The Sound of Laughter (10 page)

My dad carries on sawing and doesn't realise I've gone
until the unweighted wood tips up and he saws straight into his leg.

'BLOODY HELL!' he says in the recording. 'What did I tell you? Don't move, I said. Jesus Christ! Deirdre, get the cloth quick.'

All hell breaks loose. He'd only grazed the skin, he didn't even have to go to A&E.

Later that night I played the recording back and we all cried laughing, even my dad 'saw' the funny side of it (if you'll forgive the pun).

Another recording I cherish is from Christmas 1988. It was one of the last times we were all together as a family and I recorded it at my grandparents' house on a Boxing Day afternoon. You can hear the end theme from
Jim'll Fix It
playing on the TV before we decide to play our traditional family game of charades, or as my mum says on the recording, 'Are we playing Give Us a Clue?'

After a while it's my nana's turn to have a go and though she plays it every year she still insists on talking all through the charade.

'It's a film . . . and a book . . . and it's two words.'

'You're not supposed to talk, Mum,' my dad says, but she's not listening. She's in full flight now and she begins to fling herself round the front room, making gestures with her arms. Then my grandad asks her,

'What it's called?'

I don't know what he was thinking, I mean, what did he expect her to do, tell him and then sit down? You're supposed to guess, that's the whole point of the game. My nana ignores him and carries on, but we're all still none the wiser.

After ten minutes of complete frustration you can hear my nana say,

'Hold on.'

She goes into the kitchen and you can then hear the slamming of cupboard doors.

'Here it is,' she shouts victoriously from the kitchen.

My dad is already in hysterics now in anticipation of what she'll return with. She re-enters the front room carrying a dessert bowl and as my dad slides off the armchair choking with laughter you can hear him shout out
'Oliver Twist'.

Every Sunday morning after we came back from eleven o'clock Mass we'd watch
The Waltons
and have a big family breakfast. My dad never came to Mass, so he would've already made a start on breakfast by the time we got back from church. Well, I say made a start — he would've turned the grill on.

It's not that my dad didn't go to church, he just preferred to go to the evening Mass because he 'couldn't
be doing with all that bloody singing after everything' and also because he could bunk off after Holy Communion and sneak into the Willows for a pint.

He did have a point about the singing. They do sing an awful lot at church and it does sometimes seem that if somebody so much as coughs it's an excuse for another song. Especially at Christmas and Easter where the general rule seems to be the longer and more musical the Mass the more holy it is. The length of Live Aid pales into insignificance next to some religious celebrations I've attended.

Anyway, one Sunday we sat round the table chatting and subtly I managed to switch the tape player on to 'record' again. My dad told a fascinating story about the time he got mugged coming home from work. I don't think he really intended it to be a funny story and that's probably what made it even more humorous. A stifled laugh is always funnier.

'It was a cold Friday night in winter, I'd just been paid and was walking home from the rope works,' he says. (Incidentally, my dad worked there for many years. The only perk he ever got was an abundance of free string and washing lines. We couldn't shut our airing cupboard we had that many. I had no idea why he kept bringing them home, as we never had a use for them. Maybe he just kept doing it because they were free?) 'Two lads jumped
me from behind in the backstreet. One of them head-butted me to the ground, while the other one robbed me. Then they made off with my wages. I managed to get a look at them. It was the Critchley brothers off Tittenhurst Road. They were always up to no good. I crawled to my feet and I somehow managed to stagger home, I really don't know how because I was in unbearable agony.'

That bit always makes me laugh when I hear it. He makes it sound like he's describing a scene from
Shane
or
High Noon.

'I came in the front door and when your mum clapped eyes on me she had a fit. "Oh my God," she said, "what happened to you?" I told her I'd been mugged on the way home from work but that I'd managed to get a good look at them. Then I went straight to the shed in the backyard and got myself a piece of wood with a nail in. "Where are you going with that?" your mum said. I said, "I'm going to sort out the two rascals who did this to me." Well, I never said rascals but you know what I mean. Then your mum started begging me not to go, not to take the law into my own hands, didn't you, Deirdre?'

'No, I did no such thing, you could have done what you wanted for me, I wasn't bothered,' my mum says, which is very funny because it really knocks the wind out
of my dad's sails for a few seconds. He's trying to come across as the Charles Bronson of Bolton, a vigilante with a grudge and my mum flatly refuses to play along, she just continues clearing the breakfast table. 'I just told you to just go to the police, but you wouldn't listen,' she says.

'Anyway, so I went out looking for them. I got to the bottom of Croston Street and just as I'm walking up Daubhill, I spies a panda car coming towards me, so quickly I threw my wood into a doorway, I think it was Graci's Wine Store . . . you know next to the paper shop?'

You can tell from the silence in the conversation that I clearly have no idea where he means, but still he persists on getting the geography right. 'It's on the same side as the dry-cleaner's, you cross the lights by the Co-op near that special school where they make brushes. You know? . . . Next to what used to be that Calor Gas place before it blew up, they sell halal meat now?'

You can hear me say 'Oh yeah' but you can tell I still haven't the faintest idea where he is talking about.

'Anyway, you probably won't remember where it was, this was before you were born.'

That'll explain why I hadn't got a clue.

'The police must have seen my wood and they pulled over,' he says.

'And you were still covered in blood,' my mum adds.

'Oh aye, I was. "What are you doing with that wood?" the copper said. I said, "I'm looking for the two blokes who did this to me." "Well," he says, "you'll only get yourself into trouble taking the law into your own hands. Do you know who did it?" I said. "Yes, I do." "Right, well, get in," he said, "and we'll go and have a look for them."

'Meanwhile, back at home your grandad had called round to borrow some plates off us and he asked your mum where I was. She said, "He's been mugged coming home from work, he reckons it was those Critchley lads from off the lane, so he got a big piece of wood out of the shed and he's gone looking for them. I begged him not to go, pleaded with him, but he wouldn't listen to me."'

At this point on the recording you can hear my mum shouting from the kitchen: 'Will you stop lying, I never said no such thing,' to which my dad replies, 'Bloody hell, Deirdre, give it a rest, will you, I'm trying to tell the lad a story here.'

So my grandad went out into the night to try to stop my dad from beating up the Critchley brothers. The only problem was Grandad only had a rough idea which house they lived in. My dad meanwhile was cruising around in a police car when a message came over the radio. 'Calling
all cars, calling all cars,' (well, that's what my dad says in an American accent), 'we're getting reports of a disturbance at a house on Tittenhurst Road, some bloke's forced entry and we need medical assistance.'

'I don't know why but as soon as I heard that over the radio I knew it was your grandad,' my dad says in the recording. The police car swung round and headed for the house on Tittenhurst Road. Not sure of the address, my grandad had kicked the wrong front door in to find an old lady on the floor clutching her chest. The Critchley brothers were actually next door. They heard the commotion through the wall and legged it out the back before the police showed up with my dad. What a palaver!

'It upset your grandad, that,' my dad says. 'And he started with his angina soon after.'

'Did they never catch the Critchley brothers?' I say.

'No, but they got their comeuppance. The eldest one got done for drink-driving – he knocked a nun down on Green Lane and got ten years for manslaughter. The other one was a bit slow. He got done for armed robbery. He held up a butcher's shop on Christmas Eve because his mam had forgotten to get a turkey. Serves them bloody right. Never forget, what goes around comes around, son.'

Then you can hear my dad take a final gulp of his brew and the end theme of
The Waltons
from the telly in the corner.

In 1978 my dad had joined a record club at work. He and a few of his mates had decided to get a kitty together so they could buy and record the latest albums. It was the only time I ever saw my dad really get into something that even resembled a hobby (except for the time he tried to grow a moustache, but then gave up because everyone said that he looked like a nonce). It was through this record club that I first started to become aware of the many different types of music. When my dad went out playing snooker on a Friday night my mum would let me sneak on to his record player and listen to the latest albums he'd got from the record club.

I think my dad knew that I listened to them, but he didn't mind just so long as I didn't scratch any of them
or destroy his pride and joy. His 'pride and joy' being his Bush Stereogram featuring chrome cassette player and VHF radio. It was a stunning piece of equipment. Upholstered and finished in a sumptuous dark mahogany wood effect, each speaker weighed the equivalent of an nine-year-old boy (and I would have known as I was nine years old at the time). I'd slowly remove each record out of its protective paper sleeve then, with the delicacy of a bomb-disposal expert, I'd gently place them on to the turntable.

I'd put my dad's ginormous headphones on and sink back into his armchair. The headphones didn't fit round my head they were that big.

But I didn't care. I was lost, transported to a different world. Every Friday night. I visited the Hotel California with the Eagles, I served time in Folsom Prison with Johnny Cash and I got lost in the Bermuda Triangle with Barry Manilow.

And there were many others. I can remember being completely terrified and captivated when I first heard Jeff Wayne's musical version of
The War of the Worlds.
And I couldn't stop looking at the incredible artwork that came inside the gatefold sleeve as I listened to it over and over again.

I'll never forget the Friday I first listened to Meat Loaf's epic
Bat Out of Hell
album. I played it so loud
that the sound bled out of the side of my dad's headphones and was louder than
The Gentle Touch
on ITV. R Julie was furious and threw a glass of Vimto at my head. Luckily she was an extremely bad shot and it managed to completely miss both my head and my dad's pride and joy.

The record club opened my ears to a whole new world of musical giants. Elton John, Queen, Genesis, Steely Dan, the stunning soundtrack to
Superman The Movie
by John Williams, ELO, Supertramp, Blondie, Neil Diamond and the Clash (obviously the last two weren't together). Quite an eclectic mix of music for a boy of my age, but I devoured the lot.

I now had a hunger for music to feed. So I joined my local library who fortunately had just started hiring out music on record and cassette. I hired everything and anything you could think of, from early Sinatra to the late Frank Zappa.

Foolishly, the library also provided the public with 'reservation cards' which enabled you to order music of your choice. I must have been responsible for using up their entire yearly budget as every weekend you'd find me in the music shops of Bolton armed with a fistful of 'reservation cards' and a biro.

I'd spend hours scribbling down the names of the latest releases. Then I'd return to the library and hand in
my reservation cards. I managed to build up a vast music collection (and the library didn't do too badly out of it either). I also spent so much time in the library over the years that people were beginning to think I was either unemployed, homeless or library staff, and in a few cases all three.

One album I used the reservation cards to order was the original soundtrack to Mel Brooks's
The Producers.
I had always had a particular fondness for that film ever since my mum had let me stay up late one night and watch it on TV. I was eleven then and I thought it was the funniest thing that I had ever seen. I fell in love with everything about it, the script, the characters, the music. To paraphrase a line from the film, 'It was everything I'd ever wanted in a movie.' When I eventually got the soundtrack from the library I played it constantly, drove my sister mental. It wasn't just 'Springtime for Hitler' in our house, it was Summer and Winter too.

For many years I harboured a secret ambition to turn
The Producers
into a stage musical. I even went so far as to write a rough stage adaptation for it in an old Geography exercise book. Then I read that David Geffen or someone had bought the rights and that was that. As you'll probably be aware, a stage adaptation was made a few years ago and thankfully it was written and
devised by its original creator, Mel Brooks, with great love and affection.

I never saw the show on Broadway but I did get to see it when it eventually came to the West End in London with the brilliant Nathan Lane and Lee Evans.
The Producers
turned out to be one of the best shows I've ever seen. I thought it was very, very funny. If you haven't seen it then I highly recommend you go, because it's a great night out. The funny thing was, it actually surpassed the original film for me. Maybe I might get a chance to be in it one day . . . who knows?

Another ambition I secretly harboured when I was younger was to be a disc jockey. Well, what's the point of having all this music and not being able to celebrate it with people? Isn't that what music is supposed to be about? I found myself loitering with intent around the DJ at school discos. Martin St Clair was his name and his nickname was 'The Saint' (I bet he was up all night thinking of that). He'd been wooing girls for years with his flashing lights and his fancy white telephone-cum-headphone system. They adored him, hanging around the stage all night requesting the latest hits and swooning over his naff Anglo-American accent that lay somewhere between Cincinnati and Burnley.

The ironic thing was I didn't want to be a DJ because I wanted to be adored. I didn't even want to speak. All I
wanted to do was play the music and enjoy myself watching others enjoying themselves.

But first I had to penetrate 'The Saint' and he was a hard nut to crack. He was a fortress of false tan and Hi Karate but slowly we came to an arrangement. He'd let me play a couple of songs and in return I'd hump his speakers back to the convent at the end of the night, leaving him free to sip Top Deck shandy out of a flask lid and sign autographs for 'the gals' (as he called them), in the front street outside school. The main road would be chock-a-block with cars, filled with parents impatient to pick their sweaty, hyperactive children up and get back home in time for
Tenko.

All good things come to those who wait (except for my Uncle Gavin who got knocked down by a cement mixer while on his way to receive a new kidney). It was a simple process of elimination and Martin 'The Saint' St Clair had no choice but to hang up his headphones at the end of the summer. He was almost seventeen, he'd completed his O levels and was now ready to step out into the big wide world or, in his case, hospital radio. My loitering paid off and in September of that year, I took his baton and stepped up to the mike as his natural successor. And then every Thursday between the hours of seven and nine you'd find me on stage playing records as happy as a pig in shit. I held those kids in the palm of
my hand with classics like 'We Don't Have To' – Jermaine Stewart, 'I'm Your Man' – Wham! (on 12-inch) and the ever-faithful 'Dancing on the Ceiling' by Lionel Richie. Even Sister Sledge used to make an appearance (and I'm talking about the nun, not the band). She'd sit at the back of the hall smiling and knitting, yes, you read that correctly, 'knitting'. Occasionally she'd tap her brogues along to the beat and I swear once she actually asked me to play the Communards' 'Don't Leave Me This Way'.

It brought me enormous joy to stand up there every week playing those songs. I'd never known a thrill like it (you've got to remember I still hadn't kissed a girl properly at this point and you can't count Mandy Sharpies as she bit my tongue and spat in my mouth).

I loved to see those shapes spinning on the dance floor, faces full of pleasure and satisfaction all because of what I had chosen to play. Give the correct selection of tracks in the right order and you could elevate the people to the moon (and back).

Not that it was just thrown together, oh God no, we used to spend hours putting those playlists together. When I say 'we' I mean myself and Paul (my best mate then ... and now). We also used to spend hours hanging around the music stalls on Bolton Market, buying warped ex-jukebox singles for 50p a throw. Until Paul
came up with the clever idea of recording the music off the radio then hooking a cassette player up to the turntables — we saved ourselves a fortune. Now all we had to do was record the Top 40 on a Sunday evening and nobody would be any the wiser just as long as we managed to fade the track before Tommy Vance spoke.

When I eventually left school I continued being a disc jockey part-time. I did the occasional family function but with one proviso: if they hired the equipment I'd bring the music. I never took any payment, apart from perhaps the odd bit of buffet and a glass of Coke. I had a good run for a few years and at one point I genuinely contemplated making a go of it professionally, as it seemed like the closest I'd ever get to showbiz. But what I was soon to discover was that it was a lot tougher doing a disco for a wedding reception than it was doing it for the school. Mainly because you never got pissheads coming up to you at school telling you your music was 'shite' (well, apart from the occasional nun who'd been at the altar wine).

But when I DJ'd at weddings I used to get it all the time. There'd always be some prize knobhead who'd stagger over to me full of buffet to have a look through my record collection.

'That's shit, that's shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, Lionel
Richie, shit, Wham!, shit, shit. . . more shit.'

Then I guarantee you he'd ask me to play some obscure track for him, a dark and dreary B-side from twenty years before that reminded him of an ex-girlfriend who'd broken his heart.

I'd smile deafly and never put it on. Then he'd spend the rest of the night trying to make sure I played it for him. I'd keep nodding and giving him the thumbs up until he'd threaten to glass me so I'd have to play it. Then I'd have to watch in horror as the dance floor emptied in one fell swoop, people walking back to their tables throwing venomous looks towards me and shaking their heads in disgust. To top it all the dickhead who asked for the record wouldn't even have the courtesy to get up and dance. He'd just sit in his chair nodding, raise his pint up to me for the chorus and wink.

I also came to the conclusion that I was jinxed. Every time I seemed to hire the equipment something went wrong with it. Like the time I hired the world's most sensitive CD player. It just jumped all night long. If you moved, it jumped; if you fluttered your eyelids, it would jump. I spent five hours walking around the stage like a friggin' astronaut. The bride and groom thought I had piles.

Another night I was booked to DJ at a fiftieth for a fat woman called Jean, who claimed she was my aunt
because she'd been to water aerobics twice with my mum. I arrived to find that the hire company had dropped off the equipment but had neglected to leave me any lights. After a few fruitless telephone calls and numerous answer-machine messages sprinkled with expletives, I had to resort to paying one of the bar staff a tenner of my own money just to sit by the door all night and keep flicking the light switch on and off in time to the music.

The final straw came when I tried another hire company and turned up at the evening wedding reception to find that I had no power lead. They'd left me everything else except a power lead. With pains in my chest I frantically tried to track down a lead from somewhere while the bride, the groom and two hundred of their lovely guests sat and listened to the local radio. Luckily one of the bar staff found that a lead on a standard three-pronged kettle plug would do the trick, but my joy was short-lived when it slowly began to dawn on me that household kettle leads are only a foot long.

With tears in my eyes I dragged my equipment over to a plug socket in the corner of the room, where I then spent the remaining few hours on my knees trying to get the party started. All people could see was the top of my head and latecomers thought I was a midget. I couldn't stand up straight for days after that night. Bruised and
beaten, I decided to throw the disco towel in once and for all.

My head had also been turned by live concerts. The first one I ever went to was the Four Tops on their 'Indestructible' tour live at the Manchester Apollo. They'd had a resurgence in the charts with 'Loco in Acapulco' and had proceeded to wheel out the old hits once again. I really enjoyed them, but then again it was my first ever concert. I would have probably enjoyed the Wurzels live at that point in my life. My only criticism was that the support band did longer than the Tops themselves.

I saw Hall & Oates, Phil Collins, Prince (supported by the Pasadenas who got bottled by the crowd at Manchester City football ground as soon as they came onstage), Lyle Lovett and Was (Not Was) who supported Dire Straits and who were actually much better, David Byrne who was amazing both times I saw him and totally different, and U2 – I've seen them live many times over the years and what I find astonishing is that they always manage to outdo themselves every time.

But Billy Joel has always remained my favourite. I've seen him live so many times. In fact, he's about to tour the UK again in the next couple of weeks for the first time in twelve years and I'm going to try to go to every one of his shows, writing permitting of course.

It all started when my dad bought me an EP of 'Uptown Girl' on 12-inch in the November of 1983. It was a Saturday afternoon and I'd been out all day collecting bonfire wood all day. My dad came home from town on the bus at teatime and handed me the record. I was made up and played it over and over again. I'd seen the video on
Saturday Morning Starship
with Bonnie Langford and Tommy Boyd and thought it was brilliant.