Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (21 page)

‘Do you see what time it is here?’ the chairman said, pointing at his watch. ‘You were on at eight o’clock.’

‘Well, how are we doing?’

‘What do you mean, how are we doing?’

‘If we were on at eight o’clock, how are we doing?’

‘Is that supposed to be funny?’

‘Well, I thought it was funny.’

The chairman paced the stage while we were setting up our gear, tut-tutting and humming louder and louder. It was obvious to me that his wife had just bought him a new watch and that he wanted an opportunity to show it off. And throughout it all, I could see the audience watching the chairman’s antics: Aye, Arthur will pay them off, you know. He’ll pay them off. He won’t have this, you know.

As I tightened the screws on my drum kit, I called over to the chairman. ‘Will you do us a favour, mate? Will you stop walking up and down, looking at your watch? You are making us look cunts.’

‘You should have been here at eight o’clock.’

It was too much. I took the stanchion that attached my cow-bell to my drum kit and walked over to the chairman.

‘Can I have a look at that watch?’

The chairman proudly held it out in front of me, revelling in making the point that it was nearly half past eight.

BAP! I hit the watch cleanly with a single stroke. I could have hit him on the knuckles. I could have hit him on the arm. But I didn’t. I hit the watch smack in the middle. And it just disintegrated.

The chairman looked straight at me. ‘My wife bought me that watch.’

‘Well, she’ll have to get you another fucker, won’t she?’

‘Will she?’

‘Yes. And you’ll have to ring the agent and get another band, because we are fucking off home.’

The lads looked at me. ‘Get the gear off,’ I said.

‘But it’s taken us half an hour to carry all the gear up the stairs …’

‘
Get the gear off the stage
. We’re fucking off. Or you are playing without a drummer.’ Again, my temperament could only take so much.

But it wasn’t always an awkward chairman that caused us problems. The audience could be just as troublesome and would think nowt of throwing a pint of beer over us if they thought we were no good. After one soaking too many, I had an idea. The next time we walked on stage, instead of my usual attire of a checked or tartan suit, I was dressed in a suit made of beer towels. ‘Throw all the beer you like,’ I said. ‘I’m ready for it.’

We were playing a club in a village just outside Sunderland when a fight broke out between a stag party of about twenty lads and another dozen or so locals. I tried to calm it down from the stage but nobody took a blind bit of notice of me, so I walked off. I’d got back to the dressing room when I realised that my two prize Bose speakers, which were small but very powerful, were still on stage.

Standing at the side of the stage, I shouted: ‘George, mind them speakers.’

George grabbed the speakers and inched through the crowd, fists and glasses flying all around him as he made his way to the dressing room.

‘How are we going to get out?’ I said.

‘We’ll get out the window,’ Mick suggested.

George went first, sliding easily through the opening and dropping down into the car park outside. ‘You’re all right,’ he shouted.

I went feet first and got my arse through the window, but then came to a sudden stop. ‘My bollocks are caught in the catch, you bastard,’ I shouted.

I couldn’t see the floor outside, so George shouted: ‘Just push yourself.’

I dropped onto a car, leaving a massive dent in the bonnet. George and Mick couldn’t speak, they were laughing so much as we jumped in the van and sped off.

If it wasn’t for the pranks and high jinks – and Mick and George’s easygoing humour – I wouldn’t have been able to put up with petty club chairmen and hostile audiences. We had a well-rehearsed revenge repertoire for the worst clubs. Most clubs had a bingo machine. Usually it was a simple glass box on four legs with a fan in the bottom and a set of table-tennis balls with numbers painted on them inside it. Someone on the club committee would start the bingo by switching on the fan. The balls would blow around the box until one got caught in a little chute. A small metal prong at the top of the chute stopped the ball from escaping, holding it in place until the bingo-caller removed it and announced the number. If we really had the hump with a club, we’d bend the wire prong. As soon as the fan was switched on, the balls would fly out of the chute and they wouldn’t be able to play bingo until they’d collected them all.

A lot of the time we relied on basic spontaneity to relieve the tension of a bloody-minded audience or chairman. At Black Hill Social Club at Consett, our act was going down like a knackered lift. Nobody was laughing.

‘There’s nothing like a good act,’ I said. ‘And we’re nothing like a good act.’

Instead of a laugh or some applause, I heard a click and then a whirring sound. I looked around. The electric stage curtains were closing on us. The bastard chairman was shutting them.

Thinking on my feet, I jumped in front of the curtains just as they came together and closed behind me.

‘I think your chairman wants me off the stage here,’ I said, ‘but as far as I’m—’

Silence. The bastard had switched the microphone off.

‘
It doesn’t bother me
,’ I yelled and started shouting the rest of our act. But there was no point. No one in the audience was laughing and I had to give in. I walked off stage.

At another small club where hardly any of the audience were listening to us, I asked Mick if he had any matches. He passed me a lighter and I walked out into the audience to where an old bloke was reading the newspaper, his feet up on a chair and his newspaper held up to obscure his view of the stage. I crept up to him, ducking beneath the bottom of his newspaper. I lit it. For a second or two, he didn’t realise it was on fire. Then the flames caught and the paper went up in his fingers. Jumping to his feet, he shouted abuse. ‘You big stupid fucking bastard!’ His sudden exit from the club got the biggest laugh of the evening.

Often the laughs came when our act went wrong. The Alcock & Brown act relied on a lot of stage props and one of our best was a talking bucket. We’d put the bucket on a table with a curtain around its legs and get our roadie to hide beneath the table, operating the bucket.

It all went swimmingly until we took on a new roadie. His name was Derek, but we called him Spotty Muldoon because he was always covered in spots and because he wore a grey RAF greatcoat that was so big (and he was so thin) that he could turn around in it without the coat changing direction.

George explained the routine to Spotty Muldoon. At the end of each chorus of ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love With You’ I’d turn to George and Mick to ask if they were all right. At that point, Spotty Muldoon would have to pull a string under the table to make the lid of the bucket lift up like a big mouth to say: ‘Yeah, I’m all right.’ It always got a big laugh.

‘How will the audience hear me?’ Spotty said.

‘We’ll give you a microphone below the table,’ Mick said. We reached the point in the act where I sang the song. ‘You all right?’ I said at the end of the first chorus.

The top of the lid rose up, then clanked down without saying anything.

I sang the last line of the chorus and asked the question again. ‘Are you all right?’

Silence and no movement from the lid.

‘I
said
: are you all right?’

‘And
I
said: the fucking string’s snapped,’ Spotty bellowed over the PA. The whole club cracked up. Mick, George and I couldn’t carry on for laughing. We tried to play the next verse, but our fingers wouldn’t play the instruments.

At another venue, it was the support act that provided the laughs. We were on with two strippers and an act that I’d been asked to introduce. I met him in the slips at the side of the stage. He was shaking with nerves.

‘What are you called?’ I asked. Raving Rupert, he said.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Raving Rupert,’ I announced over the PA.

The music started. Running on stage, Raving Rupert caught one of the girl dancers with his guitar, banged her on the head and knocked her over. He tripped over his guitar lead and caught his head on the microphone. Then, as he cleared his throat and tried to pull himself together, he leant forward to speak into the microphone and knocked his nose on it. Before he could say a word, his nose began to bleed, the audience started to laugh at him and he had to leave the stage. The biggest laugh came, however, as we walked on.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Raving Rupert, my arse. You mean Clumsy Fucking Rupert.’ The place erupted.

One of Mick’s many virtues was that he was a good mechanic. At first, we used a red Morris Minor van to cart our gear to gigs, stuffing all our equipment – guitars, amps, a drum kit and a PA system – in the back. Two of us would push the door shut while the other one locked it. Then Mick brought along an old Transit that he’d repaired. It was falling to bits, with a red toffee paper stuck over a light bulb in place of the
glass on one of the brake lights. It didn’t last long.

Our next band van was a Bedford. We packed it up one afternoon, ready for a gig in Darlington that evening. When it came to leaving at five o’clock, the van wouldn’t start and I started panicking. We had to be at the club by seven o’clock.

‘I know what’s happened,’ Mick said, opening the bonnet. Standing beside him, I peered into the engine. Everything looked OK until I noticed two big thick red books, larger and wider than phone directories, wedged either side of the engine.

‘The engine mountings snapped,’ Mick said. ‘Them books are keeping the engine level, but it’s slipped down a bit.’

‘Where’ve you got them from?’

‘The library,’ Mick said. And then he started laughing. ‘They’re not due back for another week.’

‘Well, we’d better get this gig done, then.’

Mick fiddled around for a bit. There were a couple of grunts and swear words, then he emerged from under the bonnet with a smile on his face.

‘That should have done it,’ he said as he fired up the engine. It made some stomach-churning noises on the way to Darlington, but we made it to the club on time.

As in the days of The Nuts and the Four Man Band, we rarely insured or taxed our vans. We just couldn’t afford it. And when the money for petrol ran out, we’d wait until midnight, drive onto a caravan site, cut off the engine and glide towards a car, remove the fuel cap, siphon out some petrol, then scarper as fast as we could. At one campsite, Ronnie, our driver at the time, swallowed the petrol. ‘Don’t have a cigarette,’ I said. ‘Your arse will blow up and you’ll get home before we do.’ But running out of petrol was the least of our worries. We broke down so many times, Beryl thought I was having an affair with the AA man.

By late 1974, Mick and George started to tire of the stresses of erratic earnings and life on the road, and I was wanting to stretch my wings. I’d already started playing the occasional solo night when Mick and George told me they were packing in Alcock & Brown to form a duo that would give them more time to earn money from their day jobs. Meanwhile, I appeared on television for the first – and almost the last – time.

I had bought myself a little John Gray banjo-ukulele and would sit in my flat, practising George Formby songs. One day, an agent rang up while I was rehearsing.

‘I’ve got a little acting job for you on a programme going out on Tyne Tees Television called
Sounds of Britain
,’ he said. ‘I can’t get the whole band on it. They just want somebody, a big fella, so I thought of you.’

The agent explained what would happen. ‘A monkey comes ashore at Hartlepool and you arrest the monkey.’

‘What, a real monkey?’

‘Oh yeah. It’s from Scarborough Zoo. It’s called Max.’

I drove to the beach at Hartlepool where the camera crew were waiting with Max, a massive chimpanzee. I was given a policeman’s outfit to wear, ushered into a caravan for make-up and taken to meet the producer, called Heather.

‘It’s a history thing about who hung the monkey in Hartlepool,’ Heather explained. ‘What I’d like you to do is walk up and say “’Ello, ’ello, ’ello” to the monkey. Max will just look at you. You then say: “Can I take down your particulars?” And that’s it.’

We rehearsed a few times. Then they took the chain off the monkey’s neck and he sat there on the beach. Holding a notebook and pencil, I went up to him.

‘’Ello, ’ello, ’ello,’ I said. ‘And what’s your name?’

The monkey reached to grab one of the shiny silver buttons on my tunic, but accidentally grabbed my bollocks instead.
Thinking he’d got hold of a button and squeezing as hard as he could, he tried to rip off my testicles through my trousers. I was in agony. The camera crew were on the floor, howling with laughter.

Eventually, the crew prised the chimp’s hand off my trousers and we nailed the scene in the next take. As I’d been such a good sport, Heather offered me a spot in the studio. A few days later, I was standing in the studio, pissed up, dressed in my Alcock & Brown flying helmet and a multicoloured patchwork suit I’d had made to replace the beer-mat suit because I thought it looked more professional. Playing the banjo-ukulele, I sang ‘Jollity Farm’, a mildly rude song by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. At the end of the performance, a production assistant came up to me.

‘Thanks very much, Roy,’ she said. ‘What should we call you on the credits?’

I thought for a short while. I didn’t know what to say. Most people knew me as Roy Vasey, but my stage name in the trio was Mr Brown. I was just about to say ‘Just call me Roy Brown’ when I thought why not add my nickname around Redcar?

‘I’m Roy “Chubby” Brown,’ I said. And my stage persona was born.

CHAPTER TEN

MALTESE MAYHEM

SHE WORE A
red scarf to cover a head made bald by radiation. Her skin was waxy and stiff like plastic. It was obvious that she was very ill.

‘We used to come and see you all the time,’ she said as we both sat waiting for our appointment. I smiled and thought I’d crack a joke, but at nine a.m. in a cancer ward the atmosphere’s not conducive to comedy.