Grumpy Old Rock Star: and Other Wondrous Stories (4 page)

Then the most amazing fight broke out.

In the crowd between me and the band.

I carried on for a few bars, trying to peer over the fists and broken bottles of this fairly violent skirmish, but soon realised it was actually quite a dangerous situation and, besides, no one seemed to be listening. Almost in synch, the band gave up playing and fled for the nearest exit they could find, carrying their precious gear with them. We all dived into the van and sped off before the police arrived to break up the brawl – which turned out to be a clash between two rival local gangs.

Alan Leander was gutted and said, ‘What a complete waste of time!’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Ken, holding up a very expensive pair of cymbals belonging to the headlining rock band, ‘We appear to have three cymbals now!’

After a rather strange residency at a social club for people with mental disorders – don’t ask – I joined a local dance-band quartet which did a lot of work for weddings and other family events. It was proper money, £3 a night – bear in mind that when you are at school and the average pocket money is half a crown, £3 is serious dosh. And this outfit worked three nights a week, mainly over the weekend. It was an unusual line-up – guitar, drums, piano and clarinet – but people didn’t mind in those days.

This latest band was called the Concorde Quartet and the first problem was that, until I joined, it was a trio. It was run by a guy called Bernie Vick, a drummer in his early twenties who lived with his mum and dad in South Harrow. He worked for Boosey & Hawkes, which meant he had access to very cheap sheet music, which was great; plus the work was generally very local, with a lot of the functions being at Ealing Borough Social Club.

Apparently, their previous piano player had got pissed every night. This was fine for the first hour or so, but many of these functions lasted four or five hours with only a few short breaks. It wasn’t ideal that the piano player was paralytic and couldn’t play even before the buffet had been served; worse still if, by the cake-cutting, he was trying to shag the bride. I believe this sort of problem let to his demise.

The first gig was down at the Tithe Barn pub in South Harrow. I was fourteen, and I’d never actually been in a pub before, not for a drink anyway. However, I was already six foot two and looked older than my years, so this wasn’t a problem. There was a public bar, a saloon bar and a lounge bar which also went out into a ballroom. If you wanted to hear some music, you paid an extra penny with your pint and went into the lounge bar.

We started the show at the Tithe Barn and it was going down a treat. There were guys in there singing loudly and making requests and I was having a great time. Every now and then, someone would put their pint on my piano and go and have a dance.

After about an hour, Bernie said, ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to take a break now. We’ll see you in fifteen minutes for some more music.’ Then he turned to my piano, pointed at the collection of full pint glasses and said, ‘Rick, my friend, you’d better get through some of these, they ain’t half mounting up . . .’

What?

It turned out that the regulars were in the habit of buying drinks for the band and leaving them on the piano top – so within sixty minutes I had four pints to get through. By the time I drank them, they’d been replaced by three more and a couple of Scotches. I started drinking the spirits after that, because the sheer volume of the beer was killing me.

At the end of the night I got on my bicycle to ride home.

I couldn’t feel my head, legs or arms. Or stomach. Or feet. Or hands. I just had this warm glow all over my body. But apart from that I was as sober as a judge.

Using the strange logic of a drunkard, I decided to cycle through the park, figuring that would be safer than using the roads. At the end of the park, the path took a ninety-degree turn to the left, as straight on was the local allotment.

I managed to get most of my bike out of the allotment, but not all of it.

I carried the remains of my bike the rest of my way home.

I got blind drunk for the next two weekends, just the same. With my bicycle out of action, one of the band kindly took me home in his car. My mum, bless her, had absolutely no idea about me being drunk. She just thought I was ‘very, very tired’, and even said to my father, ‘It’s really taking it out of him, playing these shows and going to school.’

Sure enough, it was hard work and with each subsequent drinking session I was taking a dreadful hangover with me to school every Monday morning.

Where I was in joint charge of the tuck shop.

The ‘shop’ was actually a big temporary hut in the middle of the playing field and all it sold was crisps and Coca-Cola. The kid I ran it with, an Irish fellow, came up with a brilliant wheeze using a bottle of Scotch. He worked out that if he took the caps off the old-style Coca-Cola bottles, there was just enough room to pour some Scotch in. These were known as ‘Specials’, cost nine pence instead of the usual sixpence and were only meant to be sold to the sixth-formers. We used to go in early, get all the caps off, and pour the Scotch in ahead of the queues forming, so no teachers would know.

Which was great, as long as me and this Irish fella were working the tuck shop.

However, one day we were hauled up for some misdemeanour that
I can’t recall and they had to get someone else in to run the tuck shop.

Someone who didn’t know about the Scotch.

Someone who served all the eleven-year-olds first.

With the Specials.

In the middle of the morning.

The first eleven-year-old to puke was taken along to the medical room. ‘Probably got a tummy bug, little dear.’

The next two were also taken along to the medical room, with a few raised eyebrows on the foreheads of the teachers. By the time there were sixty first-year pupils puking and stumbling around like drunken tramps, our moonshine scheme was rumbled.

They never managed to pin it on us, but we were both taken off tuck-shop duty.

Meanwhile, back with the Concorde Quartet business was booming. It was a little odd for me to be playing so much dance music: I still wanted to play rock ’n’ roll but there was no income in that – I’d been with the band for two years by 1965 and all the money was made playing in the dance bands. There were still social clubs everywhere and at weddings people wanted a live band and to sing along to the old band tunes. People were still dancing waltzes, foxtrots and quicksteps, they were still doing that more than rock ’n’ roll. We would often throw in a ‘pop’ slot, where we’d do pretty ordinary covers of the latest pop tunes of the day, but it was mainly older stuff.

We got ourselves a really good reputation and even started working abroad . . . well, by ‘abroad’ I mean as far out as Southall. That was quite a few miles out of our patch and with the cars at our disposal and the appallingly small and slow road network, such as it was back then, we might as well have been playing in Germany.

We played some amazing shows but none more so than a wedding at the Hayes British Legion. Funnily enough,
I was already starting to think about leaving as I’d had enough of playing the dance music. The venue told us that they had their own piano, which wasn’t unusual – although it often transpired that any ‘house piano’ was wildly out of tune. I quickly learned to walk into any venue, open the piano lid and hit an ‘A’, while Terry Beresford would play a ‘B’ on his clarinet, which sounded like an ‘A’, and see how far we were out of tune.

We walked into the Hayes British Legion and there in the corner was a crisp white upright piano. I was immediately impressed. The rest of the band started getting their instruments out and setting up, so I walked over to the piano to hit an ‘A’ for them to tune up, which they did. The wedding party arrived and the best man announced that the bride and groom would start off the dancing, which was my cue to play the intro for ‘The Lady is a Tramp’. Terry counted me in and I hit the keys – and the only sound that came out was this wooden thumping noise. Terry looked over and beckoned for me to try again, which I did, with the same result. I lifted the lid of the piano and peered in. There was only one hammer in the whole bloody thing. The ‘A’.

We went and found the caretaker who was, for some reason, immediately belligerent.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said, frowning.

‘Well, it’s the piano . . .’

‘What’s wrong with the bloody piano? I saw it painted with a fresh coat of white myself just last week. It’s spotless.’

‘Yes, it is very lovely to look at. But it has only got one hammer.’

‘Listen, I don’t want any crap from you lot . . .’

I spent the rest of the evening getting pissed with the bridesmaids.

‘BRUDDY HELL, THEY DONE IT AGAIN!’

Those few pints on my piano as a sixteen-year-old evolved over the course of the next two decades into one of the most savage drinking habits in the music business. During that time, I joined and left Yes and started my own solo career, but I’ll come to that.

First, let me tell you about my involvement with the English Rock Ensemble – possibly one of the hardest-drinking bands ever to grace the stage. Made up of some of the finest musicians I knew, we toured the world and in the process I enjoyed some of the most memorable times of my life.

And several I can’t remember.

We drank a plane dry on the way to Japan once.

Back in the early 1970s, there were not that many direct flights to Japan. You would normally stop off somewhere like Moscow or Anchorage, when all the passengers had to get off while they refuelled the plane.

On this particular flight, we were heading out to play with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. The band and crew boarded this jumbo to find it was half empty – I’d say there were no more than a hundred people on board.

It was a fair few hours to our refuelling stop at Anchorage, so we all had a drink, naturally. There were about twenty of us in the entourage and remember, this was a huge drinking band,
massive
. We drank all the European beer, moved on to the Japanese beer and drank that, then we polished off the spirits, the small bottles of wine and finally the sake.

When we were still about an hour out of refuelling at Anchorage the steward came up my aisle.

‘Mr Rakeman, the captain has informed me, is dlink all gone. No more.’

‘Really? Not even sherry or perhaps a glass of port?’

‘Is all gone, Mr Rakeman.’

He then informed me that the plane’s food and beverages would be restocked along with the fuel in Anchorage. I have to say at this point that the lads in the English Rock Ensemble were always very well behaved – they might have drunk like fish but they were always on their best behaviour. Anyway, we landed and headed off to the Anchorage terminal, which in those days resembled a giant tin hut with a model of an enormous grizzly bear outside. We located the bar within seconds and ordered drinks. We sank a few more rounds and, when the time came, we reboarded the plane and settled down for the final leg to Tokyo. We called the same steward and placed orders for yet more drinks.

And then some more . . .

When we were about an hour out of Anchorage the steward came sheepishly back up to my seat again.

‘Mr Rakeman.’

‘Yes, how are you doing?’

‘Velly well, Mr Rakeman, but the captain has informed me, is no more again. All gone.’

It was unbelievable, we were laughing so much, we’d drunk the plane dry twice on one journey. The stewards were lovely and we all had a good old giggle about it together.

We duly landed, disembarked and headed off to the Hilton Hotel, where all the bands stayed, thinking nothing more of it.

The promoter in Tokyo was a man called Mr Udo who, I believe, is still big news in that country’s music business even though he must be well into his seventies by now. He’s one of the loveliest men you could ever meet. He met us off the plane – ‘Herro, Lick!’ – and we followed his car to the hotel. We were all really knackered but we headed straight to the bar for a final few jars before retiring to bed.

The next morning, Mr Udo was there to meet me at the hotel. The plan had been for him to talk me through the schedule for rehearsals, the set-up of the orchestra, the various protocols and so on. Instead, looking rather shell-shocked and holding up the front page of the biggest newspaper in Japan, he said, ‘Lick, it says here, you dlunk the prane dly . . . twice.’

Obviously I couldn’t read the Japanese script so he read out the article in all its hilarious detail. So now I knew the Japanese for ‘European beer, Japanese beer, spirits, small bottles of wine and sake’.

‘Er, is this a bad thing?’

‘It says the steward says you velly nice people, velly well behaved but he never see anything rike it in his rife!’

‘OK, but is it a problem . . . ?’

‘Not a plobrem for me, Lick. Japanese Airlines, they rish to sponsor tour!’

The actual shows themselves were magnificent. Until our arrival in Japan they hadn’t quite sold out but within hours of the newspaper headline about drinking the plane dry you couldn’t get a ticket for any money. I believe it was the first time anybody in Japan had a show sponsored, as it was pretty unheard of back in the mid-70s, so that all helped too. The show was a huge hit on both nights and a thoroughly enjoyable experience. On the first night we initially played stuff from my 1973 solo album
The Six Wives of
Henry VIII
, then after the interval we played the whole of my 1974 solo opus
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
, which had been a Number 1 record in Japan (no dinosaurs this time, but we’ll come to that . . . all will be explained).

The audience were fantastic. They seemed to take to me and part of that was my size – most Japanese people are fairly modest in stature whereas I am six foot two and a half in my bare feet and had all this long blond hair, so whenever I walked along a Japanese street I’d be bobbing up and down miles above the crowds. I was seen as quite a novelty, really.