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Fàshiön – Live At BBC Pebble Mill – Behind The Scenes

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Okay, so this is what it looked like on screen. But what about behind all the glitz and glamour!

Fashion Live at BBC Pebble Mill, June 1 1979
 
“It’s fucking impossible.” Miki says.
 
“Unlikely, I’ll grant you.” I say, eying a model’s cleavage, “But nature is occasionally overly benevolent.
 
“What? No, no, you lecherous old sod. Not her tits. The levels!”
 
“The what?” Mulligan asks.
 
“The levels.” Miki growls, then with the infinite patience of experience explaining something vital to idiots says, “Look. Will you lot please tear yourselves away from the tart brigade for two minutes and listen. This is important. These BBC engineer wallahs are insisting we record at ludicrously low volume levels. And you should see the steam-driven old PA they’ve got. We’re talking BBC World Service circa 1929, not 19 sodding 79!”
 
“Doesn’t he get excited.” Dik says, casting a connoisseur’s eye over a passing bottom.
 
“Well, it’s a good job someone does. Or you’ll end up making your television debut sounding like a wet fart in a blanket.” Miki says.
 
“Nothing new there then.” Annette says.
 
“Oy. Do you mind? That’s enough of that. She’s spending far too much time with us, you know.” I say. “I think it’s starting to rub off on her.”
 
Annette stares daggers at Dik, daring him to make some crack about rubbing off on her, then turns and asks Miki,
“What can we do?”
 
Miki lights a B&H.
 
“Dunno,” he says, “Look don’t worry about it. Just play like you normally do. I’ll try a bit of surreptitious level nudging. Oh sorry mate, was that your elbow, sort of thing.”
 
The TV studios are yet another glimpse of the plush world that lies beyond the bullet proof shop window we’ve got our noses pressed against. Although, truth be told, after five minutes of no one asking me what the fuck I’m doing in their nice TV studio throwing me out on my arse, I start swanning about as if I owned the place.
 
The show we’re on is called Look! Hear! (How do they think these things up?!) This episode gives Midlands fashion college’s bright young things a chance to show off their graduating collections. This is their first time on the telly as well. I watch them as I tune my guitar for the tenth time in as many minutes. It’s hot enough under all those lights to have your g string twanging a flattened crochet below concert before you know it. Watching them ponce around I reflect that their dreams must be filled with dodgy frocks. Their burning desires to center around endless lines of blow and throwing up the old bulimic petit-fours in the great fashion capitals of Europe. Whereas we, much more sensibly, intended to simply become the biggest band on the planet … before I die on that penthouse bathroom floor.
 
“Look at them.” Dik says, nodding as designers flutter around models making last second adjustments.
 
“Yeah. A right bunch of bleedin’ mommas boys and doomed birds.” I say. “I bet they all listen to that Leonard Cohen and Laura Nyro bollocks while they knock out their sketches. I mean look at the state of most of those outfits. Not even my Aunty Gladys on acid would be seen dead in that lot.”
Which was a pretty ripe opinion coming from a band dressed like one of Gore Vidal’s nightmares.
 
“You two can be a right pair of oafs sometimes.” Mulligan says.
 
“Oooh, get Mr. Thenthitivity,” I lisp.
 
“Yeah, sorry. We forgot. Should have guessed you’d be right in your elephant with this lot.” Dik added “And shouldn’t that be oaves?”
 
We are to perform Product Perfect, our glib little piss-take paean to excessive consumerism, that we’ve already decide would be the title track of our hopefully soon-to-be recorded first album. After a bunch of gabbing by the Toyah and some lame interviews conducted by a couple of blokes who look like their Moms choose their telly presenter clothes, a few models strut up and down in front of the cameras. For the most part, if you ask me, which sensibly no one does, most of them look like rejects from bad episodes of Dr. Who. But then I know as much about haut couture as these designers know about slotting reggae breaks into punk songs. To each their own, innit?
 
Next thing I know we’re being told we’re on in two minutes. And a right nerve-wracking time of it we have. Live TV and all. As Miki has warned we’re told in no uncertain terms not to play too loud, on account of this is TV. We grin and try to nod reassuringly, then following a run-through where volume levels are barely above the whispers BBC sound engineers have deigned they should be, we crank everything up and wallop into Product Perfect. Apparently there is much hair-tearing by said sound engineers and we’re later threatened with all sorts of dire consequences, including being banned by the BBC. All very Sex Pistols of us, I’m sure. But everyone speak to later who watched on their tellies says we sounded just fine, very strong, and after all is said and done that is the idea.
 
To cap a perfect evening I’m snubbed by all three of the models I try to pull, and duly go off home to a cold and lonely bed. I while away the insomnia hours conjuring visions of what I’m going to do with it once I get my hands on the great unsuspecting record-buying public.

Stairway To Nowhere: Chapter One

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STAIRWAY
Huh! I come awake, my chin on my chest.

Neck pain.

Eyes throbbing pain. Drooly shirt front. Bladder full.
 
“I need to piss!”
 
“No time big boy.” Miki says swerving us across three lanes of downtown traffic, “We’re almost there.”
 
“We’re late Luke.” Annette adds.
 
Fucking managers. “We’ll be wet Luke if I don’t have a slash soon.”
 
“Shut up!”
 
The truck lurches, stops, doors swing open and spit me out onto the asphalt. Staggering for balance, ice cold night air knifing my lungs, head clearing but then I’m shoved toward and swallowed by the stage door mouth. Down narrow gloomy corridors, through a door, bearing a tarnished star on flaking paint. The dressing womb. Toilet stall in the corner, thank fuck. Pissing in almost orgasmic relief, I lean one hand against the wall in front of me. Back in the room I find a speckled mirror, framed by lightbulbs, only three of which work, and a cold, metal, folding chair. Starting to focus, make-up ritual, deep breathing. Enough of that, fuck all that yoga shite Sting does, get a cigarette lit, suck some blessed relief. Fag balanced on the burn- decorated table edge. Foundation, eye-liner, eye shadow, blusher, hair gel spiked, perfect.
 
“Any chance of a beer?” I ask the room.
 
“No.” Annette says.
 
“Two minutes.” Someone yells through the door.
 
“Whaddya mean two minutes? What about the sound check?” Dik demands.
 
“Have to do it in the first number.” Mulligan says.
 
“Shit.”
 
“Are the guitars and bass in tune with my synth?” Mulligan asks.
 
“Give it here.” I say.
 
Practice amp dead, my ear pressed to bass guitar like fucking Beethoven trying to guess the bugger into tune. Have to do, close enough, I think. I hope.
 
Back out into another birth canal corridor, low ceiling, naked bulbs barely above the top of my head, wading from pool of light to pool of light, feeling the floor rise beneath my Docs. Rumble of crowd growing. Doors slam open, blinding lights, red, green, searing gold, silver, blue. Lights die, I’m plunged mid-step into an abyss. Tap-dancing across snakes nests of cables, a starter roar from the crowd. Fumble guitar lead into pedal, then into a strange amp set on fuck knows what, drag pedal next to mike stand, cable into pedal, cable into guitar, eyes adjusting to the gloom, back to amp and flick standby by switch. Twist volume knob up full, middle all tone controls. Menacing tidal wave of feedback pulsing as I swagger back to microphone.
 
“Good evening!”
 
Blam – lights up, full chaos, searing heat, blindness.
 
“We are Fashion.” Dik’s voice booming all Bog-like, bam, bam, thud, as he does a quick check of his snare and bass drum.
 
“Meeeep … warble!” Mulligan’s synth up and running. “Boom boom boom boom boom boom boooom” bass line intro to Red Green and Gold and we’re away.

Oceans of light, then drowning in darkness, coming up gasping, sweat building already, guitar neck slippery, finger positions and song structure now rooted deep in muscle memory, automatic pilot engaged, adrenaline thrill sparking like high voltage through tired wiring, head aflame with pulsing beat, guitar slicing magnesium chops through the back beat. Huge breath, mouth to mike to find it, pull back a couple of inches, and:
 
“Red, green and gold – let this be the color for all .. no more black and whi-yite game – together we can overcome all!”

This next one must be Burning Down, teeth gritted throttle that fucking guitar neck, smash the chords’ face in, sweat flaying in arcs through the lights as I dip and whirl, psycho carousel of thunder, rising like Poseidon to the mike:

“Can I borrow your lighter – ‘cos my forehead’s getting tighter – and I gotta go gotta go – bu-urn some-um-thing da-own”.

And even before there’s a chance, the smallest gap
into which might creep a whisper of applause, we’re into the third number:

“Die in the west and you’re halfway to heaven, heaven, heaven!” bawled over bratty chords, thunderous bass and drum avalanches.

There’s a gasp of breath after the last looping vocal note and into the sudden ear-roaring silence the applause wells and breaks over the lip of the stage. Take that and I’m straddled, balls to the crowd, and don’t you all just wish you could be me! A dip to the bottle of water a roadie has magicked at my feet, seared throat soothed with ice cold water shock.

“This is our new single. It’s called Citinite. You won’t like it!”

And we’re off into Mulligan’s hurdi-gurdi carousel, drowned Ferry, acid vocals with Andalusian guitar slicing the face from the windshield. Pain in my throat, notes totter on the brink of discord, breath is now furnace hot with every landed fish mouthful seeming to deliver minimum oxygen to starved muscles. One more song segment to go – I think –into Big John and then Hanoi Annoys Me, both of which Dik sings, before I have to sing The Innocent. Move off the mike and dance this beautiful fucking guitar around the moonscape stage. Mulligan and Dik’s faces rising occasionally through the lightshow bombardment like satellites lost in a cosmic stew. Teeth and grins and nods and snarls slamming in strobe. Back to the front of the stage to strafe them with the opening chords to Hanoi Annoys Me. Light spilling back off the stage giving occasional glimpses of upturned faces, arms snaking above a mass of writhing bodies. Then back to the mike to boast:

“We are innocent, it’s not our fault, if we don’t stop moving, we won’t ever come to a halt.”

And then we’ve nailed the set’s carcass to the back wall and run for the wings, a passing “thank you very much” tossed at the mike.
Panting side-stage like dogs, sweat drenched, grinning at the growing roar for more.

“Not too long – let’s go before they change their fucking minds.”

Back out into the land we now own, a roaring wave of applause washing up over me. Mea culpa, absolved, and adored. No messing, smack them with the Fashion anthem and then dive back off down the rabbit tunnel to the dressing womb.

Sweat everywhere, gasping, drowned as rats, towels lobbed over heads, Annette bobbing and gushing, the words “fucking brilliant” buzzing through the air like honey-stoned bees. A drink, a drink, my condom for a drink. A soothing stream of some cheap lager, ice cold pinning me in my seat, a babble of voices, the room filling. I can hardly breath, somebody get me a cigarette. A line, then two of white powder appear on the table at my elbow. No need to even roll my own note these days, kapow, brain floodlit, mouth buzzsawing words into easier to understand pieces, delivered with accelerating blood pulse. Limbs, smooth arms, slim shoulders, silky hair, long legs of mini-skirted slinkers, ruby mouths, proffered breast fruit, juicy arses, a joint here, another line, a shot, then outside, into a cab, I’m suddenly in orbit around a club dance floor, or two, then a hotel lobby, the room, the bed, the faceless orgasm, the exhausted slump sideways into tomorrow.

The door is being pounded. It’s time to get up and do it again.

The Clash Gig Was Canceled So We Had To Play With Duran Duran Instead

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Fáshiön
Luke Sky: guitar and vocals
Mulligan: Bass and synth
Dik Davis: Drums
 
Band meeting, Birmingham, England – July 1978
 
Mulligan, dyed platinum dreadlocks flying behind him like jet stream, bursts into the room.
 
“The Cla …. The Cla … The Cla…” He pants.
 
“You’ve got the clap?” Dik asks.
 
“What, again?” I add.
 
“No … The Cla ….”
 
“You really should cut down on the fags you know.”
 
“No stamina these keyboard players.” I tell Dik “What do you expect though? They just stand there all night.”
 
“The fucking Clash!” Mulligan explodes.
 
“Congratulations. A complete sentence. Sort of.”
 
“I knew he could do it.”
 
“WE’VE GOT A GIG WITH THE CLASH!”
 
“It’s those night school classes he’s been – WHAT!? What did you just say?”
 
Mulligan has got his breath back. He sniffs and turns his back.
 
“Never mind.”
 
“Never mind never mind, fuck face, what did you just say?” Dik demands.
 
“Come on Jon. What? A gig? With The Clash? You’re kidding, right? Like that time you told us your granddad was a captain in the IRA.”
 
“I’m not telling you now.” Mulligan sulks, but I can see malicious glee is all but straightening his dreadlocks.
 
“What we need in a situation like this is a manager.” I say, “So we’d know what’s going on.”
 
“Or a swift knee in the bollocks.” Dik says.
 
“Oh, alright then. I was in town and I ran into Corky. He needs a band this Saturday to open for The Clash at Barbarellas. He said we could do it if we want.”
 
“If we fuckin’ want?!” I’m hopping around the room like a totem pole on the loose.
 
“Hang on,” Dik says, “It’s Friday today innit. That means, tomorrow night?”
 
“Yeah.” Mulligan says, “You aren’t busy are you? Washing your pubes or anything?”
 
“Right after the gig Jon, that’s precisely what I plan on doing.” Dik says. “Right, rehearsal tonight men. There’s gonna be some fuckin’ white men in Barbarellas tomorrow night!”
 
The rehearsal is absolutely terrible, Nobody’s mind is on what they’re doing. We’re all time traveling forward to sharing a dressing room and then a stage with Joe Strummer and his pals. I forget the words and try to make up for it by playing chords that have no business being anywhere near a guitar neck. Mulligan’s synth plays itself when it feels like it, mostly between numbers, and it’s only the relentless fury of Dik’s drumming that occasionally holds the whole thing together. Not that he sees it that way.
 
“I can’t decide whether I sound like I’m building a fucking shed or pushing a suit of armor down our cellar stairs.” he says.
 
“Oh shut up, you tart. This is the third string I’ve broken this afternoon. And what the sodding hell is up with that bloody Wasp Jon?”
 
“I think it’s lonely.” Mulligan says, and as if in agreement the black and yellow, touch-sensitive keyboard lets out a sad, dribbling sounds not unlike a farting badger being blown off a cliff.
 
“Well lads,” Miki says, “You know what they say, lousy rehearsal, brilliant gig.”
 
“So on the strength of today we’ll blow The Clash offstage then.” I say.
 
“Here, here big nose,” Dik says, “a bit less of the fucking blasphemy if you don’t mind.”
 
 
I’m at home practicing for when we’re on Top of the Pops, skank dancing in front of the wardrobe mirror, miming to Product Perfect. The neighbors are probably banging on the wall but I can’t hear them. I ponder the eternal question, if a neighbor knocks on the wall but there’s no guitarist around to hear it, is he still making too much noise?
 
Then I decide more important matters are in need of my attention. I bring my Technofascist Doc Martens to a halt, set the John Birch custom on its stand, and go into the kitchen to get the boot polish and my brush. The docs are going to be polished to mirror-finish tonight. There’s a knock on the back door and it topples into the kitchen. I really must get around to rehanging it on its hinges sometime – that was some party though. So they tell me. Dik comes into the room like Taz off the Bugs Bunny show, a whirlwind of hair, knuckles, drumsticks and invective. He pirouettes to a halt in the middle of the floor and lets out a bellow of rage.
 
“Nice of you to pop round.” I spit on the toe of my left Doc and attack it with the brush.
 
“I’ll fucking’ swing for him, The cunt! He’s only pulled us.”
 
“Pulled us?” I’m not really listening. I often don’t.
 
“Corky. From the gig tonight.”
 
“WHAT?”
 
His voice sinks to a low growl filled with the promise of extremely painful retribution.
 
“He’s pulled us and put those New York poufters Suicide in our place. I’m gonna-“  
“-please. Spare me the details. They can’t be any worse than the ones I’m thinking.”
 
Mulligan creeps into the kitchen. He looks like some severely depressed Revlon field mouse who’s lost his tea party.
 
“We have to do something.” I declare.
 
“Shut up.”
 
 
Mulligan digs in his jumpsuit pocket and pops a handful of small purple pills into his mouth.
 
“I’ll put the kettle on.” I say.
 
“It won’t fit. And besides, it doesn’t go with your eyes.” Miki has trailed in behind Mulligan. He lights a B&H, so he now has one in each hand.
 
As Mulligan subsists almost entirely on a diet of toast and pills it only takes about ten minutes for the purple hearts to gallop through his empty stomach into his blood stream. Somewhere around my second cup of tea, his head snaps up.
 
“Fuck ‘em.” He says, “we’ll do a gig anyway. Our own gig.”
 
“Great idea, Jon. I mean it’s not as if anyone’s going to Barbs tonight to see The Clash is it. They’ll all need something to do.”
 
“No, come on. Fuck this. It’s us against the world, right?”
 
“Apparently.” Dik mumbles, but then he gets a sudden devilish look on his face. “Jon’s right. Us against the world. Come on lanky, shake a leg, we’ve got a gig to organize.
 
 
I’m standing with Miki at the back doors of the van. He’s just driven it over the pedestrian-only little humpback bridge outside the main entrance to The Canon Hill Arts Center. No trolls were harmed in the parking of this van.
 
“Barbarella’s has changed a bit then.” Miki observes. B&H smoke swirls around him like Sherlockian fog.
 
“Very funny.”
 
“Yes,” he says, unraveling the electric cable holding the back doors of the van closed, “it’s amazing what a dab of paint and turfing over Broad Street can do for a club’s ambiance.”
 
“We’ll be needing a fucking ambulance if you don’t shut it.”
 
“Oh yeah? You and who’s army sunshine?”
 
Mulligan bursts out of the arts center doors and hares towards the van.
 
“His.” I say.
 
“Oooh, you big butch cowboy, you know I love it when you talk dangerous.”
 
“Alright chaps?” Mulligan wants to know.
 
“Just fine and dandy.” I say with a face as long as the line currently winding its way round Barbarellas to see The Clash.
 
“How you are adjusting to life in the army Mulligan?” Miki asks him but Mulligan has already learned to disregard the more surreal of Miki’s questions. Which is most of them, then.
 
“Let’s get in and get set up.” Mulligan says and then I need you to take me back to my place please Miki. With the van. To pick up a few things.
 
 
I stand and marvel at the stage, upon which sits a good deal of Mulligan’s flat. There’s the sculpture from the bog, the one that always confuses me as to where I’m supposed to piss. His biggest paintings are strung from invisible cables so that the minotaur on the black and white checkered floor looks as if he’s about to step over and adjust the stack of televisions. There are ten television stacked on a board that’s balanced on the backs of a couple of female shop window dummies posed down on their hands and knees. All very Korova milkbar, I’m sure.
 
Dik’s standing onstage wielding the mystic Premier drum key and doing mysterious things only drummers pretend to understand to the 3-D jigsaw puzzle of his kit. There are a couple of motorbikes parked either end of the stage. Center stage, a large white screen is silently showing one of those old black and white French films, all full of rotting dog carcasses, eyeballs being sliced by razor blades, and other things the French think of as art.

Then those two thin white dukes in trench coats I’d met last week at Mulligans walk onstage, and start setting up a couple of amps and a keyboard. What were they called again?
 
“Duran Duran.” Mulligan says coming up behind me and making me jump.
 
“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
 
“They’re going to open the show for us. That’s their screen and projector.
 
“Very multi-media, I’m sure. Where’s Miki?”
 
“Up the village. In the pubs, trying to get a few punters down the hill.” He tugs a pocket watch from his jacket pocket, “He should be back in a minutes, then we’ll do sound checks. I’ve got a couple of phone calls to make” And he rushes off like a dreadlocked white rabbit.
 
 
Afterwards, how did I feel about the show: Fashion and Duran Duran at The Cannon Hill Arts Center on that night in July of 1978? We’re helping hump Mulligan’s furniture and artwork back into his flat around about half past midnight? And I’m surprised to find I actually ended up having a great time. I managed to shake off the depression of losing what would have been at that time the most important gig I’d ever played.
 
I’d actually quite enjoyed Duran Duran – they were a bit synthy and drum machiney, but they had a few other good songs as well as that Girls On Film we’d heard on their demo tape. They were a bit funky in places, that John could play bass by slapping it with his thumb which is quite impressive, then again, I am easily impressed. Add in Nick’s synths meeps and warbles, and decent singer in Andy Wickett, and their set had seemed a good enough soundtrack for the black and white arty, Frog flicks.
 
And whereas there were only about 35 people in the whole 200-seater theatre, I did actually manage to get into our songs. We played a tight set, twisting and dipping, roaring and whooshing, in all the right places, all the right notes in the right order sort of thing. I completely forgot where I was, and why I was there, and those 35 punters must have picked up on that because they did a Dr. Who Tardis number on the theater, and somehow seemed to fill the place. It was only our eighth gig and despite the circumstances it felt like progress.
 
I’m tired, sweaty and almost happy as we unload the gear back into Mulligan’s flat.
 
“Help me get the sculpture back in the bog.” Mulligan says.
 
“Good idea.” I say “I’m dying for a piss.

FREEDOM!

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Why do you first start playing guitar and singing?
 
Something magical about the process, the struggle, overcoming people scoffing at your first fumbling attempts? I’ll show you lot! Being socially awkward and looking for a way to have girls even look at you?
 
Maybe it was worshiping your musical heroes. Thrilling to Hendrix and Cream, getting that overwhelming feeling of “wow!” the first time you hear the latest Beatles or Stones single. And you, an adolescent soup of hormones all fired up in a miasma of naïve misunderstanding of what you think fame and fortune mean.
 
And before you know it, the fame parasite has its hooks into you. That first time you hear your voice and guitar recorded, even partway in tune it doesn’t matter, you’re doomed. And your ears are already dreaming of bigger and better sounds. Your fingers start to itch lusting after Les Paul Goldtop Deluxes. Your whole body breaks out in a sweat at the thought of hordes of nubile female flesh that will be yours, veritable fields of pussy laid out and available. The magazines and newspapers feed your sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll scandal dreams. Limos ghost through the New York landscapes of your dreams.
 
You get a band together. You rehearse in some sweat pit of a rehearsal room for a few months, forge the bond, the band against the world. You revel in your dream, your difference from the herd. You get your first pub gig and all it takes is a few friends to tell you how amazing you were and you might as well have signed on the dotted line in blood. Later, you will.
 
More people show up for your gigs. You start getting mentioned in the local newspaper. You do the local radio program. Your following builds. There are now people outside your gigs trying to get in and someone smashes up the toilet and you get banned from your first venue. At some point some sleaze bag steps out of the crowd tells you how great you are and promises to make you famous and wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.
 
You record a demo, play a couple of gigs in small clubs in London that go really well and some record company signs you to a lifetime of opening act slavery with promises of future headlines.
 
You slog your guts out touring, warming up crowds for bands who go on to become global megastars while you find it increasingly difficult to live on promises. You start to drink more, make more use of your drugs of choice. The band starts to bicker. The gigs are suddenly work and not fun.
 
You cross America twice, mostly in a van, playing an insane schedule of shows. You come back to England three months later and your fans are now listening to something else. They’re all wearing different hats and you’re no longer the hot new thing about to happen.
 
So at some point you say bollocks to this for a game of tin soldiers and you run away. By the skin of your teeth you still have a girlfriend who’s living in France. So you go to live in the sun in the Southwest of France with a twenty-year-old sex goddess. You get a job peeling garlic and onions in a restaurant kitchen. On your days off you romp on nudist beaches clad only in your Doc Martens.
 
But of course you’re still a musician, through it all you never stopped being a musician. It’s not the being a musician part you have a problem with, it’s the being in the music business part. So with no plans whatsoever of becoming famous you start a band with some local musicians you enjoy hanging out with and then you record THIS.
 

 
THIS isn’t about being famous. But it is about why you picked up a guitar in the first place. And whether anybody likes it or not doesn’t mean a thing to you. You like it. You had a great time playing this, and you think it shows. And you don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut whether anyone agrees with you or not. Because finally this … this is freedom.

REASONS TO PLAY THE GUITAR

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Part 6 – A COW DYING
 
 
Throughout my sixteenth year I found that blank-eyed girls in mini-skirts remained stubbornly unimpressed with my troubadour efforts to strum them out of their knickers with my guitar. But I was by now firmly convinced that the key to the twin mysteries of the contents of their bras and panties lay in my ability to woo them with sexy, flash guitar, and a rebellious yowl. The fortune and fame would be the cream … licked from their curvaceous bodies.
 
In October 1968, Electric Ladyland by The Jimi Hendrix Experience was released. Its pre-banned cover featured nineteen, count them, naked women. Such was my adoration of Jimi (and naked women) that to raise the money to buy this magical double album I sold my guitar to John Hadley for five quid. Besides, I’d already decided I needed an electric guitar.
 
But what I got for Christmas was another finger-slicing folk guitar. So, the day after Boxing Day I swapped it with a kid two doors down for a Woolworth’s Top Twenty electric guitar. It was bright red, had only five strings, and I had no amp, but I loved that plank of a guitar. My first electric plank.
 
At school there were a number of societies that met outside school hours. Things like the school chess society, or history society, or botany society. A few of us elitist, chart pop sneerers, as well as being into Jimi and Cream and Zappa, were also into progressive music. This was not so much because we actually liked the music, but rather because it of the name. It was progressive. We were progressive. So we liked it. We thought it added a layer to our coolness. I seem to remember that a lot of this “progressive” music never seemed to actually progress anywhere. It sounded like endless, pretentious dinking around on keyboards and saxophones, with no real guitar solos and lyrics that would have baffled a poetry teacher. So anyway, Mel Bingle and I decided to form the Bournville School Progressive Music Society. And just to show the world how elite we were, we were the only members.
 
In the BSPMS we had my red Top Twenty Japanese electric guitar now with six strings, a white bass with rusty round wound strings, a fifty-watt Selmer amp with just two inputs, and a 2 x 12 speaker cab. We set this lot up in the school library on Fridays after home time. As we had no microphone vocals were screamed and vanished into the racket we made. Coming upon us, one of the cleaning ladies once paused over her bucket of disinfectant. She leaned on her mop and, all yellowed eyes and hair curlers, listened to the end of our attempt at Red House.
 
“Sounds like a cow dying.” She said, sniffed, picked up her mop and bucket and trudged off.
 
My first but by no means my worst ever review.

ON TOUR WITH U2 – 1980

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(Excerpt from Stairway To Nowhere)

The thing about U2 in England in 1980 is that they are a great band. They are vibrant, passionate, energetic, they are on a mission they believe in.
 
And then there’s Fàshiön – exhausted from two years on the road, a road littered with broken and false promises, going through the motions with very little new material, slowly being devoured by internal dispute and dissent. Apart from that we’re doing just fine!
 
In fact, Miles Copeland (manager of The Police and head of IRS Records) will be later quoted in New Musical Express saying: “Fàshiön are all at sea – but doing quite well”.
 
Ah there’s nothing like having your record company’s backing … and that’s nothing like having your record company’s backing. More like having them behind you with a fistful of daggers. But I digress …
 
U2 have great songs and put on great shows. It’s a bit like touring with a bunch of really nice, well-behaved boy next door types. They don’t do any of the booze or drugs. If there had been any groupies they wouldn’t have done them either. No, they show up, treat everyone with courteous respect, play amazing music, then say goodnight and drive back to their bed and breakfast in a battered old transit van.
 
The U2 “tour”, with only a couple of provincial exceptions, turns out to consist of gigs in London’s smaller clubs, clubs we’d first played back when we thought we were on our way up.
 
First stop, May 22, is The Hope & Anchor, Upper Street, Islington, London.
 
“I see we’re back playing in someone’s mouth again.” I say, eying the red painted walls and dangerously low ceiling of The Hope & Anchor.
 
“Some of my happiest moments have been spent playing inside someone’s mouth.” Dik says.
 
“Pity we didn’t all become dentists instead,” I say, “Then again …”
 
“What’s he moaning about now?” Annette asks.
 
“Oh, the usual,” Mulligan says, “Everything.”
 
I watch Whistling Pete and Pedro try not to get squashed lowering bass cabs through the street level trap door that in former times was used to load huge barrels of beer into the pub cellar.
 
“I was just saying, we were here two years ago, that’s all. Remember there was that journalist bird from Record Mirror. Gave us a great review, she did.” I say.
 
“That’s not all. She gave great he—”, Mulligan says.
 
“Yes, yes, alright, alright. Spare us the grizzly details. True and otherwise.” I say. Then to Annette, “So is there going to be any press here tonight, boss?”
 
“I’m sure the usual will be here. NME, Sounds, Melody Maker.”
 
“Tractor Breeding Monthly?” I suggest. “Wasp Farming Quarterly? The British Journal of Dung?”
 
“Shut up Luke.”
 
“Yes boss.”
 
“Hello. Are you Fashion?” asks a fresh-faced lad, “I’m Bono. I’m the singer with U2.”
 
“Very nice to meet you Bongo.” Dik says.
 
“Yeah, welcome to the big time mate.” I say.
 
“Take no notice of them Bono.” Annette says to Bono, who has a slight smile on his face. “No one else does.”
 
She squints at her file-o-fax.
 
“We’re opening the show for you tonight. You open for us tomorrow at The Moonlight Club.,” she says, “So, we’ll get set up, and if you can have you back line ready at the side of the stage—”
 
“That postage stamp-sized thing over there,” I say. “That’s the stage.”
 
“Shut up Luke.”
 
“And next to it, that alcove where they stack the mops and sawdust, that’s the dressing room.” I say, “Watch your head on the ceiling.”
 

THE MUSIC HISTORY MUSEUM

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“No future, no future for you” scowled Johnny Rotten in Anarchy In The UK.
 
John, unlike Sid Vicious, has had something of a future beyond his time in the initial spotlight- I’m a singer in a punk band, get me out of here indeed! Sidney always had too much rope. And now Johnny wants us to frolic in a meadow covered in butter. Shame on you John Lydon.
 
There’s a school of thought that says capitalism can never die, that as long as there is one human being alive who has something the only other human being alive wants, there will be commerce. Or at least a good fight.
 
So “No Future” is finally here is it? Well you could be forgiven for thinking it is, right here in the middle of the ongoing collapse of the US and world economies, and the last days of the planet’s patience with our pesky species.
 
Even Sir Mick Jagger was once perceived by my parents as heralding not just the death of music as they knew it but also the downfall of Western Civilization, and now he sips Earl Grey tea with their Britannic Majesties.
 
If you were to look for survivors of Vaudeville Theater, would you find any? What about silent movie stars, any of them still around? And rock musicians are going the same way. Apart from self-inflicted departures, they too are counting down along with the rest of us to the big “Mind that bus. What bus? Splat!”
 
So how can we pass the time while we’re waiting for the number 69 to Eternity? Why not drop by The Music History Museum.
 
Take my current audience. Such as it is, it appears to mainly be split into two camps.
 
There’s the older survivors like myself, the blokes still in or talking about bands they were in 30 years ago along with the people who went to see them, all reminiscing about the old days, and how kids today just don’t know how to rebel.
 
Then there are the young people who come across my music and writing from time to time in the Music History Museum and hopefully find something to capture their fifteen-second attention span before they move on to the next exhibit.
 
Me? I’m quite happy here in my glass case, carrying a thirty year old picture of myself around in my head. I’m happy to help young and old alike pass part of a rainy Sunday afternoon or a school trip to the Music History Museum. Why not drop by the gift shop, pick up one of my CDs or my book, Stairway To Nowhere.
 
I have quite a good view of the fire exit from here

Luke Skyscraper talks to Nick Shatt

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Award-winning journalist, Nick Shatt, has agreed to conduct an exclusive interview with legend in his own panties, Luke Skyscraper. Shatt is three time consecutive winner of The Golden Turd, awarded by the British Union of Music Writers And Notable Kritics. Shatt wrote for many years for top music paper, No Musical Excuse. He claims to have invented puke rock, named his socks Sid and Vicious, and was once thrown off London Bridge by enraged manager and president of Floppy Records, Jack Costa Brava, following his particularly vicious review of Abbot Presley’s new album, Armed Farces.
 
NICK SHATT: About your last album
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Hello man. Yeah. What was it called again?
 
NICK SHATT: I Cum In Peas
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Oh yeah. It did quite well. I think.
 
NICK SHATT: It was universally condemned as disgusting and trite. Medley Marker called it, and I quote: “garbage from start to excruciating finish”
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Melody Marker? Do me a tangerine. What the fuck do they know about music? Besides, trite and disgusting have always worked for me in the past, man. What you might call a winning formula.
 
NICK SHATT: Yeah. Well, let’s take a look at the cover. If we can.
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Sold a couple million. (frowns) Er, …didn’t it?
 
NICK SHATT: No, it didn’t. Look about the cover …
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: What? Oh yeah, it was a plea for … well, no it was more a cry against the, er …
 
NICK SHATT: You had your dick stuck in a can of peas.
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Yeah, but they were mushy. At least by the time we finished the photo shoot they were, eh.
 
NICK SHATT: Caused quite a stir.
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Ha! Yeah, stir, nice one. Whirled peas, eh?
 
NICK SHATT: I hear there were death threats made against you.
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Yeah, well there were rumors that The Greengrocers Association had taken a contract out on me
 
NICK SHATT: The Avacados. Not a family to trifle with.
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Yeah well they might have a reputation for being a bit thick skinned but believe me under their mushy interior they have a heart of stone.
 
NICK SHATT: And that’s a good thing?
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: I dunno man. Look you’re ‘sposed to be the writer. I just play guitar and sing like an angle.
 
NICK SHATT: An angle?
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Angel. Big bugger with wings, y’know?
 
NICK SHATT: Word is they’re still planning on whacking you. Especially after you put out that single.
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Single?
 
NICK SHATT: Er …Mafia Fags?
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Yeah, no, I mean that’s just a misunderstanding, that is. See I got sponsored by that Morris Phillips, y’know the tobacco company.
 
NICK SHATT: Phillip Morris
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Yeah, them. Anyway I was paid a lot of money for that song. Plus a couple of warehouses full of menthol 100s. I was gonna be like the poster boy for a new campaign. Like that Joe Cool camel. See they wanted me help them to tap into the gay organized crime market. Apparently none of that lot smoke. They showed me a chart or graph or something. Now they’ve got China and India all puffing away, the funny boy cosy nostril is a huge new potential market. I worked on that song a long time man.
 
NICK SHATT: It sounds like a lot of coughing with pigs squealing over a disco beat.
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Sweated blood over that I did. Put my heart and soul into it didn’t I. A good 10 minutes a day for oh … about a day.
 
NICK SHATT: Okay, let’s leave that for the moment if we can. I have to take a quick, er, break and um, go to the little journalists room. But when I come back I’d like to talk about your recent marriage.
 
LUKE SKYSCRAPER: Alright Prick. No rush. I’ll just do a couple of lines of blow while you’re gone. Here you couldn’t lend us a credit card could you? No? Well in that case, hurry back. Chop chop.
 
(to be continued…)