Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (36 page)

The rather sad coda to this story is that the crocodile was never actually allowed to have the swinging chicken. I forget why, but believe it had something to do with interfering with the natural behaviour and feeding patterns of this Essex crocodile.

It was after this series of shows had been completed, and shortly before they went out, that I suppose I must acknowledge a landmark event in my career: I went on the radio for the first time.

I can recall it clearly, chiefly because it was about as poor and eggy an experience in broadcasting as I have ever suffered. God, it was shocking, humiliating even. I had been booked on to a programme called
Jellybone
that aired once a week on the LBC network and, I presume, must have been some sort of phone-in show. I say ‘presume’, because we certainly saw no evidence of anybody phoning in during the half-hour I struggled to engage with the host in light promotional conversation. The problem was I had no idea what was expected of me during the spot. When he opened with the not unreasonable question, ‘So tell us, what is this series all about?’ I couldn’t for the life of me think of the answer. My initial reaction was – and still is – to send up any project I make as if it was some sort of flaccid outrage in which I had inadvertently become mixed up. Suddenly, sitting here in a dark, serious radio studio with, to be fair, a pretty disinterested host watching the clock tick down, all that seemed somehow inappropriate. Also – what
was
this series all about? I couldn’t possibly start trotting out all those toe-curling box-ticking worthy social points I know LWT would have liked to be attached to the project. Indeed, my honest answer would have been, ‘About £250 a show.

Having spent the last few years at the
NME
ripping the piss out of the mundane, I found myself on the verge of adding to it. So I faffed, I hedged, I stammered and ultimately began speaking so fast and garbled that I saw a look of actual alarm appear on the host’s face. I think my first answer went on for about twenty minutes and yet, when I looked at the clock, only thirty seconds had gone by. Undaunted, he followed up with, ‘So who are you, Danny? Tell us something about yourself.’ I made the dreadful error here of going with a natural reaction and thus seeming to send him up.

‘Tell you something about myself? What, like on
Miss World
?’ I said with a light chuckle that immediately noted the sudden temperature drop in the room and vanished.

‘Well, OK, then,’ came back my interrogator, quite naturally a bit frosty. ‘Who are you?’

Boom. Now I was really stuck. To be honest, I don’t remember much of the debacle beyond that. I do know I was mentally gasping for air and firing off flares as my confused, fractured babble began approaching a pitch similar to how voices sound on the phone in cartoons.

Eleven long minutes in, he said, albeit lightly, ‘Well, you’re not doing a very good job selling the show here! We’ve not had a single call!’ To which I desperately replied, ‘Well then, let me go!’

Can you imagine? If anyone had said to me at that moment, ‘Ah, Dan, I think you’ve discovered your forte here,’ I think I might have laughed up my liver. The final disgrace came as we went to an ad break and the next guest, somebody from the band Shakatak, was parachuted in early to stop the rot. Shakatak were an unknown group then – a state they may have achieved again today, of course – but even so, within seconds of this new blood coming on air the switchboard was alive with queries about both him and his music. I sat there mute during the next ten minutes, possibly with my thumb up my arse, until a producer came in and said I could go.

Outside the studio I said to her, ‘That was a disaster eh?’ The usual form here is to reassure your ‘talent’ that in fact the spot had been really good and everyone was very happy. Not here.

‘I know. Car-crash time, wasn’t it? The only calls we had were complaining about your accent!’

Suffice to say, following this, I didn’t have to open the door on the way out to the street, I just walked under it.

I crept back to Bermondsey and to the flat we now lived in – you will recall I was lightly married – on the nineteenth floor of a block called Maydew House, right on the edge of Southwark Park. This was a magnificent council tower of Swedish design wherein you walked in the front door, immediately went downstairs into a lounge and kitchen area, then doubled back down more stairs to the bathroom before a final descent took you to the bedrooms. The large front windows looked out right over Central London and the back ones provided a spectacular vista across the Thames to what is now Canary Wharf. Amazingly, people pitied the location, trained as they were by then to believe all high-rise blocks were hopeless hellholes, but these were gorgeous modern apartments and whenever I heard people badmouthing them I’d remind them that it wasn’t the architect that constantly pissed in the lifts and chucked rubbish down the stairs.

Behind the door of number 113, Kelly and I had what my mum identified early on as ‘a funny old relationship’. Either she or I would be out on the road, working with some pop group or other, and often we wouldn’t see each other for days at a time. Whenever we did meet up we liked each other tremendously, but knew secretly that either of us could take or leave the arrangement. It would be me who would leave it.

I trust most people will be relieved when I reveal that I do not intend to open the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart to any great extent in these memoirs. Frankly, I’ve always thought people who ‘bare their souls’ or reveal any kind of intimate details about their home lives want locking up. Our confessional society with its full-frontal emoting and queasy headlines about some celebrity or other ‘opening their hearts’ to the public needs a massive bucket of water chucked over it. As people used to say quite often, ‘It’s none of your fucking business, thanks.’

However, I will say this: I have always been an absolute sucker for blonde working-class girls with a regional accent. In the two jobs I now found myself doing, the chances of coming into contact with any women of the working class was more than minimal. I can think of only two – Janet Street Porter and Julie Burchill – both of whom had almost caricature-like regional voices, although Julie was fervently black-haired and Janet alternated at the time between pink and green. Besides, they were in fanatical relationships anyway and, most importantly, both considered me a bit of a chump.

And then there was Wendy. In the period between my ‘floating away’ from her eighteen months previously and my now becoming a seemingly jaded though still only twenty-four-year-old rocker, Wendy had also gone off and got married. In her case to the boy she’d been going out with for a few years before we had originally hooked up, back in 1979. She still worked as the editor’s secretary in Carnaby Street, though we rarely spoke now. If we did it was jokily, albeit laced with a certain embarrassment rooted in our one-time intimacy and a sense of trepidation because we had never really, not properly, ever had an official break-up and secretly still fancied the hell out of each other. Whenever I attempted light conversation, it was always with a façade of silliness and the intimation that ‘it’s all a laugh, ain’t it?’

‘Hello, missus!’ I would guffaw if we found ourselves approaching each other down a corridor. ‘How’s life? Got about forty kids yet?’ ‘Not yet!’ she would over-act in return. ‘You all good?’ To which I would hey-ho, ‘Never better!’ And then we would go our opposite ways, both feeling a little sadder, a little more wobbly with where we were.

One evening I remember going out after work, as usual, with a whole gang of the
NME
crowd to a pub a bit further away than usual, in Soho. En route, Wendy and a writer called Max Bell said they’d catch us up because they both, separately, had to ‘take some stuff in’. I went with them and found that they were going to one of the Italian delis around Old Compton Street, places I had passed but never been in. I watched as they bought various pastas, meats, cheeses and breads, and suddenly realized that, beyond the carousing, they actually had the kind of normal, steady sensible home life that was now thoroughly alien to me but was something I yearned for deeply. As I watched their bags getting loaded up with Parma ham and Chianti, it dawned on me that my life had, at its core, become about as nourishing as the fast food I grabbed on the go most nights of the week. You can never leave home until you’ve got a home. Otherwise you are just staying out. Of course you also have to have someone you want to go home for, and it was for this final ingredient – luckily for me and the rest of my life – that Wendy was still searching.

A couple of months later I was alone in the cosy, windowless, earth-toned
NME
record room, hammering out the singles reviews, when the door suddenly opened and Wendy walked in. We had been going out after work perhaps more than was safe recently, although always in a crowd, and everything was still jokes, jokes, jokes. She had under her arm a few 45s that had just arrived and needed inclusion in that week’s column. We were now alone in a room for the first time in a very long while.

‘Um . . . Neil thought these should go in this week . . . if you’re, you know . . . doing the singles.’

What happened next changed both our lives forever.

The record on the turntable at that exact moment was Elvis Costello’s ‘Good Year for the Roses’. I had just started the review. In the gap before I could reply to Wendy, I stood up and was about to speak when the following words came through the speakers:

After three long years of marriage

it’s the first time that you haven’t made the bed.

I guess the reason we’re not talking,

there’s so little left to say that’s not been said . . .

We both heard it and the timing of it was hard to ignore.

‘Oh, blimey,’ I said, ‘that’s a page out of my diary.’

‘I know,’ she said quietly. And then she said it again.

I took one step toward her and held her as tight as I knew how. She buried her face into my shoulder and we stood like that until all we could hear was the noise of the record arm bouncing off the disc’s label.

I released my grip and looked in her frightened blue eyes.

‘What are we going to do?’ I said shakily.

‘I don’t know, Dan. I don’t know . . .’

We held each other again so tightly.

We both knew.

If that last scene seemed a little cinematic, then so be it. That is exactly how it happened. Years later I told Elvis Costello of his part – albeit with a George Jones song – in our marriage. He subsequently signed a copy of the single with the dedication, ‘Dear Wendy, Don’t blame me!’ Even more incredible perhaps is that, following that seemingly chance encounter in the
NME
review room, neither of us ever saw our respective partners again. Literally. We ran from the
NME
that evening to a hotel in the West End. I was due to fly out to Miami the day after next to join a tour by Earth, Wind & Fire and I urged Wendy to come with me, to just run away and deal with whatever fallout may come when we returned to face the music. She didn’t think twice. Her brother went to her flat in Bow to grab her passport and fill a suitcase. The required visa was sorted out via the
NME
press express route and less than forty-eight hours after we had both been drifting through another mundane day at the office, we were standing in the departure lounge at Gatwick, dazed and breathless, on the threshold to a whole new life. Wendy’s Marks & Spencer bag that had contained the food for that fateful day’s dinner lay for a week under her desk at work until somebody noticed the odd smell of decomposing vegetables. By then we were far, far away. The heady excitement of our impulse and sudden utter rushing love overwhelmed everything else while we journeyed up and along the eastern US seaboard, and it simply refused to abate, even while sharing a bus with a dozen partly stoned jazz-funk musicians.

And that exhilarating feeling remains undiminished now, more than thirty years on.

We extended our time in America to include a trip to New York, a city that Wendy had always wanted to visit. I increased her anticipation of our time there by emphasizing how sensational it was and reassured her that its then reputation as a violent hellhole teetering on the verge of moral and social collapse was reckless PR invented by locals to spice up the town’s edginess. This ludicrous assumption was first tested in the cab into Manhattan from Newark Airport when gunshots were exchanged between the car immediately in front of us and the one behind. Our cabbie simply wound in his neck and kept driving while Wendy and I crouched down in the tiny floor space available between the greasy back seats and the driver’s partition. When things seemed to have quietened down, I popped up and said, ‘Jesus Christ, mate, were we just caught in a shootout?’

Our chauffeur gave a half-shrug and said, ‘Yeah, well, you know, it happens. This is the quickest way in, anyhow.’ It was as if we’d avoided a stray dog or something.

Our destination was the previously flagged eyesore the Hotel Dixie, that suppurating infestation at 43rd and 8th. I think, in an attempt to appear to Wendy as some sort of George Sanders type seasoned traveller, I had spoken airily about the place as ‘where I normally stay when in New York’. Now, as I manoeuvred our cases through the filthy revolving doors, it was as if I was seeing it for the first time. The reception, far from the bustling cosmopolitan hub of my memory, stood revealed as a sort of lost Hogarth sketch of Bedlam at the height of the summer season. I got as far as the reception desk, hoping against hope she wasn’t seeing what I was seeing, when Wendy tugged my sleeve and broke the spell.

‘Dan, don’t think I’m being funny, but I don’t think I can stay here. There’s people passed out on the floor and someone being sick over there.’

I agreed. Pulling the cases back out on to heaving 8th Avenue I flagged another cab and, bizarrely, asked him to take us to the nearest hotel.