Grumpy Old Rock Star: and Other Wondrous Stories (12 page)

Everyone I knew locally bought their first car from UC Slim Motors in Sudbury Town. It was the best car dealership on earth. It’s long gone now, replaced by a shiny new operation that sells expensive Mercedes; back then it was a dump, but I loved going down there. I say dealership, it was more of a car lot. Well, street corner, really. With a dilapidated Portakabin.

It was run by a Mr Slim.

When you reached the ripe old age of seventeen, you would
head off to Sudbury Town to see Slim and tell him what you wanted, how much money you had, and he’d set you up . . . quite literally sometimes. Absolute death traps, every single one of them, but it didn’t matter back then because there was no MOT law, nobody cared and, besides, the sort of cars us lads could afford barely did 30 m.p.h. flat out.

I’d saved up £30 and introduced myself to Mr Slim.

‘First car is it, boy?’ he said.

‘Yes, Mr Slim.’

‘How much you got?’

I told him and he said, ‘Is that to include tax and insurance?’ To which I replied ‘Yes.’

‘All right, son, I’ve got something in mind, follow me . . .’

He escorted me out of the office and straight over to an absolutely rust-ridden 1957 Ford Anglia. It had been blue, originally. I looked through the back windows and could see the concrete forecourt of the car lot – because the floor of the car was missing. None of the dials worked. I took it out for a test drive. The dashboard didn’t light up at all so at night you would have no idea how fast you were going – although with the state of the engine you’d have a pretty good idea that it wasn’t very fast. What I didn’t know then was that it was also notoriously unreliable and would never start in the morning or if it had been left for more than six hours. Perhaps most notably, when you braked the car turned right. This might sound somewhat lethal, and it was, but I quickly learned how to drive it regardless. It was really no trouble – you just knew that if you needed to brake you also had to yank the steering wheel to the left at the same time to keep yourself in a straight line.

It was wonderful. I wanted it.

‘I tell you what, son. This is a special car but just for you I’ll do the motor and the insurance and I’ll even get one of the lads to nip down to the post office and do your tax for you – yours for £30.’

I couldn’t give Mr Slim the money quick enough.

About half an hour later, his ‘mate’ had come back from the post office with this tax disc and Slim handed me the keys and the insurance ‘cover note’ from a company called Cloverleaf. Years later, it transpired that him and his ‘mate’ actually just had a dodgy insurance pad and wrote out completely useless ‘cover notes’ as a way of getting us lads on the road. Looking back, I should have known this wasn’t exactly comprehensive cover when Slim leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Try not to claim.’

I had some great times in the Ford Anglia. I was still at school so driving your own car made me quite the big man. Even better was when I borrowed my dad’s Standard Ensign. It had brakes, which was a huge improvement on the Ford Anglia. The Ensign had three working gears and a dashboard that lit up. I could get all my gear in it so when I had an important show I’d ask my dad if I could borrow his car.

One year, the Ensign was to play an unwitting role in one of my more renowned and memorable gigs. I’d met a Salvation Army trumpet player during a residency with the Atlantic Blues in Neasden – a brilliant West Indian kid who, like me, was a huge fan of Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, all the soul stuff. ‘I know all their tunes, I sing them all day in my bedroom and I know all the brass riffs,’ he told me. At the time, dance nights usually went one of two ways – either down the Gerry and the Pacemakers route or down this American path towards Otis and friends. I found myself far more attracted to this soul material and was keen to play some of it live. We exchanged numbers and said how great it would be to play together some time.

Now, each year the school held a dance where a live band played. The deputy head teacher, Mr Wright, had somehow heard through the grapevine that I was in a band (and I must admit I had mentioned to a few friends in the school playground that I had this black American soul singer in my band) and
I was somewhat taken aback when he asked me if I would bring my band for the night. And mistakenly he said, ‘I hear you might have a black American soul singer in your band, Wakeman?’

Even more mistakenly, I said, ‘Yes.’

I vividly remember standing there thinking to myself,
How are you going to get out of this one?

Truth was, though, that I just wanted to
play
(and here was an opportunity to work with this guy I’d met from the Salvation Army band) so a tiny little white lie about nationality was splitting hairs. I shat myself for about three days until I came across his number. I phoned him there and then.

‘Hey, do you want to sing “Mustang Sally”, “Shake” and “Midnight Hour” and other numbers like that? With my band, at a school dance?’

‘Oh, yeah!’ He was so excited.

We rehearsed with other musician friends soon after and he was brilliant, absolutely sensational. I was really excited myself until I told him the time of the school dance. The problem was, he couldn’t get there very early as he worked for London Transport as a bus conductor and had to finish his shift first, then get home, change out of his work clothes, put his stage gear on and travel to the school via three bus routes. At best, he could make it for eight o’clock. The school dance started at seven and had to be finished by ten o’clock.

Then I had my brainwave.

‘Listen, we can get round this. I’ll tell them that you’ve come from a long way away.’

‘But Rick, I only live in Harlesden.’

‘Far enough. Just run with me on this.’

He agreed and we were all set.

The week before the dance I worked up the hype about the band, saying that my black American soul singer was actually flying in from Memphis especially for the night. The social context for
this is that back then, there weren’t that many black kids at school, so making the assumption that he was American was entirely feasible. The schoolkids couldn’t believe their luck, the buzz around the school was unbelievable and tickets were like bloody gold dust.

The night of the dance arrived and the deputy headmaster came on to introduce the show. ‘Wakeman and his stellar band will be playing for you tonight and I am delighted to announce that one of America’s leading soul singers is, at this moment, making his way from the airport to be here tonight. Until then we will be playing records.’

He finally turned up looking knackered but raring to go. ‘Yeah, Rick,’ he said, ‘it’s been a really long day – three separate connections to get here.’

Then he got his trumpet out with the Salvation Army logo stamped into it. I tried to cover the logo with my coat and fortunately no one seemed to notice.

As we walked towards the stage, he said, ‘Remind me where I’m meant to have come from, Rick?’

‘Memphis.’

Cool as a cucumber, he said, ‘OK, no problem.’

We went and started playing, our soul singer came on, danced like Little Richard and sang brilliantly and the place went absolutely nuts. He was a sensation. Afterwards, he came up to me and, despite being the star of the show, said, ‘Rick, you will make a career in this game, without a doubt. If you can convince a hall full of people they are listening to an Afro-American soul-singing legend from Memphis when, in fact, he is a Salvation Army trumpet player and bus conductor from Harlesden, then you are destined to go far.’

After the triumph of the Memphis soul-singing cameo, there was only one kid the teachers wanted to organise the following year’s school dance. And this is where my dad’s Standard Ensign comes in.

At a pace.

The problem was, I had lost touch with my bus-conductor friend; after the show, we’d both agreed to play together again but for some reason it had never happened. However, expectations were now so high that the school offered to pay £35 for my band this time around.

This was a lot of money at the time: professional bands were going out at about £20, maybe £25, so this was a small fortune. I sat down with Mr Wright and explained that, with regret, due to the unprecedented number of bookings my band had and the widespread record-business interest, we would normally go out for £50 or more. Which was probably true, had I still got the band, but I hadn’t. I’d thought about forming a new one but hadn’t actually got round to it.

‘Well, we’ve only got £35, Rick. Can you still play for us?’

‘As it’s for the school, sir, yes, we’ll do it.’

I couldn’t believe our luck. Then he asked me the name of the band. I started to splutter. Thinking on my feet I remembered hearing ‘Strange Brew’ by Cream on some pirate radio station and blurted out, ‘Curdled Milk.’

Bear in mind that back then you could buy a slap-up curry for about 50 pence, petrol was about 25 pence a gallon, a pint was 10 pence and fags were 15 pence. Two or three quid gave you a riotous night out. With £35, I figured if I paid the rest of the band £2 each for the night, they’d be ecstatic and I’d be rich.

So I put my band together, with two guitar players, a drummer, a bass player, a conga player, myself and a singer – a seven-piece. Curdled Milk was born. I intended the band to last generations . . . it lasted for one show. Because of rehearsal limitations, all we were going to play this time was twelve-bar rock ’n’ roll stuff, but I didn’t care, I was going to be more than £20 up.

On the night of the dance, my Ford Anglia wouldn’t start. Dad to the rescue, ‘Here, borrow my Ensign, son.’

‘Brilliant – thanks, Dad.’

I drove to the White Hart pub and met the band for a few drinks. This was just before the days of breathalysers and was not uncommon behaviour. I’d piled my gear in the boot and roof rack of the car and headed off for the school. However, as I’d had a couple of pints and was not that familiar with the rather excellent brakes on my dad’s car – compared to the non-existent brakes on my Anglia – I lost control of the Ensign under braking and span it straight across the main lawn at the front of the school, skidding wildly and churning up grass everywhere, until it came to a halt right in the middle of the headmaster’s treasured rose garden.

Which was right outside his window.

And was now completely destroyed.

So I’m no longer ‘Ricky Wakeman, rock musician’, I am ‘Ricky Wakeman, lower sixth, shitting myself’. I tried to reverse but, of course, it only churned up more mud. So I put my foot down and tried to go forward, but that churned up even more. Then, in desperation, the guys from the band started pushing me and by the time I parked the Ensign up and looked back at the rose bed it was just total devastation. The lawn was completely wrecked and the rose bed just looked like a compost heap, with mud splattered all up the outside of the headmaster’s window. There was a very nice red rose hanging out of the front grille of the Ensign though.

I didn’t enjoy the show at all.

For a start, we didn’t have a Memphis soul-singing legend with us, or even a bus conductor for that matter. The crowd felt the same and the atmosphere was much more muted than the previous year. But mainly, I was just shitting myself.

Suddenly Mr Wright, the deputy headmaster with the predilection for American soul, walked onstage in the middle of a song.

‘Stop, please, thank you, Wakeman, I’m afraid I’ve got to make an announcement. I’m sorry to have to put a dampener
on this evening’s proceedings, everybody, but somebody has brought it about themselves to destroy the headmaster’s rose bed at the front of the school by recklessly driving a vehicle across it and causing untold damage. If the perpetrator of such a foul deed has the honesty to own up and come and see me now, then I will allow the school dance to continue. If they fail to do this then the school dance will, from this moment on, cease to be . . .’

‘Excuse me, Mr Wright—’

‘Not now, Wakeman . . .’

‘But Mr Wright—’

‘Wakeman! If you are worried about your money, you will still get paid.’

‘But—’

‘Wakeman! Right, the perpetrator has one minute to come forward.’

I stood up from behind my Hohner Pianet and walked up to him at the front of the stage. ‘Er, it was me, sir,’ I said.

With devastating understatement, Mr Wright paused for a few moments, collected his thoughts and then said quietly, ‘Come and see me in the morning, Wakeman.’

I took my dad’s car home after the dance, totally dejected. When I got out, I spent the best part of half an hour picking the rose heads out of the radiator grille.

The next morning, they called me out at assembly and ordered me to go to the headmaster’s study.

Now I was really shitting myself.

The headmaster, a Dr Evans, was sitting behind his desk looking less than happy.

‘Wakeman,’ he started, ‘I was very fond of my rose garden.’

‘I’m very sorry, sir, I lost control, it was my dad’s Ensign, you see, and my Anglia wouldn’t start and the brakes are terrible but not on the Ensign and I came in and hit them too hard and—’

‘Wakeman, you’re rambling. Stop. You are fully insured, I hope, Wakeman?’

‘Well, it depends what you mean by “insured” . . .’ I was still with Cloverleaf.

‘Oh, for God’s sake. And how many times did you lose control? There seem to be three or four different skid marks.’

‘Well, what happened was . . .’ I started to feebly explain.

‘Never mind, never mind, I don’t have the energy to listen. Look, you will have to pay for the damage to the rose garden and the lawn. I have spoken to the gardener already and he has given me an estimate as to what he feels it will cost. Further, you will be banned from bringing your car to the school.’

‘It wasn’t my car, sir.’

‘Wakeman, don’t push your luck. Now, the cost of repairs to my rose garden will be £35 which, I believe, is the same amount you were due to be paid for the dance band.’