Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie (2 page)

Frank’s songsheet.

Before I knew it the public had arrived, and we were onstage. As I played I watched it all – the band assiduously emulating with proper instruments the tinny pre-programmed sounds of a
cheap, amateurish children’s Casio keyboard, the enraptured audience of about three hundred people, and Frank, the eerie cartoon character front-man, his facial expression immobile, his
singing voice a high-pitched nasal twang. I marvelled at the mysterious train of creative thought that had somehow led to this place.

Frank Sidebottom and Jon Ronson.

Towards the end of the show Frank introduced the band. ‘On drums . . . Mike Doherty.’ There was a cheer. ‘On guitar . . . Rick Sarko. On bass . . . Patrick Gallagher.’ He
left me until last. ‘On keyboards . . . Jon Ronson.’ But something unexpected happened. Every other band member had been given a cheer of basically the same volume. But the cheer I
received was very noticeably quieter. I was baffled. What had I done wrong? A room full of strangers had for some reason made a unanimous negative determination about me on what seemed the scantest
information.

And then, suddenly, I understood. The laissez-faire manner in which I’d been invited to perform in the band that night wasn’t the whole story – there had been some furtive
professionalism at work. Concerned that I didn’t know any of the songs they had at some point decided to turn my volume down to practically zero and position me so far to the edge of the
stage that most people in the audience didn’t even know there
was
a keyboard player in the band.

That night I trudged home feeling confused.

‘Why did they even bother inviting me if they were going to do that?’ I thought.

Life went back to normal. A year passed. Then Mike Doherty telephoned me and asked me if I wanted to be in Frank’s band full time, and so I immediately told my college I was quitting.
Being on the road with a band versus sitting in a lecture theatre learning about structuralism? It was a no-brainer. I moved to Manchester.

Jon Ronson and Mike Doherty.

And there I was, in the passenger seat of a Transit van flying down the M6 in the middle of the night, squeezed between the door and Frank Sidebottom. Those were my happiest times – when
Chris would mysteriously decide to just carry on being Frank. Nothing makes a young man feel more alive and on an adventure than speeding down a motorway at 2 a.m. next to a man wearing a big fake
head. I’d furtively watch him as the lights made his cartoon face glow yellow and then black and then yellow again.

***

I am writing this twenty-six years later. A film I co-wrote,
Frank
, which is fictional but inspired by Frank and our time together, will soon be premiered at the Sundance
Film Festival. A few days ago the music journalist Mick Middles sent me 30,000 words from his work-in-progress biography,
Frank Sidebottom: Out of his Head
. His book captures perfectly that
‘rarest of journeys’ when an onlooker got to see Chris turn into Frank – an ‘unsettling’ and ‘remarkable transformation’, he writes. ‘The moment the
head is placed the change occurs. Not merely a change in attitude or outlook but a journey from one person to the other. I completely believe that Chris was born as two people.’ Middles
likens Chris to transgender people trapped in the wrong body. Chris was wayward, prone to drink and drugs, but Frank was an ingénue, untouched by ‘emotional entanglements, myriad
complexities of adulthood, betrayal, hurt, loss, death, fear, tax.’

One passage in Middles’ wonderful pages stopped me short. It described his March 2013 visit to Mike Doherty’s home. The last I’d heard of Mike he’d emigrated to Bangkok,
where he’d made it big as a drummer and a tour manager in the Thai music scene, whatever that meant. But it turned out that he’d had a serious motorcycle crash and was now back in
‘Stockport’s unfashionable Cheadle Heath’, living with ‘an amiable cat, Bob.’ Forced into retirement, Mike had ‘set about, armed with only a felt tip pen, to
completely transform every room in his house via a maze of complex designs, mostly intended to celebrate his time with Frank, Manchester music in general plus the odd nod to his beloved Manchester
United.’ Middles describes the designs as having been ‘stenciled with great wit. I like to think, rather than an indication of a man with too much time on his hands, the flat is a true
indication of a still-lively artistic mind . . . and talent!’

There in Cheadle Heath, Mike Doherty told Mick Middles why he’d invited me to join the band. Having no idea how I came across to people back then, it was a great compliment: ‘It was
always difficult to get people to play in that band because there was absolutely no kudos,’ Mike told Mick Middles. ‘I mean, who the fuck wants to travel to Bradford or somewhere like
that just to play plinkety piano? There is no artistic merit at all and you are hardly going to get any groupies, are you? So it had to be a certain kind of person . . . someone who has absolutely
nothing to prove and understood Frank completely.’

I’m glad Mike Doherty saw me that way but it wasn’t true. My expectations for life back then were exceedingly low and being in Frank’s band provided me with more kudos than
I’d imagined possible. Five hundred people in Bradford was a sea of faces stretching to the horizon. We may have had no artistic merit but we had the accoutrements – drums, leads, amps.
We were very much sort of like a band.

But Mike was right about one thing. I got Frank completely. His comedy came from the juxtaposition between the parochialism of his ordinary life and the grandiosity of the songs he covered, like
‘Born in Timperley’ (to the tune of ‘Born in the USA’): ‘I go shopping in Timperley / They’ve got loads of shops / That’s where I do the shopping for my
mum / Five pounds of potatoes and loads of chops.’

Frank was our Pee-wee Herman. He was silly, unpretentious, irresponsible, homemade. He aimed low. That’s why people loved him. He was a child in a northern town remaining assiduously
immature in the face of adulthood.

Frank may have been a paean to ordinariness but Chris wasn’t ordinary. He was nothing like anyone I’d ever known. He wore a big fake head for very long stretches, for a start. And he
was secretive about his home life. I knew he was married with children, but he wasn’t like any husband and father I’d experienced. My father ran a wholesale warehouse in Cardiff. He
imported cutlery. He played bridge on Tuesdays and Thursdays and golf on Saturdays and watched TV the rest of the time. My father wasn’t a chaotic man. Chris was chaotic. Sometimes, on the
way back from some gig, I’d become aware that we were taking a detour to some house somewhere with some women we somehow met along the way. There would be partying. In the van I’d listen to his stories, trying to understand him. He reminded me of George Bernard
Shaw’s unreasonable man: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man.’ Chris was the unreasonable man, except the world never did adapt to him and he never made any progress. Like when Frank was asked to support the boy band Bros at Wembley.
There were 50,000 people in the crowd. This was a huge stage for Frank – his biggest ever, by about 49,500 people. It was really his chance to break through to the mainstream. But instead he
chose to perform a series of terrible Bros cover versions for five minutes and was bottled off. The show’s promoter Harvey Goldsmith was glaring at him from the wings. Frank sauntered over to
him and said, ‘I’m thinking of putting on a gig at the Timperley Labour Club. Do you have any tips?’

***

I never understood why Chris sometimes kept Frank’s head on for hours, even when it was only us in the van. But years later I met another man who also chose to remain
masked for long periods, and perhaps his explanation applies to Chris. The man is a real-life superhero named Urban Avenger. He journeys out into the San Diego night looking for crimes to thwart.
He told me that he loves being masked. ‘When I wear this, I don’t have to react to you in any way. Nobody knows what I’m thinking or feeling. It’s great. I can be in my own
little world in here.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ I agreed with Urban Avenger. ‘I was once at a Halloween party and I didn’t take off my mask all night. It completely eliminated all social
anxiety.’

‘Sometimes I wish I never had to take the mask off,’ said Urban Avenger.

But if that was Chris’s reason too I suspect he’d have denied it. He liked to portray himself as carefree – the more chaotic and marginal and accident- and failure-prone his
life became, the happier he claimed to be. But I think it was more complicated than that. I’d noticed something about him. During that first afternoon I’d scrutinized everyone’s
faces in the hope of some kind of visual clue as to which one was Frank – it turned out that I’d been on to something. Under the head Chris would wear a swimmer’s nose clip. It
was cumbersome, like a mini-orthopaedic brace. Chris would be Frank for such long periods the clip had deformed him slightly, flattened his nose out of shape. When he’d turn his face away to
remove the peg after a long stint I’d see him wince in pain. Furthermore, as Chris’s former wife Paula told Mick Middles, ‘He could be very attentive, romantic even, but he had a
tendency to switch off and think only of Frank. When he started staying up all night, obviously it hit me. I think I resented Frank because of that.’

One night, during a long drive home, Chris told me Frank’s origin story. He’d invented him three years earlier, in 1984, when Chris was twenty-nine. He’d been
playing in unsigned bands since he was fifteen and had, Middles writes, ‘steadfastly kept every [record company] rejection letter . . . hundreds, bulging from a Green Flash tennis shoe box
stuffed under his bed. By night he would unearth this treasure, marvelling at the sheer scope and hopelessness of his quest.’

The funny thing was, Chris’s band The Freshies was gaining quite a following when Chris made the sudden and bewildering (for his friends and loved ones) U-turn into Frank. His first
Sidebottom move, he told me, was to record a cover version of ‘Material Girl’ and send it around the record labels with the covering letter, ‘I’m thinking of getting into
show business. Do you have any pamphlets?’ An intrigued executive at EMI invited him in for a meeting. Chris arrived as Frank.

‘Have you been in show business for long?’ the A&R man asked him.

‘Oh,’ said Frank. ‘About’ – he looked at his watch – ‘ten seconds, actually.’

His debut EP, released on EMI, charted at about number 90 before disappearing. EMI dropped him. But by then he’d built up enough of an audience that we could play to 500 people a night in
almost any town in the north of England and London (although those numbers dropped significantly everywhere else in Britain/the world). I rented a flat above a wool shop in Gorton, south-east
Manchester and, when I wasn’t touring with Frank, managed the indie band The Man From Delmonte, who I’m certain would have become very successful had they teamed up with less inept
management.

With Frank I crisscrossed the north of England – Leeds and Bury and Sheffield and Liverpool – and down to London, playing the same venues over and over again. The familiarity became
comforting: the Adelphi, Hull; Dingwalls, London; Burberries, Birmingham.

Burberries, Birmingham

Popular music venue for ‘alternative’ acts in the latter half of the 80s, now defunct, having apparently expired sometime in 1990. Was located at 220 Broad
Street. Lush, Ride, Blur, Charlatans, Chills, Pixies all played here . . . The club mutated into Tramps, which subsequently closed in 1992. The site was razed in 2003 and became a car park. No
other info available.

– www.thirdav.com

We supported Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers at the Town and Country Club in London, and Frank – playing solo – supported Gary Glitter at some student union fresher ball.
Glitter’s roadies were extremely rude, Chris later told me, cornering Frank and issuing a list of do’s and don’ts: ‘You aren’t allowed to use our lights. Stay away
from our hydraulic stage.’ Under the head, Chris was seething. As soon as Frank went on, he jumped onto the hydraulic floor, which set off smoke bombs and rose dramatically above the heads of
the audience. ‘
Come on! Come on!
’ sang Frank. ‘
Do you want to be in my gang?
’ He spotted Gary Glitter’s roadies pushing their way through the audience
towards him. After his set he jumped off stage and ran down the corridor, pulling off his head and costume as he went – he had his own clothes on underneath – just as the roadies caught
up with him.