Getting High (26 page)

His marriage was in trouble. Not because of his wife, Jane, she was a good sweet person. No, it was because the conformity that marriage demands wasn't to his liking.

At the time of his wedding, Marcus had told himself that the time was right now to settle down and build for the future. And for a while he abided by this new way of thinking. Yet he couldn't shake the nagging feeling of dissatisfaction that lived in the back of his mind. It just wouldn't leave him alone. It made him feel like a fake, someone acting out what he thought he was supposed to be, not what he really was.

And his job. What a weight on his shoulders that was. Marcus worked as an economics teacher in a Harlow secondary school. At first, it had been a challenge to stimulate the rows of disinterested kids that he faced every day. Already, some of them were muttering aloud, saying what was the point of taking exams when there were no fucking jobs to go to.

Inside, Marcus could only agree with them, but he took it upon himself to show them differently, to agitate their minds, at least get them thinking in a more positive vein. That attitude lasted about a year. If that.

Now he hated his job with a passion. His yearly budget didn't even begin to cover the cost of the materials his students needed, and the routine of it all numbed him.

He knew that in September he would be teaching the laws of supply and demand. In February it would be inflation. Year in, year out, the same books, the same lesson, the same bored expressions staring up at him. It was all a sham, his whole fucking life.

And now this illness, this viral arthritis that he had somehow picked up in Portugal, had come along to frighten the fuck out of him. For the past six months he had been confined to his bed. He was in reality, a cripple, unable to walk. Marcus Russell couldn't put one leg in front of the other.

The doctor had assured him that it would pass, but the illness had lasted so long that paranoia had now set in. He secretly wondered if his friends and family were keeping a terrible secret from him, namely that he would never walk again.

‘Oh, don't be so stupid,' his wife Jane would say. ‘You heard what the doctor said.' But who was to say that his diagnosis was right? There were plenty of examples of doctors getting it wrong.

‘You men, when you're ill,' his wife would tut, ‘you're like little babies.'

That was probably true, but you try and stay in bed in this tiny council flat bedroom here in Godforsaken Harlow and dream a better dream. And on top of all that, his thirtieth birthday was now approaching. Thirty! For fuck's sake. Another ten years and he would be forty, and then... he shuddered to think.

Five months later, things had slightly improved. Marcus was back at work, he was walking, and his wife had walked too. He and Jane were now separated. Marcus knew his days at work were also numbered.

He just needed time to figure out his next move. And it was as he was pondering that a phone call was placed to his flat. It was unexpected, but then as Lennon had once said, ‘Life is something that happens to you when you're busy making other plans.'

The call was from Marcus's friend, Mike, a really close ally from his past, and it brought back a flood of memories. Mike was now living in Liverpool, but it was he and Marcus who had started the Drifter's Escape club (named after a Bob Dylan song) in their hometown of Ebbw Vale, South Wales, when they were just boys and so much younger than they were today. They were sixteen at the time and Ebbw Vale was a vibrant, economically prosperous town. By day everyone had work and by night the pubs would be filled with singing men and women. It was a time when the future was secure and people could feel their lives moving forward.

The town was also a Labour stronghold (‘put up a monkey with a red rosette and it would get 40,000 votes,' Marcus half jokes), built around a huge steel works that had guaranteed money for life. You could get a job there one day, leave the next month, travel around a bit and return home, safe in the knowledge that your old job would be waiting for you. Marcus had worked in the steel works there after leaving grammar school with six 0-levels, three A-levels and absolutely no idea what he wanted to be, except for a vague idea that it should somehow include music. In fact, he had actually worked as an unpaid roadie for a local group called Rock Cottage Barn when he was fifteen, but the work hadn't suited him. His first proper job was working the blast furnaces. It was potentially dangerous work; he was, after all, working with scalding molten iron. But it gave him money •and, more importantly, some much-needed breathing space to figure out his next move.

And, anyway, he was a teenager and there was plenty of living to be done. The future could wait.

It was 1969 and Marcus's main passion in life was music. In his youth, Paul, his elder brother, had put him on to The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Phil Spector. Now he was into groups such as Family, The Doors, Captain Beefheart, progressive rock music.

To hear such music in Ebbw Vale, Marcus would go to the local pub. This was a big building with four different rooms. The soul types would be in one room playing their Small Faces, Northern Soul and Wilson Pickett tunes. The rockers would be in another room, and the hippies, where Marcus hung out, in another. Nobody ever mixed but there was very little trouble.

It was a good scene but it was disrupted the day the order came to pull the pub down.

‘This bar opened up,' Marcus recalls, ‘called the Bottom Bar. It was a big basement bar and that took on the whole youth clientele of the old pub. All of a sudden everyone was in it together and the common denominator was the spliff or a pint.

‘After about three months all the stereotypes were gone. They had this jukebox and you could bring in your own records and put them on. That's how it all crossed over 'cos anyone could bring in a record. So you would hear everything.'

One night Marcus, his best mate Mike and a couple of other friends were sat around the Bottom Bar, drinking beer, shooting the breeze and eyeing up the local girls, when one of them suggested that they should expand the town's nightlife beyond just this bar. Why not find a spot, like that disused building, and put on groups? That's what the town lacked. All the bands they liked played everywhere but Wales. Why not bring them in? ‘Then we thought, well, instead of talking about it, let's do it. We went to the council and said, “Look, you've got a bit space sitting there doing nothing. Why don't you do something with it? We'll run it and you can take all the money.” Lo and behold they backed us.'

The first night the boys booked a local blues band and everyone turned out. The place as rammed. The council, once they saw the first week's profit, granted the boys a licence.

They named the club the Drifter's Escape, and for the next nine months it became the centre for alternative music in Wales. Mott The Hoople, Caravan and the original Genesis all played there.

‘It ran for about nine months. Then it closed down, and then it ran for another three months. It was a good time. I didn't feel that I missed out because I didn't live in London or something. Never felt like we missed out. We were in touch with people like John Peel, and we used to write off to export or import record shops in London or San Francisco and get all the music we wanted.

‘We'd read
Zig Zag
or the
International Times
,
Oz
was the other mag. I mean that whole culture was permeating our area, which was great because it really switched me on to music.'

The club didn't last. Kids there were openly taking drugs and it was only a matter of time before the authorities moved in and busted them. One day the council called the organisers in for a meeting. One councillor in particular was furious, condemning ‘the wild scenes of fornication' he had witnessed, much to Marcus's open amusement.

Afterwards, Marcus and his mate went for a drink.

‘What about that old codger who kept on about fornication,' Marcus said to his mate. ‘I mean, I wouldn't have minded if any had gone on.'

His mate put down his pint, sheepishly grinned and said, ‘Well, there was this one girl...'

So the Drifter's Escape folded, and Marcus packed his bags and moved to London for a while, working as a labourer. Despite his qualifications, he still had no clue as to his future employment.

But a girlfriend kept calling him, entreating him to go home. So he decided to rejoin the steel works. But Ebbw Vale was changing. So was Britain. Money and jobs were drying up. Soon, the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, would order a three-day working week.

‘You could smell the death of the steel works,' Marcus notes. ‘I got made redundant in 1973 and I knew that was it. I thought, hang on, I'd better get out of this town because if this place goes, everything's going to go with it, everything's going to die. I thought, I'm not gonna go labouring, I'll go to college.

‘And that's when I moved back to London in 1974 to do an education degree, a BA in economics and history at Middlesex Poly. I was lucky. I had the A-levels to get out with.'

He also had entrepreneurial skills which, aligned with his musical passion, made it natural for him to apply for the job, at the end of his degree, as the college's social secretary. He had no other ambition than to make his life interesting by filling it with music.

‘I've always been involved in music for the love of it,' Marcus states. ‘For me, music was serious all the time. So when I was in college I was involved and through that I also got involved in promoting gigs outside of the college. The agents would go, “You ran that show at college really well, do you want to promote a gig for me at Alexandra Palace?” The college had one of the rooms down there.'

By this time, 1977, the musical landscape had massively altered. Punk rock, through groups such as The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Jam, had brought in a much younger audience with new values and ideas. Marcus was in his mid twenties when the scene kicked into life and he felt too old for it. He just couldn't bring himself to go pogoing with the fifteen-year-olds in the front row.

But he was enough of a musical fan to take the mood on board.

‘At the time, I thought the only good music was old music. Punk just totally regenerated my interest in new music. I used to go to The Clash gigs – I didn't think they were as good as The Pistols, but their gigs were great. The Jam; the gigs weren't packed but they were a quality band, very, very important.

‘I used to like odd tracks by bands such as Penetration or X-Ray Spex but I used to think The Pistols were the bees' knees. Well, the album was.'

Marcus bases that assertion on the one Pistols gig he saw. This was at Middlesex Poly and he was the promoter.

Despite the rising excitement caused by the band's imminent appearance, the gig turned out to be a shambles. The Pistols came on and in ten minutes the gig was over. The fans had rushed the stage and the band retreated to their waiting vehicles. The night ended in chaos and disruption.

Undeterred, invigorated even by the show, Marcus went on to promote gigs by Siouxsie And The Banshees, Generation X and The Stranglers. His natural left-wing political leanings were activated by punk. Marcus fought the neo-Fascist National Front in Lewisham in 1977 and attended many benefit concerts around that time.

Given his leaning towards ‘classic' rock music, he was also taken by New Wave acts, such as Elvis Costello or the new American bands such as Television.

It was around this time he met Jane, his future wife and began a serious relationship. She too was a teacher and was waiting for the day when Marcus would eventually find a good teaching job and settle down.

‘She was waiting for me to start on the S & N,' he says, ‘the straight and narrow. Settle down, get a flat, get a job, wave goodbye to all your college friends. I thought I should do that then, put it all behind me. Little did I know.'

By his last year of teaching, Marcus had hooked up with a fellow school colleague called Sean. He too was disillusioned by his work and the British education system.

‘He was mad as a hatter and bang into music,' Marcus recalls. ‘He used to manage a punk band as well, The Sods from Harlow, who actually had a couple of good tunes. One of them was called “There's No Pictures Of Us”. So I started hanging around with him and it was him who really got me thinking of doing something else other than teaching. Like he wanted to start a tape duplicating business or he'd come up with these other ideas. And it was around this time that Mike called.'

It turned out that Mike had started writing songs. And good ones at that. But he was also wise enough to know he couldn't sing them properly. But he did have another mate who was ace on vocals. What he wanted from Marcus was for him to use his previous connections in the music business to secure a publishing deal.

Marcus disagreed. What Mike needed, he told him, was to get a band together. Then they could go hunting for a deal. And, Marcus added, as the songs had undoubted potential, he would like to get involved. Which is how Latin Quarter became the first band that Marcus Russell ever managed.

Naturally, Marcus couldn't just quit his job. He had bills to pay, records to buy. So he started leading, in his own words ‘a complete double-life'.

‘We got a band together and I started trying to get them a deal. But it was while I was still teaching. So I was rushing home from work at four o'clock in the afternoon and then getting on the phone to London Records or rushing into town for a six o'clock meeting with A&M.

‘And I didn't have a clue how to get a record deal, didn't have a clue about record companies. I was just selling the band, organising gigs and hoping that no one would find out what I was up to. I mean I couldn't tell the companies I was a teacher and I couldn't tell the school I was trying to be a rock manager.

‘Then it got to the stage where I really believed they had a chance and I just jacked the teaching in, just jacked everything in to be a full-time manager. I thought, well if it means I've got to live on twenty quid a week then I'll do it. Give a shit. And that's how it all started.'