And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (10 page)

Meanwhile, the guitarist Johnny Thunders had expired in a blizzard of drugs, which brings me back to this reunion gig in London. Who, exactly, was going to be on stage?

Well, Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane, the original bass player, was there, but only just. He was completely bald and apparently heavily sedated. This was seen as normal. In the early days he was often so drunk that he had to mime not being able to play the bass, while a roadie actually did play it behind a speaker stack.

It wasn’t normal, though. Unfortunately, Killer was suffering from leukaemia and last week he went west, too.

Often there are documentaries on ITV called
The Most Dangerous Jobs in the World
, but it’s hard to conceive of any that are quite as perilous as being in the New York Dolls. In fact, being in any band in the 1960s or 1970s made nineteenth-century tunnelling look safe. The Who lost their bassist and drummer and the Beatles their guitarist and song writer. Maybe they should team up and form the Hootles. It’s an idea.

Then you have Phil Lynott, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Bonham, Jim Morrison, Marc Bolan, Eddie Cochran, Brian Epstein, Duane Allman, most of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Cozy Powell, Alex Harvey, Ricky Nelson, Pete Ham and Tom Evans from Badfinger, Tim Hardin, Steely Dan’s drummer, Bon Scott from AC/DC, half of the Grateful Dead, Chas Chandler, Johnny Kidd, Rory Gallagher,
James Honeyman Scott and Pete Farndon from the Pretenders, John Belushi, Elvis, Patsy Cline, Brian Jones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Terry Kath from Chicago, and Sid Vicious. Even the Carpenters weren’t a safe haven.

Of the 321 well-known musicians who died prematurely in the glory days of rock’n’roll, 40 were taken by drugs, 36 by suicide and a whopping 22 by plane or helicopter crashes. Thirty-five died in cars, 18 were murdered, nine drowned in their own vomit and five in their own swimming pools. Picking up a guitar in London in 1972 was more lethal than picking up a rifle in Stalingrad in 1942.

Coming home from school back then and saying you were going to be a Formula One racing driver would have prompted a sigh of relief from your mum: ‘Well, thank God you’re not going to be in a band.’

Now, though, things are different. With the notable and noble exception of Kurt Cobain, who blew whatever it was he had inside his head all over the wall with a shotgun, and Michael Hutchence, who went to meet his maker with an orange in his mouth, today’s rock stars seem to be in rude good health.

So far as I’m aware, nobody in Duran Duran is dead and, the last time I looked, all of Busted weren’t. Pink is in it and even Oasis have managed to steer clear of their swimming pools.

Perhaps this is the problem with music today. Perhaps the declining audience for Radio 1 and dwindling album sales have something to do with a lack of danger. Back in 1975 I would rush to see a band, partly because I liked the energy of a live concert and partly, subliminally perhaps,
because there was a sense that they would all be dead by the following week. Usually they were.

You certainly don’t get any of that from Will Young. I saw him perform at the Cornbury music festival last weekend, and while the tunes were perfectly jolly there was no sense that he might be found the next morning in a hotel room full of hookers and cocaine.

I see him as a perfect role model for my 10-year-old daughter. But I suspect she’d like him more if he filled his head with heroin and flew his private jet into an oil refinery.

Sunday 18 July 2004

Three hundred years ago Europe was embroiled in a particularly complicated conflict called the Spanish War of Succession. I have no clue what it was all about – God, probably – but I do know that Britain walked away from the peace talks with a shiny new colony: Gibraltar.

Today, the 30,000 residents who cling to this rocky outcrop are still fiercely British, so, to mark the tercentenary of their liberation from Spain, the RAF is sending, er, its brass band. Which, after the defence cuts last week, is pretty much all it has left.

The navy was planning to send a hunter killer submarine, but that has been melted down and turned into Corby trouser presses. And the army? Well, they have sent their excuses, saying that they’re a bit busy at the moment.

Geoff Hoon – how did we end up with a defence secretary called Geoff? – says his dramatic cuts will attune our armed forces to the threats of the modern age – and, of course, he has a point. Why spend billions on extravagant homeland security when the countries that are capable of staging an invasion won’t and those that aren’t can’t?

People say we now have a smaller navy than Johnny Frog, but so what? We realised long ago that you don’t have to fight the French for control of Gascony. You just have to find a decent estate agent and buy it.

And while the new socialist government in Spain is jolly angry about the Gibraltar issue, the only armada that it could muster these days has fishing nets.

We know the Germans are capable of atrocities but, honestly, can you see them firing up the Panzers any time soon? It’s the same story with the Dutch, who are too busy buying Cuba to be a threat, and all is quiet on the Falklands front, too.

So all we have to worry about are a few disaffected Algerian youths and, frankly, using a nuclear submarine to deal with an angry teenager in Sidi Bel Abbes looks like overkill.

But we’re looking no further than the end of our noses. Hoon is trimming the armed forces to meet the threats and responsibilities that he can see today, but trouble usually comes from the most unexpected quarters. Who could have guessed in 1918 as we celebrated our victory over the Germans that, just 21 years later, they would be back for more?

Better still, who in 1970 would have bet that the next three countries to face Britain’s military might would be Iceland, Argentina and Iraq? And who could have known, as the 1990s wafted by, that Canada and Spain would be up for a spot of mid-Atlantic gunboat diplomacy?

How can Hoon possibly guess who’s next: Belgium? Sudan looks likely but it could be Cambodia or, take a big gulp, Russia.

It’s all very well saying that the Soviet empire has crumbled but have you not seen
Fatal Attraction
? You thought Glenn Close was dead, you relaxed and then, whoa, she reared up out of the bath with that big spiky knife.

Hoon seems to think that Russia is safe, though, because he has thrown doubt over hundreds of Eurofighters, believing that this extraordinary plane was designed to meet a threat that no longer exists.

We originally wanted 232 of them but have placed firm orders for only 55. What’s more, he has asked for the planes to be reconfigured as ground-attack mud-movers rather than dogfighters. His reckoning is simple. Algerian youths do not have MiG-29s, nor do the Sudanese Janjaweed militia and nor does Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. What they have are headquarters that need blasting to kingdom come from hundreds of miles away.

Unfortunately, the Eurofighter was not built to do this. It was built for air-to-air action against Ivan. It was designed to win a knife fight in a phone box; and trying to convert it into something else is as silly as buying a washing machine and then using it as a sandwich maker.

I wouldn’t mind, but Hoon has also decided to drop the Jaguar from Britain’s arsenal even though it has just been through a massively expensive programme to fit better radar, better weapons and better display facilities for the pilots.

It’s hard, therefore, to see what the RAF does have left. I read last week that they’ve found an old Mosquito in the Wash but, while there’s some hope that its mighty Merlins can be coaxed back into life, after 60 years in the oggin its balsa wood body has pretty much rotted away.

Of course, these days you could argue that Britain hardly needs any armed forces at all because we’re little more than a bird, riding around on the back of the rhinoceros that is America. We get to feast on the fleas
that live in its hide and, in exchange, the mighty US military will stick its big horn into anything perceived as a threat.

That’s fine, but what if the day comes when the rhino is no longer a responsible democracy? What if it one day elects a president with an IQ of 92 who decides to pick a fight with some large and fairly harmless state in the Middle East?

We’d have to trudge along, and it would be so expensive that the RAF would even have to think seriously about selling its trombones.

Sunday 25 July 2004

It was announced last week that the highlight of your viewing pleasure in the autumn will be a series in which 10 people you’ve never met trace their family trees. You’ll learn all about Moira Stuart’s great-great-grandmother and discover that Bill Oddie had a sister he never knew about.

Sounds dull, doesn’t it? It certainly sounded dull when the producers approached me last year, asking if I’d like to be one of the 10.

Initially I said no. Your own family tree is a sort of personalised version of Simon Schama’s
History of Britain
, and that’s fine. But someone else’s? That would be as meaningless as Simon Schama’s
History of Malaysia
. And watching it on television? That would be like watching a stranger’s holiday video.

Of course, I can understand why people trace their own ancestors and why the 1901 census website crashed so spectacularly when it went online a couple of years ago.

It’s for the same reason that scientists study black holes. Wanting to know where we came from is what differentiates us from the beasts.

Over the years I’ve occasionally thought about looking into my family’s history because, like everyone, I harboured a secret desire to find it was John of Gaunt, then Warwick the Kingmaker, and then me.

But the reality is that we come from a long line of dullards, so I’ve never bothered. And I really could not see why my family history should form the basis for an hour-long television programme. Unless it was going to be called
Revealed: Britain’s Most Boring Man
.

Actually, it could have been called
Revealed: Britain’s Biggest Inbred
because preliminary research showed that my ancestors back to 1780 – and there were about 2,000 of them – had all been born within 12 miles of one another. It’s a wonder I don’t have one eye and a speech defect.

I argued and argued that there was no point going any further with the programme because none of these people had ever done anything remotely interesting; but my mind was changed when the producers revealed that my maternal grandmother was a Kilner. And the Kilners had been nineteenth-century zillionaires. Rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Owners of mills, ships and half of the warehouses that lined the Thames. Wasn’t I just a little bit interested, they asked, to discover what had happened to the money?

Damn right I was, so for the past six months, motivated entirely by greed, I have been charging up and down the M1, unravelling a truly epic tale about the meteoric rise, and calamitous fall, of Britain’s manufacturing industry.

While Bill Oddie found that he had a sister he never knew about, I found I’m related to the actor Keith Barron. So stick that in your binoculars and smoke it, beardie.

What amazed me, as the months flew by, is just how easy it is to unearth history in this country. I had a team of researchers to point me in the right direction, but even this would have been no use in, say, Scandinavia. There,
all the ancient records were stored in wooden churches which over the years have burnt down. This means all the records are gone.

Here, I was able to stroll into Huddersfield public library and help myself to the original court records from an environmental lawsuit that had been brought against my family in 1870. Then I drove to Warwick University and read all about the strikes that plagued their mills in 1880. I even found the record of a fishing trip in 1780 on which the founder of the Kilner dynasty discovered the site for his first factory.

You can send off to the Probate Office for copies of your great-great-great-grandfather’s will, and you can find out from the National Archives in Kew where he lived. Go there and, as often as not, the current owners will have photographs of the people you are researching.

I found one of my great-great-grandfather from 1901. He was sitting in a car he had bought, which then would have been like owning a Gulfstream V business jet. So he didn’t give a damn about the environment and he was a petrolhead…

Of course the science of genealogy is fraught with difficulties, chief among which is the internet. Some say it’s an invaluable resource tool, but the only Kilners I could find on Google were members of an American high school baseball team. This didn’t seem relevant.

There are many companies in cyberland who promise to prove that you are the rightful Duke of Devonshire, but when you give them your money all you get back is some half-arsed coat of arms which proves only that you’ve been suckered.

Even in the real world, life for the history sleuth is hard because eighteenth- and nineteenth-century handwriting and spelling were lousy. I spent one afternoon reading what I thought was a history of glassmaking, but it could have been a recipe for baked Alaska.

Also, while record keeping has always been meticulous in Britain, people were not forced to register births until 1875. Worst of all, you can spend thousands of pounds and travel thousands of miles, only to find you are from a long line of farm labourers. Or, horror of horrors, that you are Bill Oddie’s lost sister.

Sunday 1 August 2004

I guess we’ve all been through an airport at some point in the past few weeks and I guess we all turned up, as requested, two hours before the scheduled departure time. Why? It used to be one hour, so why is it now two?

We’re told that airports need the extra time because, in the wake of September 11, stringent security checks have to be made. Ah, yes. September 11. The one-size-fits-all excuse for absolutely everything.

Sure, in America the twin towers thing has slowed down your rate of progress through an airport to the point where technically you are classified as a missing person.