Rock and Hard Places (22 page)

THEY DON’T THROW parties like this anymore. Record launches these days—if you’re lucky—involve a free pint of watery lager, a dozen ballsachingly banal conversations with people you’ve been trying to avoid for months, and the album in question played back at a volume sufficient to render it utterly unlistenable, even assuming it wasn’t utterly unlistenable in the first place, which it almost certainly was.

Occasionally, as closing time looms, old-timers will reminisce about the days when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, when a rock’n’roll party was a proper rock’n’roll party. Televisions rained from balconies. Swimming pools were for parking the Cadillac in. Cadillacs were for parking in the pool. A record launch was a tableau from
Days Of Sodom
, with dissolute celebrity helicoptered in from all over, chilled champagne flowing from golden bathroom taps, bald midget waiters proferring vases of rolled-up tenners, balancing crystal bowls of best Bolivian marching powder on their finely polished heads. Yes, the
veterans recall, those were the days. All green fields round here. Still had all my own teeth.

So the excitement is palpable as the bus leaves Polygram’s Hammersmith headquarters for Gatwick Airport. Def Leppard are releasing a Greatest Hits album for Christmas. The long-serving Sheffield heavy metal band have proved beyond doubt that global fame is a realistic dream even for those hampered by a total disregard for musical fashion, a drummer with one arm, and haircuts—to say nothing of one or two lyrics—that would embarass German football players. They are an inspiration to us all, and an inevitably chart-topping collection of their inimitable oeuvre is the least they deserve. To celebrate and, not incidentally, to draw attention to the record, Def Leppard asked their record company to think of something weird.

 

AS WE GENTLEFOLK of the press take our seats on the chartered jet—each with a customised Def Leppard napkin draped over the headrest—it just seems extravagant and silly, which is obviously no problem at all. The idea is that Def Leppard will play three shows on three continents in one day. Tonight, at one minute past midnight, they will start playing in the Moroccan port of Tangiers, on the edge of Africa. They will then head back to the airport, from where the chartered plane will fly them back to England for a lunchtime performance in London, fulfilling the European leg. From there, a bus will bear them to Heathrow, and a scheduled flight to Canada; the eight-hour time difference between London and Vancouver will allow all three gigs to be completed on the same calendar day. Def Leppard will then be able to claim a place in the “Guinness Book Of Records” for their endeavours, and hope that the attendant publicity will help sales of the new album do the same.

On the publicity front, at least, this absurd stunt was never going to fail. Myself and photographer Stephen Sweet are here, for a start, and Def Leppard have never really been
Melody Maker’s
thing, their few appearances in our achingly hip journal generally restricted to the news pages, and then occuring only when one of them dies, or a bit of one of them comes off. So it’s good of them to have us along, joining the hundred-plus other freeloading hacks, television crews, radio stringers and fan club competition winners on the flight. Excitingly, Sweet and
I find ourselves sitting directly behind Leppard frontman Joe Elliott—lest we forget, the man who wrote the line “I suppose a rock’s out of the question”—and the bassplayer, whatever his name is. There is something about his round spectacles and perpetually anguished demeanour that strongly suggests hours of leisure time devoted to the painting of bloody awful watercolours.

The captain welcomes everybody aboard, and extends special greetings to his star cargo, “Deaf Leper”. The members of the band, on whose career much of the movie “This Is Spinal Tap” was surely based, don’t blink as the rest of the plane dissolves into delighted guffaws.

 

IT’S MY FIRST view of Africa: chocolate-brown beaches giving way to a few struggling tufts of nondescript scrub as the plane approaches the airport. The continent fires the imagination of the traveller like no other. For centuries, Africa has attracted adventurers, opportunists, glory-hunters and criminals. It’s where people have gone to forge empires, build fortunes, hunt game or hide from the law. I have come to watch a rock group play in a cave.

A hotel on the outskirts of Tangiers has been booked as a temporary base, and we arrive as the sun sets, with a couple of hours to spare before the official nonsense commences. Most of the party demonstrate the intrepid, questing spirit that has made the British press what it is, and elect to spend the free time lounging around the hotel pool swigging free cocktails served by miserable-looking waiters in traditional dress (“traditional dress”: a universally-recognised expression meaning “Silly outfit and daft hat nobody around here would normally be caught dead in”). A few of us get taxis into town, and the medina. The medina is Tangiers’ vast, walled market, a biblical bazaar of hustlers, merchants, thieves and, it turns out, guides, who are something of a combination of the three. A phalanx of these determined, weirdly short, mostly-middle aged men blocks the medina’s gate.

“I will be your guide,” says one. “Very good price.”

“No thanks,” we tell him.

“I will be your guide,” says another. “Good price.”

“No, we’re okay,” we assure him, trying, without success, to push through them.

“I will be your guide,” says yet another. “Very good price.”

“Bugger off, the lot of you,” we say.

“Very good price.”

We’re getting nowhere, literally and semantically. Several of us have travelled in the Middle East before, and have learnt the hard way what usually comes of hiring a guide in an Arab souk: a tour so quick you feel like you’re watching a film about the place with the fast-forward button on, followed by several hours locked in his brother’s rug shop.

“We are representatives of Her Majesty’s press,” says someone with a two-surname accent, who has brought two cocktails from the hotel with him, and is sipping alternately from each. “We can look after ourselves, and we have no need of carpets, camels or any of your sisters. Now fuck off.”

It doesn’t help.

“I will be your guide.”

“Nooooo.”

“Very good price.”

“Go awaaaayyy.”

The stand-off continues.

“Please, sirs,” says a voice we haven’t heard before. “It is better to have one mosquito working for you than to be fighting a swarm.”

He’s even shorter than the others, and is talking nonsense. But it’s nonsense with a certain poetic, sage-of-the-orient charm. He also promises that he has no commercial or familial ties to any of the shops in the medina. We hire him. He marches us around the bazaar at double time and delivers us to a spice shop. The doors clang shut behind us. “Please meet my brother,” he beams.

When we are allowed to leave, an hour later, we are heavily laden with vials of essential oils, sachets of scents and bags full of funny-smelling bark fragments alleged to cure piles, kidney stones, impotence and gout—a sales pitch I suspect has more to do with an astute reading of the customers than the truth. At a souvenir shop we pass on the way back, to the mortification of all present, the man from
The Daily Mirror
not only buys a fez, but insists on wearing it. He will live to regret this. For the rest of the night he will be plagued by claret-sodden hacks tottering up to him, announcing “I’ve forgotten your name, but your fez is familiar,” and laughing until they weep.

BY WAY OF a warm-up for Def Leppard’s midnight performance, a ceremonial dinner is held in a huge marquee tent in the hotel courtyard. The food is adequate, the wine appalling, the entertainment terrific. A variety of local artistes, all of whom look like they’ve recently returned from a raid on the wardrobe department of Eastbourne Amateur Dramatic Society’s production of “Ali Baba & The Forty Thieves,” eat fire, bellydance, twist themselves into improbable shapes and charm a snake. The snake-charming turn makes me think the same thing I always think when I see someone doing this: I wonder who the first bloke was who, when confronted by a rearing cobra, decided that the thing to do was not scream and run away, or whack it with a shovel, but sit down cross-legged four feet in front of it and play the bloody thing “The Sheik Of Araby.”

As is the way of these things from here to Butlins, a few of the audience are embarassed into participating—though not, disappointingly, in the snake-charming act. Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen volunteers to be carried around by a large bearded chap in a turban who walks barefoot on broken glass. Over dessert, we are treated to the rarely edifying spectacle of drunk European women trying to belly-dance: it gets uncomfortably reminiscent of the hippopotamus scene from “Fantasia.” Outside, Moroccan soldiers put on a show for us, charging around on camels, firing guns into the air and shouting. At least, we assume they’re putting on a show for us. It looks more like they’re putting on a coup d’etat, until they dismount and ask if anyone else fancies a go.

The finale of the sideshows is a performance by four men with traditional instruments (“traditional instruments”: universal euphemism for “unwieldy contraptions made of goat-bladders, horse tails and cat’s whiskers, which sound like someone cutting rusty tin with a hacksaw, and which nobody around here would normally be caught dead playing”) who play us some traditional music (“traditional music”: “fearful, tuneless caterwauling about donkeys, dead kings and/ or God which nobody around here would normally be caught dead listening to”).

Before we leave, a be-fezzed photographer wearily makes the rounds of the tables, offering for sale polaroid snapshots he’s been taking of revellers during the evening. To his disappointment, nobody really wants a picture of themselves looking drunk in the presence of a camel.
He has only one item of in-demand merchandise: a beautifully lit and delightfully framed shot of the eye-wateringly gorgeous blonde woman who is here acting as producer with some cable television crew. “I’ll have that one,” says someone, daubing it with sticky rosé fingerprints. “No, I want it,” says someone else. “I saw it first,” objects another voice, not a million miles from Sweet. A scuffle ensues.

 

IT IS THE kind of statement that would normally cause people to back slowly away, trying to not to make any sudden movements, but Def Leppard’s show comes, all things considered, as something of a relief. The press are poured into mini-buses and driven to the venue, deep inside a complex of beautiful caves near the seaside. As we duck between the stalactites, those of us who’ve grown tired of the fez joke are now giggling, “Hey, I suppose a rock’s out of the question,” and listening to our hoots echo off the stone.

On the stroke of midnight, Def Leppard appear on the stage that has been erected in one of the bigger caves, and we gentlefolk of the fourth estate are herded away from the punchbowls in the ante-cave in which we’re gathered, and towards what we’re supposed to be writing about. A few protests are made (“We’ll be able to hear them perfectly well from here,” says someone. “You won’t be able to hear them at all,” pleads an emissary from Def Leppard’s record label. “That’s what I mean,” comes the reply). At least one broadsheet reporter tries to hide under a table.

Def Leppard’s set is an acoustic-guitars-only unplugged kind of thing, consisting of stripped-down versions of a few of their hits and several entrancingly predictable cover versions: The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” T-Rex’s “Get It On,” David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing”—PJ Harvey’s “Sheela-Na-Gig” has obviously been dropped due to time constraints. In fairness to the Lep—I feel I can call them this—there’s a minor revelation in that those turbocharged vocal harmonies, Def Leppard’s signature on every one of their utterly fatuous but irresistibly catchy choruses, are not just a product of Mutt Lange’s Mission Control-sized mixing desk. Tonight, on “Animal” and on, er, others, they’re absolutely spot on, sounding like several jet engines being revved at once.

Def Leppard depart to an ovation from the competition winners, polite applause from the media and, from somewhere up the back, a slurred rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from one hack who has evidently been at sea too long. Buses arrive to take us back to the airport. Predictably, a head count reveals that we have less on board than we arrived with, and a couple of put-upon local guides are dispatched back into the caves with torches to locate those missing in action.

By the time we get back to the airport, it’s three in the morning, with the flight not due to leave until five. The entertainment available at Tangiers airport is somewhat limited at this hour, so people make half-hearted attempts to sleep on any flat surface. It looks like an evacuation from some variety of disaster, and in some small way I suppose it is. Those who haven’t lasted the bus ride conscious are deposited in sad little heaps on the floor by the departure gate.