Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 22
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 22: Leaving on a Jet Plane
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
I’d made a pact with myself in my early thirties that I should not be booking the acts at the Holy Toilet by the time I was forty.
This wasn’t a result of the supposed drift towards mediocrity in culture decisions that is apparently an inevitable consequence of advancing years. My parents’ generation had drifted slowly away from an argument about The Beatles versus The Rolling Stones into the comfort of Radio 3, provoking the assumption that one type of culture is more appropriate for the wiser heads of the elderly than another. Although I spent most of the summer of punk in hospital, my third hand experience of it is a deeply ingrained thread of attitude I can’t unravel. Even now, I’d rather stand at the back of a room watching music I don’t understand, or have any affinity to, than buy into the endless round of retromania that seems to have gripped the wallets of the nation. I still want to see something I’ve never seen before, even if I hate it.
My view on who should book, and who should run, The Forum was driven by this confrontational outlook. I felt that the best thing for the venue would be if the booker, and promoter, this being pretty much the same thing in a grassroots music venue like the one in Tunbridge Wells, were in the same age group as the artists they were booking. It isn’t about your ability to look for, fall in love with, and secure the talents of, new artists. It was about the emotional connection, the shared life experience, that you needed to feel with the artists and crew passing through your doors.
Touring is an incredibly challenging lifestyle, seemingly endless days filled with massive levels of tedium and boring repetition. Get up off your bunk in the back of a van, or if it’s a lucky night maybe an inexpensive hotel bed. Try to find the cheapest breakfast available. Go to the van, greet all the people you saw yesterday, spend an hour putting the gear in it. Drive a hundred, two hundred or even three hundred miles, take all the gear back out again. Spend an hour or two hours putting it all on a stage and making it work. Sit in a dark room for five or six or seven hours with all the same people you sat in a dark room with for the same hours yesterday. Then forty five minutes to an hour and a half of absolutely blistering euphoria, where you are the centre of the universe. Pack the gear up, put it back in the van. Try to calm down and get some sleep. Get back up, do it all again. And again. And again.
Mega City Four were mythically alleged to have played three hundred and sixty six such shows in one year early in the 1990s, revealing either that they must have really, really liked each other’s company or providing a solid basis for the reason why the band split up. Such bands, when they walk into any small venue, deserve to be confronted by somebody who has an empathy and sympathy for the experience they are having. Little details become super important. The backstage scenes of Spinal Tap are beloved by professionals in the music industry because these are not gross exaggerations of observed behaviour, they are what it’s genuinely like. I once saw The Stereophonics perform almost the entirety of Nigel Tufnel’s inability to make a sandwich work in the backstage of the Holy Toilet not as a tribute or a referential nod to the absurdity of it, but simply because they didn’t like the size of the sandwiches. If you have nothing else to do, the size and shape of the bread can become the main focus of your day.
Sat in the office backstage one evening, the tour manager of London’s newest favourite act Radiator appears. The band have been added, reluctantly by us, enthusiastically by the agent, as the opening act of a three band bill, just below the local band who have actually sold about half the tickets, and the main headliner, responsible for the other half of sales, who are out promoting their new album. I’d vaguely heard of Radiator through the usual nexus of Camden Barfly, Falcon, Dingwalls, Monarch gigs that were beloved of the music industry A&R departments. There was a bit of an excitable buzz around them in an incredibly tiny number of postcodes all of which start with the three characters NW1. They were not, to be clear, at all known outside this circle. To be specific, we are paying them £50, a contractual obligation we would rather not have, to perform a twenty five minute slot as early as we can schedule it once doors are open. Despite this, they have sent through a rider demand which has obviously been designed by someone who is already planning what they will need when they headline the main stage of Glastonbury. It is this which the tour manager wishes to discuss, eight minutes before they are due on stage. I ask how I can help.
“Big problem. We aren’t going to be able to go on until we get this rider sorted” he states. This is an interesting conundrum, as I don’t particularly care whether they go on or not, and neither do the other 250 people here, none of whom have any idea who they are. Trying to be as helpful as I can, I ask what the problem with the rider is. The tour manager produces it from his back pocket.
“Well” he begins “what we’ve had seems to be just the cold sandwiches and some drinks, although not the range we requested. But it says here” he stabs a finger at the relevant clause “that we will need four fresh grilled lobster? We really need that, the band are very upset and they aren’t going to go on until we’ve agreed when it will arrive.”
I consider the logic of this rider demand. Our entire financial commitment to the economic value of the act’s performance is an impressive fifty quid. We obviously think musicians and crew need to eat, but it seems somewhat out of synch with the nature of this contract that someone has inserted a hospitality condition into it which would see them hosted at the nearby seafood restaurant for a bill which wouldn’t be far off two hundred quid. Maybe they want a bottle of champagne with it it as well?
Initially I’m drawn to the possibility of them making the whole thing easier to run by simply putting their gear back in the van and buggering off, but it’s been a long day, for me and for them, so I decide to offer the possibility of this outcome as a choice. I gesture for the tour manager to follow me to the entrance to the back of the stage, just behind the drum kit. From here you can see across the venue to take in the whole room, a room which is packed to the rafters eagerly awaiting the arrival of two other bands, neither of whom, at this point, have demanded a five star slap up meal. I point at the crowd.
“Here’s what is going to happen. In…” I check my watch “...six minutes your band are going to walk onto this stage and play the twenty five minute set they are booked for in front of these 250 people. Alternatively, if they choose not to that, I am going to walk on to this stage and explain to the same 250 people that you are unable to play because we haven’t bought two hundred quid’s worth of lobster and found someone who can grill it for you. After which, I’m going to let you walk on and remove your equipment in front of them, just so you can hear directly from them what they make of it. Your choice”.
A prompt five minutes later the four members of the band walk timidly past the door of the office, pick up their instruments and perform.
Now this is an amusing story which talks to the sort of daft demands people make when they are budding rock stars and bored. But it doesn’t actually show me, as a venue operator, in a good light. The One and I had moved back to London in 1997 and built a home and a life for ourselves that was becoming increasingly detached from the itinerant lifestyle of the touring artist. That life now included Daughter G and Daughter A, two bundles of joy that had arrived together in an entirely unexpected development a couple of years previously. To be exact, we had noticed that The One was forming a slightly larger than might be anticipated shape at about the fifteen week stage, and a nurse then told us at twenty one weeks that it was good news as ‘both of them doing great’. This provoking puzzled looks, she then confirmed that, as per usual, The One had out-performed expectations and we were to be the lucky parents of twins.
After they had waged war on us by sleeping in strictly alternating hours for the first six months, resulting in craters of darkness forming around our eyes and an inability to boil a kettle without the possibility of serious injury, the pair of them had settled into an incredibly delightful, partially self supporting, package. They really didn’t need too much, getting a lot of entertainment out of the simplicity of being with each other. But being only two years old they did need watching over and the basic fundamentals of living taking care of. Two children turning up at once had put a lot of pressure on us, responsibility that we had to learn very quickly. They tell you a lot in books about which illnesses to look out for, how to help them play, walk, read, stop biting things and where to put stuff so they won’t burn themselves on it or fall off it. They don’t write down too many instructions on how to manage your 24 hour-a-day feeling that you must be hyper alert to every eventuality that might befall them either in their immediate vicinity or at some unknown future point.
This new duty of care definitely had a significant impact on my ability to take seriously a lot of the behaviour of artists and crew on the road. If one of your primary roles is sticking your elbow into a bath tub of water to test the temperature so that you ensure a human being isn’t burnt by it then it can get quite difficult to keep your enthusiasm for listening to the demand for a brand new toilet seat forty minutes after doors have opened on a Saturday night because the guitarist ‘doesn’t like the feel of plastic touching their arse’. The enormous daily threat of the close proximity of molded polymer to the posterior of a key member of a band is the sort of thing that you have to really care tremendously about to be part of a touring crew, and you need a receptive ear at a venue when you have to explain that. What you certainly don’t need is someone who is busy wondering where that jigsaw puzzle piece might have gone and hoping that an X-Ray won’t be required to reveal it’s been ingested.
Mr Handsome and I had tried a number of times to replace me as the industry facing figure head for the venue without success, but finally, in 2003, a collective of different people started putting in a few shows each, and gradually my responsibility to be there all the time started to reduce. When taking on the Rhythmix work I had effectively given myself two full time jobs. Across a couple of years, this gradually reduced to about one and a half, although if anything ever seriously goes wrong at the Holy Toilet I still get the call almost twenty years later, a call I am always wiling to take and act upon. You can take the boy out of Tunbridge Wells Forum but you can’t take Tunbridge Wells Forum out of the boy.
With this new found liberation from day-to-day responsibility for the former toilet, I started spending a bit more time in Barcelona at Carrer del Pi, the climate and lifestyle providing periods of relief from my increasing reliance on medication to keep my pain levels manageable and physical movement as a possibility. One day The Monk, The Radio Personality, Mr Furia and Profesor Manso call me into the workspace to show me what they’ve been working on. It’s another animated video, a space hopping, genre defying, slice of uber pop which is quite obviously going to be a major international hit. I watch it four or five times. And then I decide to manage them. Because why not? I’m only doing one and a half jobs, and can easily fit management of this project into the hours I am failing to sleep.
The One and I start talking with even more intensity about our future. She can see how much my health is failing, something we had been obliged to discuss prior to getting married and then again when deciding to have children. Her resilience and determination to stick with me in the face of my escalating health degeneration is something I will probably never understand and will always be deeply grateful for. It’s work that’s still in progress long after we both had assumed she would be dealing with a different sort of challenge, and its about to influence a decision that will be another defining moment in both our lives.
The combination of the opportunities to work in Barcelona opening up, my failing health, thoughts about the future we want for Daughter A and Daughter G, all combine together and we reach a conclusion we have been batting about between us for a few years. Our minds are made up. We aren’t tired of life, but we are tired of London.
We are going to put our things in a truck, get on a plane, and move to Barcelona.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here: