Part 2
After the astounding success of that first Borestiffers concert, the first of three in our world tour, I decided maybe we should have a manager. There was only one obvious person to approach; Spike Milligan, and with this, my initial entry into the world of celebrity flirtation. Now, never in Wavey’s existence has he ever had to resort to copying anyone. Being an absolute original, there is no need. But that doesn’t stop people making their own comparisons human nature being what it is. I have no problem with a Spike comparison, and yes, he did come first, but no I’ve never copied or wanted to copy the fellow whom I have, of course, to respect with immensity. You may as well be predictable and suggest I was influenced by Monty Python, which I wasn’t either. Mind, THEY were influenced by Spike. The only thing I truly have in common with the Python’s is that Eric Idle was, like myself, born in South Shields. Now, when I was about 10 I watched all the Marx Brothers movies and, as an impressionable young kid, thought to myself ‘Hmm, maybe growing up and being an adult might not be too bad after all’, thinking that I could grow up and be like any one or all of the bro’s. So mebby we have the Marx bros to blame for inspiring me.
Back to Spike then. I wrote to him at the Beeb as in those days, it was 1975 recall, there was only snail mail as an option. I eventually received a personal reply wonderfully typed out in a knacky fashion on what must have been a knacky typewriter I thought, faint ribbon, dropped letters and all. However, Spike had misread the request telling me that he was himself entirely unmusical. Wah! That’s exactly what I was after from him! Oh well, the Universe gets what the Universe wants, but that was indeed my first contact with the stars of another nature. ( Note; The only REAL stars are in the sky, folks). Ok then, abandoning the half baked notion of us having a manager, we pushed on with our rehearsals, also held at Bolingbroke Hall, scene of the world’s greatest boogie crime, and arranged another show there and a further at St Aidan’s church opposite Derby Street baths. The fun started prematurely for the night we rehearsed the gym, that was also a part of the Centre, was open late, and working out in there were two well known human pitbulls who also happened to be the right and left hand men of the town’s most feared hard man Keith ‘The Sheriff’ Bell. I once discovered an old photo in a history book and it was of Butch Cassidy – and lo and be hard, it was the spitting image of Keith, a former boxer who forced his hand to spar with Muhammed Ali when the undisputed world champion amazingly visited the town in 1970 to get married at a mosque there. (That in itself is patently impossible but it DID happen) When I showed people it they laughed at the bowler hat he was wearing but made no hesitation in recognising it was Belly, other than asking ‘Where did you get that?’ KB actually had had a throne made for sitting on in his own home long before David Beckham was kicking in his mum’s stomach, and that’s no myth. A sheriff on a throne? Oh well.
So there we were banging on our suitcases and twanging our bullworkers when the two sweaty extremely thick necked and steroid filled henchmen, after almost wedging themselves coming through the adjoining door at the same time, entered the hall to investigate what the hell was the cause of the unseemly racket they had heard some distance away. And just like in a cowboy movie when the villain walks into the saloon and the piano player stops in an instant and everybody stops laughing and it goes unnaturally and eerily quiet, upon the sight of said two, the Borestiffers instantly stopped laughing and it went eerily silent, bar a few nervous gulps. Silence like silence has never been heard before. ‘What’s going on here?’ came the query from the taller and wider of the two. Silence maintained. I had to break it with ‘We’re rehearsing our songs.’ ‘Yee a band like? What duh yee dee?’. So, rather half heartedly, I instructed the band to demonstrate, clearly the spokesperson on behalf of all of the others who were silently close to shitting themselves and wanting their mum.
Now, I knew from previous experience what to expect next. Belly had forced himself upon a local punk band, the Angelic Upstarts, as their manager which meant he could take every penny they made from any form of revenue coming in and nobody could either complain or tell him to get stuffed. He had stopped people on the street forcing them to buy two or more copies of the Upstart’s limited edition single. This bloke had stables set on fire with the horses still in them if you crossed him and any complaints made to the police about him was met with the stock reply and advice, ‘Drop it. Or leave town.’ Sure enough, his well trained boys asked the question’ How much do you charge at your gigs?’ More silence. I eventually piped up. ‘Sticks of celery, hard boiled eggs and bits of paper with ‘sausages or ‘knackers’’ wrote on them’. Silence. But this time from the gorillas. And with that, they looked at one another for the briefest of brief and left. Oh yes, we’d showed ‘em alright. If that had been my only destined encounter with Belly albeit by proxy, I would have been happy. But there was more to come and this time I’d be dropped right in the heart of the poo alone. More on that later.
The gig at St Aidan’s cost us no fee for the hall, but we had to smooth out a slight misunderstanding. The Church was a regular meet for local residents, those of a specific category – the blind. And the misunderstanding was that we could have the hall for free owing to the fact that it was being staged for the blind folk. Er, what? You can imagine their consternation upon hearing our racket, and I mean more than produced from our tennis variety, and wondering what the hell was going off. Having explained this little communication mix up and diverting any sightless throng, we played the gig, leaving the caretaker in a state of shock. I had enacted what could or should have been a ‘one off’ three times by now, and thus considered it had been our last World Tour.’ Quit when you are winning’ is one of the few mottos I have ever subscribed to. Maybe in the case of The Borestiffers it was ‘quit whilst you escape by the skin of your teeth.’ (Or, ‘take the celery and run’). Three years later, the Punk Rock explosion had expressed itself expansively in the UK, and as its short lived dust settled from the fall out, and bands fell out amongst themselves selling out for commercial success, it was time for Wavis to put in an appearance and sort them all out. The only way to remain true to your fans is not to have any – watch out, here I come, ready or not. Not.
I needed to ‘cut a disc’ as they said in those days, but I had already two failed efforts at doing so, although not how you might imagine so. The first was at the time of the Borestiffers when I had noticed a national ad that said they could transfer tape onto a 7” disc for a fiver. I envisaged this being the first – and only one – ‘Stiffers vinyl single. I sent the tape off to the company who were based at Great Yarmouth and weeks went by without the expected swift transaction. When I chased them up they hastily returned the tape and said they couldn’t do it as ‘Our disc cutting machine is bust’. Or they may have said ‘broken’. I’m still unsure to this day if that was the truth, or, having played the tape, they chose not to provide the disc, perhaps thinking the tape faulty. I was inspired by the disappointment to pen a tune ’My disc cutting machine’s bust’, which appeared on one of the ‘Stiffer cassette albums. The other failure was when Hatt had become obsessed after seeing an advert at the back of a DC American Comic where you could buy a product that transferred tape to cut disc for not much than a few dollars. Unable, of course, through ineptitude to enter into transatlantic business, he persisted in the idea that he could own his own disc cutting machine and knock out hundreds of Led Zeppelin bootlegs in his bedroom to sell at ridiculous profitable prices.
RCA Washington, the nearby record pressing plant for the namesake label, was the place to approach, the Mad Hatter thought, and hassled me endlessly until I rang their Mr Turnbull to negotiate a purchase. Mr Turnbull thought I was a businessman, and I gave him no inkling to think otherwise. After making the call and the 25 minute conversation ending on Hatt’s landline, I went to share the developments. ’What do you want first,’ I said, ‘the good news or the bad news?’ With a glint of optimism in his ears, he chose the bad first. ‘Ok. A record pressing machine costs £165,000’. ‘What’s the good news?’ he said in a state attempting to hold back instant comatose. ‘I’ve knocked them down to £150,000’ I said, no doubt suppressing an almighty laugh from deep within. I’d not had so much fun since the time I persuaded The Hattster to advertise his allegedly rare (it wasn’t) Steve Hillage single in the ads column of the SOUNDS and replied to it myself as somebody else, ensuring the letter to him was posted from another county to match the fictional person’s equally fictional address, and offering him a tenner. When His Royal Hattness eagerly replied to this solitary response, I immediately sent him another letter brazenly asking him if he would accept a bounced cheque. He deflatedly lost interest in the deal but never sussed it was me. Another digression.
The first intended demo I did was in Tinwhistle’s bathroom. Wonderful acoustics. It was a 4 tracker and I whizzed it off to Beggars Banquet, the small label that had hit the small big time courtesy of a chart hit by Gary Numan. The A & R man there sent me it back and said little other than it was ‘unusual’, spelling the word upside down. Not too fazed by that, I next sent it out to a fellow called Chris Hall who had placed an ad in the SOUNDS asking for demos for his intended indie record company called, simply, Company Records They were in Lincoln and so too was I soon afterwards. He had fallen in instant love for a lifetime with the lyrics of my demo and said that he had to record this man. It was a very snowy Lincoln in 1978 that I visited with the Famous Five namely Wavis, Geldwink (the only one who could drive), Fatty Round, Anders and Hatt. When the car conked out alongside the River Trent it was froze over, and whilst Geldwink tinkered under the bonnet Roundy dared me to tread out onto the frozen surface. I’d gone down to make a record but nearly went down on record as the first visitor to drown on their first visit. I managed to walk almost half across the wide berth and then the cracking noise started. I had to instantly stand stock still or could have dropped straight down through the ice sheet and drowned. Tenuously making it back to dry if somewhat snowy land, the car fixed, we arrived in Lincoln to eventually find Chris at his ‘offices’ at Fort Barnes, armed with forty four tracks on cassette. The majority of this fine number had been concocted in Fatty Round’s living room. Each day when his parents went to work, the band – me, Anders and Hatt – would sneak in and utilise his dad’s Working Men’s Club electric organ in the corner of the room. His dad never could work out the enormous electricity bill he would drum up, even though he hadn’t. We had, and the organ had an almighty fine built-in drum machine to assist us in drumming up the bill. Roundy would play what was technically his organ despite not being allowed legitimately by his dad, Anders contributed guitars, me the singing and songs and Hatt was our human synthesizer.
Incase you would like to know, I will say this about myself. I don’t play any instruments, but give me a good pen and some blank paper and I can write you lyrics about anything in next to no time and music to go with it. If I’d wanted to write and perform ‘proper’ songs, instead of my surreal offerings, then I would have, but then I would have been Phil Collins. No two Wavis songs ever sound the same and each one is wildly different from each other. One morning when we turned up Roundy was hardly awake and still had his dressing gown on. The tail end of it was in the electric fire he had switched on behind him as he was talking to us and we kept quiet when soon after flames were heading in a northernly direction. We kept even quieter when he said ‘Can you smell smoke?’ Anyway, that woke the foooker up. We had to keep the curtains drawn so that the window cleaner would never see what was going on inside lest he ever engaged the parents in casual converse. I guess the neighbours suspected there was a ‘something’ going on next door, but would never have guessed that it was the opening of a another dimension, it was Wavis World. Chris took us to a 4 track studio at Wragby in the Lincolnshire wilds, owned by his mate Andy Dransfield who would engineer the recordings in his converted barn,’Wragby Studios’. Andy was never and could never be prepared for what was about to hit him.’Hatt, Hatt’, he would say innocently through the sound proof window, ’Diddle-ing-dink, diddlle-ink-dink’, indicating that Hatt should raise his sound level on that bit that makes much of what the song ‘Mauve shoes are awful’ actually what it is, without realising that Hatt withstanding, we were all struggling to hold our howls in at this stranger calling our mate by the name he so hated but was stuck with courtesy of me and the fact that his ginger fringe curled upwards rather like Tin Tin.
‘Mauve shoes’ has as part of its content something that no other record has. When we were recording the demo in Hatt’s bedroom, his dad next door – I dubbed him ‘Butch’ after this incident – had, unbeknown to us, twice tried to unceremoniously switch off the electricity supply to bring an abrupt halt to proceedings as the racket of Hatt’s booming ‘diddle-ing-dinks’ was fraying his nerves, and for such audacity the electricity had stung him twice in return administering two hefty shocks. He burst in the room, the surprise guaranteeing our silence, to announce nastily, (quote); ‘Are you finished? Are you finished yit? Ah’m fuckin’ on here ah’ve had two stings alriddy, so yuz had better get a bluddy move on, ahm chopping the electricity oot’. Exit Butch. Went on to dub him Butch because when he burst in the room from nowhere he reminded me of the rough looking dog Butch who would similarly appear from nowhere during the Sooty show and have the same worrying and silencing effect on Sooty and Sweep. Me and Hatt burst out laughing after he had gone but the tape had been rolling throughout and so it had all been recorded. I arranged with Andy that when it came to that same precise point in the song that Butch had burst in, he was to splice in the genuine outburst after which we would proceed with the studio take. And he did, so what you hear on the original ‘Mauve Shoes are awful’ track from my first EP is immortalised. When the USA indie label Messthetics included the track on one of their compilation albums in 2000, they chopped Butch oot of the song on the grounds that American listeners wouldn’t be able to understand his Geordie. Ironic that – Butch tries to chop us oot, I chop him in and the Yanks re-chop him oot.
The 6 track EP ‘Denis Smokes Tabs (John Is a Fig Roll)’ was recorded in Andy’s barn and released on Chris’ Company Records label in early 1979. I doubt Andy recovered. The Famous Five stayed at Chris Hall’s small property on Monks Road and drove him mad, almost ruining his relationship with his girlfriend Linda who wanted rid of these Geordie lunatics and their antics upon first sight. I may have also driven the boys mad too when it came time to get down. I recall all of us piled into a huge makeshift bed, mattresses and duvet covers on the floor, but I ambled off and would stay up for hours in a particularly irritating mock OCD demonstration switching the light on and then off a few seconds later whilst going ‘Diddleing, diddleung’ to identify the alternative clicking. I was still doing it when they had all fallen asleep. One night when there was only Anders and myself available, an acoustic guitar that was propped up a wall began to strum itself for a few seconds. He, who was trying to get to sleep in a small alcove under a stairwell, swore that I had silently gotten up from my sofa some distance away and had done it but I hadn’t. The band (by now the ‘banned’ almost) had to hang around until we had further sessions from which ‘Anna Ford’s Bum’ would one day surface, and for which the Newcastle indie label Anti-Pop would stump up £100 for the Master tape and the honour to have it pressed by Island Records for them in 1980, when Chris had run out of money and couldn’t afford it as a follow up to the EP. He also ran out of life, I understand, in 2001 when as a sad alcoholic he took his own life. Sad really, all he ever wanted to do was wear a smart suit and nip down to London trying to impress label A & R men with whatever he would have tucked under his arm that day.
Our ‘Denis’ EP had done us proud, eventually selling out two pressings of 2,500 copies each I understand. In my own home town, I smiled at my success in choosing the name Wavis O’Shave as people confessed that they were embarrassed to go into the local record shop who had happily stocked it and ask for it by the artists name. Really! Is it that difficult to say ‘Wavis O’Shave’? Well, many wouldn’t and instead handed over a scrap of paper with it written down! In 2013 during a BBC4 docu on albums, whilst visiting a collectors shop, the EP was clearly visible in the background, its Time Travel making me smile. Andy, who drummed on AFB, as well as engineering it, fared a bit better than Chris. I last left him at his mixing desk in 1980 and had no further contact with him until 2004 when I noticed he was now the engineer and owner of his Chapel Studios, South Thoresby, Lincolnshire, a church he had bought and converted, into a swish recording studio that had known bands sent up from top London labels to record their hits there at £1000 a day (Wet Wet Wet being one of them), although he did them reduced package deals. Out of the blue I turned up at his studio and crept in to sit down alongside him to recreate the scene whereby we last parted company. It was like a scene from Dr Who – genuine time travel, one moment it being 1980, the next 2004. After a brief reintroduction and confirmation of who we were, I played him my latest song on Cd which was ‘Katie Derham’s bum’. Booming through his studio speakers he said, ‘It sounds very Wavis’. Of course it did, you daft bugger!
Time travelling back to 1980 now and I had made myself an appointment with the A & R fellow at Virgin’s new subsidiary label, Dindisc. Tinwhistle and I travelled by train to meet with ex-Sounds curly head writer David Fudger, yes, his real name. He was running over schedule when we arrived, and apologising paid for a taxi for us for a ride out in London with a promise to listen to the demo, a roughly mixed four track taken from the intended Anna album, if we came back later. After an impromptu meeting with Iggy Pop on the Portobello Road in between, we returned and he met his obligation. David was well interested in signing Wavis but unfortunately he wasn’t the figure who signed the cheques and so we parted company with the proviso that I rang him in a week or so. I was unaware that the very day I had taken myself off to London, personnel from Anti-Pop, had turned up on my doorstep having secured my address from Tyne Tees TV, with the sole intent of signing me up for themselves, having grooved along to the Denis EP which had been introduced to the British airwaves courtesy of late night BBC DJ John Peel.
It was welcomingly cute to hear ‘You think you’re a woman cos you don’t eat fishcakes’ and ‘Don’t crush bees to death with the end of your walking stick’ coming out of national radio. Peely was the only DJ that you could ring ten minutes before his show went out live – and this would be at 9.50pm you’d dial – and he would actually come and speak with me so that I could find out if he was playing any Wavey that night. I sprang him a surprise once and was waiting for him when he left the Beeb shortly after midnight. I simply followed him to his car wearing a reasonably sized false nose, and to be fair he offered me a lift should I be wanting one which I wasn’t. I didn’t introduce myself or even speak apart from maybe a few ‘sneck’ and ‘beak’, but I have no doubt he knew who I was. I did notice he walking quite fast tho’. In 2004 I had been trying hard to secure a Rod Stewart autograph for a disabled fan having no longer retained the personally signed 20 or so I had myself from my old mate ski-slope nose back in the 70’s. Every time I rang a TV show that I’d seen him advertised to be on I’d find out it had already been recorded. The end of the quest seemed in sight when out of the blue Rod deigned to drop in on the John Peel Show, with a week’s warning, so I quickly arranged with the show for them to grab me an autograph from him when he was there, and they were happy to do so. In that gap week Peely had nipped over to Cusco, Peru on a working holiday – and he never came back, popping his clogs from a heart attack. Double whammy – no autograph and no Peely.
Another Beeb DJ who caught the Wavis bug happened to be Mike Read, and so I met up with him at a BBC Radio One Roadshow where he invited me to play footy with him on the nearby beach, an offer I would have taken up but as luck would have it I had a locked knee joint that day from a dodgy cartilage and therefore couldn’t show off my natural skills. Mike thought he was Cliff Richard, and in the 90’s I almost met the real thing when after blagging my way at a venue on his tour I was one thick wall away from encountering him and asking him why people insisted he was gay. I already had the contrived question ready to ask, ’Cliff, wouldn’t you like to get to the bottom of it?’ Tut, tut. His security finally had sussed I was no-one important to present before their treasured item and I was turned away just as I was being led into his dressing room by staff. In the Noughties, Capital Radio DJ Chris Tarrant joined the ranks of Wavis admirers.
Let’s return to Anti-Pop. They were dismayed when Miggla told them where I was and what for. Their dismay needn’t have lasted long as I had bumped into Dave Fudger at an awkward time as he was rapidly getting fed up by being thwarted by the cheque signer who had for some time ignored Dave’s better choice of judgement, held onto the cheques and allowed other labels to nab bands that went on to justify that Dindisc should have had them first, by racking up chart hits. Just before I had arrived on the scene Dave had to watch Madness slip though his fingers. Unable to sign Wavis had been the last straw for him and he left Dindisc right in the middle of our dealings. It wasn’t overly difficult for Anti-Pop to snaffle me up as I was keen to get on with wanting to see AFB realised, and they were convinced by all the national music press I had been getting myself with favourable reviews for the EP that they could only be on to a good thing. Actually, by ‘signing’ to them, they were and I wasn’t. It was by association with Anti-Pop that I came entangled with the VIZ COMIC, unconsciously becoming their Patron Saint. In his 2006 autobiography ‘Rude Kids’, original Editor Chris Donald confessed that he can’t remember where he got the name VIZ from. Easy, Chris, it was Wa-VIZ. So there we were upstairs above the ladies hairdressers in the AP offices in the Bigg Market when this mop haired skinny kid timidly traipsed up the stairs with a wedge of drawings under his arm. He asked us if we could help him as he wondered where Anti-Pop had got their posters done to advertise their local gigs and would it be possible that their source might like to print up his own wares, which transpired to be his own comical artwork, loosely a stab at his own comic. Having established that he was at the time working for our arch enemy the SS (Social Security), I suppose we could have seen him off with a flea in his ear with paranoid suspicions that he may have been on a governmental spying mission, but upon studying his talent it was clear to see that Chris was veering more towards the mental side of governmental. The rest is history.
We went on to help him print the first VIZ, 500 anarchic and outrageously rude copies sold at 50p each to punters at the local College, raising enough money to ensure that at least one more copy would come out. The rest is every more historier, Chris, with his bother Simon, going on to eventually during the 80’s become a millionaire. Chris let me down big time in 1997. Having not seen him for about ten years I invited him to my home when I was going through a list of people I hadn’t seen for a decade minimum. Wavis’ image was always genuinely that of a reclusive fella, and so the invite was, I guess, intriguing. During the visit he casually mentioned how only recently John Brown, the Publisher of the now nationally acclaimed VIZ that had outsold Private Eye, was desperate for the boys to come up with an idea for a movie for the cinema. He had just coughed up for an all expenses paid week in Somerset for them on the promise that they came back with a movie for him. The boys, however, did what they were best at and had simply got pissed up for the week returning with not as much as a blank sheet of A4. I informed Chris that I already had a full script sitting around doing nothing. It was called ‘Two’s Company, Freezer Rats’ and starred The Hard. It really was hilarious, and I had even cast cameo roles in it for Peter Stringfellow, Richard Whitely and Uri Geller. Uri, whom I finally got round to befriending in 2001 was meant to bend lampposts and unbend bent coppers. About a week later, Chris got in touch with me, praising my wife for the ingenious ‘Fart Machine’ she had invented and had given him, and enquired could we send him the script? (Another time, we sent him a ‘Hard Turin Shroud’, the scorched outline of the dead Hard painted upon a linen cloth, complete with white gloves to negotiate it). He got the script and I got the nod that here, in the making, finally, was what would became the script for the full movie length VIZ film for the cinema. I quickly arranged all the actors and even the film Company to shoot it on location in London and Newcastle, an enterprising Arsenal fan Ashley King who had earlier worked for one of the top ad companies in London. (Funny how Arsenal keeps cropping up, isn’t it?)
Ashley was a huge Hard fan and had him earmarked for Bovril adverts for the telly the previous year. He had drove up from London to my old address in South Shields – Stoddart Street, or ‘St. Odd Art’ Street as I had employed it as well as calling my pad ‘Heretic House’...it had ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter’ on the front door - that Tyne Tees had given him. I’d left there many FA Cup finals before so he had a wasted trip, poor lad. His Company then placed an ad in the local newspaper in South Shields seeking the whereabouts of Foffo Spearjig, or did anybody know where he was? I didn’t hear of this until a week later when an associate showed me it. Playing it cool, I didn’t ring the number for a further week, and when I did they didn’t believe it was me because since placing the ad they had had 105 people, smelling money in the air somewhere, ring them claiming to be Foffo Spearjig. Eventually convinced, they hurried back up North and we shot what was to be the last ever Bovril Tv ads. ‘Bovril – it comes in a H-a-r-d jar!!’ growled the Hard in the six or so scenes scripted by Ashley with my approval. I like him – he looked like Torchy the Battery Boy from the 60’s kids tv show. Subject to test screening in front of a randomly selected audience of cockney punters back in the Smoke, the contract was signed, sealed and about to be delivered. Until out of nowhere the BSE scare came along erupting at the same time. The owners of Bovril quickly changed tack and said they now wanted to promote Pot Noodle instead, and that, basically, was that. The original disused ads can be seen on Youtube under ‘The Lost Hard Bovril ads’, and for the record I would think that my participation in the world of tv advertsing must qualify me as the only straight male who has ever made it in there, for I’m sorry ladies, but it's about time someone told you that ALL males in Tv ads employed through agencies are gay. I’ll be in trouble for that.
Anyway, Chris had promised me the movie shoot would take place in the spring, a waiting period of about six months. The spring came along, nothing springing into action. Breaking the silence I contacted him and he offered excuses that meant it would now have to be shot late Summer. Late Summer came with another unnerving silence. Contacting him again, he told me due to other commitments he now was unable to see the project through, and referred to himself as a ’Cxxt’. Which he had fast become, so I thought. Reading his autobiography (in which he calls me a cross between Howard Hughes, David Icke and Tiny Tim) I discovered how he had suffered a nervous breakdown round about the time of all this movie promise, of which the death of his restaurant’s chef in a car crash played a part. And so, the VIZ movie that never was and starring Foffo Spearjig as The Hard, never was.
Back to the Bigg Market and Anti-Pop, more precisely Phil Branson and Andy Inman. The album popped out and to a great 4 star review in the SOUNDS. I had promoted it on its release date by camping in their Virgin Records shop window in a bed, eating fig rolls and watching Anna vids recorded off News At Ten. For three days. It was reported in the music press that I had also camped out in Anna’s own garden, which I have to say I didn’t. but only because our Fleet Street hacks wouldn’t let us have her Kensington home address. You’d have thought they would have enjoyed that story if they had. Shame the greedy Anti-Pop buggers went behind my back as was their custom and ordered another 10,000 be pressed after the sale of the first 5,000. Too much too soon. Had they done their homework they would have noticed that the sales of the Dennis EP dwindled to a halt after eventually reaching a similar figure. There are still hundreds of copies of AFB under a few embarrassed Anti-Popper beds, although the majority went back to island to be melted back down. (I knew Anna had the hots for me).
Demand for the fleshly Wavis, however, was on the rise. I knew I had finally made it with a double confirmation. The first was when I had been invited down to the NME to do an interview with Danny Baker, who had given my Denis EP a great review on the singles page, all expenses paid. When I arrived Dan was around the corner still interviewing Kiss. Yes, they were my interview ‘supporting act’. (The other confirmation came when I was the answer to seven across in the Sounds’ crossword, the peak of rock stardom.) My friendship with Dan may well have ended that day. He took me up to the top of the NME building to do the interview there. I intimated I might throw myself off which spooked him but when he had a photographer turn up unannounced snapping shots at the speed of light I told him that I had brought him the pix I wanted him to use, so he could forget any others. Reluctantly, Danny boy said that he would have to borrow the negatives for the Baker’s dozen or so of them. The following week, when the promoted interview failed to appear despite having been earlier advertised to, I rang the NME Editor Neil Spencer to find out why. He apologised for Danny losing my precious negatives, the twat. He’s still evading me now. I was at the time also friendly with Dan’s rival at the Sounds, Garry Bushell, who is still a good friend today.
Mind, I wasn’t too sure about the friendship when he really dropped me in it and I nearly got dropped, in 1982. Remember Keith ‘The Sheriff’ Bell? Garry had promised me a SOUNDS interview face to face but it never quite happened, we just kept missing each other, so I suggested he used some excerpts from the many personal letters I had been sending him over a year. He was happy with that and soon after the massive full page article appeared. Gulp. Surely he had understood that when I said use some excerpts I meant the tailor made ones designed for general public consumption and not the very, very private bits not meant for an early version of Facebook that would have been more like ‘Two-Facebook’, or ‘Twatter’. No, he didn’t, and so there it was me apparently seen taking the piss out of the Sheriff at a time, and Gal didn’t know, when he was in Durham nick, so it read even worse, making me look like I was having a safe laugh whilst Belly was banged away. It was difficult enough that everyone in the town automatically assumed that the character of The Hard was styled on Keith Bell, and maybe it was, but hey we all have known these stereotypical hard figures from as far back as the Tv portrayal of Frankie Abbot in ‘The Fen Street Gang’, so that was my legitimate get out clause. But would KB want his claws in me when he got out? The answer came on the third day after the national interview.
I was strolling along a familiar route for my customary Sunday night visit to some scalliwags on their council estate when the sight of two dots on the horizon began to enlarge as they were approaching me. By the time they were face on the two dots had transformed into two huge gorillas one of them growling, ‘Are yee Wavis O’Shave?’ Not quite thinking this out I gave them the stock reply I’d give anyone. ‘Depends if you want to beat me up.’ ‘Aye, well Keith sez he wants to see yee when he gets oot’, replied the other misidentified dot and off they swaggered, job done. So that was it then. Curtains for me. Ironically I had already faked my death in the music press with a little help from a dodgy death certificate provided by VIZ – death by mercury omelette – and it worked for over a week before I was spotted alive by a local reporter, but this time it might just come true. I never mentioned the encounter to a soul as I knew the recipient would reinforce the inevitability of my approaching death, and it was disheartening when I would randomly hear things like, ‘Belly’s oot next month’ in scalliwagal converse. And, inevitably, came the day he was.
Maybe three weeks afterwards came the even more inevitable encounter when he spotted me across a road opposite the Town hall. It was hard to mistake or misinterprete his summoning gesture which included a snarling, ‘How, yeee!’ I awaited his imminent approach. ‘I saw what you put in the paper…’ he continued snarling which I should add was his usual way of communicating anyway. I was wary that he had positioned me in the classic stance, just enough distance for him to put his hand on my shoulder and swing his other, a clenched ex-boxer’s fist,to knock me into next month’s edition of SOUNDS. Jumping the shotgun which he had been known to associate with, I piped up, ‘Keith, look at me...not a muscle in my body. Do you REALLY think I would say anything about you? That was Gary Bushell who said that, not me.’ Well, Gaz was safe in London. I was standing in a very psychological position here considering it was my only chance of a defence, with my arms across my chest in an ‘x’ fashion, ‘x’ of course the symbol you would insert in a ‘no’ box. Maybe my blank wagic gesture worked as he looked me up and down and considering the obvious logic of my reasoning, continued,’ Well….dee it again and ah’ll kill yee’, and slowly strode off like a cowboy, perhaps Butch Cassidy. Just as I was beginning to think that maybe Lady Luck was aware of my presence in this world he stopped in his tracks and turned around . ‘Ah saw yee on the telly last week..’ Oooh, er…I had been on The Tube playing the Hard that week as Lady Luck would have it and in that microsecond of realisation I thought I was back in the frame. ‘Enjoyed it, ‘ he snarled and then heading off again for his horse. From that encounter on if he ever saw me when he was out jogging or fresh from some episode of ultra-violence, he would wave over at me and I would sublimely leg it to quit while I was winning.
Ok, so the Anna album was out and about as I had been too, appearing in the music press with both the lady herself in that infamous snap with me fully resplendent in two foot false nose, and seen in similar pose with Britt Ekland and the hottie totty of the day Debbie Harry, Blondie herself, although in that final encounter the nose had extended to about five foot and had to be manually assisted by the intervention of an egg whisk half way along the length. To be snapped with Wavis was fast becoming a requisite for top media lasses, a bit like how earlier it had became trendy and a must for top celebrities to be seen on The Muppet Show. With the help of Geldwink holding the camera, we had sprung the surprise on the delectable Anna with a meticulously timed strategy as she left News At Ten that night, hence photographing the most desirable Queen of the Screen at that time. The pic was syndicated and made the front page of the Sunday People, spoilt by the fact that the twats had spelt my name as Wavis O’Shane. The People had made a more decent offer than The News of the World who were going to misquote anything I would or wouldn’t say to make me out a right old pervie courtesy of the enlarged hooter, and some Editors even thought the pic was faked as this surely could not have happened. Incidentally, Geldwink has yet to be paid for this amazing photographic evidence although in this respect I have no doubt that Anti-Pop were. Handsomely. I decided I had made my point and that three beauts were enough to prove that the magnetic charm of Wavey was a force to be recognised. Joanna Lumley, incidentally, was next on the hit list should I have changed my mind.
Maybe I should clarify the Britt incident, the actress going on to play a Bond girl no less, thus allowing me to perhaps boast that I have dated such a desired luminary. Having sportingly connected herself with mineself after her late night appearance on a live Tyne Tees chat show, (Brian Clough appeared also but he refused to take me up on my offer to be signed unless I got a haircut first) the story goes that we were last seen hopping into her laid on roller and drove off into the night. Maybe my tartan hat and huge hooter had fondly reminded her of her old flame Rod Stewart, of whom I had become a personal friend for some years as far back as 1972, and had started the myth that his name actually is also my real name, as The Tube would often mistakenly state. First things first. Maybe, just maybe, Britt and I headed off under my suggestion to Quadrini’s posh nightclub in Newcastle, enjoying each others company and culture clashes, and whatever else. Maybe she hurled me out the roller pressing the ejector seat button. Make up your own mind, but I will say this. Considering she was somewhat harshly referred to in the press as ‘Hollywood’s most famous bed springs’, she certainly was a good sport. As for my name being RS, well, I did encourage that red herring by using the name Roderick Stewart for a many years to write under during expression of another facet of my existence, and we all know how many other names I often employ, don’t we? I’m the only person I know who has more than one entry in Wikipedia, can post to myself on Internet forums before I realise I’m replying to myself, and have played football with six names down the back of my shirt – all true and verified.
Now then, as the huge hooter was the major Wavis trademark for most, I suppose I should comment on where it came from and why. Sorry to disappoint you, but I can honestly tell you, I don’t know. Aware that much of my surrealism rises up from deep within my subconscious as you would expect it to reside, then I guess it would be hard to wriggle out of the obvious Jungian symbolism of it being an enlarged willie, expressive of a latent powerful sex drive. Rather saucy if indeed so, whilst worn along such desirable totty. Mind, I rear up again if I were to think this could be used as circumstantial evidence against me for me being branded the original knob head. No, I’m not sure that would stand up in court, pun intended. And then there is the possibility, continuing the Jungian theme and unconscious, that ‘noses’ cannot be pronounced without duplication of the Greek philosophical word ‘Gnosis’ which means esoteric, spiritual knowledge. Note that Moses (perhaps he was actually ‘Noses’ and a dyslexic took the notes?) received the Ten Commandments upon Mt Nebbo. (I’ve always suspected there were eleven, the chopped oot one being ‘Thou shalt be wacky.’) Now I like that one, O’Shave – mystic or mistake - so in football result terms; Jung 1 Jung 1, extra time now being played, and if it goes to penalties I’ll not be taking one. And let’s not forget King Nebuchadnezzer, responsible for one of the 7 wonders of the world. Mind he eventually went barmy.
With ‘Anna’ topping the Alternative music charts in the Sounds, there was demand for the obligatory gigs, and of course it made perfect sense that we do one only with somebody else playing me. In fact, couldn’t we do several gigs a night in several places if we could provide enough bands? Wavis would never do either the obvious or the expected and so it was never going to be that he would do a live show. The music mag Record Mirror even reviewed one show giving it the thumbs up with t'Yorkshire man Phil Branston who was the heavily disguised Wavis, hooter and all, even though the review placed a great emphasis on Wavis’ Geordie accent. Tv was different, my first association and appearance on a Tyne Tees Tv programme came on the back of the success of the Denis EP. Producer Malcolm Gerrie wanted me on one of their youth magazine shows ‘Check it Out’ and naturally wanted a song out of me. I think he had his ear on ‘You think you’re a woman cos you don’t eat fishcakes’ or ‘Don’t crush bees to death with the end of your walking stick’. I told him that this was too obvious for Wavey, a singer singing one of his songs, could I do a comedy sketch? Surprised, he asked if I could come up with one. Within 24 hours there it was on his desk all laid out scene by scene.
So Hootsi Tabernacle, Grand master of the Californian Nebbist cult made it to the silver screen in a wonderful spoof where this dry yankee hiding his face under a ridiculously exaggerated huge cowboy hat had bought a local landmark, a huge standing stack rock on the beach and was having it flown back to the States by helicopter. I had asked for the station’s most trusted announcer to interview Hootsi and although they did provide him he had naughtily not learned his script at all and so there was I not only having to concentrate on a convincing American accent but left with a dozen off pat answers to a dozen questions he hadn’t bothered to look at, plus the bastard couldn’t keep a straight face. Roll camera! I also asked that they never reveal it was a spoof but of course they did. Not being able to keep a straight face was a constant curse when I worked with cameramen and crew. Often they would ruin the take by guffawing or the camera would wobble up and down on the cameraman’s shoulder and we’d have to go again and again. The Director would instruct his crew, ‘Just leave him to do what he wants’. Well, I am unmanageable I’ve already told you – difficult for any Director or Producer who needs to be in charge.
One of my best tussles was with Geoff Wonfor, husband of Granada Director and knighted, the late, Andrea, Geoff beating Spielberg to film the prestigious ‘Beatle Anthology’ for a global Tv series. He was Chief Director for the Tube, and this time I had been granted the luxury of a full crew for a day. As luxurious as it was rare. This time I was playing the Hard’s toff cousin Lord Losbang Coalseamwig in his monocle, top hat, tails, Doc Martens and his gold roller especially hired for the day. And of course he felt in a toff’s accent ‘ No thing.’ After scenes at a hard disco aboard the ‘Floating Princess, a’ swish nightclub aboard a moored liner on the Tyne, the next scene was where I was to be thrown off the Tyne Bridge to land and dust myself down in my crumpled top hat on the pavement hundreds of feet below to feel ‘no thing’. We had been granted special permission from the police to shoot the scene and of course we would have edited it once we had thrown the convincing Losbang dummy off the bridge.
Now, in one of those moments I earlier explained involving me and great heights, and straight people with enormous responsibilities, in those situations I like to amuse myself by convincingly putting the word about to someone nearby that I will actually hurl myself off the current stationary height. Obviously the fellow I casually mentioned it to wandered off in shock and passed this bit of trivial info to Geoff, a burly fellow of 6’ plus.
Next thing I know he is pinning me up a wall and relaying this message; ‘If you jump off this bridge I’ll fuckin’ kill you’. Well, I would have thought the leap would have taken priority in the death stakes, but there you go, pure comedy. The Lord Coalseamwig shoot was perhaps the best comedy I have ever shot but sadly it was never screened despite been advertised in advance. And why? Nobody ever officially told me and avoided confrontation, but one day long after I did find out. The crew were having such a good time that long day that they all got progressively over pissed on the free booze and with laugh induced wobbly footage, upon reflection back in the studio, it was unusable. What a costly waste of time, effort and talent. Quite often what we filmed for the Tube never made it to transmission to share with the Hard fans of the nation, and a further classic example of this was ‘The Non-Swearies Puppet Show’, ah yes! A classic ahead of its time, I swear.
After the astounding success of that first Borestiffers concert, the first of three in our world tour, I decided maybe we should have a manager. There was only one obvious person to approach; Spike Milligan, and with this, my initial entry into the world of celebrity flirtation. Now, never in Wavey’s existence has he ever had to resort to copying anyone. Being an absolute original, there is no need. But that doesn’t stop people making their own comparisons human nature being what it is. I have no problem with a Spike comparison, and yes, he did come first, but no I’ve never copied or wanted to copy the fellow whom I have, of course, to respect with immensity. You may as well be predictable and suggest I was influenced by Monty Python, which I wasn’t either. Mind, THEY were influenced by Spike. The only thing I truly have in common with the Python’s is that Eric Idle was, like myself, born in South Shields. Now, when I was about 10 I watched all the Marx Brothers movies and, as an impressionable young kid, thought to myself ‘Hmm, maybe growing up and being an adult might not be too bad after all’, thinking that I could grow up and be like any one or all of the bro’s. So mebby we have the Marx bros to blame for inspiring me.
Back to Spike then. I wrote to him at the Beeb as in those days, it was 1975 recall, there was only snail mail as an option. I eventually received a personal reply wonderfully typed out in a knacky fashion on what must have been a knacky typewriter I thought, faint ribbon, dropped letters and all. However, Spike had misread the request telling me that he was himself entirely unmusical. Wah! That’s exactly what I was after from him! Oh well, the Universe gets what the Universe wants, but that was indeed my first contact with the stars of another nature. ( Note; The only REAL stars are in the sky, folks). Ok then, abandoning the half baked notion of us having a manager, we pushed on with our rehearsals, also held at Bolingbroke Hall, scene of the world’s greatest boogie crime, and arranged another show there and a further at St Aidan’s church opposite Derby Street baths. The fun started prematurely for the night we rehearsed the gym, that was also a part of the Centre, was open late, and working out in there were two well known human pitbulls who also happened to be the right and left hand men of the town’s most feared hard man Keith ‘The Sheriff’ Bell. I once discovered an old photo in a history book and it was of Butch Cassidy – and lo and be hard, it was the spitting image of Keith, a former boxer who forced his hand to spar with Muhammed Ali when the undisputed world champion amazingly visited the town in 1970 to get married at a mosque there. (That in itself is patently impossible but it DID happen) When I showed people it they laughed at the bowler hat he was wearing but made no hesitation in recognising it was Belly, other than asking ‘Where did you get that?’ KB actually had had a throne made for sitting on in his own home long before David Beckham was kicking in his mum’s stomach, and that’s no myth. A sheriff on a throne? Oh well.
So there we were banging on our suitcases and twanging our bullworkers when the two sweaty extremely thick necked and steroid filled henchmen, after almost wedging themselves coming through the adjoining door at the same time, entered the hall to investigate what the hell was the cause of the unseemly racket they had heard some distance away. And just like in a cowboy movie when the villain walks into the saloon and the piano player stops in an instant and everybody stops laughing and it goes unnaturally and eerily quiet, upon the sight of said two, the Borestiffers instantly stopped laughing and it went eerily silent, bar a few nervous gulps. Silence like silence has never been heard before. ‘What’s going on here?’ came the query from the taller and wider of the two. Silence maintained. I had to break it with ‘We’re rehearsing our songs.’ ‘Yee a band like? What duh yee dee?’. So, rather half heartedly, I instructed the band to demonstrate, clearly the spokesperson on behalf of all of the others who were silently close to shitting themselves and wanting their mum.
Now, I knew from previous experience what to expect next. Belly had forced himself upon a local punk band, the Angelic Upstarts, as their manager which meant he could take every penny they made from any form of revenue coming in and nobody could either complain or tell him to get stuffed. He had stopped people on the street forcing them to buy two or more copies of the Upstart’s limited edition single. This bloke had stables set on fire with the horses still in them if you crossed him and any complaints made to the police about him was met with the stock reply and advice, ‘Drop it. Or leave town.’ Sure enough, his well trained boys asked the question’ How much do you charge at your gigs?’ More silence. I eventually piped up. ‘Sticks of celery, hard boiled eggs and bits of paper with ‘sausages or ‘knackers’’ wrote on them’. Silence. But this time from the gorillas. And with that, they looked at one another for the briefest of brief and left. Oh yes, we’d showed ‘em alright. If that had been my only destined encounter with Belly albeit by proxy, I would have been happy. But there was more to come and this time I’d be dropped right in the heart of the poo alone. More on that later.
The gig at St Aidan’s cost us no fee for the hall, but we had to smooth out a slight misunderstanding. The Church was a regular meet for local residents, those of a specific category – the blind. And the misunderstanding was that we could have the hall for free owing to the fact that it was being staged for the blind folk. Er, what? You can imagine their consternation upon hearing our racket, and I mean more than produced from our tennis variety, and wondering what the hell was going off. Having explained this little communication mix up and diverting any sightless throng, we played the gig, leaving the caretaker in a state of shock. I had enacted what could or should have been a ‘one off’ three times by now, and thus considered it had been our last World Tour.’ Quit when you are winning’ is one of the few mottos I have ever subscribed to. Maybe in the case of The Borestiffers it was ‘quit whilst you escape by the skin of your teeth.’ (Or, ‘take the celery and run’). Three years later, the Punk Rock explosion had expressed itself expansively in the UK, and as its short lived dust settled from the fall out, and bands fell out amongst themselves selling out for commercial success, it was time for Wavis to put in an appearance and sort them all out. The only way to remain true to your fans is not to have any – watch out, here I come, ready or not. Not.
I needed to ‘cut a disc’ as they said in those days, but I had already two failed efforts at doing so, although not how you might imagine so. The first was at the time of the Borestiffers when I had noticed a national ad that said they could transfer tape onto a 7” disc for a fiver. I envisaged this being the first – and only one – ‘Stiffers vinyl single. I sent the tape off to the company who were based at Great Yarmouth and weeks went by without the expected swift transaction. When I chased them up they hastily returned the tape and said they couldn’t do it as ‘Our disc cutting machine is bust’. Or they may have said ‘broken’. I’m still unsure to this day if that was the truth, or, having played the tape, they chose not to provide the disc, perhaps thinking the tape faulty. I was inspired by the disappointment to pen a tune ’My disc cutting machine’s bust’, which appeared on one of the ‘Stiffer cassette albums. The other failure was when Hatt had become obsessed after seeing an advert at the back of a DC American Comic where you could buy a product that transferred tape to cut disc for not much than a few dollars. Unable, of course, through ineptitude to enter into transatlantic business, he persisted in the idea that he could own his own disc cutting machine and knock out hundreds of Led Zeppelin bootlegs in his bedroom to sell at ridiculous profitable prices.
RCA Washington, the nearby record pressing plant for the namesake label, was the place to approach, the Mad Hatter thought, and hassled me endlessly until I rang their Mr Turnbull to negotiate a purchase. Mr Turnbull thought I was a businessman, and I gave him no inkling to think otherwise. After making the call and the 25 minute conversation ending on Hatt’s landline, I went to share the developments. ’What do you want first,’ I said, ‘the good news or the bad news?’ With a glint of optimism in his ears, he chose the bad first. ‘Ok. A record pressing machine costs £165,000’. ‘What’s the good news?’ he said in a state attempting to hold back instant comatose. ‘I’ve knocked them down to £150,000’ I said, no doubt suppressing an almighty laugh from deep within. I’d not had so much fun since the time I persuaded The Hattster to advertise his allegedly rare (it wasn’t) Steve Hillage single in the ads column of the SOUNDS and replied to it myself as somebody else, ensuring the letter to him was posted from another county to match the fictional person’s equally fictional address, and offering him a tenner. When His Royal Hattness eagerly replied to this solitary response, I immediately sent him another letter brazenly asking him if he would accept a bounced cheque. He deflatedly lost interest in the deal but never sussed it was me. Another digression.
The first intended demo I did was in Tinwhistle’s bathroom. Wonderful acoustics. It was a 4 tracker and I whizzed it off to Beggars Banquet, the small label that had hit the small big time courtesy of a chart hit by Gary Numan. The A & R man there sent me it back and said little other than it was ‘unusual’, spelling the word upside down. Not too fazed by that, I next sent it out to a fellow called Chris Hall who had placed an ad in the SOUNDS asking for demos for his intended indie record company called, simply, Company Records They were in Lincoln and so too was I soon afterwards. He had fallen in instant love for a lifetime with the lyrics of my demo and said that he had to record this man. It was a very snowy Lincoln in 1978 that I visited with the Famous Five namely Wavis, Geldwink (the only one who could drive), Fatty Round, Anders and Hatt. When the car conked out alongside the River Trent it was froze over, and whilst Geldwink tinkered under the bonnet Roundy dared me to tread out onto the frozen surface. I’d gone down to make a record but nearly went down on record as the first visitor to drown on their first visit. I managed to walk almost half across the wide berth and then the cracking noise started. I had to instantly stand stock still or could have dropped straight down through the ice sheet and drowned. Tenuously making it back to dry if somewhat snowy land, the car fixed, we arrived in Lincoln to eventually find Chris at his ‘offices’ at Fort Barnes, armed with forty four tracks on cassette. The majority of this fine number had been concocted in Fatty Round’s living room. Each day when his parents went to work, the band – me, Anders and Hatt – would sneak in and utilise his dad’s Working Men’s Club electric organ in the corner of the room. His dad never could work out the enormous electricity bill he would drum up, even though he hadn’t. We had, and the organ had an almighty fine built-in drum machine to assist us in drumming up the bill. Roundy would play what was technically his organ despite not being allowed legitimately by his dad, Anders contributed guitars, me the singing and songs and Hatt was our human synthesizer.
Incase you would like to know, I will say this about myself. I don’t play any instruments, but give me a good pen and some blank paper and I can write you lyrics about anything in next to no time and music to go with it. If I’d wanted to write and perform ‘proper’ songs, instead of my surreal offerings, then I would have, but then I would have been Phil Collins. No two Wavis songs ever sound the same and each one is wildly different from each other. One morning when we turned up Roundy was hardly awake and still had his dressing gown on. The tail end of it was in the electric fire he had switched on behind him as he was talking to us and we kept quiet when soon after flames were heading in a northernly direction. We kept even quieter when he said ‘Can you smell smoke?’ Anyway, that woke the foooker up. We had to keep the curtains drawn so that the window cleaner would never see what was going on inside lest he ever engaged the parents in casual converse. I guess the neighbours suspected there was a ‘something’ going on next door, but would never have guessed that it was the opening of a another dimension, it was Wavis World. Chris took us to a 4 track studio at Wragby in the Lincolnshire wilds, owned by his mate Andy Dransfield who would engineer the recordings in his converted barn,’Wragby Studios’. Andy was never and could never be prepared for what was about to hit him.’Hatt, Hatt’, he would say innocently through the sound proof window, ’Diddle-ing-dink, diddlle-ink-dink’, indicating that Hatt should raise his sound level on that bit that makes much of what the song ‘Mauve shoes are awful’ actually what it is, without realising that Hatt withstanding, we were all struggling to hold our howls in at this stranger calling our mate by the name he so hated but was stuck with courtesy of me and the fact that his ginger fringe curled upwards rather like Tin Tin.
‘Mauve shoes’ has as part of its content something that no other record has. When we were recording the demo in Hatt’s bedroom, his dad next door – I dubbed him ‘Butch’ after this incident – had, unbeknown to us, twice tried to unceremoniously switch off the electricity supply to bring an abrupt halt to proceedings as the racket of Hatt’s booming ‘diddle-ing-dinks’ was fraying his nerves, and for such audacity the electricity had stung him twice in return administering two hefty shocks. He burst in the room, the surprise guaranteeing our silence, to announce nastily, (quote); ‘Are you finished? Are you finished yit? Ah’m fuckin’ on here ah’ve had two stings alriddy, so yuz had better get a bluddy move on, ahm chopping the electricity oot’. Exit Butch. Went on to dub him Butch because when he burst in the room from nowhere he reminded me of the rough looking dog Butch who would similarly appear from nowhere during the Sooty show and have the same worrying and silencing effect on Sooty and Sweep. Me and Hatt burst out laughing after he had gone but the tape had been rolling throughout and so it had all been recorded. I arranged with Andy that when it came to that same precise point in the song that Butch had burst in, he was to splice in the genuine outburst after which we would proceed with the studio take. And he did, so what you hear on the original ‘Mauve Shoes are awful’ track from my first EP is immortalised. When the USA indie label Messthetics included the track on one of their compilation albums in 2000, they chopped Butch oot of the song on the grounds that American listeners wouldn’t be able to understand his Geordie. Ironic that – Butch tries to chop us oot, I chop him in and the Yanks re-chop him oot.
The 6 track EP ‘Denis Smokes Tabs (John Is a Fig Roll)’ was recorded in Andy’s barn and released on Chris’ Company Records label in early 1979. I doubt Andy recovered. The Famous Five stayed at Chris Hall’s small property on Monks Road and drove him mad, almost ruining his relationship with his girlfriend Linda who wanted rid of these Geordie lunatics and their antics upon first sight. I may have also driven the boys mad too when it came time to get down. I recall all of us piled into a huge makeshift bed, mattresses and duvet covers on the floor, but I ambled off and would stay up for hours in a particularly irritating mock OCD demonstration switching the light on and then off a few seconds later whilst going ‘Diddleing, diddleung’ to identify the alternative clicking. I was still doing it when they had all fallen asleep. One night when there was only Anders and myself available, an acoustic guitar that was propped up a wall began to strum itself for a few seconds. He, who was trying to get to sleep in a small alcove under a stairwell, swore that I had silently gotten up from my sofa some distance away and had done it but I hadn’t. The band (by now the ‘banned’ almost) had to hang around until we had further sessions from which ‘Anna Ford’s Bum’ would one day surface, and for which the Newcastle indie label Anti-Pop would stump up £100 for the Master tape and the honour to have it pressed by Island Records for them in 1980, when Chris had run out of money and couldn’t afford it as a follow up to the EP. He also ran out of life, I understand, in 2001 when as a sad alcoholic he took his own life. Sad really, all he ever wanted to do was wear a smart suit and nip down to London trying to impress label A & R men with whatever he would have tucked under his arm that day.
Our ‘Denis’ EP had done us proud, eventually selling out two pressings of 2,500 copies each I understand. In my own home town, I smiled at my success in choosing the name Wavis O’Shave as people confessed that they were embarrassed to go into the local record shop who had happily stocked it and ask for it by the artists name. Really! Is it that difficult to say ‘Wavis O’Shave’? Well, many wouldn’t and instead handed over a scrap of paper with it written down! In 2013 during a BBC4 docu on albums, whilst visiting a collectors shop, the EP was clearly visible in the background, its Time Travel making me smile. Andy, who drummed on AFB, as well as engineering it, fared a bit better than Chris. I last left him at his mixing desk in 1980 and had no further contact with him until 2004 when I noticed he was now the engineer and owner of his Chapel Studios, South Thoresby, Lincolnshire, a church he had bought and converted, into a swish recording studio that had known bands sent up from top London labels to record their hits there at £1000 a day (Wet Wet Wet being one of them), although he did them reduced package deals. Out of the blue I turned up at his studio and crept in to sit down alongside him to recreate the scene whereby we last parted company. It was like a scene from Dr Who – genuine time travel, one moment it being 1980, the next 2004. After a brief reintroduction and confirmation of who we were, I played him my latest song on Cd which was ‘Katie Derham’s bum’. Booming through his studio speakers he said, ‘It sounds very Wavis’. Of course it did, you daft bugger!
Time travelling back to 1980 now and I had made myself an appointment with the A & R fellow at Virgin’s new subsidiary label, Dindisc. Tinwhistle and I travelled by train to meet with ex-Sounds curly head writer David Fudger, yes, his real name. He was running over schedule when we arrived, and apologising paid for a taxi for us for a ride out in London with a promise to listen to the demo, a roughly mixed four track taken from the intended Anna album, if we came back later. After an impromptu meeting with Iggy Pop on the Portobello Road in between, we returned and he met his obligation. David was well interested in signing Wavis but unfortunately he wasn’t the figure who signed the cheques and so we parted company with the proviso that I rang him in a week or so. I was unaware that the very day I had taken myself off to London, personnel from Anti-Pop, had turned up on my doorstep having secured my address from Tyne Tees TV, with the sole intent of signing me up for themselves, having grooved along to the Denis EP which had been introduced to the British airwaves courtesy of late night BBC DJ John Peel.
It was welcomingly cute to hear ‘You think you’re a woman cos you don’t eat fishcakes’ and ‘Don’t crush bees to death with the end of your walking stick’ coming out of national radio. Peely was the only DJ that you could ring ten minutes before his show went out live – and this would be at 9.50pm you’d dial – and he would actually come and speak with me so that I could find out if he was playing any Wavey that night. I sprang him a surprise once and was waiting for him when he left the Beeb shortly after midnight. I simply followed him to his car wearing a reasonably sized false nose, and to be fair he offered me a lift should I be wanting one which I wasn’t. I didn’t introduce myself or even speak apart from maybe a few ‘sneck’ and ‘beak’, but I have no doubt he knew who I was. I did notice he walking quite fast tho’. In 2004 I had been trying hard to secure a Rod Stewart autograph for a disabled fan having no longer retained the personally signed 20 or so I had myself from my old mate ski-slope nose back in the 70’s. Every time I rang a TV show that I’d seen him advertised to be on I’d find out it had already been recorded. The end of the quest seemed in sight when out of the blue Rod deigned to drop in on the John Peel Show, with a week’s warning, so I quickly arranged with the show for them to grab me an autograph from him when he was there, and they were happy to do so. In that gap week Peely had nipped over to Cusco, Peru on a working holiday – and he never came back, popping his clogs from a heart attack. Double whammy – no autograph and no Peely.
Another Beeb DJ who caught the Wavis bug happened to be Mike Read, and so I met up with him at a BBC Radio One Roadshow where he invited me to play footy with him on the nearby beach, an offer I would have taken up but as luck would have it I had a locked knee joint that day from a dodgy cartilage and therefore couldn’t show off my natural skills. Mike thought he was Cliff Richard, and in the 90’s I almost met the real thing when after blagging my way at a venue on his tour I was one thick wall away from encountering him and asking him why people insisted he was gay. I already had the contrived question ready to ask, ’Cliff, wouldn’t you like to get to the bottom of it?’ Tut, tut. His security finally had sussed I was no-one important to present before their treasured item and I was turned away just as I was being led into his dressing room by staff. In the Noughties, Capital Radio DJ Chris Tarrant joined the ranks of Wavis admirers.
Let’s return to Anti-Pop. They were dismayed when Miggla told them where I was and what for. Their dismay needn’t have lasted long as I had bumped into Dave Fudger at an awkward time as he was rapidly getting fed up by being thwarted by the cheque signer who had for some time ignored Dave’s better choice of judgement, held onto the cheques and allowed other labels to nab bands that went on to justify that Dindisc should have had them first, by racking up chart hits. Just before I had arrived on the scene Dave had to watch Madness slip though his fingers. Unable to sign Wavis had been the last straw for him and he left Dindisc right in the middle of our dealings. It wasn’t overly difficult for Anti-Pop to snaffle me up as I was keen to get on with wanting to see AFB realised, and they were convinced by all the national music press I had been getting myself with favourable reviews for the EP that they could only be on to a good thing. Actually, by ‘signing’ to them, they were and I wasn’t. It was by association with Anti-Pop that I came entangled with the VIZ COMIC, unconsciously becoming their Patron Saint. In his 2006 autobiography ‘Rude Kids’, original Editor Chris Donald confessed that he can’t remember where he got the name VIZ from. Easy, Chris, it was Wa-VIZ. So there we were upstairs above the ladies hairdressers in the AP offices in the Bigg Market when this mop haired skinny kid timidly traipsed up the stairs with a wedge of drawings under his arm. He asked us if we could help him as he wondered where Anti-Pop had got their posters done to advertise their local gigs and would it be possible that their source might like to print up his own wares, which transpired to be his own comical artwork, loosely a stab at his own comic. Having established that he was at the time working for our arch enemy the SS (Social Security), I suppose we could have seen him off with a flea in his ear with paranoid suspicions that he may have been on a governmental spying mission, but upon studying his talent it was clear to see that Chris was veering more towards the mental side of governmental. The rest is history.
We went on to help him print the first VIZ, 500 anarchic and outrageously rude copies sold at 50p each to punters at the local College, raising enough money to ensure that at least one more copy would come out. The rest is every more historier, Chris, with his bother Simon, going on to eventually during the 80’s become a millionaire. Chris let me down big time in 1997. Having not seen him for about ten years I invited him to my home when I was going through a list of people I hadn’t seen for a decade minimum. Wavis’ image was always genuinely that of a reclusive fella, and so the invite was, I guess, intriguing. During the visit he casually mentioned how only recently John Brown, the Publisher of the now nationally acclaimed VIZ that had outsold Private Eye, was desperate for the boys to come up with an idea for a movie for the cinema. He had just coughed up for an all expenses paid week in Somerset for them on the promise that they came back with a movie for him. The boys, however, did what they were best at and had simply got pissed up for the week returning with not as much as a blank sheet of A4. I informed Chris that I already had a full script sitting around doing nothing. It was called ‘Two’s Company, Freezer Rats’ and starred The Hard. It really was hilarious, and I had even cast cameo roles in it for Peter Stringfellow, Richard Whitely and Uri Geller. Uri, whom I finally got round to befriending in 2001 was meant to bend lampposts and unbend bent coppers. About a week later, Chris got in touch with me, praising my wife for the ingenious ‘Fart Machine’ she had invented and had given him, and enquired could we send him the script? (Another time, we sent him a ‘Hard Turin Shroud’, the scorched outline of the dead Hard painted upon a linen cloth, complete with white gloves to negotiate it). He got the script and I got the nod that here, in the making, finally, was what would became the script for the full movie length VIZ film for the cinema. I quickly arranged all the actors and even the film Company to shoot it on location in London and Newcastle, an enterprising Arsenal fan Ashley King who had earlier worked for one of the top ad companies in London. (Funny how Arsenal keeps cropping up, isn’t it?)
Ashley was a huge Hard fan and had him earmarked for Bovril adverts for the telly the previous year. He had drove up from London to my old address in South Shields – Stoddart Street, or ‘St. Odd Art’ Street as I had employed it as well as calling my pad ‘Heretic House’...it had ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter’ on the front door - that Tyne Tees had given him. I’d left there many FA Cup finals before so he had a wasted trip, poor lad. His Company then placed an ad in the local newspaper in South Shields seeking the whereabouts of Foffo Spearjig, or did anybody know where he was? I didn’t hear of this until a week later when an associate showed me it. Playing it cool, I didn’t ring the number for a further week, and when I did they didn’t believe it was me because since placing the ad they had had 105 people, smelling money in the air somewhere, ring them claiming to be Foffo Spearjig. Eventually convinced, they hurried back up North and we shot what was to be the last ever Bovril Tv ads. ‘Bovril – it comes in a H-a-r-d jar!!’ growled the Hard in the six or so scenes scripted by Ashley with my approval. I like him – he looked like Torchy the Battery Boy from the 60’s kids tv show. Subject to test screening in front of a randomly selected audience of cockney punters back in the Smoke, the contract was signed, sealed and about to be delivered. Until out of nowhere the BSE scare came along erupting at the same time. The owners of Bovril quickly changed tack and said they now wanted to promote Pot Noodle instead, and that, basically, was that. The original disused ads can be seen on Youtube under ‘The Lost Hard Bovril ads’, and for the record I would think that my participation in the world of tv advertsing must qualify me as the only straight male who has ever made it in there, for I’m sorry ladies, but it's about time someone told you that ALL males in Tv ads employed through agencies are gay. I’ll be in trouble for that.
Anyway, Chris had promised me the movie shoot would take place in the spring, a waiting period of about six months. The spring came along, nothing springing into action. Breaking the silence I contacted him and he offered excuses that meant it would now have to be shot late Summer. Late Summer came with another unnerving silence. Contacting him again, he told me due to other commitments he now was unable to see the project through, and referred to himself as a ’Cxxt’. Which he had fast become, so I thought. Reading his autobiography (in which he calls me a cross between Howard Hughes, David Icke and Tiny Tim) I discovered how he had suffered a nervous breakdown round about the time of all this movie promise, of which the death of his restaurant’s chef in a car crash played a part. And so, the VIZ movie that never was and starring Foffo Spearjig as The Hard, never was.
Back to the Bigg Market and Anti-Pop, more precisely Phil Branson and Andy Inman. The album popped out and to a great 4 star review in the SOUNDS. I had promoted it on its release date by camping in their Virgin Records shop window in a bed, eating fig rolls and watching Anna vids recorded off News At Ten. For three days. It was reported in the music press that I had also camped out in Anna’s own garden, which I have to say I didn’t. but only because our Fleet Street hacks wouldn’t let us have her Kensington home address. You’d have thought they would have enjoyed that story if they had. Shame the greedy Anti-Pop buggers went behind my back as was their custom and ordered another 10,000 be pressed after the sale of the first 5,000. Too much too soon. Had they done their homework they would have noticed that the sales of the Dennis EP dwindled to a halt after eventually reaching a similar figure. There are still hundreds of copies of AFB under a few embarrassed Anti-Popper beds, although the majority went back to island to be melted back down. (I knew Anna had the hots for me).
Demand for the fleshly Wavis, however, was on the rise. I knew I had finally made it with a double confirmation. The first was when I had been invited down to the NME to do an interview with Danny Baker, who had given my Denis EP a great review on the singles page, all expenses paid. When I arrived Dan was around the corner still interviewing Kiss. Yes, they were my interview ‘supporting act’. (The other confirmation came when I was the answer to seven across in the Sounds’ crossword, the peak of rock stardom.) My friendship with Dan may well have ended that day. He took me up to the top of the NME building to do the interview there. I intimated I might throw myself off which spooked him but when he had a photographer turn up unannounced snapping shots at the speed of light I told him that I had brought him the pix I wanted him to use, so he could forget any others. Reluctantly, Danny boy said that he would have to borrow the negatives for the Baker’s dozen or so of them. The following week, when the promoted interview failed to appear despite having been earlier advertised to, I rang the NME Editor Neil Spencer to find out why. He apologised for Danny losing my precious negatives, the twat. He’s still evading me now. I was at the time also friendly with Dan’s rival at the Sounds, Garry Bushell, who is still a good friend today.
Mind, I wasn’t too sure about the friendship when he really dropped me in it and I nearly got dropped, in 1982. Remember Keith ‘The Sheriff’ Bell? Garry had promised me a SOUNDS interview face to face but it never quite happened, we just kept missing each other, so I suggested he used some excerpts from the many personal letters I had been sending him over a year. He was happy with that and soon after the massive full page article appeared. Gulp. Surely he had understood that when I said use some excerpts I meant the tailor made ones designed for general public consumption and not the very, very private bits not meant for an early version of Facebook that would have been more like ‘Two-Facebook’, or ‘Twatter’. No, he didn’t, and so there it was me apparently seen taking the piss out of the Sheriff at a time, and Gal didn’t know, when he was in Durham nick, so it read even worse, making me look like I was having a safe laugh whilst Belly was banged away. It was difficult enough that everyone in the town automatically assumed that the character of The Hard was styled on Keith Bell, and maybe it was, but hey we all have known these stereotypical hard figures from as far back as the Tv portrayal of Frankie Abbot in ‘The Fen Street Gang’, so that was my legitimate get out clause. But would KB want his claws in me when he got out? The answer came on the third day after the national interview.
I was strolling along a familiar route for my customary Sunday night visit to some scalliwags on their council estate when the sight of two dots on the horizon began to enlarge as they were approaching me. By the time they were face on the two dots had transformed into two huge gorillas one of them growling, ‘Are yee Wavis O’Shave?’ Not quite thinking this out I gave them the stock reply I’d give anyone. ‘Depends if you want to beat me up.’ ‘Aye, well Keith sez he wants to see yee when he gets oot’, replied the other misidentified dot and off they swaggered, job done. So that was it then. Curtains for me. Ironically I had already faked my death in the music press with a little help from a dodgy death certificate provided by VIZ – death by mercury omelette – and it worked for over a week before I was spotted alive by a local reporter, but this time it might just come true. I never mentioned the encounter to a soul as I knew the recipient would reinforce the inevitability of my approaching death, and it was disheartening when I would randomly hear things like, ‘Belly’s oot next month’ in scalliwagal converse. And, inevitably, came the day he was.
Maybe three weeks afterwards came the even more inevitable encounter when he spotted me across a road opposite the Town hall. It was hard to mistake or misinterprete his summoning gesture which included a snarling, ‘How, yeee!’ I awaited his imminent approach. ‘I saw what you put in the paper…’ he continued snarling which I should add was his usual way of communicating anyway. I was wary that he had positioned me in the classic stance, just enough distance for him to put his hand on my shoulder and swing his other, a clenched ex-boxer’s fist,to knock me into next month’s edition of SOUNDS. Jumping the shotgun which he had been known to associate with, I piped up, ‘Keith, look at me...not a muscle in my body. Do you REALLY think I would say anything about you? That was Gary Bushell who said that, not me.’ Well, Gaz was safe in London. I was standing in a very psychological position here considering it was my only chance of a defence, with my arms across my chest in an ‘x’ fashion, ‘x’ of course the symbol you would insert in a ‘no’ box. Maybe my blank wagic gesture worked as he looked me up and down and considering the obvious logic of my reasoning, continued,’ Well….dee it again and ah’ll kill yee’, and slowly strode off like a cowboy, perhaps Butch Cassidy. Just as I was beginning to think that maybe Lady Luck was aware of my presence in this world he stopped in his tracks and turned around . ‘Ah saw yee on the telly last week..’ Oooh, er…I had been on The Tube playing the Hard that week as Lady Luck would have it and in that microsecond of realisation I thought I was back in the frame. ‘Enjoyed it, ‘ he snarled and then heading off again for his horse. From that encounter on if he ever saw me when he was out jogging or fresh from some episode of ultra-violence, he would wave over at me and I would sublimely leg it to quit while I was winning.
Ok, so the Anna album was out and about as I had been too, appearing in the music press with both the lady herself in that infamous snap with me fully resplendent in two foot false nose, and seen in similar pose with Britt Ekland and the hottie totty of the day Debbie Harry, Blondie herself, although in that final encounter the nose had extended to about five foot and had to be manually assisted by the intervention of an egg whisk half way along the length. To be snapped with Wavis was fast becoming a requisite for top media lasses, a bit like how earlier it had became trendy and a must for top celebrities to be seen on The Muppet Show. With the help of Geldwink holding the camera, we had sprung the surprise on the delectable Anna with a meticulously timed strategy as she left News At Ten that night, hence photographing the most desirable Queen of the Screen at that time. The pic was syndicated and made the front page of the Sunday People, spoilt by the fact that the twats had spelt my name as Wavis O’Shane. The People had made a more decent offer than The News of the World who were going to misquote anything I would or wouldn’t say to make me out a right old pervie courtesy of the enlarged hooter, and some Editors even thought the pic was faked as this surely could not have happened. Incidentally, Geldwink has yet to be paid for this amazing photographic evidence although in this respect I have no doubt that Anti-Pop were. Handsomely. I decided I had made my point and that three beauts were enough to prove that the magnetic charm of Wavey was a force to be recognised. Joanna Lumley, incidentally, was next on the hit list should I have changed my mind.
Maybe I should clarify the Britt incident, the actress going on to play a Bond girl no less, thus allowing me to perhaps boast that I have dated such a desired luminary. Having sportingly connected herself with mineself after her late night appearance on a live Tyne Tees chat show, (Brian Clough appeared also but he refused to take me up on my offer to be signed unless I got a haircut first) the story goes that we were last seen hopping into her laid on roller and drove off into the night. Maybe my tartan hat and huge hooter had fondly reminded her of her old flame Rod Stewart, of whom I had become a personal friend for some years as far back as 1972, and had started the myth that his name actually is also my real name, as The Tube would often mistakenly state. First things first. Maybe, just maybe, Britt and I headed off under my suggestion to Quadrini’s posh nightclub in Newcastle, enjoying each others company and culture clashes, and whatever else. Maybe she hurled me out the roller pressing the ejector seat button. Make up your own mind, but I will say this. Considering she was somewhat harshly referred to in the press as ‘Hollywood’s most famous bed springs’, she certainly was a good sport. As for my name being RS, well, I did encourage that red herring by using the name Roderick Stewart for a many years to write under during expression of another facet of my existence, and we all know how many other names I often employ, don’t we? I’m the only person I know who has more than one entry in Wikipedia, can post to myself on Internet forums before I realise I’m replying to myself, and have played football with six names down the back of my shirt – all true and verified.
Now then, as the huge hooter was the major Wavis trademark for most, I suppose I should comment on where it came from and why. Sorry to disappoint you, but I can honestly tell you, I don’t know. Aware that much of my surrealism rises up from deep within my subconscious as you would expect it to reside, then I guess it would be hard to wriggle out of the obvious Jungian symbolism of it being an enlarged willie, expressive of a latent powerful sex drive. Rather saucy if indeed so, whilst worn along such desirable totty. Mind, I rear up again if I were to think this could be used as circumstantial evidence against me for me being branded the original knob head. No, I’m not sure that would stand up in court, pun intended. And then there is the possibility, continuing the Jungian theme and unconscious, that ‘noses’ cannot be pronounced without duplication of the Greek philosophical word ‘Gnosis’ which means esoteric, spiritual knowledge. Note that Moses (perhaps he was actually ‘Noses’ and a dyslexic took the notes?) received the Ten Commandments upon Mt Nebbo. (I’ve always suspected there were eleven, the chopped oot one being ‘Thou shalt be wacky.’) Now I like that one, O’Shave – mystic or mistake - so in football result terms; Jung 1 Jung 1, extra time now being played, and if it goes to penalties I’ll not be taking one. And let’s not forget King Nebuchadnezzer, responsible for one of the 7 wonders of the world. Mind he eventually went barmy.
With ‘Anna’ topping the Alternative music charts in the Sounds, there was demand for the obligatory gigs, and of course it made perfect sense that we do one only with somebody else playing me. In fact, couldn’t we do several gigs a night in several places if we could provide enough bands? Wavis would never do either the obvious or the expected and so it was never going to be that he would do a live show. The music mag Record Mirror even reviewed one show giving it the thumbs up with t'Yorkshire man Phil Branston who was the heavily disguised Wavis, hooter and all, even though the review placed a great emphasis on Wavis’ Geordie accent. Tv was different, my first association and appearance on a Tyne Tees Tv programme came on the back of the success of the Denis EP. Producer Malcolm Gerrie wanted me on one of their youth magazine shows ‘Check it Out’ and naturally wanted a song out of me. I think he had his ear on ‘You think you’re a woman cos you don’t eat fishcakes’ or ‘Don’t crush bees to death with the end of your walking stick’. I told him that this was too obvious for Wavey, a singer singing one of his songs, could I do a comedy sketch? Surprised, he asked if I could come up with one. Within 24 hours there it was on his desk all laid out scene by scene.
So Hootsi Tabernacle, Grand master of the Californian Nebbist cult made it to the silver screen in a wonderful spoof where this dry yankee hiding his face under a ridiculously exaggerated huge cowboy hat had bought a local landmark, a huge standing stack rock on the beach and was having it flown back to the States by helicopter. I had asked for the station’s most trusted announcer to interview Hootsi and although they did provide him he had naughtily not learned his script at all and so there was I not only having to concentrate on a convincing American accent but left with a dozen off pat answers to a dozen questions he hadn’t bothered to look at, plus the bastard couldn’t keep a straight face. Roll camera! I also asked that they never reveal it was a spoof but of course they did. Not being able to keep a straight face was a constant curse when I worked with cameramen and crew. Often they would ruin the take by guffawing or the camera would wobble up and down on the cameraman’s shoulder and we’d have to go again and again. The Director would instruct his crew, ‘Just leave him to do what he wants’. Well, I am unmanageable I’ve already told you – difficult for any Director or Producer who needs to be in charge.
One of my best tussles was with Geoff Wonfor, husband of Granada Director and knighted, the late, Andrea, Geoff beating Spielberg to film the prestigious ‘Beatle Anthology’ for a global Tv series. He was Chief Director for the Tube, and this time I had been granted the luxury of a full crew for a day. As luxurious as it was rare. This time I was playing the Hard’s toff cousin Lord Losbang Coalseamwig in his monocle, top hat, tails, Doc Martens and his gold roller especially hired for the day. And of course he felt in a toff’s accent ‘ No thing.’ After scenes at a hard disco aboard the ‘Floating Princess, a’ swish nightclub aboard a moored liner on the Tyne, the next scene was where I was to be thrown off the Tyne Bridge to land and dust myself down in my crumpled top hat on the pavement hundreds of feet below to feel ‘no thing’. We had been granted special permission from the police to shoot the scene and of course we would have edited it once we had thrown the convincing Losbang dummy off the bridge.
Now, in one of those moments I earlier explained involving me and great heights, and straight people with enormous responsibilities, in those situations I like to amuse myself by convincingly putting the word about to someone nearby that I will actually hurl myself off the current stationary height. Obviously the fellow I casually mentioned it to wandered off in shock and passed this bit of trivial info to Geoff, a burly fellow of 6’ plus.
Next thing I know he is pinning me up a wall and relaying this message; ‘If you jump off this bridge I’ll fuckin’ kill you’. Well, I would have thought the leap would have taken priority in the death stakes, but there you go, pure comedy. The Lord Coalseamwig shoot was perhaps the best comedy I have ever shot but sadly it was never screened despite been advertised in advance. And why? Nobody ever officially told me and avoided confrontation, but one day long after I did find out. The crew were having such a good time that long day that they all got progressively over pissed on the free booze and with laugh induced wobbly footage, upon reflection back in the studio, it was unusable. What a costly waste of time, effort and talent. Quite often what we filmed for the Tube never made it to transmission to share with the Hard fans of the nation, and a further classic example of this was ‘The Non-Swearies Puppet Show’, ah yes! A classic ahead of its time, I swear.