Tea. Drums And Speed
Les Broad
TEA, DRUMS AND SPEED
Les Broad
Copyright 2011 Les Broad
Tea, Drums and Speed
In a windswept town somewhere in northern England snow began to fall. It wasn’t snow that promised to be deep and crisp and even; this fall, in February of 1965, was wet and turned to grey slush almost as soon as it hit the ground. It was driven by an icily cold, wet wind from the Arctic that drove the few people who had ventured outside to seek shelter inside.
In a greasy little café in a grey street near the centre of that grimy town the only four customers sat around a table, thick cups standing empty on the cracked surface of a rickety table near the steamed up window. They seemed an odd quartet of young men, immaculately groomed yet scruffily dressed. They had been debating whether they could afford the few shillings that four more cups of tea would cost; the ‘no’ lobby was winning.
The proprietor, as much a stranger to personal hygiene as his apron was to washing powder, gave them four more cups anyway, saying, “there y’are, boys, pay me for ‘em when you’re famous.” Chuckling, he retired behind his counter once more.
“What we need is a new name,” one of the young men said, “I mean, ‘Bobby and The Blue Boys’, not exactly with it, is it?” He was Rick Gear (although his birth certificate said Percival Wilkins), drummer in the embryonic pop group gathered around that table. “And,” he went on, “I never liked them blue suits.”
“You never said when we bought ’em,” replied bass guitarist Dave Best (who really was Dave Best), “but if we get a new name we could get a new image too.”
A grunt, possibly signifying agreement, issued from the form of lead guitarist Spider (christened Anthony) Webb, slouched against the wall and looking asleep. It was his usual state.
“We need a new singer too,” remarked singer and guitarist Kenneth Thompson, otherwise and preferably known as Gary Gray. “I keep forgettin’ the words.”
“P’raps,” Dave suggested, “we orta forget bein’ like Gerry and the bloody Pacemakers, an’, well…” He was about to say something he’d always wanted to say and had realised he would never get a better chance. “P’raps we should be more like the Rollin’ Stones an‘ get rid o’ them suits.”
“Yeah,” Gary said, thoughtfully, “there’s an idea….”
“If we ‘ave a new singer can we ‘ave a bird, an‘ a decent lookin‘ one?” Rick asked. “It’d be better to look at than you lot.”
By the time they left the café Bobby and The Blue Boys were no more and the hated blue suits had been consigned to history. The four members of an as yet nameless rock ‘n’ roll band cherished thoughts of performing songs made famous by The Animals and The Rolling Stones with a new singer, if they could find a girl willing to join them. But they were lucky: within a week they had found their new vocalist, in their eyes a vision of perfection. Calling herself Cristine Cruell - with intended misspellings - she was tall with long, wild, blond hair, slim and seemed to live and perform in greasy, skin-tight jeans and equally grubby tee-shirts. As if to add to her sheen of ideal perfection she drank anything alcoholic to excess and, daringly, smoked marijuana-laced cigarettes. The boys soon discovered that she’d swallow any sort of pills too, just to see what the effect might be.
So the new band was formed. All they needed was a name. Cristine listened to the suggestions with horror: ideas such as The Ferrets, Gary And The Bandits and, worst of all, The Crestas were discarded, some with a smirk, others with a sneer. As the five of them sat around a pub table seeking inspiration in alcohol, but failing to find any, it slowly dawned on Gary, if nobody else, that their new singer hadn’t made any suggestions of her own. “Alright,” he said with a touch of frustration in his voice, “you give us a bright idea.”
“OK, it’s gotta be something people’ll notice.”
“Such as?”
“How about ‘A Fate Worse Than Death‘?” She lit another illegal-smelling cigarette.
It was met with silence. But slowly, as the idea filtered into a quartet of alcohol-fogged brains, blank looks turned to grins.
So the decision was made. They would relaunch themselves as a scruffy rock group called A Fate Worse Than Death with Cristine as their singer. It was a decision that was going to bear fruit very quickly; Cristine knew a few people and, taking advantage of a shared interest in substance abuse and intimate physical activity, she soon secured a manager for the new group and the first of their concert dates.
Rehearsals were hastily arranged so that the group could cover some of the more popular rock ‘n’ roll songs as well as a rather greater number of more obscure album tracks. Those rehearsals didn’t always go smoothly, though, thanks to a heady mixture of alcohol and drugs that increased in intensity with alarming speed. The smiling friendliness of Bobby and The Blue Boys had been replaced by snarling, alcohol-fuelled aggressiveness which the members of A Fate Worse Than Death showed to each other, and anyone else they came across. Before they took to the stage for the first time they already had a reputation as troublemakers who were likely to attract even more in their audience.
Their first performance was, musically, wholly unremarkable. It took place in a theatre in the English Midlands; the music was adequate but suffered by comparison to the original artists. What was remarkable, however, was the off-stage happenings. Backstage Dave and Gary came to blows before the show, maintained their hostility towards each other throughout the performance - to the huge delight of the audience - and resumed their violence as soon as they had left the stage. A couple of burly stagehands separated them, but Rick and Dave joined in and needed to be restrained by others.
Cristine just watched, grinning.
The audience took their cue from the group and set about each other with enthusiasm, causing a lot of damage to the theatre before their fighting spilled out into the surrounding streets. The local police had an unexpectedly busy night, as did the casualty department at the local hospital. The theatre manager was heard to say the next day, “we’ve had the Rolling Stones here, and I thought that was bad, but this lot, well, it made the Stones’ night look like a picnic!”
The pattern was set. Everywhere A Fate Worse Than Death played it was the same story; the band appeared, came on stage openly hostile to each other and full of drink and drugs, Cristine bawled insults at the audience between songs, the audience began fighting and smashing anything they could grab and the emergency services realised that they had been right to dread the band’s appearance. It was a downward spiral, too, once the band were given a recording contract by a record company desperate for any sort of publicity: instruments were destroyed on stage, with anything up to twenty guitars a night being left in pieces amid the wreckage of drum kits and amplifiers. It was all replaced by the record company, who also paid the band’s increasingly outrageous hotel bills. Those bills invariably included huge sums for the repair of damage to wrecked rooms, and almost as much for the vast quantities of liquor the band got through.
Now the band felt they had money to burn their downfall was inevitable. In just one night it all came to a shuddering end. Spider was rushed to hospital having believed he could cope with an input of heroin far beyond human endurance. Rick drove Dave to the hospital in his new Jaguar in pursuit of the ambulance but in his alcohol-fogged state crashed at a very illegal speed, breaking both his legs badly and sending Dave through the car’s windscreen. Both would live, one blind, the other in permanent need of a walking stick. Gary, convinced by his own drug input that he could fly, dived head first into a swimming pool from a second floor balcony; it was to be his last act, inducing a coma from which he may never awake. And Cristine? She escaped lightly with no more than mild, drug-induced brain damage, which couldn’t be said for her son
, born six months later and destined never to know who his father was simply because his mother didn‘t.
Bobby And The Blue Boys had, finally, metamorphosed into a band that had really lived up to its new name.
The Windscreen
Driving along an isolated, lonely, dark country lane isn't what I want to be doing in a howling gale, but I suppose I don't have much choice considering that's exactly what I'm doing right now. I'd rather be in the pub. Still, just another twenty miles and I'll be sitting in front of a nice, foaming pint.
And the wind's getting worse. I mean, who wants to be driving a car under wildly swinging branches, swaying like drunken guardsmen in the teeth of that blasted gale. I mean,
