Rod: The Autobiography (22 page)

Strach said, ‘I thought it might be a nice buzz for the lads to come to your place.’

A buzz for them? A bigger buzz for me, more likely.

The day before they came, the gardeners worked on the pitch until after sundown, making it perfect. Next morning, two huge luxury coaches came rolling through the gates and around the drive and came to a halt with a hiss. One brought
the players, the other brought the coaching staff and the gear and the food which they would later eat, sat around the pool. Around
my
pool!

I watched them arrive from an upstairs window, hidden by a curtain – watched them step off the bus, one by one: Aiden McGeady, Bobo Baldé, Kenny Miller, Neil Lennon, Artur Boruc, Gary Caldwell . . . the players from my team, on my drive. I had gone all shaky, like a teenage girl with a crush. I didn’t want to come out of the house, didn’t even want to meet them.

It took my wife to get my act together. Once they had changed in my tiny dressing room (now relocated and enlarged) and gone down to the pitch, I followed them with Penny, who was heavily pregnant with Alastair, our first-born. We shook some hands and stood on the touchline. The staff had put out cones and the players were playing a game of one-touch, at amazing speed it seemed to me – and on my pitch, which had never looked so beautiful. Gordon had told the team there was to be no swearing, but something went wrong for McGeady, who shouted ‘Fuck!’, then immediately turned to Penny: ‘Sorry, ma’am.’ Good as gold.

Who else in the world has had his favourite football team train in his garden? What kind of schoolboy dream is that?

Here’s an old joke: a wife says to her husband, ‘Sometimes I think you love the Celtic more than you love me.’ The husband says, ‘Dear, I love the
Rangers
more than I love you.’ For how much longer, though, will cracks like that be funny, or even possible? Rangers, Celtic’s fierce cross-city rivals, went into liquidation in 2012 and now play in Scotland’s lowest professional league. I was trying to explain to my young son Alastair – who seems to have caught the Celtic bug from somewhere – that there wouldn’t be any Old Firm derbies for the time being and he was genuinely saddened. I feel for the Rangers fans, especially the young ones. But there is loss for supporters on both sides of the divide: a century and a quarter of fervent, life-enhancing rivalry thrown into jeopardy. And Scottish football in general is such a frail and impoverished thing by comparison with the
English version. At a match in 2008, I found myself sitting next to the Dundee United chairman Eddie Thompson, a lovely man who, sadly, has since passed away, and who once sent me a recipe, written in his own hand, for the club’s meat pies. I asked Eddie how much Dundee hoped to profit by finishing fourth in the league at the end of the season. He said, ‘One hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds.’ Al the Tout immediately said, ‘That’s Frank Lampard’s wages for a
week
.’

All you can do, though, is fly the flag and keep it flying. If I’m in England and Celtic are at home, we’ll take the plane up: me, Big Al, Al the Tout, and Ricky Simpson, if he’s around. We’ll go to Rogano in the middle of Glasgow and order the cod and chips. Then we’ll drive out east to the ground, see the streets grow busier the closer we get, see the green-and-white hooped shirts thickening in number. And then we’ll pass the big brooding bronze statue of Jock Stein holding the European Cup and head inside. I sometimes think I would go for the singing alone: the passionate, inventive, non-stop chanting of the Green Brigade, those great terrace originals who create the songs the rest of the world sings. My seat for life is in the directors’ box, with a brass plate bearing my name, next to one for Billy Connolly. In front of me and just to the right sits Billy McNeill and, alongside him, Bertie Auld – two of the legendary ‘Lisbon Lions’ side of 1967 – and to sit there, as a fan, and be in the presence of the club’s history in that way is an immense privilege and makes me a very happy man.

I was a Lisbon Lion myself once, you know. OK, only in a charity match in 1994. Still, what a thrill, to sit in a dressing room alongside Billy McNeill and Ronnie Simpson and John Clark and be told by Bertie Auld, in full Scots brogue, before we ran out, ‘Rod, ah want ma passes
crusp
.’ (Translation: ‘Rod, I want my passes delivered crisply.’) Our opponents were a Celtic XI, and Lou Macari, with no love lost, kicked me right up in the air from behind. I still owe him for that.

Even when I can’t go, I’m still watching. In January 2012, I had to fly from London to Jakarta for a show. But I was hardly
going to miss the Scottish League Cup semi-final against Falkirk, was I? So I went online and found a Celtic Supporters Club, the SingTims, in Singapore, and I arranged to break the journey there. And thus I found myself, approaching midnight, packed into a tiny bar, the best part of 7,000 miles from Glasgow, surrounded by Scots, all wearing their hooped shirts, and all shouting and singing at the television set, the picture on which kept freezing because it was being downloaded from the Internet.

Celtic, incidentally, won 3–1, with two goals from Anthony Stokes and a penalty by the captain, Scott Brown. Not that we saw any of them. The television chose those moments to freeze.

It’s all-consuming and, by any logical analysis, mad, and it has the power to change my mood, for better and worse, and I spend too much time thinking about it and I attach far too much importance to it. But what can you do? It’s football. One time, at 4 a.m. in Vancouver, Canada, I was heading to a bar where I knew I would be able to watch the broadcast of a lunchtime kick-off, and the sun was just coming up, and I saw this bloke on his bicycle, with his cycle clips on, in his hooped Celtic shirt, pedalling determinedly through the empty streets, on his way to the game. And I thought, ‘Me and you both, pal.’

Come on, you bhoys in green.

IN JULY 1971,
the record company throws a party for the Faces at a nightclub called Bumbles in Los Angeles. It’s the usual scene: loud music, a foaming ocean of free drink, a number of record company types in various stages of nervousness and inebriation, and a horde of women in luscious night attire who are here with the sole aim of flinging themselves at the band, which they duly do with cheerful immodesty.

In these circumstances, I am learning, it is impossible, as a member of the group, to maintain a position in the middle of the room. You can start out there and cling on to the carpet with your toes as hard as you like, but you will eventually be forced outwards by the waves of people coming at you, until you are backed up against the wall, literally peeling people – mostly women – off yourself. That said, on this occasion I can hardly be accused of hiding from the attention: I have chosen for the night a white velvet suit bright enough to light up an ice hockey arena.

The girl I eventually notice, however, through the throng, is not flinging herself at me, nor pressing me up against the furniture while barking into my ear a startlingly frank proposal regarding the rest of the evening. On the contrary, she is sitting at a table to one side, in a blue and white dress and a pair of clogs. And she is observing the scene, including my suit, with an air of detached bemusement. I introduce myself – and the introduction is necessary because Dee Harrington from England is here with a friend and is no particular fan of the Faces, or
indeed of rock music in general, and has very little idea who I am. She prefers soul music, as it turns out, but then soul is a passion of mine, too, so that’s a point of connection straight away. When Aretha Franklin’s ‘Spanish Harlem’ comes on, I ask her to dance. Then we sit down and talk some more. And then we leave the club and live together for four years.

Instant mutual attraction. Immediate comfort in another person’s company. It’s hard to unpack the chemistry of these things, but there it was, plain enough. Dee was twenty-one years old, a well-brought-up, southern counties English girl, the daughter of a Royal Air Force pilot – Wing Commander Harrington, no less. She had been a secretary at a record company in London and was in LA looking for work and not quite finding it. And she was attractive in that appealing way that seems not to know exactly
how
attractive. A few days before I met her she had been sitting in reception at a photography studio, waiting for a friend of hers who was a model to come out, and a photographer had walked past and offered her a
Playboy
shoot on the spot. She had a plan to save some money, maybe move on to Japan. She ended up with me instead.

The urge to be alone, just the two of us – that was instant, too. We left the party and walked and talked, not really knowing where we were. A police car pulled up and checked us over at one point – were we all right? Nobody really walked around like this in LA. We were fine; never better. Eventually we found Sunset Boulevard and the Whisky a Go Go club, but we couldn’t get in because Dee didn’t look twenty-one and had nothing with her to prove that she was. So we walked back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the band was billeted, and Dee said she couldn’t stay because that just wasn’t the kind of thing she did – just hook up with some rock singer in a night club and go back to his room . . . but maybe she could if we just slept. So we did.

But not before I had produced from my bag, for her approval, the model I carried with me of a Lamborghini Miura. ‘This is the car I’ve got back in England,’ I said. Am I the only person
to have attempted to seduce a woman with a
toy
sports car? She said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been in one of those.’ She hadn’t, though. She was just determined not to seem even slightly impressed.

The next day she came to see the Faces in Long Beach, travelling in the limo with me and through the back door and up to the side of the stage just before the show, so that when the lights went on she saw the crowd for the first time, this sea of people, and realised something about the scale of this thing. And backstage afterwards we got separated – at opposite ends of a long, packed corridor, me semaphoring madly to security to bring her through the press of groupies and hangers-on. Her second glimpse of the madness, which she never liked, or wanted any part of, although for a long time that didn’t matter because our relationship took place in total and blissful isolation from it.

Back in London, I rang her and arranged a date at a pub in Lancaster Gate, where I pulled up outside in the yellow Lamborghini, to demonstrate that I hadn’t made it all up. (And I think she secretly rather liked it: the two-seater aspect of it, the fact it went fast and that everybody looked at it. And why not? We were young and that kind of thing was compelling.) Within three months I had proposed to her, in a hotel in New York, slightly surprising her with the speed of the offer, and also perhaps the ‘squareness’ of it, because getting hitched wasn’t exactly a hip thing to be doing in those days – at least, she certainly didn’t think so. (And, indeed, we never did get round to the wedding bit – just drifted along in a state of engagement.) And within three months of that, we would be shacked up in a rambling mansion in the English countryside.

Quite suddenly, and for the first time in my life, I had a lot of money coming in – an awful lot of money, to the point where my accountant was telling me to spend more. Specifically, he was telling me that it might be a smart idea to get rid of £100,000 or so on a property of some kind, to avoid having to pay the same sum in tax.

Well, if he absolutely insisted . . .

Except that, in 1971, finding a property that was worth as much as £100,000, and which wasn’t Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament, was quite a challenge. As close as I could get to the target was £89,000: the price on a stucco-faced Georgian mansion named Cranbourne Court, near one of the Queen’s other places at Windsor, in the countryside not far west of London. Apparently Bob Hope had lived in this house at one time, which I rather liked the thought of, and also, while it was the home of an antique dealer, Sophia Loren used to drop by on browsing expeditions.

Its owner, Lord Bethell, however, was an English aristocrat fallen on hard times. As he showed Dee and me over the property one afternoon, Dee nudged me and pointed out quietly that his trousers had worn so thin that you could make out his striped underpants through the material. If His Lordship had any dark feelings about flogging off the family heritage to some nouveau riche, long-haired rock star and his blonde bird, he didn’t share them. He was probably simply relieved that he had found a buyer.

So, on 1 January 1972, just six months after first meeting, Dee and I moved out of my four-bedroom mock-Tudor house in Winchmore Hill and into a gigantic country pile with stone eagles on the pillars at the gateway, a sweeping drive through rhododendron bushes masking about seventeen acres of assorted gardens and paddocks, and with an entrance hall with a forty-foot ceiling and a giant staircase climbing out of it. I was very proud when I first showed it all to my mum, but she looked worried more than anything else.

‘Ooh, Roddy, how much did all
this
cost?’

‘You don’t wanna know, Mum.’

But then I don’t think she or my dad ever really got their heads around how much money I was earning. In fact, many years later I would ask my mum what she wanted for Christmas.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Let me treat you to something.’

After a lot of thought, she said she wanted a new bread bin.

The problem wasn’t going to be paying for Cranbourne Court – the problem was going to be filling it. When it was unpacked, the furniture from the old house took up less than one room in the new one, which left thirty-five more rooms in need of furnishing. Decorating the house was to become the project of the next two and a half years, the main thing to which Dee and I devoted our time.

We found a chandelier the size of a Morris Minor to hang in the hall. We hunted down leather Chesterfields and velvet sofas in antiques shops in the King’s Road. We bought eight tall wicker butterfly-backed chairs to go around the dining table. My brother Bob, who was a carpenter, came to help sort a few things out and was still there two years later.