I’ll start with an aphorism, albeit a clunky one. All good music is musical entertainment, but not all musical entertainment is necessarily good music. Two words probably best sum this up. Gary and Barlow. The difference between entertainment and music is a subtle, finely drawn line. The Cheating Hearts of course, can turn that fine line into a gaping chasm.
In 1987 I moved from that London they have nowadays back up to the North West having fallen out with the Inner London Education Authority. Nothing was ever proved and I left that court a free man. (That’s a joke by the way, just in case anyone literally minded is reading, in which case you might want to consider if this site is really for you). Up until then I had mainly played the clubs. I was a young teacher in the East End of London and I needed the money. I did have other ventures: my first ‘real’ band, ‘The Game’ and a fine original eighties band, ‘No Video’ There was my first foray into Country and Western with ‘Paulette and the Barroom Boys’ and various other projects.
But largely I played most weekends with ‘Sapphire’, a cabaret band consisting mainly of me and a girl singer Paulette and a drummer called Alan. Various other musicians dipped in and out of ‘Sapphire’ and all my other efforts. There was another Nick, Nick the bass, two fine guitarists in Alan Binks and Gary Winterflood, and a fine accomplished and eccentric drummer called Dave Plummer. All splendid chaps who entered good humouredly into each doomed project I managed to entangle them. They will crop up more fully in later pages.
Back up North, with the financial pressure lessened, I was free to play what I wanted rather than what I needed to. There is an almost perfect inverse relationship between how high the quality of music is, and how desultory and insulting the fee is, evidence professor Dawkins largely overlooked when arguing that there is no God.
I joined a local band called ‘Shakedown’, an R&B outfit featuring at least fifty percent of all the known musicians in Blackburn. Or at least of those who owned their own instruments. The drummer was a sweet guy called Alan Edmundson. A professional sign-writer by trade and a graphic and fine artist. (He also had the slightest of speech impediments which I always find charming and endearing). He was a proper drummer by which I mean he could read. I mean read music of course, I don’t know about books and things, he is after all a drummer, one's expectations shouldn’t be too high. Alan was apparently once asked to paint the shop sign for Burnley’s first delicatessen. The proprietor came along in the afternoon to see how Alan was getting on.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“Look” said Alan “I’ve had five goes at ‘delicatessen’ and had to paint over it each time, you didn’t write it down and I don’t carry a sodding dictionary round with me”
“I know Alan, but even so..........Potted Meats?”
After a few months Alan told us, with regret, (though possibly not too much regret), he had to leave the band. He’d been offered a season at Butlin's, playing for the shows, in a duo, backing the artists. He would be on good money, he got his own caravan and he just had to turn up with his dinner suit, bow tie, sticks and it would be fun ahoy. He would be in the entertainment business, not just the music business, and entertainment paid better. Almost anything paid better.
He soon settled into the season’s routine. Mondays backing the guest artist, usually someone who had been 17th in the charts several decades ago. I guess nowadays it would be an artist from several decades ago who had managed to stay out of prison.Tuesdays was playing for the show and Wednesdays was that pre-karaoke institution, ‘Free and easy’. Now I’ve played a Butlin’s talent show, and I’ve written a musical for Pontin’s, so I can tell you that ‘Free and easy’ is a definite misnomer. ‘Free and easy’ is deadly serious and for some, the highlight of the year. But more of that in a moment.
Tuesdays was showtime, and involved full dinner jacket and dickie bow. Alan, like all of us in those days liked a drink. He realised with happy anticipation that he could walk the length of the campsite to the theatre, do the show and get thoroughly pissed at the same time. Monumentally pissed as it turned out. He woke up the following day, still in full mufti absolutely covered in mud from head to toe. He had no recollection of how he could possibly have got so muddy. There was a little patch of it outside his caravan, but apart from that, the campsite was essentially paved and mud free. The following week the same thing happened. Walked to the theatre, got pissed, woke up in his caravan, fully dressed and covered in mud. Every week throughout the season, bewilderingly, the same thing happened. There were endless trips to the dry cleaners. On the last week of the season, determined to stay clean and tidy, Alan got in his car and drove gingerly across the site and parked right up against the stage door. If necessary he was going to drive back to the caravan that night. Having not understood that the answer to this weekly puzzle was perhaps not to get quite so insensibly and utterly pissed Alan duly went on an even more mighty bender as it was the last show. He came to the following morning to the sound of happy campers walking past him to the early breakfast sitting.
He was in his car, a mere two yards from the stage door and absolutely, completely and to this day inexplicably, covered in mud.
Every Wednesday was ‘Free and easy’. Alan and the camp keyboard player, (that’s a noun not an adjective), provided the musical backing. This involved campers getting up to be Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennet for three or so minutes and singing their favourite song. Some were in earnest and brought band parts and had had stage suits made. They could be touchy and precious about their yearly assault on fame and stardom. Assault is about right in some cases. The Great American Songbook could suffer some grievous bodily harm on those nights. Others would simply come up to the keyboard player and say ‘can you play....?’ and of course expect the duo to know it, play it and mystically divine the correct key into the bargain. This particular night a camper approached the keyboard player and said, "I want to do ‘That’s what you are’". The keyboard player thought for a moment. ‘Don’t know that one mate’. he said. The camper looked put out. "Course you do, ‘That’s what you are’ everybody knows that”. The keyboard shook his head apologetically. "Sorry". The camper stalked off muttering. The next act clambered on the stage.
He called out his song. “Yeah that’s ok” said the keyboard player, “What key?”
“It’s OK I’ve brought my own”. Alan and the keyboard player exchanged a wary look Out from the punter’s jacket pocket came a walkman and a pair of headphones. He put the headphones on, pressed play, waited for the 8 bar intro, and started singing to an accompaniment shared exclusively with himself. Alan and the keyboard player watched helplessly on. If you have ever tried to sing along to a song on headphones without the advantage of your voice being looped back to you, you’ll know it is possible to sing horribly out of tune, an accomplishment this chap carried off with some distinction. The audience winced as one. After the second interminable chorus he went quiet and simply stood there snapping his fingers and tapping his feet. He looked at the audience confidingly. “Guitar solo” he explained.
After that the first camper reappeared, a little more drunk and belligerent. “’That’s what you are’ he glowered, “everybody knows that, come on”. “ Look”, said the keyboard player, “Do you mean 'The way you are'? Billy Joel?” “Nah, Billy Joel for fuck’s sake, ‘that’s what you are’ you must know it, Everybody knows it, what kind of musician are you?”. “Nope, don’t know it, sorry” shrugged the keyboard player. Petulantly the camper returned to his table, to glare resentfully at the band. There followed a few more acts, the usual ‘free and easy’ fare, I imagine one of them would be the bloke singing ‘Rawhide’ and crashing a beer tray across his head, one of my favourites. (‘Mule Train’ works just as well but you need a larger beer tray).
For the third time, and by now much the worse for wear, ‘That’s What You Are’ returned angrily to the foot of the stage. “You must know it” he slurred, “I sing it every Saturday down The Rat and Cockle”. “That’s the way it is?” The keyboard player ventured hopefully. “ Nah” said the camper. “Look, sing us the first line” said the exasperated keyboard player.
The man took a breath.
“ Unforgettable” he sang.
On the last night of the season, feeling jaded, Alan returned to his caravan. He was tired and ready for home. He stood at the door looking out at the late summer evening. It had been a long stint, and the drinking was taking its toll. Unknown to him, the young band in the caravan just along had run out of gas, and earlier, had changed Alan’s full gas bottle for their empty one. There is a knack to changing a gas bottle, which none of them, it transpired, possessed. Alan gazed at the stars above and in a gesture that he would later come to consider as unwise, lit a cigarette. Behind him the caravan went up in a cinematographic blaze of light and flame and Alan was catapulted at high speed several yards away from the now extinct caravan, dressed in full dinner suit and bow tie, face down. In the mud.
There is a codicil to this story. Some years after this Alan found himself the drummer for ‘Freddie and the Dreamers’. Doing Ok and travelling the world playing for Freddie’s unique kind of ‘Comedy Vocal’. More or less extinct now ‘Comedy Vocal’ was hugely popular in the clubs, and on television until the nineties, when audiences collectively came to their senses. Freddie Starr made a fortune out of it. So did Russ Abbot. My wife’s father made a decent living for himself in the sixties and seventies doing exactly that.
Now, if I have a reputation for anything, it is my onstage demeanour. I am, famously, the most miserable, dour, funereal looking keyboard player in, possibly, Europe. I can’t help it; it’s the way I’m made. Inside I’m joyous, outside I look like I forgot to post a winning pools coupon.. It’s almost my gimmick, my onstage persona. When I’m depping for a band that doesn’t know me well, my expression can be unnerving. If you need a pall cast, I’m your man.
Alan called me after Freddie died. “Nick, I’ve had an idea, I could do with some decent work, and I need to keep it small, a neater split. I thought of doing a comedy vocal duo. I’ve got the contacts and a bit of an idea of a set and I wondered.......” Even as he spoke, I could tell he was visualising me on stage, trying to be, if not funny, at least, well, human. He suddenly found his imagination wasn't up to it. As he spoke, I could hear him mentally recalibrating. He dried up mid sentence. “Sorry Nick” he mumbled apologetically. “Forgot who I was talking to back there for a minute”.