Stand well back - I might start breaking things.

Starting Sunday… It took me four and a half hours to get to Ashton-Under-Lyne, driving as fast as I could between Sunday drivers, stray trucks and the odd tractor pulling consignments of pre-processed peas through the Lincolnshire countryside. When I got to the club it was like one of those budget music shops – the ones that sell folk instruments, tutor books, little plastic busts of famous composers – you know the kind of shit. The place was full of cheap acoustic guitars. It seemed there were two support acts.
I got my soundcheck over as quick as I could, and having failed to strike up any rapport with the middle-aged woman who was doing one of the other acts merchandising (I half hoped she could keep an eye on my stuff while I played), I repaired to the Chinese restaurant opposite.
It was called Elvis Palace, and inside the walls were covered with framed pictures of Elvis Presley, interspersed with big colour photos of a Chinese Elvis impersonator. I can imagine that the owner was a fan, and may have actually been the Elvis impersonator himself – not that there was anybody in evidence who looked remotely like Elvis Presley. I was served by an inscrutable Chinese lad with a Manchester accent. You don’t really want to know what I had – I’m trying to forget it myself, it was a sort of duck in MSG sauce effort accompanied by plain rice with grey bits in it.
There were disco lights on the ceiling trained on a couple of mirror balls, and there were steps up to a mezzanine level flanked by cheap PA speakers. I could imagine the Elvis impersonating proprietor gyrating down these steps in full Las Vegas attire and wowing the clientale. But not tonight – I was the only customer. My eye was drawn to the carpet, one of those hard-wearing red Wilton or Axminster efforts, with a repeated motif. It said ‘Adams Tandoori’.

Back at the venue the first support act was on. I slunk into the dressing room, a blue-painted ice box lit by a fluorescent striplight and containing a couple of old beer fridges, a stainless steel kitchen sink, a purple vinyl-covered seating unit and some sheets of plywood. It was fucking freezing. I found a gravy-stained blow heater and turned it on full. One of the beer fridges contained a bottle of mineral water, three bottles of beer, a carton of ‘Apple Drink’ and a plate of spam sandwiches made with a white bap. I think it was my rider. I extracted the bottle of water and shut the door on the rest. There was a kettle but no teabags or milk which was a shame because I could have done with a cup of tea having driven all that way and everything. I dare say I could have got some from the bar but I didn’t want to walk through the audience with people staring at me, and for that same reason, later on I pissed in the sink.
And meanwhile the support acts ground along. It’s nothing personal – They were all very nice Lancashire lads – well, Lancashire lads grown old really. The evening was developing a real carpet slippers and Radio Times vibe. It was all a bit too comfy and I could tell that the audience weren’t, for the most part, all that interested. Songs about roadies and guitar players in the Tameside area in the seventies and a song we haven’t yet recorded because we never play it the same twice – every song came in a package with an introductory preamble that told you what it was about - and it wasn’t just one band doing this – there were two bands that sounded almost identical, lame with a veneer of professionalism, or shall we make that accomplishedness.
Like I say – it’s nothing personal, it’s just that I wished they’d all fuck off because, from where I was in the dressing room, all I could hear was my audience being bored and worn out before I got to them. The second band even had a five minute gap in between the first and second number while one of them failed to figure out that he’d got his first string caught under the frets of his cheap acoustic. They asked the audience to bear with them and be patient because they hadn’t played together for seventeen months. Not the audience’s problem. I wouldn’t be so caustic about all this but somewhere near the end of my set one of the bands marched down to the front and set about collecting up their gear. They made a pointed exit. I could tell, after thirty years of doing this sort of thing, that it had more than a hint of the amateur musicians reposte: and you’re supposed to be the professional? – which is the music scene version of the cunt that looks at the Turner Prize and says that his ten year old daughter could do better.
I was looking forward to this gig but in the end I feel that I couldn’t get it into focus – I felt that the audience were past their best having been subjected to at least twice as much support act as is ever really neccesary. And the same went for me too. It went OK, but it could have been a lot better.
On the way up I listened to the new Joe Strummer album three times and felt really inspired. I bought it on Saturday and haven’t stopped playing it. Every home should have one. I played it twice more on the way home. I left the venue at about midnight having played right up to closing time - I’ve been making records for twenty six years so I think a longer set, like an hour and twenty minutes is in order. I just wish I was always given the space and conditions to do this – it’s called value for money - and it’s what keeps audiences coming back.
I got home at half past four which wasn’t bad considering that I did half the journey behind nocturnal cattle trucks in thick fog. I had a good solid four hours sleep punctuated by phone calls to do with the Southend gig that night. I could have unplugged the phone but I was tired so I forgot.
Karen came with me to Southend. We set off at about three, taking it very easy – more in the spirit of an outing than a gig. I had to do two numbers with the Blockheads and that was it. It was billed as a celebration of the music of Essex – I don’t know quite how I fit into that coming from Sussex, but I suppose it’s got sex in it, I’ve taken drugs and I know a bit about rock ‘n’ roll, so that’s all right. There was a suggestion that I could do Whole Wide World but I don’t think that’s very Essex and also I don’t think it suits the Blockheads style so I suggested Razzle In My Pocket, the B side of Essex & Drugs & Rock & Roll as it had been re-christened for the night. I thought it was ideal – In my yellow jersey I went out on the nick – South Street, Romford, shopping arcade ...
The Blockheads didn’t know it – they didn’t actually play on it – just Chaz with Ian on the drums. Chaz had no recollection of it whatsoever so it fell to me to supply a copy on CD. I had to dub it off the original vinyl and convert it into digital format in the computer using Cubase and then burn it to CD. It was a lot of effort. Karen helped me to do it on Sunday before I set off for Ashton-Under-Lyne. In the event Johnny Turnbull didn’t want to play it – he didn’t think it would work, but the others over-ruled him. They learnt it very quickly. I suggested they played it like the Shadows, recalling a story of Chaz playing at a tennis club when he was sixteen. It seemed to make sense. I think it went well on the night but I don’t think Digital 6 are going to use it in the broadcast. They need the space for the less Essexian but much more crowd pleasing numbers like Sweet Gene Vincent (very well performed by Phill Jupitus) and Clevor Trever which of course I did.
Before the show a team from Digital 6 collared me for an interview. They were appalled by the squalor of the upstairs room where the interviews took place. But these are my normal on the road surroundings – a car that I haven’t had time to clean out for weeks, motorway services (I dealt with them in one of last month’s rants), clubs where the carpet sticks to your feet, dressing rooms containing old foam sofas that nobody wants anymore, mud and shit-stained red and yellow beer crates, old chewing gum, spilled beer and cigarette ends, and the constant graffitti – I don’t know who writes all this shit but I have an impression that it’s done by laddish support acts and failing, reformed third generation punk bands. I could do a PhD in the study of badly drawn cocks and balls. I have never written on a dressing room wall in my life - except for a quick note to Alan Clayson who was playing the same club the next night sometime in 1978 – and I used a pencil so that he could rub it out. It seemed I wasn’t being paid for the Southend job – that is, Digital 6 were paying me for the broadcast – a straightforward hundred and twenty-three pounds or something. But as far as the actual gig was concerned I’d somehow slipped through the net. The Blockheads didn’t book me so I wasn’t in for a share of their fee and Digital 6 had nothing to do with the club booking so they just gave the promoter my number so that he could organise something with me. Nobody got in touch and nothing was mentioned though I was used extensively in the club’s advertising – an evening of Essex & Drugs & Rock & Roll presented by Phill Jupitus featuring The Blockheads, Billy Bragg & Wreckless Eric. The admission price was sixteen quid. The capacity of the club is three hundred people. The gig was sold out. That makes a gross door take of four thousand eight hundred pounds. I helped to generate that revenue but nobody wanted to talk about a fee.
I took it up with the Digital 6 producer, a nice man called John Pearson. He was appalled and promised to take it up. Yesterday I received an email from him enclosing an email from the promoter:

It was indeed a fantastic night, I know Billy and the boys loved it as did
the crowd and all involved, I can't thank you enough, it was a great idea!
I have £50 sitting hear for Eric, unfortunately he disappeared on the night,
I will give him a ring and post it to him.

It’s great to know you’re worth something.

Got home at about half past three, had a quick six or seven hours sleep and set off for London where I was recording a bit for a Christmas show at Digital 6 with Liz Kershaw. This time I went by train and Karen came along to keep me company. It involved a drive to the station because I live three or four miles out of town and you can’t rely on the buses round here. A taxi would cost seven pounds each way so parking in the city centre at round about six quid is a cheaper but less eco-friendly option.
We didn’t have time for breakfast and I hadn’t got anything in anyway, so we had to get a baguette from the shitty Uppercrust, a kind of half-sister-in-cancer to the Little Chef, but for train travellers. That cost about eight quid and then another two and a half quid for a couple of cups of tea on the train which come in kit form – a plastic cup of hot water and a tea bag with a kind of foil handle so that you can waft it around in the water before slopping it down on the formica table. Anglia Railways are going for a homespun image – I wish they’d fuck off with it. They sponsor art you know. Me and Karen did one of their projects last year – we got fuck-all money and they told us not to film their stations. The project was run by a couple of amateur fuck-wits and resulted in a totally pointless exhibition in a corridor at a local theatre. But that’s by the way. What I’m trying to say is that it all costs a fortune and you don’t get value for money. Or choice. Or service.

And I’m trying to tell you what my life is like doing all this stuff. I’m not whingeing about it - I get fucking angry sometimes. People tell me I should have more self-belief, more self-confidence, more self-esteem. I’ve been a professional musician for twenty-six years, working, for the most part, in entirely shitty conditions. I’m a recovering alcoholic and I haven’t had a drink for over eighteen years. Don’t ever question my self-belief.
I get very fucking tired of people coming up to me after gigs like this one with the Blockheads and telling me, with a slight look of surprise, how good I was.

YES – I’M VERY FUCKING GOOD – I WOULDN’T STILL BE DOING IT AFTER ALL THIS TIME IF I WASN’T.

Thanks to everybody for your support, co-operation and understanding.

With love

Eric X

December 14th
I’ve just found out that the Google search engine has been directing people to the old site which is still in existence in an obscure corner of the world-wide web. People were complaining that the site hadn’t been updated since October 19th and I heard tales of another site very much like mine – well, it was mine. I think the internet is haunted.

I was wrong about Clevor Trever – Digital 6 broadcast the Southend gig on Thursday night and used Razzle In My Pocket. It sounded like Kilburn & The Highroads, except with me singing.

The Doctor’s Tonic in Welwyn Garden City was indeed something of a tonic. I’ve done something weird to my back – you know the kind of thing – turned round too quickly and stretched something. I’ve been in agony since Wednesday. It feels as though someone has taken a hammer to it. Before the gig we went to the Pizza Hut. We were shown to a table in a corner next to a big window looking out over the town centre shrubbery. The streets were just like any other town on a Friday night – scattered with blokes, naked under their Ben Shermans, looking for some hard action.

The service in the Pizza Hut was pathetic. We sat there for fifteen minutes before anyone came to take the order and waited another twenty for it to arrive. I don’t blame the staff – why should they bother – they probably get paid fuck all and the person in charge only gets slightly more. There’s no pride in the job. Pizza Hut must surely use the cheapest, shittiest ingredients they can get away with in order to keep the overheads down and maximise the profits, and at no benefit to anybody in the communities in which they operate. Karen and I started talking about the abolition of franchises. Franchises are fucking this country – Pizza Hut, Burger King, MacDonalds, Starbucks, Costa, Nero, Little Chef, Uppercrust… You pay a lot but the product and service are abysmal. When did you ever walk into one of these places and find all the tables cleared or get exactly what you wanted without waiting forever? When did you ever eat anything out of these places that didn’t taste as though it came out of a food version of the Argos Catalogue?

In Norwich there’s an independent sandwich shop and café called Togo. I much prefer to go there, it’s better all round and it’s cheaper. But I wonder how long it can survive in the face of opposition from Starbucks, Nero and Costa who can afford to buy up premium sites in the city centre. The people who work in those places are little more the drudges and the customers are suckers.

Anyway, back in Welwyn Garden City we would have liked to have eaten in a basic, independently run Italian restaurant but we couldn’t find one so I’m afraid we got suckered in, and now here I am trying to salve my conscience, trying to pass it off as research.

The Doctor’s Tonic was like everything else in Welwyn Garden City, modern. I like the place more and more every time I go there. The very modernity of the place lends it, for me at any rate, an old fashioned air. Welwyn G C was built in the sixties – a long time ago but I remember the sixties very well – I remember when it was all new, an end to post-war austerity. I recall a news item on the Home Service (BBC Radio 4 as it became) in 1966 – Welwyn Garden City, one of the country’s first New Towns, was a hotbed of drug-taking. The teenagers were all on something. They were interviewed by a reporter who asked why they took drugs:

‘Because they turn you on.’

‘Because there’s nothing to do round here.’

Just like where I lived, the uncelebrated new town of Peacehaven. But we were so uncosmopolitan that we didn’t even have a drug problem. It took most of the seventies for Peacehaven to get up to speed on that.

They’ve got the Doctor’s Tonic now, but there are four burly bouncers in shiny black windcheaters and suit trousers standing round the door to make sure that no drug dealers get in. The downstairs is all Hip Hop Nights, Karaoke Nights, Quiz Nights, everything an ageing new town could need as an accompaniment to getting off its face, but if you turn right inside the front door and climb the stairs you’ll enter a different world.

It looks like a function room - matching carpet, curtains and upholstery. Stud walls and magnolia paintwork with a little bar in the corner. It looked like a set for a 1970’s Play For Today.

There were two supports, Tom Stallard and The Bush The Tree & Me. We missed Tom Stallard because of the Pizza Hut I’m afraid, but we were back in time for The Bush The Tree & Me, two girls, one singing the other playing acoustic guitar, and a bloke called Bob, a really good acoustic guitar player who I remember supporting me at the Horn in St Albans the other month. It was difficult to hear because they weren’t very loud and a crowd of beery regulars kept up an inane chatter about cars and suchlike all the way through their set. But the people at the front who were refreshingly young were into it.

I enjoyed my set immensely, and so did everybody else. I went through my usual agonies and insecurities about whether what I’m doing is right, relevant or any good – hoping that I was getting through. But the sound was right, the communication was good, and I found myself playing really well. Even the blokes at the back shut up and listened. Because of the other acts I got to play to a younger audience who perhaps wouldn’t normally have come to see me. They liked me and I was thrilled to bits. And my back even stopped hurting for a while. I’ll stop now before I launch into one of those you’ve made an old man very happy scenarios.

On Saturday I did an hour long show, the Hello Goodbye Show hosted by Dexter Bentley on Resonance FM, a community radio station in London’s bustling Denmark Street. I did a couple of readings from the book, they played Whole Wide World, Sign Of The Chicken and Comedy Time from the Len Bright Combo CD, we talked about punk and stuff like that and I played two of my new songs live, Same and Local. I got a very nice email from them yesterday – excuse my brief moment of vanity:

dear eric,

just wanted to once again repeat our thanks for helping to make what we deXters have duly agreed upon as being the best 'hello goodbye' show so far...

'same' & 'local' are classic and I think that when you are performing there's enough fire in your belly to power an entire Norfolk village, cheers for keeping us warm!

'til next time, Richard

dB

tune in to hello goodbye with deXter Bentley

every saturday from noon to one on resonance 104.4fm or online at www.resonancefm.com

for more info on deXter Bentley's un-hip pop activities visit www.dexterbentley.com

Dexter Bentley are a group too. Dexter is Richard the singer’s middle name – he told me his dad was a jazz musician and he got his middle name in honour of Dexter Gordon. He’s got a great voice, something that Karen first noticed at the radio station. They gave us a CD with a picture of a teabag on the cover which we like a lot - not just the teabag, the music too. I’m not going to describe it because I’ll only help to tip them into a category and categories are one of my big problems – which brings me on to:

Sunday night with John Otway at the Boardwalk in Sheffield. A friend of mine in London told me he didn’t think I should do gigs with Otway because people who haven't seen me play assume I’ll be like Otway – they think I’ll be funny and slapstick, unable to play very well, and just take the piss out of myself. And that’s not what I do. My shows are funny but they’re also very serious and I have great musical moments. I can laugh at myself, and frequently do, but it isn’t the basis of my gig. I don’t do cover versions (except occasionally) and I put a lot of newer material into the set. I’m not putting Otway down at all – it’s just that I don’t want to be shoved into a category with him or anybody else. I like him a lot and his videos make me laugh. It’s been great doing a couple of gigs with him – amazingly his audience seem to have taken to me. Otway is almost a religion to a lot of these people so I was quite nervous. I worried about the silence while I was playing – it took a while to realise that they were actually listening and that it wasn’t a grim silence of disapproval.

I’ve just found out that I’ve got a page in Mojo magazine and The Independent On Sunday have included my book in their round-up of the best books of the year. I suppose this is something I’ve got in common with John Otway – mine is indeed A Dysfunctional Success.

I’d like to thank Chris and everybody at the Boardwalk, and also Grae and everybody who helped put on Friday’s gig at The Doctor’s Tonic. These are some of the good guys. Tomorrow night it’s the 12 Bar Club which will be my last gig before Christmas. After that I’m back to recording the album.