The Living Years (20 page)

But what we didn’t know was whether Phil would carry on with Pete’s surreal, ghostly stories. He was always more worried about the chat between songs than the singing. So much so that on that first night in Ontario he’d written out pages of A4 notes, reminders of what he was going to say, which I could hear rattling in his hand as he went up to the microphone to say good evening.

I’ll always hold that image in my mind: Phil in his T-shirt and long beard and his shaking hand. It was a surreal moment, looking at him in front of me and not having Pete there. An odd moment for everyone. But then you got past it and I can still remember the feeling, after we’d played the first couple of songs, that it was going to be okay. And it was. After that first night he just made up banter as he went along and everybody loved it.

Phil’s chat helped us. It lightened the atmosphere between some of our moodier, darker songs. Pete was mysterious and untouchable on stage, which was great, but Phil was always the bloke-next-door to whom you could relate. With Pete’s theatrics we never quite knew where we were going. Now the emphasis seemed to be back on the music and us as musicians. Compared to
The Lamb
, I certainly felt a bit more confident on stage now – not that, besides the standing up, anyone watching would have noticed. From now on I would start feeling more comfortable inside myself, more sure of who I was, and my only regret was that I would never again play a whole show with Phil on drums. No one could play drums like Phil – he’d play for the song, not for himself – and I missed that to the end. From the drumming point of view, it was never quite the same again live.

* * *

When I split up with Debbie ‘the dancer’ (who happened to be a very good one) my thoughts once again went back to Angie. I was starting to get worried. She was now living with an annoyingly good-looking guy and seemed quite smitten. Fortunately, they had a volatile relationship, so when I saw her after there’d been a blazing row I suggested she come to America with me for a couple of weeks to think things through. To my surprise she agreed. Her boyfriend even dropped her off at my flat. He seemed to be cool about the whole thing, realizing that we were just platonic friends. (My long term plan belonged to me.) I was trying not to feel insulted that he didn’t even see me as some red-blooded rival.

We arrived in Dallas for band rehearsals and checked into the hotel for two weeks. I still didn’t feel it was the moment to tell Angie how I felt, and we slept in separate beds. For whatever reason Angie decided not to go home. She hadn’t mentioned the boyfriend and stayed with me as we flew up to Canada to begin the tour. I would have thought it would be a difficult transition from ‘friend’ to ‘lover’ but somehow it just seemed right one night when we were in New York. (Admittedly we’d been to a party thrown by Andy Warhol and were both a bit smashed, and our barriers were down.) We finally started sharing the same bed, but unlike Earl’s Court this time it was together. Nothing had ever felt so right.

* * *

Dad never did give me any advice about relationships. I’m not sure how he discovered the facts of life but he was obviously still in the dark as a ten-year-old when his father took him to see a musical hall performance at the London Empire:

as we made our way from the dress circle for my interval ginger pop, we crossed the famous promenade behind the circle. I saw many beautiful ladies, exquisitely dressed and usually moving about in pairs. When I asked who they were, my father said that they were on holiday. In later years I realized that they were, professionally, very much on the job.

My father always impressed on me the importance of treating women well: always being polite, always pulling out chairs. He was naturally chivalrous, to the extent that during the war uniformed Wrens seem to have been a bit of a shock to him:

I found it odd to be called Sir and have doors opened for me by girls whom I should rightly have been partnering on the tennis court or squiring to dances.

Having said that, he’d always liked my mother’s independent spirit. And fortitude. She was:

one of the few people I know to be totally unaffected by a ship’s motion however violent. On many occasions in passenger vessels, with the ship standing on her head in rough weather, she was the only person in the saloon at breakfast, leg hooked round the table and ploughing through porridge, fish and eggs, while even the experienced stewards looked a bit wan.

Dad loved a pretty girl and he adored Angie. At family functions he would always seek her out. Angie got my father’s dry sense of humour, too. In marrying her I think that Dad thought that I was doing something the right and proper way for once, and I know that he and Mum both enjoyed our wedding in 1976.

I had asked Tony Smith to be best man at my wedding. As our manager he lived the same life as we did in the band and if there was a problem we’d always confide in him first before each other. We would always hope that Smith would be able to find a solution and normally he did. He didn’t strike me as being the perfect person to organize a stag party, though, but I couldn’t see Tony or Phil being up for the best-man role either. As it turns out Smith wasn’t as hopeless as I had feared.

Apparently I spent the night before the wedding at a bar called the Speakeasy, drinking Southern Comfort. I got so drunk I couldn’t get the key in the door and ended up slumped on the doorstep until Angie found me the next morning.

I should have realized that the Egyptian honeymoon might not have been as romantic as I’d hoped when I secretly booked the holiday. (
Death on the Nile
hadn’t even been shot in Luxor at this point.) The Savoy Hotel didn’t live up to its name as we climbed the fire-exit steps to our room, which smelt dank and damp. The single rusty, wrought iron beds with the lumpy looking mattresses didn’t look very appealing either. As for the en suite, the loo was a hole in the floor with an overhead shower. I realised if I didn’t take urgent action this marriage might never be consummated. After frantic calls home to our tour travel agent we booked into the Winter Palace Hotel, which had been ‘full up’. They now managed to give us the most magnificent suite overlooking the Nile. Things were looking up, and I booked a romantic fishing-boat experience down the Nile that evening. We’d catch our own fish and have them cooked in front of us as the sun set. Angie ended up with dysentery. Her view, for the rest of the holiday, was the black-and-white-tile floor in the bathroom. Meanwhile, I was walking around the streets of Luxor in the long kaftan I’d bought in the souk, open toe sandals, my long hair and beard. I thought I was being followed because they hadn’t seen many tourists before. When the name Jesus was being banded about I then realized I had my very own disciples. Mum knew it was only a matter of time.

* * *

Getting married was one landmark, buying my first house was another. It was in Courtnell Street in Notting Hill Gate, which wasn’t the area it is now. Courtnell Street itself was okay but the street behind it was a war zone for local drug dealers. I had £4,000 in the bank and got a mortgage – God knows how – for £25,000.

More than anything else I had achieved, it was buying a house that impressed Dad. He hadn’t owned a house until he was fifty and a father of two: I was twenty-seven. For my parents it validated their support and I think it was also a relief to them in terms of the innuendo that they’d had to take from aunts and cousins: ‘Poor Mikey, what a shame after that education.’ ‘When’s Mike going to get a proper job?’ My parents would always defend me, ‘Oh no, he’s artistic’, but I think they had to be quite strong to keep up the impression that they weren’t bothered.

I think Dad was also proud about my ability to do little things around the house like change a fuse. For all his engineering training he could just about change a light bulb but change a plug? No chance. Domestic life was another world to him. When Mum, Nicky and I used to stay at Morris Lodge while Dad was still working at Hawker Siddeley, Mum would always leave him a list of instructions: get the coal in (a job we all hated); feed the dog (the dog got proper meat, never canned and, being a spaniel, would always get its ears pegged behind its head with a clothes peg before it ate to stop them getting in the gravy). We came back after one holiday and Dad told us that he’d been getting his dinner and the dog’s one night and realized it’d been a toss-up which one looked most appetizing.

After a life in official quarters being attended to by a batman, household chores must have been quite bizarre for my father. Neither he nor my mother ever really got into domestic life: both of their homes, Far Hills and Hill Cottage, stayed exactly as they were when they moved in. ‘Homes’ isn’t even the right word: wherever they lived, there was always a sense of transience about the place. Maybe that’s why one of my first jobs after we’d moved into Courtnell Street was to repaint. I knew Angie and I wouldn’t be there forever but I was still going to make it ours.

1977 was the year of punk: it was everywhere. Or it was supposed to be. When you’re on tour for seven months out of twelve – as we were that year – quite a lot things pass you by. As far as I was concerned punk was one of those things: I didn’t feel I was really around for it.

Phil’s line about punk was always ‘shaking the tree’: seeing which old bands dropped off and disappeared when you gave them a bit of a shove. Inasmuch as it affected me, I felt the same. I knew punk was in part a reaction to bands like us – the big and grand – and I did like the DIY ethos it brought back. It reminded me of how we’d started in Brian Roberts’s attic in the Easter holidays. But I also felt that if you were good enough, what had you got to worry about? And I felt we were good enough. Plus I liked what we were doing as a band.

Wind & Wuthering
was recorded in three weeks while we were staying in a little dormer-windowed house in the Netherlands. This house was in the middle of nowhere and we’d have breakfast in the morning, drive the fifteen minutes to the Relight Studio, shut the door and come out at midnight, by which time the few bars there were had closed. You can get a lot done in three weeks when it’s like that.

I’d read
Wuthering Heights
at school and I’d always enjoyed English as a subject, but I was too busy resenting Charterhouse to really take it in. Tony was the fan and
Wind & Wuthering
is one of his favourite albums: it’s a very feminine album and to me it also felt a bit like treading water after the excitement and challenge of proving ourselves with
A Trick of the Tail
.

There were highlights: ‘Blood on the Rooftops’, which Phil wrote with Steve, was one of Steve’s best songs, and ‘Afterglow’, which was Tony’s, was a big highpoint on stage. We’d have a huge arc of magenta lights behind the drum riser going out into the crowd.

My main contributions were ‘Your Own Special Way’ and ‘Eleventh Earl of Mar’, which began with some quite grandiose chords that had given me an image of the Scottish highlands. The lyrics were inspired by a story I’d found about a near uprising among the old Scottish clans.

I knew we’d suffer a bit lyrically without Pete. When you were writing words you’d often be tied by the music to a certain area – but both Tony and I still tended to gravitate towards science-fiction and fantasy-type stories and didn’t have the edge of reality that Pete always had. Even when he was at his most quirky, there’d be a harder edge to Pete’s lyrics and he’d ground them more in human life and human emotions.

My lyrics mostly fell somewhere between those of Phil and Tony: Phil’s were very simple and Tony’s were . . . complicated. Tony never did understand how to make words flow. His words are the reason why he’ll never write a hit single, although sometimes you have to admire his bravery: he’s the only person who could ever get away with writing a lyric about double glazing and nylon sheets and have Phil make it work.

But at the time we didn’t really allow ourselves to have any of these thoughts: it would have been too depressing. Neither Tony nor I look back very often – we both tend to operate in the now. And as the years went by we got better at lyric writing too, although long after we were able to be more honest about the quality of each other’s songwriting, we still wouldn’t comment on the words. We probably should have done, but it was one area where we were all still a little too sensitive.

‘Your Own Special Way’, which was a love song to Angie, had a simple, straightforward lyric and was a bit of an emotional breakthrough for me.
Rolling Stone
even called it ‘a first-rate pop song’, but then they never did like us. In 1971 they’d called us a ‘new contender for the coveted British weirdo-rock championship’ and, five years later, I still didn’t particularly enjoy being condescended to by them.

Reviews and the music press in general changed with punk: that was one of the effects it was impossible to miss. When we’d first begun it was quite a friendly scene. The papers might ignore you but they didn’t really knock you: there was too much good that was going on with English music at the time for them to feel the need. But with punk the
NME
in particular got very angry and aggressive.

I never believe people who say, ‘I don’t care about the reviews.’ Of course they care. We all want to be loved, it’s human nature. But it was Phil who took our press most seriously. He’d ring up journalists sometimes and defend himself, which I always told him was the one thing you should never do.

However, reviews always mattered less to me than what was happening in the real world. There was one journalist in Toronto who hated us. For years he gave us bad reviews, but the worse they got the bigger we became. That’s what I loved about live music: the reaction and feedback from the crowd was spontaneous and natural.

The fact that our success came through live work was one of the things which made us different from the bands that came afterwards. We were popular not because we’d had a hit single (we hadn’t, really) or because we’d been on MTV (which didn’t exist yet) but because our small cult audience had now become a big cult audience. As soon as we got famous, the initial small cult then felt left behind – as always happens – but the vast majority of the following we’d built weren’t going to go away whatever we did.