Over the Moon (31 page)

In any case, when it came to music it seemed like the decision had been made for me. Ever since the turn of the nineties, radio stations had ignored any recording I had made. This was crystal clear when
Cover Shot
hit number three and I listened to Radio One’s album chart rundown. When he reached the top of the chart, the DJ acknowledged my album but never played a track.

I guess Radio One have their job to do and they are all about youth and the shock of the new, which means my generation of
artists
don’t get played. Status Quo and Cliff Richard have made a big fuss about being ignored by Radio One and I see their point but it’s not something I have a chip on my shoulder about. It is just the way things are.

Yet it is frustrating as an artist to make records year-in, year-out that nobody hears and it’s dispiriting when a well-meaning member of the public asks me ‘Have you stopped making music?’ After all, the fact that my tours sell out means that people must still be interested. It’s a shame, but not worth getting bitter about.

So in the mid-nineties I continued to plug away making albums like
Living in England
and
Missing You
and touring, as well as going on the odd adventure. In 1996 I returned to Africa under the auspices of Comic Relief on a venture that was awarded the less than gracious title of Balls to Africa.

Because of my experience of Africa, I was made the captain of a football team of celebrities that included Frank Skinner, David Baddiel, Nick Hancock, Angus Deayton, Ainsley Harriott, Karl Howman and John Leslie. Our coach was ex-Arsenal manager Terry Neill, whose sole instruction to us was, ‘If you see someone in the same coloured shirt, pass to them.’ I guess it’s all you could expect from a Gooner.

Terry turned up in a full Lawrence of Arabia outfit one night in Burkina Faso when a sandstorm blew up. We were also taken to meet some village elders, who ordered a dance ceremony in our honour. The native dancers’ beaded fringes went horizontal as they shimmied before us, leading the reliably irreverent Frank Skinner to turn to me and whisper: ‘Ooh, it’s a car wash!’ It was impossible not to laugh, even in a country where rainfall is a rare and precious commodity.

The football highlight of our trip was a game against the Ghana women’s national team, which we managed to shade 4– 3. I was reasonably pleased with my performance, despite being woman-marked by a combative opponent not unlike a female take on Alvin Martin.

Back home on the domestic front, Bill and Kit were now settled in school in England and Carlotta and I decided to get married. This entailed Maureen and I finally getting divorced first: as we had been separated for seventeen years by now, it was probably about time. Maureen was also happily settled with her current partner, Jeremy, who has always been great with Verity and Dan.

A natural free spirit, Carlotta was fairly lukewarm about getting married, and in truth so was I. Both of us were perfectly happy as we were, but in some quarters there is still this ridiculous, old-fashioned stigma about having unmarried parents, and we didn’t want Bill and Kit to suffer from that.

For the second time in my life, it was a low-key registry office wedding with no reception and no honeymoon. It was a happy day, though, and my best man was Mick the Greek, a security man that I had first met on
Mutiny!
By then he was more like a brother to me, as he still is today.

So the second half of the nineties were very much about family as my music career ticked over in the background. It was hard to believe but 1998 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of ‘Rock On’, and Phonogram marked the occasion with a
Best of
collection. As I also released a new album,
Here We Are All Together
, I played not one but two tours that year.

The following year I put out
I Still Believe
– even if Radio One clearly no longer did! – and another fifty-four-date tour climaxed at the Albert Hall. Yet my major news event of 1999 saw me receive a summons from Buckingham Palace.

The New Year Honours List brought the news that I had been awarded an OBE, or made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, for my music and charity work. This entitled me to use the letters after my name, although my kids soon made it clear that if I did anything so presumptuous, they would be referring to me, Brian Clough-style, as Old Big ’Ead.

You are allowed to take three people to your investiture, which was an incredibly hard decision, but I settled on Mum, Verity and Dan. Incredibly excited, my mum bought a new hat for the auspicious occasion, and it was one of the very few times I had ever seen Danny suited and booted.

We felt on top of the world as we drove into the palace grounds on the big day. They say pride comes before a fall, though, and my elation was temporarily punctured when an attendant took one look at me driving the car and asked if I was there to drop somebody off.

Her Majesty the Queen herself was giving out the gongs that day, rather than the Prince of Wales who sometimes stands in, and before the ceremony I mingled with the other lucky OBE recipients. They were a fascinating and talented bunch, from senior medics who had cured fatal diseases to architects who had designed life-saving third world dams, and to me their achievements all seemed so much more worthy than mine.

When the time came we filed into a large state room and I waited nervously to renew my acquaintance with HRH. As my
name
was called, I stepped forward and bowed my head before the Queen.

She took my hand, shook it and at the same time pushed it away, which apparently she has to do as often people are so awestruck to meet her that their brain freezes and they cling on to her hand for ages, gawping and pumping her arm furiously.

‘The VSO is a marvellous organisation and you fully deserve this,’ she told me as she pinned my OBE on me. Oddly enough, although it had been awarded for my charity work
and
my music, she didn’t say a word about the latter. It was almost enough to make you think that she hadn’t got any of my albums.

It had been a fantastic day, and for a patriotic man and a royalist like me it had been incredibly special. Mum, Verity, Dan and I posed for family portraits in the Buckingham Palace grounds afterwards and they all looked as proud as I felt.

I might have been moving in the highest of social circles that day but you never forget your roots and when Britain’s Gypsy Council asked me to become its patron soon afterwards, I was honoured to accept. The Council is a body that seeks to improve people’s understanding of the travelling community, which I think is a very worthy aim. To this end, they made a video in which I met and chatted with some Romany gypsies, sang a few songs with them around a campfire and poked around a traditional caravan.

Even today, when prejudices such as homophobia and racism have largely been eradicated, there is still far too much negative feeling towards gypsies, especially in Eastern Europe, where they suffer terrible persecution. Even here, people will regularly toss ‘pikey’ and ‘tatter’ about as casual insults.

I won’t pretend I am steeped in gypsy life and lore nowadays but I will always feel closeness with that community. When the Dale Farm furore kicked off last year, the
Daily Mail
called me for ‘my reaction’. I didn’t give one: it was far too big a topic to be captured in a glib soundbite. I just agree with what my mum always said: ‘A land without gypsies is a land without freedom.’

I also furthered the gypsy cause, or maybe set it back, in 2000 when I played a kind-hearted traveller in ITV rural cop drama
Heartbeat
. It was fun, but in truth the main reason that I did it was that it was one of my mum’s favourite shows.

Life in the new millennium carried on ticking along. In 2001 I made an album called
Wonderful
and Mel Bush lined up one of his fifty-date tours: it is hugely to Mel’s credit that he always thought outside of the usual ‘handful of big cities’ itineraries. Even more excitingly, along came another of those rite-of-passage moments as one of my children got married.

Verity’s big day was held in a castle in the West Country. It was a gorgeous sunny winter’s day and special from the outset. Your daughter’s wedding day is such a big deal and you want it to be so perfect that inevitably you get nervous, and I sweated long and hard over my father-of-the-bride speech.

Maybe because songs have always come more easily to me than speeches, I also hired a string quartet and sang her a song I had written years ago called ‘Verity’. It was actually the B-side of ‘A Winter’s Tale’ and quotes a line of Byron: ‘
You are the friend to whom the shadows of far years extend
.’ Everybody was in tears – including me, trying to sing the bleeding song.

A year later, Verity presented me with my first grandchild. Josef was a beautiful little boy and I learned something very
interesting.
Becoming a father is a wonderful thing with big responsibilities. Becoming a grandfather is a wonderful thing with much less in the way of responsibility and, whisper it soft, may even be more fun.

Around 2002, Carlotta, the boys, my mum and I moved down to Guildford, in Surrey. It was a nice big old rambling house and Bill and Kit had the top floor, which meant that their teenage fights could start there before carrying on right through the house and into the garden.

My life of semi-retirement continued as I made one album per year:
Forever
in 2002,
Sunset
in 2003 and
It’s Gonna Be Alright
in 2004. With Danny producing the albums in my studio down in the basement and me self-releasing them on my Lamplight label then going out on tour, I had effectively turned myself into a small cottage industry.

I had needed a break, and it had been great, but now I felt ready to get back in the game. I began to pay closer attention to the work offers that Mel was fielding and decided to return to the theatre when I was asked to take part in a musical called
Boogie Nights 2
in 2004.

Following on from a production called
Boogie Nights
that had been based around the music of the seventies and had toured for months,
Boogie Nights 2
was what is today termed a juke-box musical featuring hits from the eighties. I quickly formed a close friendship with its very talented writer, Jon Conway.

I played St Peter, the narrator and overseer of proceedings, and we opened in Bromley in August. The play was not a big stretch or too demanding in terms of the acting and singing it
required
from me, but, to put it in its simplest terms, it felt good to be back.

Another offer came my way and I took two months off in June and July 2005 for a new departure for me: a multi-artist tour. The
Once in a Lifetime
tour of UK arenas featured some fellow artists who had hit big in the seventies in David Cassidy, Bay City Rollers singer Les McKeown and the Osmonds.

When Mel first told me about this nostalgia-fest I was reluctant to be involved and probably a little snobby, but I am glad that I changed my mind because it was a great experience and turned out to be a celebration of a generation. The arenas were packed with forty- to sixty-year-olds every night as each artist played their own set and joyously relived their musical glory days.

I hadn’t known any of them first time around but the Osmonds were lovely while Les was also friendly enough. David Cassidy seemed to have a few issues, however. He was always courteous to me, but became a little vexed when I declined to swap places on the bill.

David was following me and going on last. Theoretically this should have been the best slot but he was not so keen, and while I hate to be immodest, it might have been because I was going down well and proving a hard act to follow. I didn’t want to swap for a very practical reason: as the penultimate artist, I could get home earlier.

Things came to a head in Belfast, a city that has always loved me because I was one of the few artists to tour there regularly during the Troubles of the seventies. I went down great, and after a short interval, a hacked-off David arrived to woo the audience
with
a killer opening remark: ‘Here we go for another night in a godforsaken city!’ What a charmer.

After
Once in a Lifetime
, I was back on the road with
Boogie Nights 2
, finishing up with a three-month season in the north’s party capital of Blackpool. That was great fun, particularly when I rented a house in the slightly more genteel Lytham St Annes just up the road.

On the music front, a guy called Bob Stanley from a band named St Etienne got in touch to ask me to be part of a concept album they were putting together called
Tales from Turnpike House
. I liked the central idea of the songs depicting different characters all living in a London block of flats and did a lovely spoken-word piece called ‘Bedfordshire’ with one of their kids.

In 2006
EastEnders
briefly entered my life for the first time. My mum religiously watched the soap’s Sunday omnibus edition in Guildford every weekend, and when I told her that I had provisionally agreed to do a three-week stint playing Jack Edwards, the father of Holly, she was the most excited she had been since I went on
Heartbeat
.

When I met the
EastEnders
producers, however, it became clear that they would need me for far longer than the three weeks I could spare, and also the character didn’t particularly grab me, so I politely dropped out. I guess sometimes in life things just don’t happen until they’re ready.

Instead, I returned to the West End stage doing four months in a musical version of the
Footloose
movie and also made another album with Danny down in the basement studio,
Beautiful Day
. Mel must have been losing his touch when he booked me the tour for that one: I only did forty-eight dates.

We all needed a family holiday to recharge our batteries and we headed to Cuba so I could re-indulge my fascination with Latin America. As I was walking along the beach my phone rang. It was Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.