Prima donna drummers, on the other hand, are few and far between. I’ve heard stories but I’ve never actually met one. But then I never met Buddy Rich.
Eventually we discovered Tony ‘T. J.’ Davidson’s rehearsal studios in a decaying old mill on Little Peter Street, Manchester. We were put in a room at the far end of the corridor at the back of the building, up a rickety flight of wooden stairs. These rooms had probably been offices until quite recently. They had thin partitioned walls onto which copious amounts of Rockwool roof insulation had been halfheartedly glued to give some sort of rudimentary soundproofing.
It was a medium-sized space with a walk-in cupboard, which we would use to store gear and items of a much less savoury nature. Tins of piss mostly. Our room at the end of the long corridor meant it was also the furthest from what passed for a toilet at T. J.’s. The entire building was more ventilated than heated – it was like spending all day inside a fridge, which didn’t help. At rehearsals, the gaps between the songs were spent taking turns to sit on a salvaged electric heater for warmth. So, rather than getting even colder on the long stroll to use the proper facilities, certain members of the group would resort to the use of old soft drinks tins as urine receptacles, which they would then leave in this walk-in cupboard for later inspection. Don’t ask me why. They soon piled up, adding to the health-and-safety hazards for which we remember the 1970s so fondly.
Honestly, I don’t recall it ever getting physically violent between us, unlike some bands. We were at heart too soft for that. Our major disagreements were about who was playing too loud – a disagreement that has been going on for years. There was one time, in the upstairs room at the Talbot, when things got a bit personal between Hooky and Bernard over how loud the other was playing. It was nothing really but it went on and on, as these things do, and nothing was built into something. In retrospect, it was at that point when what they were playing began to diverge. Around the time of the argument, there was a change where what Hooky and Bernard were playing started to separate more into this-is-my-bit and that-is-your-bit and never the twain shall meet.
We never socialised outside the band and we still never talked about our feelings or emotions with any depth, apart from how we felt about other bands and how hard done by we were. These days, people would say we had a communication problem, and something bad was bound to happen sooner or later.
12
GIRLFRIENDS
Bernard and especially Ian always managed to appear relatively smartly dressed albeit in a slightly ex-army manner. Ian’s pride and joy, though, was his pair of black leather pants, essential for the Jim Morrison/Lizard King lead singer look. Not the sort of thing he’d be seen wearing at work, of course. The pair of them looked pretty sharp, Hooky less so.
It was Hooky’s choice of footwear that seemed to let him down. He had peculiar taste in shoes, and in particular was an enthusiast of the Western-style cowboy boot. This was quite a common complaint in the late seventies and it would manifest itself upon the most unlikely souls. When the band’s piss-taking about his Broncobusters became too much, he moved on to the Army & Navy jackboots, which suited his personality to a T.
Mind you, I wasn’t much better dressed. In fact, I was the worst of the lot. I was very self-conscious and found the process of buying clothes an ordeal, so I would wear the same clothes until they disintegrated. Stripy cheesecloth shirts, grey Farrah slacks, brown tweedy blazers with leather elbow patches, and the ugliest footwear of all: Clarks’ Nature Treks, or ‘pastie shoes’ as my bandmates jokingly called them. I topped this ensemble off with glazed-over eyes and a mop of thick black hair that seemed to possess a mind of its own. It was not a good look. And definitely not that of a would-be rock star. Smart I was not.
My fashion sense, or lack of, was a great source of amusement to my bandmates. It is part of the role of the drummer to be a village idiot or willing stooge. I think this stereotype has a lot to do with Ringo; in fact, a lot of band behaviour clichés may have their origins in the Fab Four’s projected relationships. The four lovable mop-tops notion of a band has a lot to answer for.
My drug-addled geography teacher look was not one that most members of the opposite sex found attractive either. There was the odd exception. Mostly, these girls were quite addled themselves and we would both struggle to remember what happened and who with the following day. Occasionally this would be a blessing. But as the throbbing pain of the hangover slowly subsided, guilty embarrassment would flicker on and off, accompanied by the wincing, uncertain hope that it may have all been a dream. To be followed later by apologetic phone calls.
My ever-sensible sister was by now at an all-girls’ grammar, Macclesfield High School, the female equivalent of King’s. Here she ended up acting as my haphazard matchmaker or fixer upper. Hearing someone at her school remark that they loved David Bowie, for instance, Amanda would respond with, ‘You’d like me brother, he likes David Bowie too’ before adding a cautionary ‘He is a bit mad though . . . And he plays the drums.’
Most of the time this was deterrent enough, though every so often it could be an incentive. Drums and madness: what’s the attraction?
I despaired at my sister’s taste in music – she’d previously been David Cassidy’s number-one fan and had by now moved on to Dr Hook and Barry Manilow. This didn’t stop her sneaking into my room when I was out and listening to some of my LPs. The Eagles, Bryan Ferry and, surprisingly, John Cale’s Paris 1919 would be found displaced from their rightful alphabetical location, their grooves vandalised by unauthorised fingerprints and mysterious scratches. Sacrilege!
Despite out musical differences, Amanda remained concerned over my love life, or the lack of it. She would trap me, usually while leaving or entering the house, and say, ‘Stephen, there’s this girl at our school who fancies you.’
Which would lead to awkward meetings at the bus station, followed by even more awkward stilted conversation over drinks in the Macclesfield Arms (punctuated by frequent trips to the loo or jukebox). These generally culminated in an artless stumble back to the bus stop.
‘I’ll call you.’
These approximations at dates all felt a bit like my numerous unsuccessful band auditions, though I was often confused about who was rejecting who or what and why. Was I that boring? Don’t answer that.
A couple of girls stuck it out for longer than that, but not much. It wasn’t my interest in drugs that usually ended things. They usually found the guys I hung around with a much more attractive proposition as they were, as a rule, older, more reliable and had their own cars. What the girls didn’t understand or didn’t care for, even those who had an unlikely initial interest, was my obsession with being a drummer in some weird rock band or other. ‘You think more of that band than you do of me’ was a common and frequently justified complaint.
My drinking pals, despite being hardcore music fans, were more realistic in their life ambitions: steady job, steady girlfriend or wife and two kids, house, nice car, booze and a spliff at the weekends, and they would be happy. At times I did find myself thinking that they might have had a point. It was the line of least resistance.
I was going out with a girl called Stephanie at the time I joined Warsaw. She was a tall, fair-haired, whimsical fan of Si mone de Beauvoir and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Going to pubs for an evening of weak-bitter drinking, smoking and conversation was the chief social activity in Macclesfield and pretty much everywhere else in the 1970s, so when I wasn’t gigging, rehearsing or watching other bands, I was out drinking and socialising with my mates. If not every night, then at least every weekend. My doping and drinking pals found the idea of making us an alliterative couple amusing – Stephen and Stephanie, how poetic. She worked for the Inland Revenue.
My friends thought me a bit odd in a tedious kind of way. They frequently yawned when I began to talk about music for instance. But Stephanie was odd in ways that I struggled to understand. She took the being odd thing to a whole new level.
&n
bsp; She once called me in the middle of the night: she’d been thrown out and would have to sleep rough on the mean streets of Bollington. Would I come and rescue her? I’d just downed two tins of Carlsberg Special (I found it a great nightcap and nerve settler) and was in no fit state to drive, but being foolishly drunk I woke my mother, who agreed to take part in this outlandish post-midnight rescue mission. She should have told me to fuck off and go back to bed, but mums don’t do that sort of thing do they?
Stephanie’s story kept changing and unravelling from the moment we found her sobbing at the Bollington phone box. None of it made much sense. Her parents seemed to have transformed into evil zombies of some kind and had chased her out into the night.
It was three on a Sunday morning and Mum and I just wanted to get back to bed. ‘We should call the police,’ my mum suggested, but past experience told me this was an extremely bad idea and I managed to put her off.
The next morning, the drama had magically dissipated. Stephanie had called home and it had all been a terrible misunderstanding. Apparently it happened a lot.
‘Odd girl that, Stephen, odd,’ said my dad and I had to admit he had a point.
This sort of thing kept happening. The dramatic SOS phone calls, ‘I’ve got on the wrong train and I don’t know where I am’ or ‘There’s a strange man following me and I think he’s a rapist’ were the kind of things that used to brighten my otherwise dull life.
Things with Stephanie reached a head on 13 October 1977. We had yet another gig at Rafters, supporting the Yachts, and Steph naturally came along. I picked up Ian and then Stephanie. That something was wrong became apparent from the moment she got in the car. Her demeanour was even more skittish than usual. The reason was soon revealed as she produced a half-drunk bottle of some cheap Scotch liqueur from her handbag, took a swig and offered the bottle to Ian. After sampling the goods he professed it was ‘OK’ but said he would be sticking with Breaker – a four-pack of which was his usual tipple for the journey to a gig.
‘Ooh, Breaker! Great. Can I have one?’ piped my girlfriend.
‘Er, OK. We can always stop and get some more can’t we, Steve?’
Another four-pack of malt liquor later and I suddenly had an inkling of what the captain of the Titanic must have felt upon hearing the cry, ‘Iceberg ahoy!’
By the time we got to my habitual parking spot in the remains of Manchester’s once magnificent Central Station, the damage had been well and truly done. The Breaker had worked its pre-gig magic on Ian and he was suitably psyched or vibed up for the night ahead. Steph, on the other hand, was legless – drunk as a skunk and not making sense. My lips were being thoroughly chewed as between us we managed to prise her out of the car.
Somehow we steered her into the gig and I went back to unload the drum kit. Upon my return, I was greeted coldly by Hooky’s girlfriend, Iris, with the news that ‘The girl you were with, what’s her name, has locked herself in the ladies and she’s a bit upset.’
What’s the saying – out of sight, out of mind? So I set to assembling the bits of wood and metal tubes into something that would pass for a drum kit and hoped things would sort themselves out. I have taken this approach to many problems throughout my life and I can report an almost zero per cent success rate.
The reports came thick and fast and they were not good.
‘She’s been sick on the floor.’
‘She’s passed out.’
‘You can’t leave her stuck in there.’
‘The manager wants her out.’
So after a nerve-calming joint, I extracted her from the ladies and bundled her up the stairs, out of the club, and back down Oxford Street to the car park. I left her comatose on the back seat with a plastic carrier bag in case of emergency. This was probably not the wisest of things to do, but I thought, ‘It’s just round the corner, I’ll come back and check at regular intervals.’ And ran back to the gig.
This to-ing and fro-ing went on all night. Despite my being a bit more wound up than usual, the gig was OK and the Yachts were a lovely bunch of fun-loving Liverpudlians, who cheated at pool. John Peel played their single a lot and Henry Priestman eventually ended up in the Christians. Oh well.
By the end of the night, I had decided that enough was enough when it came to Stephanie. We broke up.
I didn’t do a very good job of it. It became a long drawn-out goodbye. I didn’t like upsetting anyone and that only made it worse.
Rejection is never any fun, is it? I’d been on the receiving end a few times and being on the other end of it wasn’t a barrel of laughs either. I was much better at getting rejected than being a rejector. I turned out to be just as bad at ending a relationship as I’d been at starting one.
Steph took it badly and began a campaign of sui cide threats. I got to know the local branch of the Samaritans very well and became depressed and slightly suicidal myself. I ended up seeing a very unfriendly doctor at Parkside Hospital. As dour a Scot as ever there was – a large man with big bushy eyebrows and piercing eyes staring from below. He never smiled. He had me pegged as a drug addict of the worse kind, a liar and a cheat (his comments are still there in my medical records to this day). He would lecture me on the evils and dangers of smoking pot and he put me on a course of antidepressants. I was to start on three capsules a day, then six, until I was on eighteen of the big orange fuckers every twenty-four hours.
Now, I quite liked the idea of antidepressants – pills that would make you happy, restore the old joie de vivre, what’s not to like? But no. These pharmaceutical marvels seemed to work by stopping me from feeling anything at all, apart from a kind of perfect blank numbness. This, the glum Scot informed me, was normal and would wear off when I took enough of the pills. Their effect was worse than the brown bottles of barbs I’d swallowed back at Dizz’s, worse than a bucket of Phensedyl cough medicine. It never wore off and only got lousier with each dose. I felt like the proverbial nervous wreck. Well, I would have done if my nerves weren’t deadened. These pills would not make anyone happy. Not sad either, just empty and hollow inside like my soul had been drained out and flushed away. I felt like I was caught in a dark spiral and being dragged further and further down into a pit.
I do remember being strongly advised by the serious Scot to avoid eating cheese as unspecified bad things might happen. I love cheese. Maybe that was the problem.
Stephanie continued to pop up in unexpected places: trying to jump in front of my car, occasionally going round to Ian’s house and locking herself in the bathroom, looking for razorblades; hiding in the bushes outside my widow and screaming. She adopted a diet of rat poison or similar substances. It was not funny at all. She needed help, obviously, help that was beyond me to give, and I am sorry that I have had to drag up her own troubles in order to talk about mine. She later abandoned Macclesfield for life in London and eventually Paris.
In the meantime, I had so many packets of the antidepressants that I thought I would try selling them on, but none of my drug-enthusiast friends found the experience remotely enjoyable. There were no takers. These tangerine capsules were a nightmare. So eventually I pitched the lot on the fire. They didn’t burn well either.
I lied to the Highland quack that I was feeling much better, thanks. I just had to cling on and hope that it really would get better, that nothing is ever as bad as it seems, it never is, but that’s easy to say and sometimes impossible to believe when you’re in a black hole. I found that reading about Buddhism helped a bit –the idea that this too will pass and all that illusory nature of reality thing. I read a lot of Zen, a bit more of Crowley’s Golden Dawn mystic hogwash, Jean Paul Sartre and Raymond Chandler, and eventually this did help me lift the old spirits. Maybe not the Sartre.
I really did begin to feel better. Mind over matter. No thanks to the Scot. He put me off going to the doctor for twenty-odd years.
Drumming also made me feel better. It never failed. Alan, an old pal of mine, used to get unhinged on a regular basis u
nless he exorcised his demons with some violent drumming every once in a while. He’d picked it up in the Scouts. Drumming’s a great cure for stress – well, it is for the person doing the drumming, not so much for those nearby. The making of a hellish racket that disturbs the outside world can be a powerful and satisfying feeling.
Existential misery can take root anywhere. I never once thought that my mood swings could have anything do to with my intake of illegal substances. I would have thought the idea ridiculous, a straight conspiracy. In hindsight, I’ve got to admit that this was more than likely the source. Your troubles are never your own fault. That’s how paranoia starts.
My mother was prone to occasional dark moods – it’s probably hereditary. She suffered with migraine and would say every so often that she’d had enough of it all and, in the spirit of Virginia Woolf (but without the stones), she was going to throw herself into the canal at North Rode. She couldn’t swim. She always came back dry though.
All the doors at Ivy Lane had locks on them – every room. It must have been a 1920s security fad. The keys were kept in a small cabinet by the front door. My mum would sometimes take to locking certain doors in the house to keep me out or to punish me by depriving me of access to my drums. I couldn’t really start breaking doors and windows, though I did think of it, as she would call the police. Reasoning didn’t work either. So I would grin and bear it. It amused the rest of the band that I was such a wet blanket.
13
‘JOY DIVISION, NEVER HEARD OF YOU’
There were two things the band needed to do to get on.
Number one was get a gig in London – that’s where everything was happening, wasn’t it? Well, it looked like it was happening there or had happened there once. At the very least, that’s where the music business was.
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