ABSOLUTE BOWIE - Serious Moonlight in Sutton

In what is becoming a trend but not yet a habit, my son Sam treated me to a tribute act night out as a birthday present, just as he did last Christmas when we went to the Half Moon in Putney to see John Campbell do his Jimi Hendrix act with his group Are You Experienced. Last night it was Absolute Bowie at Sutton Football Club’s social club, which becomes The Boom Boom Club when they present rock, which is often and which regularly puts on tribute acts.

Absolute Bowie do not identify themselves, and instead go under assumed names connected with Bowie, with Halloween Jack on vocals, Mick Ransom (sic) on guitar and the like, but ‘Jack’ has an uncanny ability to sing and prance about in ways that echo the real thing, and the whole show benefited from the boundless enthusiasm that all five musicians put into their show. Their love of David was evident from the opening notes of the opening number ‘Time’ to the closing encore ‘Heroes’. By this time the crowd of 150 or so was showing the same kind of excitement the man himself generated at Live Aid, all arms waving, feet dancing and singing along at the tops of their voices. Heroes indeed.

The show was divided into two halves, the first a Ziggy presentation and the second songs from post-Diamond Dogs with the singer first in Thin White Duke mould and later in a silvery suit and glittery tie. Carrot topped and wearing a Japanese style white silk outfit, ‘Ziggy’ sang all the songs you would expect – ‘Changes’, ‘Man Who Sold The World’, Ziggy Stardust’, ‘Sufragette City’, ‘Queen Bitch’ etc – all the while flirting with his guitarist, who was wearing a long blonde wig, and the stocky bass player who was sturdy, efficient and cool but looked a tad uncomfortable in his black wig with blonde streaks. At one point Ziggy knelt on the floor to echo Mick Rock’s famous shot of David licking Ronno’s guitar strings, and for ‘Moonage Daydream’ he placed a twinkling light in his mouth to create a rather unsettling but nevertheless very dramatic effect. He also affected some of David’s mime moves, like opening a troublesome sliding door or fanning his arms like a bird in flight, and toyed with a mask on a stick. The first half closed with ‘Starman’, and there was much arms-around-the-shoulders action a la David’s famous appearance on Top Of The Pops in 1972.

After a 20-minute break the band returned, changed now into more regular outfits and looking a bit relieved, especially the bass player who’d swapped his wig for a pork pie hat. Led by the keyboard player, they made a fearsome racket that eventually transformed into the riff from ‘Station To Station’ and on bounded the singer in black pants, black waistcoat and white shirt, his hair now blonde and fluffy. All that was missing was the packet of Gitanes but health and safety no doubt rules that sort of thing out these days. This David always had a distinctive way of holding himself, straight-backed, slightly angular dance moves, his arms bent at the elbow and hands just below shoulder level, almost as if he was sparring, a grin on his face as he glanced slyly at the band. All this was on the nail as the ensemble moved through ‘Golden Years’, ‘TVC15’, ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ and ‘Ashes To Ashes’ which featured a terrific guitar solo, all escalating vibrato and heavy metal flash. It helped that all bar the drummer sang, so the sound was fat and full, the effect at times verging on the choirlike.

The show proper ended with a suitably spiky ‘Let’s Dance’, but they came back for a stab at ‘Diamond Dogs’, introduced with the recitation from the album, then it was into ‘Space Oddity’, with ‘David’ strumming a 12-string, ‘Rebel Rebel, all hot tramps and torn dresses, and, finally and inevitably, ‘Heroes’ which the singer dedicated to his daughter who was apparently celebrating her 19^th birthday. They’d been at it for over two hours, played 23 songs and entertained Sutton's Bowie community royally – and all for £12.

There are some in my profession who take a rather disdainful attitude towards tribute acts but I am not amongst them. My son is 19 and unlikely ever to see the real David Bowie, and I would imagine that most of the crowd in Sutton Football Club probably never saw him either, but the pleasure they all took from this show negates any scorn that some might feel at what is, after all, a shameless imitation. I take the view that Absolute Bowie and their ilk are keeping David’s music before the public and serving to remind us of the depth of his catalogue, the broad nature of his songwriting styles and, last but by no means least, what a fantastic stage performer Bowie really was. And that can only be a good thing.

(I downloaded the image from Absolute Bowie’s website where it is credited to Raven Photography.)

PETE INTERVIEW, June 1974

This picture of Keith, Bobby Pridden and myself was taken by Bob Gruen in New York in June 1974 during The Who’s four-night residency at Madison Square Garden. I’ve written about that week elsewhere on Just Backdated but never really wrote about how, on the Wednesday, I went round to Pete’s hotel in the afternoon to do an interview. He was expecting me but he didn’t answer my knock on his door in the middle of the afternoon. I persisted and eventually he opened it, looking a bit hung over, a bit bedraggled, like he’d just got out of bed. I offered to come back later but he invited me in and went to the bathroom to sort himself out. Then he returned to the suite and ordered a bacon and egg breakfast.

         Unusually, Pete was staying at the Pierre Hotel while the rest of the band stayed at the Navarro, their regular berth in NY. Bobby Pridden had hooked up some sort of mobile phone link for Pete to communicate with the others, but there wasn’t much communication until late afternoon and the Wednesday was a day off anyway. I think the Garden had been booked for something else, maybe a Nicks game.

We started by talking about the set the band were playing and it turned out it was deliberately planned for New York even though it was previewed at the recent Charlton football ground concert. "In the last two year we've more or less delegated the responsibility of what the actual songs are going to be to Roger,” said Pete. "We often decide just a few minutes before we go onstage what we're going to do, but I don't have a knack of organising an order that theatrically works.

"It's the same with programming an album, which is one of Glyn John's attributes. Roger just happens to be the best at it in the band.

We decided to include some of the old stuff because we felt initially that a good five or six thousand of the front row seats at the Garden would be old Who devotees who enjoy the old stuff. And I think they did. It was easy to remember how to play the old songs 'cos we played them that many times before. I just picked up the guitar and they seemed to come out."

Surprisingly this was the first time The Who had played the Garden. In the past, said Pete, they've felt it was too big for them to get through to the audiences. He reckoned he knows every fan in the first 20 rows by their first names. "These fans feel that they own The Who. They were there in the front row at the Murray The K Show and now that The Who have reached this stage they feel that as they've been so loyal they have a prior claim to what numbers we're going to play and things like that. New York to us is like what the Goldhawk Club is like to us in England.

"Most of these kids, the ones I've met, seem to have a similar attitude to life. The ones you saw freaking out at the front are the fanatics and they all seem to be deeply intellectual people who are very worried about life. They find the Who to be a kind of gut release which is what I get from the Who, too. They're people from the dead suburbia of New York who need a release from everyday life.

"It was conversations with people like that that made me begin work on Quadrophenia, not just in America but in England, too. Quad was for them pretty directly."

Talk turned to guitar wrecking and Pete's eyes twinkled as this topic was dear to his heart. He'd smashed one on Tuesday, he said, because he was so pleased at the way the show went. "On Monday the thought ran through my head that it had been such a boring day and the least I could do was smash a guitar, but in those circumstances it wouldn't really be right.

"On my first day in New York I felt a great feeling of being back and a great respect and kinship for that audience. I enjoyed Monday because of that but obviously I was upset for Roger who went out there and put his toes on the line showing that he was the figurehead for the group. I sat back ready for a good musical evening because I play better when I don't jump about too much.

"The trouble with all of us in this group is that we have such incredibly defined traditional ways of playing that we tend to be bogged down by them in some senses, but I like to go out and do a solo on single notes instead of the usual routine."

The four Garden shows aside, other activities keeping Pete busy at the moment include the filming of Tommy which he doesn't much want to talk about and the compiling of an Odds And Sods album which will include material that's pretty well known in Who circles but was never released on record.

Many of these tracks came from sessions done with Glyn Johns immediately after the release of Who's Next. Pete thinks it's important that they should be released, more as a collectors' item than the next "big Who venture."

"What I'd like to see happen in the rest of this year is to see the individuals in the band follow their noses. I don't think anybody really realises how much John would like to work on the road with Rigor Mortis and get a gut reaction from the crowd on him and his music.

"Keith has been offered some drummers' dream gigs. He's the only guy who could get Harry Nilsson on the road and that's something that could happen if it was allowed to.

"As far as The Who are concerned, we can really take chances. There's no chance of dissipation of Who energy because there's no way that that peculiar kind of energy can fit in with any kind of anyone else's music.

"I'm sure that Roger will come out of the Tommy movie with a realisation that he has a screen presence and want to do some more acting. Keith loves acting and wants to do some more. That's obvious.

"As for myself I'd like to have first refusal on a few of my songs. The Who always have first refusal on the things I write and my first solo album was, if you like, a bunch of rejects. I'd like to record some songs that would be good enough for The Who.

"Without becoming alarmist about it I guess that I don't get as much out of performing on the stage as I used to. I don't have the same lust for gut feedback that I used to and more and more I want to get feedback from pure music.

"I think The Who are going to have to allow themselves time to breathe without allowing their sense of identity to dissipate. I don't want The Who to end up on stage playing because they have to, but playing because they want to.

"If it turns out they don't want to play together, then I don't think they should, but at the moment we don't play that often and when we do it's because we want to. I can't wait to get back on stage tonight."

        

Actually it was the next night when Pete got back on stage. I think it was that night that I took him, John and Keith down to the 82 Club where Television were playing. John hated them – not sufficiently professional for him – but Pete was interested in what they were doing. Not sure what Keith felt about them – he was off chasing skirt anyway.

LOSING MY VIRGINITY - Not what you think…

In January, 1972, Melody Maker dispatched me to the Midem Festival in Cannes, the annual trade fair for the music industry where behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing is transacted, much of it related to the mysterious business of music publishing and sales of territorial rights on this or that song or publishing catalogue. I stayed at a small hotel in the back streets near Cannes railway station, away from the fashionable Croisette which runs along the sea front, and on the first morning shared a breakfast table with an amiable British chap with long blonde hair, a beard, blue jeans and rumpled sweater. He looked like a bit of a hippie, the sort of bloke I could befriend, and he told me he’d just opened record shops in Oxford Street and Notting Hill in London and was thinking of starting his own record label.

        After breakfast my new friend asked me to do him a favour. He explained that he didn’t have a pass to enter the Midem Festival hall but that he had a Rolls Royce car, borrowed from his father, in which he’d driven down through France. Would I, he inquired, pretend to be his chauffeur, drive him to the hall and open the car door for him. That way, he reasoned, the doormen would assume he was someone important and allow him entry without even asking for a pass.

I agreed to do this favour on one condition, that the following day he would do the same for me: drive me to the hall, and open the door as if I was someone important. He agreed.

And so we set off, me driving the elegant Roller and he sat on the back seat. I negotiated the narrow back streets of Cannes successfully and arrived at the hall, leapt out and opened the door for my ‘boss’. I watched in amusement as the doormen, noting the car, saluted my new friend and ushered him through the festival doors without asking for a pass. I then drove the Roller back to the hotel and left its keys at the reception desk as we’d agreed. 

There was no sign of him next morning at breakfast, nor the following morning. It seemed to me that he’d left the hotel and forgotten about me, and his side of our bargain. Then, two days later, I saw him again, on the beach with some cronies, other hippie types, perhaps four or five men and girls, having what appeared to be a picnic lunch. He saw me staring at them all and beckoned me over.

“Thanks for the other day,” he said, smiling.

“You promised to do the same for me,” I replied.

“I know. I’m sorry. I left that hotel.”

“What did he promise you?” asked one of his friends who was eavesdropping the conversation.

I explained.

“You welched on the deal,” he said loudly so that the whole party heard. “You must pay a forfeit.”

One of the girls jumped up. “Will you cancel the debt if he runs into the sea naked?” she asked.

“Yes,” I laughed.

Without argument, the bearded man promptly tugged off his jeans, pants and shirt and ran naked into the Mediterranean.

Thus, for the first and last time, did I observe Richard Branson’s arse.

Just over two years later, in April 1974, I was flying from New York to London when who should be on the same flight but Richard, in the economy section like me. In those days I crossed the Atlantic a lot, as did he, and we both knew that midweek night-flight jumbos were unlikely to be full and if you were lucky you could find an empty row of central seats towards the rear of the plane on which you could stretch out and sleep. We were lucky that night and after a quick chat we bid each other good night and slept well.

         It would have been somewhere over Ireland when we awoke and had tea and toast together the following morning.

         “Do you like flying?” I asked him.

         “I love it,” he replied. “One day I want to have my own airline.”
         Fat chance, I remember thinking.

I didn’t see Richard Branson again for about 20 years, but in the early nineties I was playing host to Artemy Troitsky, the well known Russian music writer who had written a book for Omnibus Press and who has since become a close friend of mine. On this visit Artemy had asked me if I could fix up a meeting with Richard and I was able to oblige.

         The meeting was arranged for 6.30pm in an upmarket art gallery in Mayfair where Richard had been invited to privately inspect a bejewelled carving of Buddha that he was thinking of buying. Artemy and I knocked on the gallery door and were ushered inside. We were expected and were led downstairs to a vault where the Buddha sat twinkling on a table. Richard was scrutinizing it as the gallery owner looked on.

         He greeted me like a long lost friend and seemed especially pleased to meet Artemy. The gallery owner wasn’t too pleased at the interruption.

         “What do you think of this, Chris?” asked Richard. “Do you think I should buy it?”

         “How much?” I asked.

         “Three hundred thousand pounds.”

         “Well,” I said. “If I had three hundred grand to spare I wouldn’t spend it on that.”

         “Hmm, maybe you’re right. Neither will I.”

         The gallery owner looked like he wanted to kill me.

The three of us left the gallery together, Richard conferred with his driver who was waiting outside in a big car and we strolled down the street to a pub. I left Richard and Artemy chatting in a quiet corner and went to order us all a beer. The barman had recognised the man whose face was as well known as the Virgin logo.

         “Is that Richard Branson?”

         “Yes. He’s having a quiet, private meeting and I’d be grateful if you say nothing to anyone about him being here until we leave.”

         I rather enjoyed playing the Looking-After-A-VIP role, and gave him a fiver. “Look after us and there’s another of these for you when we leave.”

         “Certainly sir.”

         Thereafter the barman gave us waiter service while Artemy asked Richard about Virgin Records’ plans for Moscow and Richard quizzed Artemy about travel opportunities in Russia. At one stage in the conversation Richard told Artemy that the Kremlin had offered him the chance to buy a hotel at a Black Sea resort and evidently talked it up big time.

         “Do not buy it,” Artemy told him in that wonderfully resolute way that Russians have, the deep voice that brooks no argument. “There is a rubbish tip nor far away. Terrible smell. The best place is one hundred miles down the coast where all the government people go on holiday. But they won’t let you buy there.”

         Richard was grateful for inside information untainted by vested interests. When we left he told Artemy that if ever he was in the UK again he could stay at any of his houses, in Holland Park, Notting Hill, Maida Vale or near Oxford, anywhere he liked.

I gave the barman another fiver as I left the pub, and that was the last time I had any contact with Richard Branson.