Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (28 page)

One Wednesday morning on the pitch at St
James’
Park – where we were filming
The Real Me
video – I challenged, possibly threatened, him to a penalty shootout. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you? Anyone can win at penalties. Immediately, Paul began compiling a list of handicaps that he would take on.

‘Right,
you can take ten – I’ll just have six. I mustn’t have a runup. I can only kick the ball by putting my right foot around behind my left foot. And I have to tell you in advance where I’m going to put
it.’

Now look. I understand that I am not in Paul Gascoigne’s class. I’m not even in the same school, city or universe. But there is a limit to the amount of patronizing tosh a chap can take. And he wasn’t done.

‘Even
better. You can tell me where I have to put it. And on the last one, I have to run up backwards and heel it in with me eyes
shut.’

It was then that it dawned on me these insane, self-imposed rules were neither a display of ego nor arrogant grandstanding. This was the only way he knew of giving tasks the edge necessary to engage his ferociously competitive drive. Like the chronic gambler who will
agree to sit in on a poker game he knows to be crooked, Paul needed to stack the odds against himself in order to feel anything at all from the resultant victory.

Everyday life and action bored him. It always had. The constant need to assuage this gnawing inner ennui ran deep within him. By the nineties he was attaining the power, freedom and means to temporarily fend off the void by cranking up the heart-stopping risks on a daily basis. Even then he knew it was an addiction that would never be satisfied, no matter how spectacular its manifestations became. He knew it would eventually drive him insane. The brighter his star shone, the more its inevitable collapse into a black hole haunted him.

On many days, and with growing frequency, I could glimpse the fear of that impending sentence burning wildly behind his perpetually teary eyes. Gazza cried when he laughed and he cried when he hurt. He cried while telling stories and while miles away in thought. There is an argument that he was among the prime movers in making crying such a queasy modern British phenomena. Yet his were no tears for effect. He simply never wanted any feeling, any fleetingly distracting pulse of experience, to stop. The tears marked the moment. He was
‘there’
then. Soon the restless agonies would swallow him up again, denying him peace, denying him even a few
hours’
sleep.

For a while though, the
‘cures’
for his pain were both explosive and exhilarating.

I have a store of extraordinary stories about Paul, each one presenting a unique, astounding, sometimes hilarious, often portentous facet of a personality so huge it eventually obliterated normal everyday function.

But let me here simply reproduce one particular sack of monkeys that might help people glimpse what life in his orbit was truly like.

There is an infamous, much-reproduced photograph that shows Paul, Chris Evans and myself standing in the reception of the Grosvenor House Hotel, London, looking as if we had been drinking all day, out all night and had no intention of wrapping things up for at least another thirty-six hours.

It was actually taken at about midday and the build up to it, and the events that followed, pretty much sum up the circus that was Paul’s life back then.

The first thing to say is that we are all stone-cold sober in that shot. Moreover, if you look at Paul, he is frozen to the spot in out-and-out terror. You’ll discover why.

The plan – hastily arranged via a few phone calls earlier that morning – had been to go and spend the day at the races. Why, I have no recollection – none of us are gamblers. Paul was playing for Glasgow Rangers at the time and rarely made it down to London, so probably he was looking for something more to do with his furlough than just watch DVDs and down a few Budweisers.

Paul, Chris and I were three extremely close friends then, bonded by a love of basic proletarian low-life laced with liberating high jinks. We had no interest at all in the celebrity circuit and its fascination with exclusive media venues like the Groucho Club. Indeed, the fact that when we did have a drink we’d do it openly in ordinary pubs somehow set the tone for the whole
‘Three
Muska-
Beers’
tagline that has dogged the three of us to varying degrees ever since.

If we were photographed in a pub on a Monday and then again on a Thursday, it was presumed and indeed printed that we had been at it for the whole four days. To be fair, sometimes Chris actually had. (I have never in my life known anyone who could keep up an almighty pace like Chris Evans, but that truly is another story.)

Me? I could manage the occasional long day’s carousing, but like most men, not the way I could in my teens and twenties. Besides, I had a terrific home life with young children and, though the idea that I was part of some new hell-raising elite could be flattering and amusing in equal part, it certainly did not fit with the lifestyle of a middle-aged dad making the school run most mornings. Also my wife is not exactly the long-suffering little woman who waits and weeps.

Then there’s Gazza himself. Gazza never could and never will be able to drink alcohol. In those days this was true in every sense of that phrase, literal and physical. Not only would two beers have him
swaying on his axis with the world doing a Watusi around him, but he never seemed to really like the stuff. Whenever possible, he did his best to avoid alcohol.

An early trick I observed, and a common one for men who feel intimidated by the capacity of those around them, was to surreptitiously pour booze away when he thought everyone else was distracted. I’d see him take a drink from the table and, while keeping his eyes directly on whoever was talking, slowly drop his arm down by his ankles. The glass would quickly emerge a couple of inches less full. He would then wink at me and silently motion that I should keep quiet. He would do this, of course, while regularly motioning the bar staff to keep them coming for everyone else. He loved nothing more than being part of – indeed, being
the cause of
– a good time. The fact that he was always slightly apart from and outside the euphoria might only be detected through longer exposure to his hosting technique.

In the early days, with just the three of us, Paul would actually seek
‘permission’
to either miss a round or have a soft drink.
‘Lads
, I’m lagging, I can’t do it any more – do you mind if I have a Coke or
something?’
Yet if somebody else joined us he would say he was on the vodka and Cokes and, subsequently being bought one, dutifully drink it down in one huge gulp. Never wanting to disappoint, he would slip into the cartoon Gazza of red-top legend.

Later, he took to ordering bizarre and comical combinations as if to satisfy both sides of this ludicrous social pressure. If you hadn’t seen him for a while it was intriguing to see which two disparate drinks he might have moved on to in the interim. Brandy and 7-Up. Malibu and blackcurrant. Pernod and Sunny Delight.

‘Paul,’
I would say,
‘that
is ridiculous, disgusting. There is no such
drink.’

But he would be quite serious.

‘Danny,
it’s brilliant – have one. It gets you blootered, but you can carry on drinking
it.’

That desperate ambition to numb himself round the clock was still some way off at this stage.

Initially, with Chris and I, he didn’t need to keep up any act. We were drinkers and he liked that. But the drinking wasn’t
why
we all got on so well, and he liked that even more.

In Chris he’d met his restless equal in terms of keeping the
‘craic’
in constant motion. Chris, for his own, different reasons, lived his life then as a travelling circus of possibilities with an ever-changing backdrop of locations and faces, each pub becoming an essential base station as he mounted that day’s sensory Everest. The point was simply to be out, to be doing something, and that dovetailed perfectly with Paul’s dread of being alone.

Conversely, in me, or perhaps more pertinently my family, he saw a home. He loved our extended family with all the kids, the noise, the meals, the motion, the neighbours, the sense of permanence. On the many times when he came to stay and all that was planned was a big dinner and a night in, he would lie full-length on the sofa repeating over and over to himself – all who know Paul will attest he continuously carries on a personal mumbled monologue –
‘This
is it. Staying in. Stay in. Door’s shut. Fook off, that’s me in now. Done. Door’s shut. Telly’s on. Love it. In.
IN
.’

None of this is to say that there weren’t times when Paul, Chris and I would get pleasantly lit up, but to my knowledge none of these excellent sessions were carried out within a flashbulb of a press pack.

So, back to that Tuesday morning with the phone ringing and the suggestion of a day at the races.

Peculiarly, the agreed rendezvous was a pub in Shepherd’s Bush – a part of town that is only matched in its complete lack of promise by its total inconvenience for all three of us as a location. The meet was set at eleven-ish and upon convening it soon became clear that leaving the bustling metropolis and going to some racecourse to slog it through seven wallet-sapping races was something that only maniacs might consider progress, so what were the alternatives?

Now here I should perhaps re-cap how well-known a tabloid trio we actually were at this point. Yes, even me.

I had recently been noisily fired from
606
for suggesting on air that appalling refereeing, and one referee in particular, was a constant threat to law and order and should a mob one day decide to
go to an official’s house with lighted torches and demand a sacrifice, I could totally understand their ire. In fact, I might support it. The fallout from this glorious tirade made the front or back pages of most newspapers and even the nine o’clock TV news. I will deal more fully with the various times I have been fired and re-hired a little later in these recollections, but will have to speed past them for now or this particular chapter will end up about the thickness of a Harry Potter compendium.

Chris had of course raised his own profile just a little since teaching me how to play records on the radio and at the time of the Shepherd’s Bush liaison was quite simply the best-known media personality in the whole of the UK.

And Paul was, well, Paul at the height of his pomp, one of the most famous people in the whole world and, as it turns out,
not even supposed to be in London that day at all
.

So given all that and our penchant for keeping a pretty low profile, it seems an unlikely course of action that we eventually decided upon.

We decided to pitch up at a nearby media award ceremony.

For those of you who don’t live in London, award ceremonies are as common in the capital as branches of Starbucks or McDonald’s. Most large buildings are hosting one of these events at any given time, sometimes several simultaneously on different floors.

This one was happening about twenty minutes away and was the Television & Radio Industries Club – or TRIC – bash, the same academy whose award had fallen from my mantelpiece a few years previously. If you are unaware of the TRIC Awards, that is perfectly understandable. Nobody has ever referred to the TRIC Awards as
‘the
traditional curtain-raiser to the Oscars’. It is a low key, un-televised, industry do that can sometimes be a little under-nourished in the high-profile recipient
‘actually
being
there’
department.

Chris’
radio show had been nominated for two awards at this affair and his office had sent a message in reply to the invitation saying he would do his best to attend, diary permitting. This is agent-speak for
‘no’.

However, as we huddled in that pallid pub, mulling the way forward, it did seem like something to pass the time before we decided what to do. My only objection was that, being grotesquely unshaven and wearing an enormous shapeless WW2 navy duffel coat, I was hardly likely to be mistaken for David Niven promenading around Cap Ferrat. Would the TRIC people mind? Chris said that, seeing as Paul and I weren’t invited anyway, we shouldn’t let such social niceties cloud our thinking.

And this is where the story really starts.

To get to the hotel on Park Lane from Shepherd’s Bush is straightforward and takes about five minutes. Except that it doesn’t, because the road is always so choked with traffic it takes about six months. And on this day it was going to take twice as long.

Stuck in the back of a stifling taxi, Paul, as usual, simply could not sit still. Head continually turning to spot some action, he was acting as though somebody had told him Michael Jackson had come back to life, was in London, and if you looked through the right cab window at exactly the right moment, you’d see him. Then there was the ever-running dialogue:

‘Shall
we get out? Is it far? Shall we get out? Shall we just leave it? I might walk – shall we walk? How ’bout we run through that park? Come on, let’s run. Driver! Drive on the pavement, go on! Go through that sweet shop – I’ll give you fifty quid. I’m getting out. Look at her in that Porsche. Look at that bloke’s tie. I’m going to buy it off him and wear it roond me heed. I’m boiling. I’m gonna take me shoes off. How many legs has that dog got? Is it a dog or a rubbish bin? Look at him! Look at him! Jogging! Ha! Jogger!
[Window down]
Hey, mate! Git ya lig o’er! Run, Forest, run! Ya daft bastard! Come on, let’s catch him up. Let’s run with him. Driver – have ya got a cigar?’

Immediately behind us in the stationary parade was a double-decker London bus. Kneeling backwards on the taxi seat, Paul, via the rear window, began miming to its driver that there was something wrong with the bus’s wheels. The driver wasn’t buying it. So Gazza upped the ante and feigned horror because apparently the radiator now had flames coming from it. The driver shook his head,
but, with a squint, suddenly realized who this antsy alarmist was and smiled broadly with both thumbs up.