New Year’s Eve, the biggest paying gig of the year, and invariably the most dismal, tawdry and uninspiring one as well. In Britain, New Year is not for looking back at the past year and its highs and lows, for anticipation of a fresh start and opportunities to come, nor is it to enjoy the mellow company of those closest to you. No, in our little cultured corner of Europe, New Year is for getting hopelessly and unutterably pissed. Not incidentally or accidentally pissed, not as a happy by product of a great night out and treasured company, but pissed as a result of a determined, well planned, military style assault on the liver and whatever faculties of judgement and good taste there might possibly have been present at the start of the evening.
At new Year I’ve played in pubs, and I’ve played in clubs, for dinner dances and for private functions. Every time, what I play, and what the crowd wanted wasn’t even on nodding terms. I mean, most of the time they knew what they had booked, it wasn’t as if I’d blagged my way into a completely unsuitable gig. Well, not every time that at least. But even at familiar venues where you might have thought, "Well, at least they always like us there", you start playing to a completely unrecogniseable minatory crowd shorn of every familiar face. "Where are they all?" you wonder. Anywhere but in a crowded Lancashire pub on New Years Eve is the obvious and sensible answer.
Over the years my response on the phone to a request for an engagement has gone from a puppyish grateful enthusiasm to narrow eyed cynical suspicion. Once upon a time my first question might have been ‘What is the fee?’. Now it’s more likely to be, ‘Will there be stairs involved?’
I got a call in about 1991. It was a thick, laughably stereotypical Scandinavian accent. “Hi, I am Sven, I am from the Wigan Norwegian society, I wondered if a gig for us you would do?” “Oh yes mate”, I thought. “This is a wind up if ever I heard one, as if I’m going to fall for that one”. I kind of zoned out as he spoke whilst wondering which of my musical friends might be responsible for the prank. I mentally worked through some of the possible candidates and then realised that the list was inexhaustible so I wasn’t really concentrating when I heard Sven say “The fee will be one thousand pounds, is this acceptable?”. Acceptable was the mildest of adjectives for a thousand pounds in 1991. “I’ll just put Mr. Cornall on” I said hurriedly.
I had agreed to the booking and put the phone down before I remembered that at that particular moment in time I didn’t actually have a band. At Two hundred and fifty quid each, and the possibility of a truly interesting evening it took only three phone calls to form a more than decent band in record time. As it happened out there was indeed a thriving Norwegian society in Wigan. There was a regular channel of exchange between Manchester University and Norway apparently, and there were hundreds of them, and they all lived in Wigan, which as everyone knows is the Trondheim of West Lancashire. (Is Trondheim in Sweden, come to think of it)?
Every single one of the six hundred Scandinavians present on that evening was young, svelte, blonde, charming and very, well, Norwegian. I have never seen so many beautiful girls, and boys in one place as that night in Haigh Hall Wigan. Shugs, who of course I had inveigled onto the gig, and myself stood transfixed in the corner at the break and gaped. Gaped in a sort of British pasty faced, smokers cough and ill-fitting suit sort of way. Every so often a vision of Nordic beauty would waft past, exuding an admixture of charm, unavailability and rejection and our powers of speech would desert us. Shug, who was flirting at the time with professional status would say plaintively “I’m in the Happy Mondays you know” but he could have been in the Happy Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and twice on Sundays for all the good it did him. They smiled uncertainly and moved on. Possibly the ‘Happy Mondays’ weren’t regarded as sufficiently Nordic.
One of the problems with New Year is who got you the gig? Agents, as any musician knows, will get you the most inappropriate gigs, but to be fair, I am quite capable of doing that unaided. Weddings are a regular problem. The number of times we have been brow beaten into ruining someone’s wedding despite warning the bride and groom that, yes, they love us, but their Aunty Ethel will undoubtedly hate us. I was once in the toilets stood next to Shug after a gig when a young bloke weaved uncertainly in and squinted at us in a haze of drunken recognition. “Here”, he said, “You lot did my wedding”. “Sorry”, Shug and I mumbled apologetically. “Er...did it last?” I asked. “Nah” he said, benignly.
The list of my terrible New Year gigs is dispiritingly endless. There was the gig in Clitheroe, for example, where we went onto a party afterwards, crestfallen after another evening of pearls before swine and Chris Beckett, the bass player innocently antagonised a clearly deranged ex paratrooper and we had to tramp the streets looking for somewhere safe to sleep. The guitarist’s house, as it happens, much to the annoyance of his wife.
Chris was a good natured and talented bass player. One New Years Eve he and I were booked for the Silverman Hall in Nelson, quite a good venue. Well, good in the sense that it had dressing rooms and a stage high enough to make a drunken tumbling over the floor monitors into the drum kit at the very least an achievement. (This is as traditional on New Year’s Eve as is Auld Lang Syne and sicking up in the car park). We were playing with the excellent ‘Diving Ducks’ that year and we got the booking in July. During a rehearsal one of us, I forget who, idly said to Chris that it was a fancy dress occasion, and we amused ourselves for ten minutes or so with what we might wear. Of course it was no such thing but Chris was too much of a temptation to tease, part of his charm being that he was gullible and almost impossible to offend.
On the actual night he was on the last minute and arrived just in time to set up quickly and play. The reason he was late, it transpired, was that he had had to collect his bespoke skeleton suit for the gig, what with it being fancy dress and all. He was a good looking ex-army guy and was careful of his appearance and he wasn’t going to turn up in some hand-made, bodged costume. He had been planning this since August. It fitted perfectly and he would have been a candidate for a first prize at any fancy dress New Years Eve party. Rather a pity then, that this wasn’t one. To be honest I’d completely forgotten that we had told him it was. Too late to go home and change he did the gig looking like some kind of weird renegade from The Alex Harvey Band or possibly one of David Bowie’s lesser known reinventions. He stood at the back glowering and simmering with an out of character fury and mouthing “Cunts” every time one of us caught his eye.
In about 1996 the first iteration of ‘The Cheating Hearts’ was, In hindsight unwisely, booked to play at a dinner dance somewhere in Gisburn in the Ribble Valley. It was one of those ghastly large pub/hotels that specialise in weddings, or anniversaries or maybe, God help us, hen nights. The sort of place that doesn’t do food, it does ‘Fayre’. The sort of place you get parties of twenty or more, tacky helium balloons, a disco and a live band that plays all the standard dance along hits, usually wearing some kind of uniform and with, and this is important, ‘Patter’.
Imagine, if you will, the Nuremberg Rallies with peppercorn sauce and a free glass of Cava.
Peter, who I shall no doubt dwell on at some length in future blogs was the eccentric lead singer of the first ‘Cheating Hearts’. A great big bull of a man he was a trucker and an authentic country singer with possibly the largest repertoire of songs I have ever come across. And that includes a certain Phil Mahon of ‘The Johnny Friendlies’ a band it is my privilege to sit in with whenever Phil is in the country.
Phil knows hundreds of songs. Peter knew thousands.
This particular evening Peter had dimly recognised that this was a proper function, quite unlike our usual gigs. A dinner dance and a special occasion and a somewhat nicer venue than we were used to. To be fair we weren’t used to much in the way of niceness. Personal safety was the limit of our normal expectations. Of course we would busk it as usual, in what has become ‘The Hearts’ modus operandi, playing whatever Peter threw at us, until we reached a sort of sublime fusion of taste and groove, or alternatively, (and more usually) the wheels fell off with a clatter. But on this night we were to busk it in a more organised and professional manner apparently. “See, what they want at a do like this is a set list”, said Peter producing a fag packet with some songs scribbled on the back, “and patter” “Patter?” said the band in unison, looking at each other nervously. “Aye”, said Peter, “Patter”. “Is that wise Peter?” said Shug, taking on the role, briefly, of Sergeant Wilson. “Aye, I’ll start with a few jokes, it’s what they expect” said Peter, the worst and most obscene joke teller in Western Europe.
We trooped on stage. A less likely audience for ‘The Hearts’ would be difficult to imagine. Beyond the footlights there was an air of happy expectancy, cheap cologne, Forest Gateaux and alcohol. On our side it was mainly foreboding. I can’t actually remember the opening joke of Peter’s ‘patter’ I have extirpated it from my consciousness, but Shugs to this day swears it started with, “There was this black prostitute, see, with a dildo up her bum”. What I do remember is playing our opening number to a horrified audience with their dessert forks frozen halfway to their mouths. There wasn’t a great deal of downhill after that, but it goes without saying we managed to find it.
In 2000, the end of the millennium, ‘The Cheating Hearts’ actually decided sod it, we’re not playing this time and we are going to enjoy New Years Eve for a change, like normal, (well fairly normal) people. Shug decided to hold a millennium party which, mingling among the guests, I realised was made up of most of the best local musicians in the area. Obviously they all felt as we did. The atmosphere was celebratory, warm and sentimental. No-one wanted to be doing a grotty gig on such an august occasion. Mack McMahon, the sax player had invested in three firework rockets, rather paltry things but he was determined to go in the front garden and set them off to welcome in the next thousand years. Given the amount of drugs he had consumed I would personally have not let him near anything as thermo-nuclear as a packet of Swan Vestas, and only then with asbestos gloves and a proper risk assessment, but we all dutifully wandered into the garden at the appointed time and someone helpfully provided three milk bottles to launch the rockets from. Shug’s house faced the municipal park, to which Mack had his back. On the stroke of midnight Mack set his three rockets off. At the same moment, in the park, Blackburn, just like every other town in Great Britain that night, ignited its own mammoth firework display, a mere 400 yards from where we were all facing. The sky lit up with a deafening roar and our faces were infused with the colours of the rainbow. A series of gasps and ‘ooohs’ rippled through the party-goers. Mack, with his back to it all, beamed proudly at us. “Not bad for four pounds fifty eh?”
I did go back to New Year gigs after that, but largely as a duo with The Watson. We knew the gigs would be crap, but we kept local, friends and wives came along and there is no finer company to see a New Year in than The Watson’s.
We played a few years in Accrington pubs run by Dennis, a dapper and old fashioned publican sadly no longer with us, whom both I and The Watson liked very much. One of his pubs was run by an ex stage hypnotist. We sat having a chat with him before the gig. As we got up I had a sudden thought. “Here”, I said. “You haven’t been ‘doing’ us while we’ve been chatting have you? I mean come midnight we’re not going to sing the national anthem in German and take our trousers down, anything weird like that?” “Nah”, he replied. “But when you get home, you’ll think you’ve been paid”.
To be honest, the state we were in by the end of the evening, thinking would have been quite beyond us anyway.
Walton-le-Dale Conservative club was our last New Year’s gig. The social secretary, Frank, had booked us. A nice chap, hippyish, with long frizzy hair. He had the job of ‘Entertainments’ largely because he was so much younger than the other club members and they felt a bit of youthfulness might energise the Saturday night entertainment at the place. Bring a fresh new younger approach to the job, they said.
Frank was 63.
On this particular night our wives came along about half way through the gig. As they walked in there was that ‘oh look Doris, strangers’ sort of ominous quiet that you often get in small Lancashire clubs, (or possibly in the deep south of The United States, say, Alabama, just before a lynching). Our wives clearly felt a bit uncomfortable. The Watson, ever quick to pick up on this sort of thing immediately sought to lighten the situation. “Oh good, the strippers have arrived” He said. The audience, or at least the male half, brightened considerably. For The Watson and me it was February before we got a decent meal and the semblance of a conversation.
The week before that gig an agent had called us and offered us £1500 to do another club. Even for New Year, that was a fair amount for a duo. Obviously someone had cancelled at the last moment and they were so desperate as to consider us, ‘The Usual Suspects’. To be honest we couldn’t have let down Frank at such late notice despite his desultory fee, but it made us think. If we’re not really doing this for the money, what the hell are we doing this for?
From that point on, apart from a moment of madness in 2019, I haven’t played a New Years Eve since. For years The Watson and I, our wives, and our dearest good friends have decamped to the capitals of Europe and spent New Year in Barcelona, in Madrid, in Brussels until finding the little Spanish town of Nerja where we have giggled, chortled and drunk our way round the bars and seen in the New Year in a spirit of happy gig free contentment.
About 1998 I put a little band together for a New Year gig in a village hall in The Ribble Valley again. The guitarist and organising villager was a guy called Chris. Chris was quite an interesting guy who was an artist and illustrator originally from the South of England. He lived in a vast barn conversion up the road from the village hall with his wife who was a consultant anaesthetician at the local hospital. They were possibly the most middle class family I have ever met, and that’s from someone who considers himself to be middle class, but, it turns out, isn’t. I remember a party at his vast spread one summer’s evening, some significant birthday or anniversary. Our wives came along. All the doors of his fifteen spaciously roomed barn were held open by enormous unlit candles. My wife at the time nudged me. “£55 quid each at Marks and Sparks, those are”, she said, nodding towards the door and pursing her lips like Hilda Baker. She had a point.
This particular New Year Chris kindly suggested I stop over after the gig as his place was just up the road. This meant I could get as pissed as I wanted so was therefore an offer not be turned down. In the morning I found that my car wouldn’t start. Now, at the time that car was my pride and joy. It was a Fiat Uno and had the distinction of being the first car I owned that was built in the same decade that I was driving it.
I opened the bonnet and peered into its entrails. Peering of course being the full extent of my mechanical skills. I am an expert peerer and if required, in extremis, can kick a tyre too. Chris’s Dad, a retired barrister or something from Surrey came strolling out. “I say old chap”, he said, “ what a coincidence, we have a little shopping car like this at home”. There was a dull clunk as my head caught the bonnet. I wanted to say, “Shopping car? shopping car? Where I come from in Blackburn a vehicle a mere two years old with all its wheels in place and only the slightest traces of visible rust is actually called a pussy magnet thank you very much, you bourgeois southern git!” Of course I didn’t. He was actually quite a nice bloke. I restrained myself.
There is a post script to this.
Chris was endlessly improving his estate. Whenever I went round he would gesture expansively to the new patio area, or outbuilding development, or life size replica or the Taj Mahal or whatever, and say, I’m having this done, or I’m working on this. Of course, what he meant was, a team of builders were working on this, or doing that. I sympathise, I can’t do anything practical myself and therefore I have to get someone in to do stuff, though not on quite such a lavish scale as Chris. (I did once assemble a wardrobe and as a result was the only man on my street with a bedroom shed).
Chris had a daughter, about six years old. A charming girl whom everybody liked, called Arabella. One day her mother was having her friends round from the area for morning coffee. The drive was full of Range Rovers and the local wealthy mums were all round drinking prosseco and generally having a hoot. The builders as usual were at work in the grounds and Arabella walked in from the garden to join the assembled mums with a little toy hard hat and a little yellow plastic wheelbarrow the builders had got her. She had become a kind of mascot and they made quite a fuss of her.
“Look mummy” squeaked Arabella, holding up a little brown envelope excitedly. “I’ve got my wages”. The builders had indeed got one of their wage packets and put fifty pence in it for their young apprentice. The mums cooed and passed round the little wage packet. “And are you going to be working with them next week Arabella?” asked one of the mums. “Yes” said six year old Arabella enthusiastically. Then, after a moment’s thought she said, “As long as those fucking paving slabs arrive”.
Happy New Year.