Going on the Turn, page 7
Oh I know! I hear you. And I am currently bowing low to left and right in recognition of your awe-struck hosannas. Not all the links were so high-blown though, and Dennis Hopper was among the few stars who even bothered with the script. Most simply bounced on to the Wembley stage and immediately began screeching the only words they knew to say to a stadium full of people: ‘Whoo! How you doing out there?’ followed by a few more whoos and the occasional ‘Come on, give it up for Lady Diana!’ In front of them, I could see the autocue being desperately whizzed through in an attempt to find if I had actually written ‘You guys look amazing!’ fifteen times in a row.
It had been that sort of day. Working in a windowless room deep in the bowels of the venue, I had received an endless procession of managers, agents, publicists and stylists of the mainly American turns awaiting their half hour onstage. Without exception, they would say that their star wasn’t happy with their introduction so could I write something else. Something along the lines of, ‘Now welcome a totally unique and awesome genius who has sold more records than anyone, whose last tour played to over a hundred billion fans in Europe alone and whose new fragrance is so unbelievable everyone is losing their minds.’ I promise you that is not exaggerating some of the empty-headed claptrap suggested to me that day by what Chris Evans and I termed ‘the scribble’. (In general, on TFI we found even the biggest stars to be perfectly reasonable people, happy to muck in with a sketch or game if you asked them directly. Ask a member of the star’s ‘scribble’ first and even the lightest of requests was treated as though the Fate of Nations depended on it and they couldn’t possibly bother their Artist with such a difficult and exhausting enquiry.) The scribble from Kanye West, P. Diddy and Fergie all wanted to check exactly how many words other performers had in their introduction and, having tallied them, they would then request I make their act’s intro longer. This I would do; they would then thank me in that sing-song oily LA way that drips insincerity, and as soon as they went I would delete it and paste my original back. It was all tremendous fun.
My chief concern was Wendy and the kids. They were not allowed backstage – the security was understandably intense – and they’d been allocated rotten seats. I felt sure they must be finding the long day starting to drag come nightfall, particularly during some of the more operatic offerings. I had mistakenly believed my duties on the actual day of the show would be relatively light, but, as it turned out, I was not allowed to unplug my laptop until the final act, Elton John, left the stage and the crowds were streaming for the exits. Stuffing everything hurriedly into my bag, I put on my coat and made for the corridor. I had last checked in with my family around five hours ago, when we’d agreed that if I couldn’t get free again before this thing ended they should sit tight and I’d come and find them. Just as I was busting out of my anchorite’s cell, however, the royal equerry appeared in the doorway.
‘Danny, thank you so much for all your help today,’ he began, then proceeded to tell me what a success he felt the day had been. I made a few polite responses but inwardly was picturing Wendy still up in the stands, fuming in the belief that I was now swigging champagne from the bottle while hanging with my new pal Kanye. I began to try and edge past my effusive guest, but as I did so he said:
‘Anyway, look, we’re keeping this very low key, but the two princes would like to personally thank some of the people involved today and so we’re having a small reception upstairs in the suite. They have asked that you join them.’
Continuing to edge around him, I attempted to outline my predicament:
‘Now? Oh, do you know what, that’d be great, but I’ve got to shoot off.’
He looked stunned. ‘Shoot off?’ I remember him saying.
‘Yes, honestly, straight off. I’ll get slaughtered if I hang about, so could you say I had to go.’
He managed to utter the words ‘I see . . .’ before I squeezed out of the room and began a swift jog towards the main arena. As I did so, it hit me for the first time that his gentle invitation was probably nothing of the sort. I now realized it was more a subtle command of the type that probably influenced the way future MBEs got distributed. Most likely my name would have been on some carefully drawn-up list of those to be honoured with a personal meet-and-greet and, in turning it down like a bedspread, I may have thrown the whole machinery out of whack.
‘I am so sorry, your highnesses,’ I imagine he said to them as a string quartet played in the background, ‘but Mr Baker, our writer, has had to, um, “shoot off”. He did say, and I quote, “If I get a chance later, I’ll put me nut around the door to see if anyone’s still about.” It was most irregular. So now allow me to introduce the next cab off the rank; the Grand Exalted High Macha of Raspur . . .’
When I managed to make it back to everyone, I found I could, in fact, have nipped up for a quick one.
‘Oh,’ said Wend, ‘I thought you’d be ages yet!’
‘I could have been,’ I replied, ‘but I just blew out the future king of England.’
To be fair, I have absolutely no strong feelings one way or the other about the royals. Certainly not the immediate family, anyway, though a cull of all the earls, dukes and viscounts – or as Spud always called them ‘the lickers’ – seems well overdue.
On the way back from Wembley, Wendy asked if I had done the right thing in legging it. I said absolutely and she then asked if there was a famous person that I would have abandoned them all for. I knew of only one: David Bowie. If Bowie had asked me to go for a few drinks that night, it’s entirely likely that my wife and children would have still been sitting in row Z at Wembley Stadium as the crowd filed in for the first of the World Cup qualifiers two months later. Even though, as these books chronicle, I have met virtually every big name in show business over the last 40 years, from Tommy Cooper to Michael Jackson, from Bob Dylan to Kenneth Williams, I had to play the long game to meet finally Bowie. In truth, I never truly thought this particular sit-down would ever happen. Bowie, to me, was too mythical, too sensational, too much. However, one Friday afternoon in 1999, while half lost in reverie in a deserted west London room, I finally found myself sitting smack bang opposite the eternal Dame.
The Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys
By 1998, TFI Friday was such a hit fixture in the TV schedules that we no longer had to scramble to attract major guests. It was more a case of having to place anti-tank guns on our studio roof to keep them at bay. Everyone but everyone came through those doors during its stellar run until inevitably came the week when Suzi Aplin casually said during the Tuesday get-together that David Bowie had been confirmed for that coming Friday’s broadcast. The meeting probably went on for another hour after that, but I didn’t hear a word of it. Though seemingly listening attentively, in fact all I could hear was a voice, rather like when Gene Wilder goes nuts in The Producers, shouting: ‘I’m going to meet David Bowie! I am going to meet DAVID BOWIE!’ Up until that point, I had not met David Bowie – and spectacularly so. Let me explain.
My secondary school, West Greenwich Secondary Modern Boys, was a big old comprehensive close to Deptford High Street. Deptford High Street was, and to some extent remains, about as perfect an example of run-down inner-city life as even a location scout for the next Ray Winstone movie might dream about. Recently I came across a film made by the Children’s Film Foundation called Hide and Seek that was shot almost entirely in and around Deptford High Street in 1972, even including some shots of the house in Scawen Road that was to become my own home ten years down the line. The film starred a young Gary Kemp and I emailed Gary to tell him how, for me, every frame of Hide and Seek made Proust’s rotten madeleines suddenly seem such a piddling allusion. I explained that I was constantly pausing the gripping action – a thoroughly ripe yarn about local kids getting mixed up with some fake policeman and a missing twenty-pound note – to weep hot nostalgic tears at the vanished old street scene literally frozen in time. Did he know, for example, that the poorly painted swastika on the wall of the bomb site he got chased across was put there by a kid called Phillip Chapman who was in my class? (Swastikas were not uncommon graffiti in that pre-Banksy age. Invariably daubed by youngsters, they carried no intentional political message and were deceptively difficult to draw. Chapman’s effort was typical in that he had bent the front of it up when it should have gone down and vice versa at the back. Consequently, the thing looked like a lopsided, angular number eight. He had compounded the howler by writing ‘High Hitlar’ underneath it.) I further told Gary that, in all probability, I would have been just around the corner in school while he and his scripted chums were bringing the burglars to justice.
Brother Kemp, as loyal to North London as I am to South, replied that, while happy I was getting so much pleasure from this early entry into his oeuvre, his overriding memory of the shoot was having to constantly duck bottles and half-bricks aimed at him and his fellow actors by ‘hordes of local toughs’. ‘Don’t suppose you were among them, were you?’ he added as a PS. Well, the answer to that is absolutely not. I assured Gary that, in 1972, had I seen a film crew in Deptford, far from aiming rubble at the players, I would have been in among them, greasing away, asking the director whether there might not be an impromptu part for a local lad with authentic accent and a strong line in meaningful pauses. All references could be provided by anyone who had seen my Mad Hatter in the Rotherhithe (Junior Mixed) production of Alice in Wonderland (1967).
Anyway, should you ever see this film, described in the BFI brochure as ‘containing its fair share of fun’, you will see that the area in which my school was located did not look like the sort of place that in 1972 David Bowie, in the guise of his brand-new alter ego Ziggy Stardust, was going to be hanging around in, queuing for sausage rolls or waiting for a bus. I use these examples because queuing for sausage rolls and waiting for a bus were two of the things that the non-music-obsessed boys in my year claimed to have seen David Bowie doing when they related the sightings to Bernard Sibley and me, who happened to be the biggest Bowie fans in the school. ‘Oi, Baker,’ they would shout as they returned from spending their school dinner money (and other kids’ school dinner money) on fags and chips. ‘That weirdo bloke you like, he was in the chemist just now.’ Or maybe, ‘Dan. You keep missing that queer geezer – he was lining up in Broomfield’s the Baker’s with some other dropouts.’ Naturally, Bernard Sibley and I rose above such baiting and continued to pore over the lyrics to Bowie’s ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ in an effort to discern what he might have meant when he said, ‘Lay me place and bake me pie, I’m starving for me gravy.’
Quite often after school, Bernard and I would get the number 1 bus that, an hour later, decanted us into Charing Cross Road. From here we would go to Trident Recording Studios in Soho and stand outside in all weathers, hoping that this would be the night Bowie and his band would appear. They never did, although we once convinced ourselves we saw Rick Wakeman, who had been a longtime side man of David’s, get some sort of beverage from a half-hidden vending machine. Even this low-wattage sighting was denied us when later ‘Rick Wakeman’ exited Trident and turned out to be a blonde woman in a green silk blouse.
In the meantime, our giggling classmates kept up with the Bowie sightings that, somehow, we always seemed to miss. He was ‘sitting on the pavement by the chemist, strumming a guitar’. He was ‘going through old singles in the junk shop up the road’. He was ‘finishing some fish and chips down Greenwich High Road’. They always urged Bernard and me to move quickly lest we miss him. I am happy to say we never gave them the satisfaction and simply rewarded them with indulgent smiles.
So. Let us now fast-forward to 2010 and the publication of Kevin Cann’s exhaustive Any Day Now: David Bowie The London Years 1947–1974, for my money one of the truly indispensable Bowie books. This definitive work chronicles day-by-day exactly what David Bowie was doing and where David Bowie was for the first third of his life. It was when I arrived at the period during which Bowie was piecing together tours in support of Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust that the book fell from my hands and I began gasping for air like a stupefied skate just landed on the trawler. For I now know, thanks to Mr Cann’s tireless research, that David Bowie spent a great deal of 1971–72 at Underhill Rehearsal Studios, ‘beneath a chemist’s shop on Greenwich High Road at the foot of Blackheath Hill’. Or, to give you another contemporary map reference, about a hundred yards from West Greenwich Secondary Modern Boys School.
Four decades on, I learned the astounding truth. My thug-life chums were not guying us, teasing us, winding us up, or having a laugh. David Bowie really was ligging about outside. He was having his fish and chips. He was smoking a fag. He was queuing for his sausage roll. He was doing all these things about forty seconds’ walk away from where Bernard Sibley and I were freaking out in our moonage daydream, foppishly playing the homo superior to our tin-ear peers and refusing to fall for their ‘pranks’. On top of this, we would then get that fucking bus all that way to idiotically stand in the pissing rain in Soho playing a pointless game of peek-a-boo with women who were not Rick Wakeman.
In 1973, Bowie played the Lewisham Odeon, my local cinema, and something of a homecoming for a man who had spent a good part of his creative life ten minutes up the road in Beckenham. Bernard and I failed to secure tickets for this. The reason for that involves the naked treachery of a black-hearted ‘friend’ of mine called Russell Watson who to this day swears it was all a misunderstanding. On the night of the concert we arrived ultra early to see if, as a consolation, we could simply glimpse Bowie arriving. As we approached the stage door of the Odeon we heard the muffled thump of music coming from within, though it was only late afternoon and the venue’s doors weren’t due to open till a few hours hence. Getting as close to the building as we could, we discerned that this thump-thump-thump was a vocal-free version of ‘The Jean Genie’. It then stopped sharply. Now we could hear amplified voices going back and forth, though the conversation was not decipherable against the noise of the traffic at our backs. The song started up once more and a man emerged from some large metal gates about thirty yards away. He walked towards us.
‘Excuse me, do you work in there?’ I said, pointing directly at the Lewisham Odeon (there was an ice-cream van nearby and I didn’t want there to be any confusion about such an important query). The man said he did work in there.
‘Is that David Bowie we can hear?’ asked Bernard with trembling breath.
‘Yer, sound check,’ said the fellow, now striding past us. To be honest, neither my pal Sibley nor I knew what a sound check was, but we both cooed, ‘Oh sound check, right.’ Then, this bizarre individual who seemed to think nothing of leaving a place with David Bowie in it, delivered the killer blow: ‘If you’d been here ten minutes ago, you’d have seen him go in.’
Are you sensing a pattern here? Well, Bern and I remained where we were in the hope that Bowie would emerge. He didn’t. The hours went by and the crowds started arriving and the gig began and we were joined outside the Odeon by a hundred or so other unfortunates like us who hadn’t got tickets but couldn’t stay away. We listened as best we could to the whole concert, muffled, thudding and distorted as it boomed through the brickwork. When it was over, the streets became chaotic as masses of wild-eyed and hysterical Bowie fans poured out into the night and gathered around any door that looked like it might be his escape route. We held our ground right at the front of the crowd by the big doors we had been camped outside for nearly six hours and even when a rumour went around that Bowie might be going out through another exit on the other side of the building, we decided to stand firm where we were. Guess what? Bowie went out through that exit on the other side of the building. Even we started to see the grimly funny side of it. Bowie and the band had probably been popping in and out of that portal all day, may even have played football in the street or invited the few stragglers over there inside to share their sausage rolls and sing along at the sound check. The gods had decided that my meeting David Bowie was simply not to be.
And then, twenty-six years after Lewisham, here he was, coming to me.
I had a particular, and largely successful, modus operandi whenever TFI Friday welcomed a performer of great magnitude. Shortly after they arrived I would greet them irreverently while trying to incorporate a reference that would indicate we knew more about them than the usual headline. For example, when Paul McCartney did the show, he arrived very early because he wanted to rehearse a technical effect he had planned. This involved six or seven old-fashioned TV screens behind him that, when synced together live, showed Paul being his own backing band. When I got to the Riverside Studios that Friday he was already onstage, running through the various cues and prompts necessary for the tricky performance. I watched this from the darkness of the studio floor for a bit until there was a suitable short break in the work, and bellowed, ‘What’s all this? You should have turned it in after “Besame Mucho”.’
The mention of this obscure, cheesy number that the Beatles had discarded early on in their career and that had played some part in them getting famously turned down by Decca Records caused McCartney to throw back his head and laugh out loud.
Shielding his eyes against the spotlight, he peered at me. ‘Oh, it’s you!’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about you.’
This was another of those moments in my life when Gabriel could have floated down and gathered me to the Lord and I wouldn’t have complained. Still smiling at the idea, Paul then proceeded to sing the notorious old ballroom standard pretty much in its entirety. It sounded fine. Finishing with it, he looked down at his guitar and said, ‘That’s a good song actually . . .’
Leaving it a beat, I said, ‘No it’s not.’ He laughed again and I knew we’d be fine.
I employed this same device when Led Zeppelin came on. Barging into the dressing room in which both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were billeted, I looked from one to the other and with great joy cried, ‘Stone the crows – it’s Miki and Griff!’
