Frank Skinner Autobiography (19 page)

When we got to the top class at St. Hubert's, we had to try out for the school choir. I quite fancied being in the choir. I loved singing and as, traditionally, ninety-five per cent of the top class got selected, I had to fancy my chances. We all lined up at one end of the class and started singing ‘Soul of my Saviour'. Mrs McGee wandered up and down the line, listening closely to each kid in turn. When she came to me, she listened for a while and then put her hand on my shoulder. ‘We're not American,' she said. I'd blown my chance. She obviously wanted sweet, angelic children's voices and I was trying to be Elvis.

In fact, I've spent most of my life trying to be Elvis. There was a time when I wouldn't have bought an article of clothing unless I could imagine Elvis wearing it. Luckily, white flared jumpsuits were fashionable in the West Midlands right up to the late eighties. I've spent too much of my life with my hair swept back into a quiff, even though it doesn't suit me because my head is shaped like a light-bulb. I've spent too much of my life with sideburns that start about an inch below where my hair stops, leaving a stupid gap at the top. During my last attempt at sideburns, in 1998, the make-up person on
Fantasy World Cup
used to colour in the gap with mascara. Whatever music I dance to, my dancing always comes out like an under-rehearsed parody of Elvis's ‘Jailhouse Rock' routine. Every school exercise book, pencil case, duffel bag, even my First Communion card, had ‘Elvis' written on it.

I kept an Elvis scrapbook, forced my mom to buy his latest single, learnt the words to all his songs, and not only went and saw all the dodgy movies like
Clambake, Speedway
and, of course,
Paradise, Hawaiian Style
, but whenever the Oscars rolled around, I was outraged when Elvis didn't get a nomination. I really believed in those movies. I really thought life was like that. I thought I could get a job as a barman or a pool-attendant (once I'd learned to swim) and then hang around the club at night until someone asked me to get up and sing a song. Then, within seconds, the whole place would be rocking, and people, instinctively clapping along, would turn to each other, smile and nod. When I left school, it wasn't quite like that.

I went through a wanky poetry-writing stage when I was seventeen. Here's the opening of one of my least wanky efforts:

It all started because Terry was a bit of an Elvis fan. I slightly hero-worshipped Terry. I remember once copying what order he ate his dinner in so I could be like him. Consequently, I got into Elvis through his influence, but then I became much more obsessive about him than Terry ever was. The big thing that tortured me was that I was blonde, well, blondeish, whereas Elvis's hair was black. This, I believed, was the only significant difference in our physical appearance. My mom wouldn't let me dye my hair and so my non-Elvis colouring plagued me for years. I was thrilled when Elvis wore a blonde wig to play his own twin in the film
Kissin' Cousins
, but I knew, in my heart of hearts, it was only temporary. It sounds stupid now, but this hair thing was a major concern of mine as a child. Many years later I discovered that Elvis's hair was the same colour as mine but he dyed it black. Another interesting life-lesson for me: don't yearn for what other people seem to have because they might not have it at all. The other man's hair is always blacker.

My Elvis obsession continued through my teens, at a time when my friends were all into heavy-metal bands like Sabbath and Zeppelin. Eventually I admitted defeat on the quiff and grew my hair like it is on the photo-booth picture, but I still loved The King. Then, when I was twenty, I got home from the pub one night to find my mom and dad waiting for me with deep concern upon their faces. ‘We've got some bad news,' my mom said. ‘You'd better sit down.' I was already thinking death in the family. My dad looked anxious but said nothing. ‘What's up?' I asked, finally.

My mom took a breath. ‘Elvis is dead,' she said.

I didn't say anything. Funnily enough, I was going through my punk stage at the time. I looked down at my multi-zipped jeans that my mom had customised for me. Punk was about rebellion and turning your back on the oldies. (Unless they had a sewing machine.) I hadn't played an Elvis record for about four months. I don't think I'd ever gone four days without playing one before. It reminded me of a rabbit called Chubby Checker I owned when I was a kid. My mom and dad were always going on about how I didn't look after him properly, never cleaned him out, missed his meal-times and so on. I went to feed him one day and found him dead, lying in about an inch and a half of his own piss. I felt guilty as hell. Now I had neglected Elvis and he had died too.

I had a cup of tea but rejected the idea of supper. My parents went to bed and I put the telly on to try and get some details, but this was in the days when the telly finished at about midnight. They used to have a thing called
Closedown
, which was usually a photograph of something like ‘Sunset on the Norfolk Broads' with a bit of classical music over it. Then a voice-over would come on and say goodnight. The National Anthem was in there somewhere, as well, but I can't quite remember the sequence. Anyway, tonight,
Closedown
was a bit different. They showed a picture of Elvis, I think it was from the sleeve of
Greatest Hits Volume 4
, and they played him singing ‘You'll Never Walk Alone'. I never much cared for Elvis's version of this but I cried like a baby. The tears ran down my face and onto my jacket, the right sleeve of which was held on only by safety pins. That's my 1977.

If they'd shown a picture of my rabbit and played ‘Let's Twist Again', I think I would have had a breakdown.

I suppose that those of you who are paying attention will be wondering what happened in the second leg of the Division One play-off against Bolton. Fuck off.

In 1967, I was sitting in the classroom at St. Hubert's with my teacher trying to get me to think of a one-letter word. ‘Well,' she said, ‘who is the most important person in your world?' Obviously, she was hoping this line of questioning would eventually lead to me recognising ‘I' as a one-letter word. ‘Jeff Astle,' I said. Jeff Astle was Albion's star centre-forward of the time. What they now call an ‘old-fashioned centre-forward'. He was big, strong, aggressive, and the best header of a football I've ever seen. He wasn't just loved by the Albion fans, he was worshipped. In 1968, Albion got to the FA Cup Final. I couldn't get a ticket so I watched it on our twelve-inch black-and-white telly, with my dad, of course. Astle had scored in every round. In the third minute of extra time, he scored what was to be the winning goal in the final. I can still see the goal going in. Me and my dad went skyward, then I dropped to my knees and kissed Astle as he raised his arms in celebration on our small black-and-white screen. I felt the crackle of static electricity against my lips as the Albion fans sang (to the tune of that part of Camptown Races that's about going to sing all day etc), ‘Astle is our king. Astle is our king. The Brummie Road will sing this song, Astle is our king.' (The Brummie Road End is where Albion's most vociferous supporters tend to stand, or, nowadays, sit.)

Twenty-odd years later, I sat with Jeff Astle in a crowded mini-van in Portsmouth while a bunch of lads neither of us had met before sang a variation on the song, ‘Astle's in our van. Astle's in our van . . .', followed by, admittedly a less enthusiastic version of ‘Skinner's in our van . . .'. Now, how did that happen?

In the early nineties, David Baddiel and me were writing and hosting the TV show
Fantasy Football League.
The show included a pre-recorded segment called ‘Phoenix from the Flames', in which we did comic re-creations of great footballing moments, joined by the footballer who'd been involved in the original incident. We did that ‘did it cross the line?' goal from the 1966 World Cup Final with Geoff Hurst, Brazil winning the 1970 World Cup with Carlos Alberto, Coventry City's famous ‘donkey-kick' goal with Willie Carr, and so on. When the show was first commissioned, we sat down to compile a list of suitable football moments. I was dead keen to re-create a Jeff Astle goal, ever-so-slightly offside, against Leeds United that led to a massive pitch invasion back in the early seventies. I felt that the incident had comic potential, but my main priority was that I wanted to meet my boyhood hero. The filming was set up and Dave, a small film-crew and me turned up at Jeff's house in Burton-on-Trent.

‘Phoenix from the Flames' proved to be a very popular part of
Fantasy Football
, but not every footballer we worked with took naturally to the acting element of the job. One old Chelsea star greeted us at ten in the morning, already on his second can of cider, not a method that I could remember from the book
An Actor Prepares.
Dutch defender Ronald Koeman refused to dress as the Milky Bar kid because, as he put it, ‘I am not a Gazza', Billy Bremner said yes and then no, as did Paul Ince. The old Celtic player Tommy Gemmel nearly killed me when re-creating a foul of his on the German striker Helmut Haller, and then declared, ‘I've had a great day: a few hundred quid, free beer, and I got to kick an Englishman,' and the great Argentinian striker Mario Kempes took one look at the script and said, in surprisingly good English, ‘I won't do it. It is just shit.'

But Jeff Astle was a natural. As well as being a nice bloke, he had genuine comic timing and was incredibly keen to help, as was shown when he uttered a phrase that went straight into
Fantasy Football
folklore, ‘My wife'll be Gary Sprake.' I had met my hero and he'd come up trumps.

When the second series of
Fantasy Football
was commissioned, Dave and me thought it might be a nice idea to end with a song. We considered singing it ourselves, but decided that Dave and me singing a song could never really capture the public imagination.

Then I remembered something. Back in the early seventies I had bought a single on RCA Victor called ‘Sweet Water'. I bought it because the singer was Jeff Astle. Apparently, when Jeff was in the 1970 England World Cup squad, they all went off to record an album and after hearing the whole squad sing, Jeff was given lead vocal on several of the tracks. So what about closing the show with a section called ‘Jeff Astle Sings'? The idea was that, towards the end of the show, the doorbell would go and it would be Jeff, dressed in a series of ridiculous costumes, who would then sing a song.

Now, Jeff could sing, but he didn't actually seem to recognise any songs. We once asked him to sing Rod Stewart's ‘Sailing' and he said that he didn't know where we dragged these obscure songs up from. His lovely wife, Lorayne, would conduct Jeff from just behind the auto-cue, so he knew when to come in, and he would go for it. It was very funny, but only because Jeff was really trying to do a good job on the song. If he'd deliberately messed it up, it would have been rubbish. He was totally aware that the worse he was, the funnier it was, but he was always trying to prove he could sing really well. When he did, the audience roared encouragement. It became a crucial part of the show, Jeff would sing, and Dave and me would dance behind him.

When Eric Cantona, in an elaborate metaphor about media-attention, spoke of the seagulls following the trawler, we had Jeff come on dressed as a trawler, and we danced behind him holding up photos of Stephen Segal. (We were shameless.) Jeff is from Nottingham. (He always said that D.H. Lawrence had lived in the same street. From the sublime . . .) When an old lady who had been Jeff's next-door neighbour in that street wrote to us saying that she used to scrub his back when he was a baby, we wheeled Jeff on in a tin bath at the end of the show with that same woman scrubbing his back. In our now-established tradition of incongruity, Jeff sang ‘There's no business like show business'.

Through it all, Jeff was a real pro. At heart, he was a showman. He had milked the applause as an Albion player and he loved showing off on the telly. He began touring the midlands with his ‘Jeff Astle Roadshow', which included him singing, sometimes, alarmingly, done up as Tina Turner, telling gags, and doing a question-and-answer session. Audiences would vary between Albion fans to whom he had always been a cult-hero, and
Fantasy Football
fans to whom he had quickly become one. I know it was a success because my niece, Helen, went to see him and he charged her fifty pence for an autograph!

When Jeff retired from football, he started up an industrial window-cleaning business. When we went to his house to film that day, he had his company van on the drive. On the side it said, ‘Jeff Astle never misses the corners'. Up until
Fantasy Football
, non-Albion fans had known Jeff only as the bloke who had missed a sitter against Brazil in the 1970 World Cup. Suddenly, he'd become a TV star.

Hold that thought, I'm about to change the subject completely. I'm writing this in my tenth-floor two-bedroom flat in Birmingham. It's what I like to call Mirrorlands, because I bought it with the money I made from writing a weekly football column for the
Daily Mirror
, a few years ago. It's June 3rd, a sunny day, and in the distance I can hear a brass band playing in the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. As I write, they are banging out a chirpy, rom-pom-pom version of ‘Born Free'. No doubt, those bandsmen can see the smiling, appreciative faces of the assembled punters around the bandstand, but none of them could know that, half a mile away and a hundred feet from ground-level, their music is making me think of African tits and schoolboy hard-ons. I'm sure some of them would be appalled by this news. Still, on this occasion, where there's brass, there's muck.