

by Jon Ronson

  ***

  I never understood why Chris sometimes kept Frank’s head on for hours, even when it was only us in the van. But years later I met another man who also chose to remain masked for long periods, and perhaps his explanation applies to Chris. The man is a real-life superhero named Urban Avenger. He journeys out into the San Diego night looking for crimes to thwart. He told me that he loves being masked. ‘When I wear this, I don’t have to react to you in any way. Nobody knows what I’m thinking or feeling. It’s great. I can be in my own little world in here.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ I agreed with Urban Avenger. ‘I was once at a Halloween party and I didn’t take off my mask all night. It completely eliminated all social anxiety.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish I never had to take the mask off,’ said Urban Avenger.

  But if that was Chris’s reason too I suspect he’d have denied it. He liked to portray himself as carefree – the more chaotic and marginal and accident- and failure-prone his life became, the happier he claimed to be. But I think it was more complicated than that. I’d noticed something about him. During that first afternoon I’d scrutinized everyone’s faces in the hope of some kind of visual clue as to which one was Frank – it turned out that I’d been on to something. Under the head Chris would wear a swimmer’s nose clip. It was cumbersome, like a mini-orthopaedic brace. Chris would be Frank for such long periods the clip had deformed him slightly, flattened his nose out of shape. When he’d turn his face away to remove the peg after a long stint I’d see him wince in pain. Furthermore, as Chris’s former wife Paula told Mick Middles, ‘He could be very attentive, romantic even, but he had a tendency to switch off and think only of Frank. When he started staying up all night, obviously it hit me. I think I resented Frank because of that.’

  One night, during a long drive home, Chris told me Frank’s origin story. He’d invented him three years earlier, in 1984, when Chris was twenty-nine. He’d been playing in unsigned bands since he was fifteen and had, Middles writes, ‘steadfastly kept every [record company] rejection letter . . . hundreds, bulging from a Green Flash tennis shoe box stuffed under his bed. By night he would unearth this treasure, marvelling at the sheer scope and hopelessness of his quest.’

  The funny thing was, Chris’s band The Freshies was gaining quite a following when Chris made the sudden and bewildering (for his friends and loved ones) U-turn into Frank. His first Sidebottom move, he told me, was to record a cover version of ‘Material Girl’ and send it around the record labels with the covering letter, ‘I’m thinking of getting into show business. Do you have any pamphlets?’ An intrigued executive at EMI invited him in for a meeting. Chris arrived as Frank.

  ‘Have you been in show business for long?’ the A&R man asked him.

  ‘Oh,’ said Frank. ‘About’ – he looked at his watch – ‘ten seconds, actually.’

  His debut EP, released on EMI, charted at about number 90 before disappearing. EMI dropped him. But by then he’d built up enough of an audience that we could play to 500 people a night in almost any town in the north of England and London (although those numbers dropped significantly everywhere else in Britain/the world). I rented a flat above a wool shop in Gorton, south-east Manchester and, when I wasn’t touring with Frank, managed the indie band The Man From Delmonte, who I’m certain would have become very successful had they teamed up with less inept management.

  With Frank I crisscrossed the north of England – Leeds and Bury and Sheffield and Liverpool – and down to London, playing the same venues over and over again. The familiarity became comforting: the Adelphi, Hull; Dingwalls, London; Burberries, Birmingham.

  Burberries, Birmingham

  Popular music venue for ‘alternative’ acts in the latter half of the 80s, now defunct, having apparently expired sometime in 1990. Was located at 220 Broad Street. Lush, Ride, Blur, Charlatans, Chills, Pixies all played here . . . The club mutated into Tramps, which subsequently closed in 1992. The site was razed in 2003 and became a car park. No other info available.

  – www.thirdav.com

  We supported Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers at the Town and Country Club in London, and Frank – playing solo – supported Gary Glitter at some student union fresher ball. Glitter’s roadies were extremely rude, Chris later told me, cornering Frank and issuing a list of do’s and don’ts: ‘You aren’t allowed to use our lights. Stay away from our hydraulic stage.’ Under the head, Chris was seething. As soon as Frank went on, he jumped onto the hydraulic floor, which set off smoke bombs and rose dramatically above the heads of the audience. ‘Come on! Come on!’ sang Frank. ‘Do you want to be in my gang?’ He spotted Gary Glitter’s roadies pushing their way through the audience towards him. After his set he jumped off stage and ran down the corridor, pulling off his head and costume as he went – he had his own clothes on underneath – just as the roadies caught up with him.

  ‘Did you see Frank Sidebottom?’ they asked him.

  ‘He went that way,’ said Chris.

  Frank wasn’t the only outsider artist on our circuit. There was Edward Barton, a quiet, bearded man who would stand on stage and scream, ‘I’ve got no chicken but I’ve got five wooden chairs.’ He was the son of a Royal Air Force officer and he maintained the polite, formal bearing of his upbringing. He kept his belongings in a tiny satchel. He travelled home with us one night and we dropped him off in the early hours in his neighbourhood, Hulme – a desolate housing estate near the city centre. Hulme was an exceedingly failed 1970s experiment in social housing. The idea had been to make it a kind of Brutalist Bath – Georgian crescents reimagined in raw concrete. They called the crescents Charles Barry Crescent and John Nash Crescent, names that had taken on a savage poignancy by the late 1980s now that Hulme was crumbling, infested with cockroaches laying their eggs amid the asbestos. The heroin addicts had moved in – including, unexpectedly, Nico from The Velvet Underground. The walkways in the sky were police no-go areas. But the most apocalyptic thing about Hulme was the packs of wild dogs that roamed the crescents, feeding on God knows what. You’d hear them howling in the darkness as you’d run frantically home from a night at the Hulme Aaben cinema. We opened the van door to let Edward Barton out. As he climbed down, with his satchel clutched to his chest, the clasp broke and it opened, all his possessions falling onto the floor.

  We drove off, but I kept looking at him from the back window. He made no attempt to bend over and pick up his belongings. He just stood there, his head bowed, staring at the scattered debris. It seemed like I was watching a man at exactly the moment he had reached his nadir. I was confused. From where I stood, Edward Barton was living the dream. He was a decade older than me and had managed to become a fixture on the circuit. He was secure. If he wanted to play Burberries, he could play Burberries. The same went for the Witchwood, Ashton-under-Lyme; the Leadmill, Sheffield; the Duchess of York, Leeds; the Citadel, St Helens . . . As I looked at him I felt a sudden flash of alarm. Was this not enough? Should I have more ambition? Should I be aiming higher? But the feeling quickly passed. I was in the Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey Big Band. These were halcyon days. The Transit van turned the corner.

  We carried on crisscrossing the north of England. Our hard work and long hours were paying dividends. The audiences of 500 in every town had grown to 750 and sometimes even 1,000. It was consequently baffling for me to become aware of a growing sense of discontent in the van.

  Chris had been in the habit of asking his friends and relatives to perform cameos between the songs on his records. They’d take the form of little skits – conversations between Frank Sidebottom and his milkman or grocer or whoever. In this spirit he had asked his brother-in-law’s friend Caroline Aherne – a secretary working at the BBC – to voice the part of Frank’s neighbour, Mrs Merton. Afterwards, Caroline decided to keep Mrs Merton going. She somehow got her own TV show, The Mrs Merton Show. She won a BAFTA and a British Comedy Award for it. Her follow-up series, The Royle Family, won about seven B
AFTAs. The Royle Family Christmas Day specials attracted audiences of 12 million. A poll organized by the British Film Institute voted The Royle Family the thirty-first best television show of all time. And meanwhile we were crisscrossing Manchester and Bury and Leeds and Sheffield and Liverpool in our Transit van.

  Chris’s disgruntlement wasn’t that Caroline had robbed him of Mrs Merton. She hadn’t. As Mike Doherty told Mick Middles: ‘She was really funny . . . a natural. All she took was the name. I have no doubt that, somehow, Caroline Aherne would have made it to the top. It just so happened that she did it with a Frank character’s name.’

  The band’s guitarist Patrick Gallagher added to Middles: ‘It wasn’t Caroline’s fault. Chris was totally out of control. Whereas, say, Caroline Aherne had a single vision and could just pursue that, Chris might have a fantastic idea, spend some time gaining interest and developing it and then, just as the point where it might actually get somewhere, he would spin off onto something completely different. That’s OK for a while but it tended to piss people off because they never knew where they stood.’

  Chris never accused Caroline of plagiarism, not even in private. The worst I ever heard him say was that maybe she could have given Frank some recognition in interviews. By then she was forever on the front pages of the British tabloids, under headlines like:

  A very fragile superstar

  When she surveys the lights of London’s West End from her new £800,000 penthouse flat off Carnaby Street, Caroline Aherne ought to feel as if she really has reached the top. The daughter of Irish immigrants Bert and Maureen, she grew up on a council estate in Wythenshawe, Manchester, and her first job was answering the phones at the BBC offices in Manchester.

  Today, she is acknowledged as an original and immensely talented writer and actress. She is now a wealthy young woman, garlanded with awards and hailed as a comic genius.

  She has, of course, had her problems. A broken marriage, a drink problem and a string of failed romances drove her to a suicide bid, intensive therapy, and eventually escape to Australia.

  It is a year since she left Britain, saying that she no longer wanted to be famous. ‘I’ve played the fame game long enough and I just want to disappear,’ she said.

  Alison Boshoff, Daily Mail

  It was hard not to feel jealous. And it wasn’t only her. Suddenly everyone around us was becoming famous. My next-door neighbour Mani had a band. They became The Stone Roses. Our driver Chris Evans left us to try and make it in radio. By 2000 he was earning £35.5 million in a year, making him Britain’s highest-paid entertainer (above Lennox Lewis at second and Elton John at third). Edward Barton, who I’d last seen staring at his scattered belongings in Hulme in the middle of the night, wrote the song ‘It’s A Fine Day’. It was covered by the group Opus III, became a huge hit, and was sampled by Kylie Minogue in her song ‘Confide in Me’. And we kept crisscrossing the country, playing to 1,000 people, sometimes 750, sometimes 500. Still, there were happy times. Like when we played in London and on the way to the venue our driver said the funniest thing I’d ever heard anyone say. He pulled the van up on Edgware Road and wound down the window.

  ‘Excuse me?’ he said to a passer-by.

  ‘Yes?’ the man said.

  ‘Is this London?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Yes,’ said the passer-by.

  ‘Well where do you want this wood?’ he said.

  ***

  There is always a moment failure begins. A single decision that starts everything lumbering down the wrong path, speeding up, careering wildly, before lurching to a terrible stop in a place where nobody is interested in hearing your songs any more. With Frank I can pinpoint the exact moment failure began.

  ‘Chris wants to have a rehearsal,’ Mike told me over the phone one day.

  There was a silence. ‘Chris wants a rehearsal?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Mike said, after a moment.

  ‘Why would Chris want to rehearse?’ I said.

  ‘To take things up a level,’ Mike said.

  ‘Take things up a level?’ I said. I paused. ‘Where are we going to rehearse?’

  ‘At Chris’s house,’ said Mike.

  Mike was trying to sound enthusiastic. But I think he was worried too.

  Chris’s house was in a normal, nice, modern cul-de-sac a long walk from Altrincham station. His children were playing in the street outside. His wife, Paula, answered the door. I can’t remember what she said to me but I recall being struck by how smart and funny she was in that dry, dour Manchester way. She told me to go to the spare bedroom. I walked up the stairs, passing the bathroom door. It was open. I glanced in. Staring back at me from the sink was Frank’s head.

  ‘In here, Jon,’ I heard Chris shout from a room at the end of the corridor.

  I opened the door. And stopped. Things were different – ominously so. A new man was standing there. He wore a maroon shirt tucked smartly into neat black jeans. A bass guitar hung around his neck. As I walked in he started playing a tight soul-funk riff with seeming nonchalance, like it was just something his fingers did, but I understood it to be an act of aggression. He was marking his territory. Chris looked impressed by the man’s adeptness.

  ‘Don’t you manage that shit band The Man From Delmonte?’ the man muttered indifferently.

  ‘Who . . . are you?’ I said.

  ‘I’m Richard,’ he said. ‘From The Desert Wolves.’

  The Desert Wolves, Richard is top right.

  The Desert Wolves were an ’80s indie band in the vein of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions who wrote songs with lyrics like ‘We could go driving down Mexico way / The wind in your hair / You look lovely this time of year’. I’d like to say that during the twenty-five years that have passed since Richard took an instant dislike to me in Chris’s spare bedroom, a dislike that only intensified during the months that followed before the band imploded, and climaxed in him yelling at me during one tense soundcheck that he’d like to break my ‘keyboard playing fingers’, he went on to have a disappointing life. But he didn’t. He became one of the world’s most successful tour managers, looking after Woody Allen and The Spice Girls, and he currently manages the Pixies.

  Richard was not the only proper musician Chris brought in to make us more professional-sounding. A skilful guitarist and a saxophone player turned up in the spare bedroom too. Mike counted us in with his drumsticks. And it began. We sounded like an excellent 1980s wedding band – the kind of band that could do note-perfect versions of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ and ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’.

  Chris told me to book us the biggest tour we’d ever undertaken. Thirty dates in thirty days. We’d play every venue that had ever had us on. He choreographed it so I would begin the show. I’d walk on stage, alone, into a spotlight, and play a powerful C with my left forefinger. The synth brass tone – the most stirring of all the Casio tones. This lone note could last a minute or more – it would be up to me to judge at what point the audience were at a peak of anticipation – and then I’d play with my right forefinger, G, F, G, A, F, G. ‘Born In Timperley’ (our version of ‘Born in the USA’, Timperley being the Manchester suburb where Frank and Chris lived).‘Born In Timperley’. This would be the cue for the rest of the band to join me on stage for our power-rock reimagining of the song.

  The day the tour began we hired a people-carrier instead of a Transit van and we set off to our first venue. The mood en route was noticeably more pumped. The old Oh Blimey Big Band members had a certain frail avant-garde loucheness to them. But this new band: I felt like I was in a college sports team. We soundchecked. The audience arrived. The place was packed. And then I walked out into the spotlight.

  And in the space of that first song – that single ‘Born in Timperley’ – the audience veered from fevered anticipation into puzzlement into hoping we were playing a weird joke on them into realizing with regret that we were not. What had become of our beloved plinkety-plonk sound? We were Mrs Merton b
eing backed by Survivor. I did my best to covertly sabotage the musical direction from within, being as plinkety as I could muster, playing lots of bum notes, but my influence was limited, drowned out in an onslaught of ’80s rock. After a few nights the NME savaged us in a live review. By the end of the tour we were playing to almost empty houses. Chris returned to Manchester to a court summons. He owed £30,000 back tax. On the day of his court appearance he stood up in the dock. The judge told him it was a very serious matter and had he considered a payment plan?

  ‘Would a pound a week suffice, m’lud?’ he asked.

  ‘No it would not!’ the judge shouted.

  Chris never actually said to me, ‘You’re fired.’ But I began to notice in the listings magazines that he was doing a lot of solo shows – just him and a keyboard. They were in the same venues we used to play, and then in smaller venues, and then eventually there were no shows at all.

  I moved back to London.

  ***

  And there I was, two years later, twenty-five and presenting a terrible BBC2 television show nobody remembers called The Ronson Mission. After leaving Frank’s band I’d become a radio presenter at KFM in Stockport and a columnist for Time Out magazine in London. My old college lecturer Frank Hatherley had approached the BBC’s Janet Street Porter on my behalf, suggesting me as a presenter, and they’d given me a chance. Now I was sitting in the corner of the editing suite watching the producer, director and editor work on an interview I had done in Bournemouth with a Conservative town councillor. For most of the interview she’d been perfectly nice. But at times – when irritated by my line of questioning – she’d become screechy and short-tempered. In the editing suite they were carefully stitching together her screechiest moments, whilst meticulously deleting the normalness.