HOW DOES IT FEEL? A Life of Musical Misadventures MARK KERMODE HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd v 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DZ An Hachette UK Company 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright © Mark Kermode 2018 The moral right of Mark Kermode to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN (hardback) 978 1 4746 0897 8 ISBN (trade paperback) 978 1 4746 0898 5 ISBN (ebook) 978 1 4746 0900 5 Typeset by Input Data Services Ltd, Somerset Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY www.orionbooks.co.uk HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd vvii 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 Playing the diatonic harmonica – an instrument on which it is impossible to play a wrong note. HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd 7 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 The glam years – thanks to Slade and Bowie, this is what I imagined a budding pop star looked like. HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd 1199 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 HOW DOES IT FEEL? The Spark Plugs (with Dave Baddiel, left, on Strat copy guitar) recording in the school music room. which to jot down lyrics and I was so impressed that I went out and bought my own notebook, which I promptly lost. I recently found a couple of black-and-white photographs of that recording session and one thing is apparent; no matter how good we may or may not have sounded, The Spark Plugs did not look like pop stars. We didn’t even look like we were trying to be pop stars; we just look like school kids with bad hair who happen to have stumbled on a room full of cheap musical equipment. Back in the mid-seventies, proper pop stars looked like Slade – a band defi ned by Noddy Holder’s refl ective top hat, with its tower of glittering mirrors, and by Dave Hill’s custom- built guitars, which came in a range of increasingly ridiculous pointy shapes and sizes. The most infamous of Hill’s guitars was shaped like a giant pistol, with the neck as the barrel and 23 HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd 2233 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 HOW DOES IT FEEL? Everyday Electronics – build your own pop stardom! of the guitar was in fact a screwdriver, hence its failure to do the job properly. A man of strong opinions and occasionally incautious language, he informed me that the next time he caught me being that stupid he would ‘place my size ten boot up your arse!’ It was a phrase I would hear many times over the next two years; I knew he was joking, but it still put the wind up me. The shape of the guitar I was building was peculiar; a cross between an elongated Vox Delta and a stunted Gibson Flying V, with neither the style of the former nor the classic panache of the latter. Dave Hill would doubtless have found it 29 HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd 2299 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 HOW DOES IT FEEL? The only surviving photo of my home made Delta. Note the art easel microphone stand. The fi rst band in which my homemade Delta fi nally made an appearance went by the improbably upbeat name of The Tigers. The driving force in the group was a wry young man called Chris who played piano far better than I ever could and read exotic literature by foreign authors of whom I had never heard. Inevitably, Chris had no time whatsoever for my childish infatuation with Slade, preferring the altogether hipper sound of The Doors, whose music I was duly instructed to study. The fi rst song The Tigers learned to play was ‘I Looked at You’, a poppy Doors hit over which I played an almost comedically simple guitar riff. We rehearsed it at the home of Chris’s best friend Hugh whom we’d roped in on vocals because he looked 33 HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd 3333 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 Duncan Cooper’s lyric sheet for ‘Surrey by Night’, with typically self-effacing hand-written notes. HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd 4422 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 The Basics play the Sixth Form Common Room. Before breaking the strings on my Westbury . .and after, with Gavin’s white Telecaster. HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd 4466 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 MARK KERMODE Fifth Incident sound-checking at the Moonlight. Simon Booth wielding his mighty Aria axe. ways. But Simon and I wanted to keep playing together, so we teamed up with Saul Rosenberg and Simmy Richman to form Fifth Incident – a band whose primary mission was to make aggressively complicated cubist rock music that would frighten people away in droves. Fifth Incident played their fi rst gig at The Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, supporting a band called Paint, whose line-up I believe included former members of Wayne (later Jayne) County and the Electric Chairs. Our soundcheck was thrillingly loud; the gig itself was even louder. Somewhere, there’s a cassette tape of that gig; all you can hear is screaming feedback, thunderous drums, booming bass, and the sound of people crying in pain. I loved it. It really was impressively 48 HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd 4488 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 Poster for Fifth Incident at the Moonlight, and upstairs at the Starlight, stealing an image from Altered States. HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd 5500 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 MARK KERMODE Brag at the Moonlight. Brag’s fi rst gig was the best gig we would ever do. The tape worked perfectly, the songs were short and sweet, and the audience heaved a sigh of elated relief that we were playing music you could actually dance to. As an encore, we did the Box Tops standard, ‘The Letter’, and everyone cheered and whooped with delight. After the gig, an old friend came up to me and said, ‘That’s brilliant. You’ve dispensed with the issue of ever having to soundcheck a drum kit ever again. Genius!’ I hadn’t realised it at the time, but he was absolutely right. The best thing about Brag was that we’d been able to spend thirty minutes soundchecking the vocals and bass, rather than scrab- bling around in the few remaining seconds left after miking and checking an entire bloody drum kit. We’d already done that – back in Dimitri’s studio. All we had to do was give the soundman a jack lead out of the back of the reel-to-reel tape 58 HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd 5588 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 MARK KERMODE Border Incident in supremely unglamorous surroundings, Manchester. Angels rip-off song got played on the radio in Manchester; people heard it and we immediately started booking gigs at fairly decent venues. Even more remarkably, we landed a sup- port gig with (guess who?) The Comsat Angels – the band to whom we essentially owed our entire thieving existence. On the strength of that radio exposure, we’d already wound up supporting bands like The Higsons and New Model Army. But the Comsats were a step up because they were one of my favourite bands in the whole world. When I wasn’t pretending to be in Yachts, I was desperately trying to imitate the Comsats and their bleakly cinematic landscapes. Despite the fact that international superstardom proved elusive, I always consid- ered them to be the very pinnacle of post-punk pop music. As I kept telling anyone who would listen, ‘The Comsat Angels are the band Joy Division could have been if they could sing 72 HHowow DDoesoes iitt ffeel?eel? - VV5.indd5.indd 7722 331/07/20181/07/2018 112:272:27 MARK KERMODE Proof that Border Incident(s) did, indeed, support The Comsat Angels. Years later, when I had actually become a ‘proper’ jour- nalist, my Comsats-mania continued unabated. By the early nineties, I was presenting BBC radio shows that could actually play The Comsat Angels’ records like ‘Shiva Descending’ and ‘Field of Tall Flowers’. I also persuaded the Radio 1 arts show The Guest List to let me do a feature about the studio that the Comsats had built in Sheffi eld. Then when I took over from Mark Radcliffe as the programme’s presenter, I got Steve to come on and perform a live acoustic set, and introduced him as a ‘god-like genius’. After years of harassment, I felt like I fi nally had the chance to repay him for putting up with me so politely for all those years.