Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (27 page)

I said it was.

Well, Bob Dylan came on the stage and was utterly superb. This was during his electric rabbi period where he and his band all wore bolero hats and long black coats while attacking his back catalogue with some verve. Several times he looked down into the pit and must have wondered who these two civilians were, sectioned off from the riff-raff and applauding like crazy. This would have been privilege enough, but as his set reached its climax with an encore of
‘Rainy
Day Women # 12 &
35’
I made a fateful decision that changes the headline on this tale from How I Stared Directly into Bob Dylan’s Eyes to How I Made a Complete Idiot of Myself in Front of Bob Dylan. During that dreadful extended chaotic final note that even the best of bands do to signify a song is ending, I nudged Brian and said,
‘Come
on, let’s nip round the back again and watch him come
offstage.’
As we made to leave, our security pal asked us where we were going.
‘Toilets!’
I shouted. I don’t know why I said that. It was a rotten deception after these blokes had gone out on a limb for us, but I was by now quite hyped up and, yes, on the outside of quite a few bottles of Budweiser, and I didn’t want them to ask us to wait.

As Brian and I trotted around the rear of the stage, there was Bob Dylan and his band already descending toward the little marquee that had been erected for them to briefly relax and receive a few select guests within. Dylan, I remember, had removed his stage hat and had his head enveloped in a bright pink towel. As he disappeared
into the tent, I felt we had missed our chance to get really close to the legend, possibly slapping his back or exchanging a few words during which he would realize that I wasn’t a nutcase and invite both Brian and I to join them all under the canvas. Then two things swung the odds back in our favour. I saw the first Glaswegian bulldog man was on sole duty at the marquee entrance, and beyond him inside was the unmistakable lofty, languid frame of the great Nick Lowe.

I knew Nick pretty well and was sure he would be pleased to see me. More importantly, he was already in conversation with Dylan and once at his side I was confident he would effect the necessary introductions. In short, I was in! Bustling over to the tent, I calmed the initial look of alarm on my puffa-jacketed pal’s face by saying,
‘It’s
OK – I know that bloke. He’s asked me to pop
by.’
At this he even held back the canvas flap as I strode by. Nick Lowe had his back to me and was wearing a wonderful black-and-white cow-skin jacket that at that time was his trademark. Walking right up to him at a brisk pace, I grabbed him around the waist and said,
‘Nick
-eee! How ya
doing?’

Nick turned around, surprised, almost spilling his drink. I beamed at him and made a gun-shape with my thumb and forefinger while clicking my tongue.

Only it wasn’t Nick Lowe. I don’t know who it was, but an individual less like Nick Lowe it would be difficult to describe even if you were asked to achieve this by a police sketch artist. So now there was me, some fellow who looked nothing like Nick Lowe, two other blokes and Bob Dylan all standing round suffering a ghastly silence. The man who wasn’t Nick Lowe eventually broke the spell.

‘Uh,
buddy,’
he stammered,
‘could
you, uh, just give us a few moments
here?’
Though he said this politely, his eyes were darting around, obviously hoping to locate security.

Saying nothing at all, I turned away just in time to see brother-in-law Brian, who had been several yards behind me, legging it out of the tent and possibly the county too. I exited right after him. My Scots friend grabbed my arm.
‘Danny
, what the fuck? You’ll get me in all kinds of shit, what the fuck were you doin’, f’
Chrissake?’

I don’t know what I replied. Indeed, I don’t know what I said for the next few years. I bumbled through life in a sort of traumatized bubble, living in constant fear I would hear a Bob Dylan record and the whole disastrous episode would come flooding back. Today I am more sanguine about it and can even play
‘Rainy
Day
Women’
without sweating panic-stricken bullets. Whenever I run into Nick Lowe – the real one and not one of these weasels who go around pretending to be him right up until the last minute – I will always happily relate the story for any company with a light laugh. Against this, I think the fact that shortly after the Phoenix Festival our house switched to Ariel Liquid for all our washing machine needs, a decision that persists to this day, illustrates that perhaps further therapy is required.

I would place my wordless meeting with Bob Dylan slightly above my wordless meeting with Her Majesty the Queen. This too happened under serendipitous conditions when I nipped out to the local corner shop one evening to buy an
Evening Standard
. The convenience store was situated in Trundley’s Road, Deptford, close to the yard where mad Rambo the dog marked his turf. Nobody has ever mistaken Trundley’s Road for The Mall, so as I emerged from the shop with my newspaper I at first thought the outsize black vehicle stopped at the traffic lights was a funeral car that had come adrift from rest of the cortège. As I walked past the stationary limousine I looked inside and found myself exchanging an awkward glance with Elizabeth, Queen of Great Britain and Her Other Realms and Territories. She was wearing a pale lemon dress and hat, with her gloved hands in her lap. Like a character in a bad sitcom I literally stopped in my tracks and gawped at her while furrowing my brow. It was one of those reason-scrambling moments where normally you would find yourself being shaken awake by a railway employee telling you the train had now arrived in Folkestone, all change, please. The Queen continued to look in my direction and I remained frozen with my
Evening Standard
under my arm. There was no other traffic on this often quiet back street and not a single other pedestrian with whom I could share and confirm the improbable vision. The lights
seemed to be taking for ever to turn to green, but eventually they did and the Queen sailed away. At a quickening pace I scooted back to tell Wendy what had just happened.

‘Wend!
I just saw the Queen! The Queen in Trundley’s Road! She was just at the traffic
lights!’

Wendy seemed mildly surprised but neither knocked out or incredulous.
‘Oh
, that’s the Thames Barrier at Woolwich. She opened it today, she must have been on the way back from
there.’

Something registered in my brain. Yes, I had heard about the new Thames Barrier but didn’t know it was being opened that day and had no idea the Queen was officiating. Anyway, that wasn’t the point.

‘But
she was in Trundley’s Road! Outside the everything shop. In Trundley’s Road. Where it goes into the bus lane. Trundley’s Road. The
Queen.’

‘Well,’
Wendy coolly reasoned as she swept by me with Bonnie on her hip,
‘I
expect they come around that way to avoid Evelyn Street at this time of night. That’ll be
solid.’

This was hardly the point. I could not understand why the huge event of chancing across the Queen when you pop out for a paper wasn’t going over as big as I anticipated. In fact, whenever I got to tell the story later I always embellished it by saying that, as Her Majesty looked at me, I took a ten-pound note from my pocket and, pointing to her picture, said,
‘Look
, ma’am, I collect all your
money!’

I wish I had done that instead of freezing, utterly pole-axed like an overawed serf. Which, of course, is exactly what I was. The
Evening Standard
when I eventually looked at it carried the story of the Thames Barrier opening, right there on its front page. Had I imagined the whole episode after subconsciously registering the newspaper splash? Even now I wrestle with that, but had I been tripping out surely the incident would not have been so mundane nor occurred in real time. No, there is no doubt that Her Majesty the Queen and I really did share a private moment over by Rambo’s junkyard. The most reassuring part of the tale has to be that even the Queen of England doesn’t just creep across red lights on quiet roads when there’s no one around.

My Friend The Sun

T
he continuing success of both
Morning Edition
and
606
on the radio quickly spiralled into a welter of job offers from all points of the media compass. Financially, these culminated in the adverts for Daz and Mars Bars, so that during any commercial break it was possible to spot my happy old head popping up in consecutive shills, bellowing assured testimonials about forty-degree washes and promising chewy glucose goodness. I have to report that whatever goodwill the public may have towards a performer can soon be soured by such a brassy assault.

The Mars campaign was directly linked to my soaring profile as a sports voice to trust, and so I would find myself travelling with the England team on their official coach, all of us wolfing down the toffee-and-chocolate snacks while urging everyone watching to do the same. I can’t quite remember the deathless copy I was required to deliver, but it was probably something along the lines of,
‘These
taste sensations are goodlylicious in anyone’s language! Isn’t that right,
boys?!’
To which all the England players would nod while trails of lightly whipped nougatine ran from the corners of their mouths. In fact, for the most part we used blocks of wood inside customized wrappers as real chocolate would have melted under the hot TV lights. People still raise an eyebrow when I tell them that Mars, like Birdseye, is a family name. At that time every single ad made for the company worldwide had to be personally signed off by Forest Mars himself, then ninety-three years old and living in New York. In terms of their budget, or
‘spend’
as I believe it is now called, the Mars commercials made Daz look like an old lunatic in sandwich boards walking the streets and ringing a bell. The high point for me
came on the morning the 1992 Barcelona Olympics were due to start: I was one of the few people allowed into the final rehearsals of the opening ceremony, where I was filmed walking among the legion of dancers in crackpot costumes, chewing my lips off and holding up a disguised wooden block.

Another spin-off from
606
came about as a result of a throwaway remark during one of the early shows about there being far too many VHS videos on the market depicting the brilliance of footballers and not nearly enough looking at the game from the other end of the telescope. Why, I wondered out loud, was there no compendium of shocking misses, terrible action and wonderfully bonkers own goals? Within a few days a leading video distributor contacted me to see if I was serious about this. I said I was, and the resultant series of releases –
Own Goals & Gaffes
– sold through the fucking roof.

I had, however, featured in one video previously to this: Paul Gascoigne’s
The Real Me
. It was thanks to this assignment that I first met Paul; neither of us could have anticipated that our friendship would become so close, nor that it would, for a brief while, dominate the tabloid agenda just a few years down the line.

The two of us had almost met in Italy during the 1990 World Cup. That year England had made it to the semi-finals, where they were to face Germany in Turin. I leave you to recall or imagine how berserk was the resultant mania back in Britain at the time. I was working on
Six O’Clock Live
and the story we were looking at was about the desperation of England fans to make it out to Italy in time for kickoff. All flights were full and by other means time would be tight. Somebody in production had the idea that there might be something in seeing if I could hitch-hike out to Italy in twenty-four hours, filming my own progress. This was long before the era of blogs or video diaries and the novelty, coupled with the ticking-clock element, was deemed to be worth the punt. As a further incentive, ITV Sport said that if I arrived before the game they would provide me with a ticket to the match. As a little film it all worked pretty well, although it required a little cheating to ensure that events attained the necessary level of drama.

Having arrived at Dover, I was filmed walking along the long line of lorries waiting to board the ferry, saying that the next leg of my trip would be trying to get to Paris. Beyond that, I was hoping to get a succession of private cars to inch me towards the Alps. Walking up to the lorry at the front, I tapped on the driver’s window. As I did, I think my speech to camera went something along the lines:

‘Now,
fingers crossed one of these drivers will not only speak English but be willing to drop me somewhere near Paris where I can put out my thumb and begin the next leg of this adventure
 . . .’

The driver wound his window down.

Excuse me, where are you
headed?’
I asked him.

‘Turin,’
he said.
‘Want
a
lift?’

This of course was a hopeless answer in terms of our proposed nail-biting epic. Just seeing me get in a trucker’s cab and get out again at the stadium would hardly sustain dramatic interest. So we waved away driver number one and tried several others in the queue, but it was hopeless. Everyone, it seemed, was going my way and only too happy to drop me almost on the centre spot of the Stadio delle Alpi. This was not how we had excitedly imagined the story back in London. Once again tricky old real life had failed to acknowledge the fantasies of a feverish media. Eventually we did find a man who agreed to be filmed saying he was going in the direction of Paris and would get me as close as he could. In fact, he was going to Turin with a load of cherries, but we slipped him a tenner so that our epic thriller could at last begin with the required difficulty.

These days there would be an outcry that we had manipulated everything and we’d be forced to show the truth – me making small talk with an HGV driver from Poplar for seven hours. Allow me once more to direct you toward my earlier remarks about what full disclosure did for radio competitions and prizes. While we’re here, I can tell you that when we all got
‘caught’
making stuff up, I introduced a phrase to our culture that has now been eagerly adopted by the political classes. During a particularly thin item about how the fans of Matt and Luke Goss, then Britain’s leading pop sensations, Bros, had been upsetting the residents of the swanky new neighbour-hood they had moved into, we found that nobody was upset in the
least. This inconvenient detail rather put a crimp in our exclusive, so a friend of one of our researchers was filmed mouthing all the necessary disapproval. Even the producers on a programme as slight and knockabout as ours thought this was a bit much and so the item was shelved until some genuine crazy people could be tracked down. These were scraped together a few months later, happily for us while Bros were still hogging the notoriously fickle teen agenda. However, on the night of broadcast the original edit went out, featuring our researcher’s chum. This caused many of those who lived near Matt and Luke to ask who on earth this posturing oaf was, spouting all the fury. A few local papers then went to town on this, and once the
London Standard
hopped aboard the growing imbroglio LWT found it had landed itself a reputation as television’s leading deceit sewer, where supine stooges queued up to badmouth national treasures for the price of a hot meal.

At the height of the furore, I was stopped outside the studios by a journalist who asked how on earth we had thought we could get away with such horse feathers. I told him what had happened and, as a sort of sign-off, concluded,
‘It
should never have gone out at all – but it was a cock-up, not a
conspiracy.’
This diffused the scandal somewhat and today whenever I hear those last six words uttered, usually against the backdrop of Westminster, I roar out the chorus of
‘Drop
the
Boy’
in fitting tribute.

Back at the 1990 World Cup, the footage of my travels to Turin was adequately massaged to make it appear I got there in the nick of time and settled into my seat to watch England lose on penalties in a game they really should have won. This was the match of Gazza’s tears and Gary Lineker’s
‘have
a word with
him’
signal to the bench. Although there had been talk that I might talk with the team after the final whistle, the result and general mood in the stadium at the finish put paid to all that.

So I was not to meet Paul until a few months later, when I was asked to play the public’s guide on
The Real Me
, a light documentary officially endorsed and starring the nation’s darling himself. Our introduction came in the Tottenham
Hotspurs’
treatment centre, adjacent to their Middlesex training camp. We were left alone in
one of the rooms and at first Paul busied himself with something, anything, rather than attempt eye contact. He then sat pretending to read a copy of the
Daily Mirror
while I spouted off stories. Every now and then he would look up, his face alive with pleasure, saying,
‘Is
that right? Fantastic! Tell me again
 . . .’
Half an hour later the pair of us were exchanging rapid jokes and opinions about TV personalities, the kind of kids we’d been to school with and the way the man who just came in to fix the sunbed spoke. It was an instant and joyful bonding and set the scene for some of the wildest times I have known in my life. There was hardly a week in the years immediately after that first encounter when we didn’t see each other; rarely a day passed without flurries of phone calls. Whenever we met up – though I have never been and never will be a larky sort – the infinite possibilities of each passing moment definitely became more heightened.

You could tell when he’d done something. He’d disappear for five or ten minutes and then return hopelessly casually, bristling with nonchalance, unable to prevent the corners of his mouth from turning up and giving off a sort of silent alarm. Also it had been twenty minutes since the last
‘thing’.

‘Paul,
I know you. You’ve done something. Please don’t have done
something.’
I would plead with him,
‘No
, Paul, this is a great restaurant – I come here a
lot.’

‘Ha’way
man, you’re paranoid. I just went for a tab
 . . .’
And he’d fix you with dancing eyes, bursting to let you in on whatever booby-trap he’d just set beneath your social standing. This would rapidly evolve into a smile that would disappear clear around his jaw-line.

‘What?!’
he’d splutter.
‘What
?! Relax, y’old bastard. I swear, I just had a quick
puff.’

And I’d receive a concentrated beam of inner hysteria, unbridled laughter in all but sound. Whatever it was this time, he was particularly proud of it and we’d all find out before long.

It could be anything. Paul was very fond of introducing stray cats and dogs to high-end locations. He could be found in the kitchens of unspeakably fashionable eateries, searching for
‘real
bread’
in order
to make an egg sandwich. And nudity was only ever a heartbeat away.

At Champneys health spa in Piccadilly – admittedly an unlikely rendezvous for the pair of us at that time – to the horror of both staff and clientele Paul arrived smoking an enormous Cuban cigar that thoroughly stunk up the entire reception area. On being told to extinguish it immediately, he physically jolted at his thoughtlessness, profusely and genuinely apologizing. Then, in the absence of any ashtrays, he placed the burning tip into the desk fan, sending not only a thousand shards of stogie into the atmosphere but extending the hearty smell of it to hitherto untouched portions of the club.

Going out with Paul Gascoigne was like taking to the town with a case full of wet dynamite. Like promenading with a hybrid of Hunter Thompson and Norman Wisdom. Like nothing mattered.

Everybody at some point in their lives deserves to know someone like Paul Gascoigne, someone so reckless and magnificent they have seemingly been raised by lightning. For several years I knew him intimately, and I cannot think when I’ve laughed more or felt more alive.

Few people can, as the saying goes,
‘stop
the mighty roar of London’s
traffic’
simply by appearing on its streets. I know Madonna can’t because I’ve seen Madonna shopping in London’s West End and the sight of her pootling along Bond Street barely caused a pizza-bike to backfire. But Paul Gascoigne could.

Shortly before the above described cigar faux-pas I had watched him crossing the road in Piccadilly and every car, every bus, every taxi came to a halt and started sounding its horn. People leaned from windows hollering jokes and hellos that all became lost in the swell of the rising din. The tourists knew him, the policemen knew him, the newspaper sellers knew him. The social anarchy that followed his every move in the mid-nineties was totally genuine. He had no
‘people’
to organize and manufacture his celebrity, no agenda other than to simply get through each tumultuous day that his gift and nature had bequeathed him.

On an early visit to Paul’s family home in Newcastle I was shown his trophy room. Though not a large space it was completely shelved
and every shelf was full of cups, medals and prizes. The startling part was that only about a third of these were for football. Virtually every other mainstream sport was represented here, from cricket to snooker, and there were very few silver awards or runner-up certificates. Like Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man
with his uncanny mathematical abilities, Paul could
‘do’
sport as easily as draw breath – and plainly had been able to do so since taking his first baby steps.

I later found out that his genius for games was so acute that it became difficult for him to find competition willing to play against him, even among his supposed soccer equals. Thus, at the England training camp, if Paul was playing snooker he was only allowed to hold the cue with one hand. If he played table tennis he would have to put the bat aside and just play with his hands. He could only get a game of darts on the condition that he threw his arrows with the point facing toward his nose. Not only that, he would simultaneously smoke, talk and keep an eye on the horse racing while doing all these things.