Some sort of biography

I know I should play the game but I don't want to. I know how it works - you click on the snazzy button that says biography and straight away you've got a potted history of me that you can use to write your article or base your interview questions on. You whiz through it and on the day you can ask:
    How many years have you been in the music business?
    And you'll be secure in the knowledge that I'll reply:
    N'er orn fordy-seben yerr cum Lamastide squire.
Except if you decide to cast me as a chirpy but loveable Cockney Rogue, and then you'll have to add Cor blimey to the front of the answer and possibly replace Squire with Guv'nor or the even more ghastly mate.
I don’t want to play the game because, for the most part, I hate the music business – I refuse to call it the industry because for most of us it will never be anything approaching that, just a thing of minority interest acted out in basements, living rooms and dirty clubs, a million light years from the world that contains Robbie Williams, Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, and all those boy bands who will probably grow up to be cashiers in the petrol stations where I stop to fill up on the way home from my gigs.

If playing the game means writing another crap biography – the story of my life in three easy-to-read disposable sentences – you can count me out. Every so often I fall into the trap and end up talking to someone stupid, usually a junior reporter from a local newspaper. I was interviewed by one just the other day. He’d heard that I once lived locally so his first question was which street did I used to live in. So we'd immediately arrived at an impasse because I didn’t consider it relevent so I wouldn't tell him. I tried talking about the group I was in when I lived there (the Len Bright Combo – it was Chatham) but he’d never heard of us. I don’t think he’d ever heard of me either so there wasn’t much point to any of it. If only he could have read my biography – then he could have asked if I ever saw my old mates from the Stiff days. And I could have told him that I didn’t have any mates – I was Billy No-Mates. By the end of the Stiff fiasco I didn’t have a friend in the world.
Not that I’m complaining. Or bitter. Of course I’m not fucking bitter. I used to say I wasn’t when I was, because I thought it would make me appear noble in some silly way. Then one day I decided I’d had more than enough of being noble and gave myself up to bitterness. I immediately started to feel better. I can still get pissed off with it but that involves getting pissed off with myself, or who I was back then, and that wouldn’t do. I’d prefer to be proud of the things I did achieve. I’m alive, I’m together and I’ve stood the test of time. And I’m here to enjoy it. Ian Dury used to say about Stiff Records: they’re pissing your talent down the drain. He was absolutely right and I once thought that I hadn’t got any left. But I was wrong.

So what can I tell you - I lived in France for nine years (1989 - 1998) - I went to Art School in the early seventies where I studied Fine Art (Painting & Sculpture) - (no I don't) - I made my first record in 1976 for Stiff Records - I toured all over the place (UK, Europe, America, New Zealand, Australia) and just on the points of busting through into the real bigtime I got sort of pissed off, jacked it in and pursued a career as a full time alcoholic. I signed to Go! Discs with a group called Captains Of Industry which included two of the Blockheads. I fucked that up but finally got my drink problem under control and formed the Len Bright Combo. From that point on all my records have been home made except for a version of Clevor Trever that I recorded with the Blockheads in a proper grown-up studio - it it sat very nicely alongside Paul McCartney's Partial To Your Abracadabra and the ubiquitous Robbie Williams and his shit-drenched version of Sweet Gene Vincent (no disrespect to The Blockheads). Oh - and I've written a book. It's called A Dysfunctional Success published by The Do Not Press. You can find out all about it by clicking round about

here

I released my album, Bungalow Hi, on my very own Southern Domestic label (distributed by Shellshock). And after I've got over the shock of writing my first book I'll probably write another.