I wrote this one in the middle of the first Stiff Tour (that's the one with Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Larry Wallis, Dave Edmunds etc). The paranoia level was running high. Suddenly we were all famous, or of interest or whatever. I was really just a rustic, a small town hick who'd been to art school. I probably thought I knew it all but I was really quite naive when it came to the ways in which people behave.
At times, after the shows, I was surrounded by fans, by creeps, by people who wanted something from me. They wanted me to say something funny, they wanted personal details, personal effects, a badge, a ring off my finger, the buttons off my shirt. I felt as though people were hanging on my every mundane utterance in case I said something cosmic. I didn't like it.
I saw my friend Ian change before my eyes. Surrounding himself with sycophants. One night, in a hotel bar in God knows what town somewhere in England, he was holding court with a collection of middle-aged bores. He called me over and demanded that I either sing something, say something or do something funny for these people. I reached for a handy vase of lilies and tipped them over his head. I stormed off to my room. I was just about to kick the TV screen in when Dave Robinson burst through the door, took a dive and grabbed my foot thus depriving me of what might have been a great, if slightly pathetic, rock'n'roll moment. I suppose I would only have had to pay the bill. There probably wasn't enough money to pay for any more damage - a few days before in Liverpool I'd seen Dave Edmunds take the door of a hotel room clean off its hinges and smash it into fragments. In Bristol, after the third night, a large, glass topped occasional table covered with drinks was thrown across the foyer of the Holiday Inn. In Glasgow Davey Payne threw the entire breakfast table across the hotel restaurant because they wouldn't give him a second cup of tea or some such nonsense. I shared a room with him. The first I knew of it was when Davey came back looking flustered and furious. Then there was a knock at the door and the room was full of burly Glaswegian men who assisted us in our packing and kicked us into the lift and out onto the pavement.
This is all beside the point when it comes to Brain Thieves but it's probably more interesting - never before has there been such a candid behind the scenes peek at the first Stiff tour. I'd better stop now before I get in trouble. We made a pact, I'm sworn to secrecy.