“Ooo, Heaven is a Plaice and Chips”

If ever there was an idiom that I most identified with it is to “just go with your gut”.

Which is exactly why this story starts with me in the queue at my local chippy on a Sunday evening, still nursing a hangover and in desperate search of carbohydrates. However, that wasn’t the only time I listened to my gut whist waiting for my battered sausage that night.

Chip Shop walls are an untapped data bank of useful information. If you ever need a will writing, a driveway tarmacking or to attain grade 8 on the viola there is a business card for your every need adorning the tiled wall of your chip shop. And even if you don’t need any of the services advertised on business cards haphazardly blu-tacked to the wall, you will find yourself inanely scanning them anyway, rather than strike small talk with the spotty 16 year old serving attendant on minimum wage.

But on this particular evening, there was something a lot more prominent on display. Even more glossy than the forehead of the teenager who was soon to serve my tea. You could instantly tell it was important as it was on A4 paper and in colour. And it wasn’t Billy Smarts’ circus either – that had left town weeks ago.

International singing sensation and Grammy nominated artist Belinda Carlisle was coming to town. My town!

I wasn’t actually a fan. I was only really familiar of her discography through school discos and taping the Top 40 on a Sunday evening. But when a globally recognised megastar comes to a sleepy Buckinghamshire backwater, it’s enough to make you drop your chips!

I rushed home to tell my housemates. At the time I was living with a couple of friends and to say we were uncultured was a gross understatement. The majority of the television we watched was on the now obsolete Bravo channel and usually involved a synopsis like “My battle with my 50lb testicle”. Our shared house was a perpetual tip – our glass recycling box was usually overflowing the day after our bins were collected and there hadn’t been a female visitor in years. One of my housemates once brought a pair of stick insects, insisting that they were zero maintenance and that “even we could keep them alive”. They escaped the first night we had them. For weeks we were picking up twigs and sticks that we had walked in to the house and that still remained due to our lack of a cleaning rota – desperately hoping we had located our new pets. They knew they were in trouble as soon as they had arrived and despite their limited cognitive capacity, made an astute dash for freedom.

But as I entered our hallway scoffing the last of the chips so I didn’t have to share, I divulged the exciting news of our chance to at last sample something remotely cultural – “Belinda Carlisle is coming to Newport Pagnell!!”

Well not Newport Pagnell exactly. I doubt the Workingmen’s Club or the British Legion generated the kind of pull a world renowned vocalist craves. She was due to play The Stables – an intimate rural venue only a few miles away, owned and managed by Jazz impresarios Cleo Lane and John Dankworth. Tickets went on sale the following morning and we were all keen to go. In a time before the internet and mass advertising, I had pulled down the poster in the Chip Shop to reduce the competition for tickets. I took the next day off work as holiday, sat myself in the least uncomfortable chair and hovered eagerly over the phone waiting for the ticket office to open…

“I’m sorry – all our operators are currently busy. Please try again” Press Redial. “I’m sorry – all our operators are currently busy. Please try again”.

It appeared that my plan to censor the marketing of Belinda’s cosy performance had been futile. Her appeal was apparently a lot more universal than those queuing for a fish supper. Then, after four hours of dogged persistence a human, non-recorded voice answered the phone. The operator regrettably informed me that due to phenomenal demand all standard tickets for the show had now been sold. However, due to a cancellation on the system that had appeared as we were talking, three tickets to sit amongst her entourage had just become available – at three times the standard ticket price.

‘Just go with your gut!’ – my internal monologue surmised. How often would an opportunity of this magnitude present itself so close to home? It had been a full 6 years since Eric Bristow had played that exhibition darts match in the back room of The Cannon.

“Ok!! I’ll take them!” I excitedly and nervously replied. We were going to see Belinda.

After a few months of building the excitement up to a tumultuous crescendo, the big day finally arrived. None of us had ever attended an event of this class before and we had already decided that we would wear our best suits for the occasion. To be completely honest, there wasn’t a spectrum of suits to choose from. We each owned one – and they had only been worn at the odd Christening or that court appearance where we decided owing the new Playstation was more important than keeping up with our council tax payments. None the less, we were going to pull out all the stops and look the absolute best we could.

We arrived at the venue and went straight to the bar. It appeared after scanning our immediacy that no-one else in the entire audience felt the need to convey their delight at witnessing such a private performance by turning up in cheap, polyester BHS apparel. I’m sure there’s another apt idiom I could cite here about polishing a turd. After finishing our drinks, we headed towards the main auditorium to explore exactly what kind of view we had secured for the equivalent of a months rent in our stick insect infested dump. The usher looked at our tickets and personally took us to our seats. Front row. Centre stage. Only a few feet from the microphone. This show was definitely going to be as cosy as this extremely cheap five year old suit I had wrestled myself to get in to earlier.

Before Belinda was scheduled to come on stage and enthral us, there was a locally sourced warm up act booked to get the crowd suitably engaged. The singer/songwriter that kicked of proceedings wasn’t particularly notable but what was very apparent was that the woman beside me was his biggest/only fan. I astutely worked this out as she had crudely fashioned her own non-official merchandise using an iron-on photo of the artist and a black marker pen. I am not entirely sure how prevalent restraining orders were at the time, but I remember thinking if I was him I’d pay for a full security audit of his home at the earliest opportunity. We didn’t stick around to see how much his abject fear affected his entire set and went to beat the crowd and get some interval beers from the bar.

The excitement amongst us was palpable. We were moments away from watching a huge international superstar perform in our own backyard. Up close and extremely personal. Wearing the nicest clothes we owned. Completely against the aesthetic we were trying to convey, we ordered a bucket of beer between us for the performance and went back to take our seats. The seats that were more expensive that the cumulative cost of our entire outfits that night. We showed the same usher our tickets again and she led us back to where we had been sitting. But this time they weren’t just front, centre and extremely intimate. They were now occupied.

“Oh. This isn’t right.” she observed.

“Too right!” I retorted. “We have paid a lot of money for this privilege. Can you please sort it out?”

The usher tentatively made her way towards the rogue seat thieves and what appeared to be a very uncomfortable conversation ensued. Although we couldn’t hear the actual details of the discussion, it appeared to centre around a challenge to see tickets, a very effervescent riposte by the male protagonist complete with arms flailing and foot stamping and ended with provisions for the man and his young daughter being made to sit stools dragged out from the bar. They both appeared very disconsolate as they stormed past us on the way to their makeshift viewing station at the very back of the room. We shook our heads in unison at the sheer audacity of their attempts to usurp our premium seats. Shame on you.

We eventually took our seats and the lighting was dimmed to almost complete darkness in anticipation of Belinda’s arrival. The tension was building with every passing moment of silence. Then the lights came up. Belinda entered the stage and immediately went for the jugular with her cornerstone song “Heaven is a Place on Earth”. The crowd went wild! But after a few moments of getting her stage orientation, she started staring straight at us with a look of what I can only describe as confusion. It unsettled her professionalism for a few fleeting moments, before she went on to deliver a performance well worthy of a months rent of a three bedroom semi detached house in Newport Pagnell.

On our way out of the show as my friends and I lauded over the spectacle we had just witnessed, the usher who had so expertly fought our corner earlier was eagerly waving at us to grab our attention. After meandering through the leaving crowd, she eventually caught up with us and with an extremely sheepish look on her face.

After a very brief and unsettling explanation, it transpires that we had inadvertently asked the usher to evict Belinda Carlisle’s husband and daughter from her show after they had made a surprise transatlantic visit to come and watch her. Whilst we were at the bar getting our bucket of beer, there had been a very quick and poignant reunion – hence the strange and telling looks we had been getting from the global superstar as she came on stage. After a 10 hours flight and a mercy dash to the theatre to get there in time, we had indirectly arranged for their removal from ~~their~~ our seats and they had to make do with watching the object of their affection from the worst vantage point in the house. Expecting to see her loved ones again as the lights came up, she was instead greeted with our smirking faces, feeling vindicated that we’d won a big battle for Joe Public.

And that was the first and last time I ever took inspiration from a Chip Shop noticeboard. I still don’t have a will, my driveway needs urgent attention and I haven’t picked up the viola in years. Still, I do have a story about the time I got one up on a platinum award winning international artist. Chip anyone?

Let me be Frank – I was There!

The one thing that unites us is the belief that we all grew up in an era when music or comedy was the best.

You are all wrong – I was.

I have been extremely fortunate to see some truly amazing artists perform over the years and am lucky to be able to say “I was there!” at a few defining moments in our musical heritage.

I was there in a pub in Bedford when Oasis toured prior to the release of their first single in front of a crowd of just twenty.

I was there amongst the crowd of 80,000 to witness Kurt Cobain fall out of a wheelchair dressed in surgical scrubs when Nirvana headlined the Reading Festival in 1992.

But it was something else I bore witness to that August Bank Holiday weekend in 1992 that presented me with my favourite “I was there!” moment – although I didn’t realise its significance until 27 years later…

I’ll start from the very top.

I have always loved music – ever since getting the inaugural ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ for Christmas in 1983 and listening to it incessantly in dens made out of my Masters of the Universe duvet set. The rudimentary nature of cassette players back in the early 80s made you listen to an album in it’s entirety without skipping or repeating songs. The lack of a rewind function meant that you needed a degree in physics and the patience of a saint to work out how to get back accurately to the start of a specific track.

My love of music also survived the artistic wilderness of the late 1980s – an epoch synonymous with the wailing of soap-stars spewed out by Stock, Aitken and Waterman on an industrial scale. The reward for successfully navigating that void of musical substance was the revolutionary output coming from North West America at the turn of the decade – the complete polar opposite of anything the Minogue sisters had to offer. Grunge.

And as this alternative riposte started to infiltrate the musical zeitgeist of pubescent teens up and down the country, kids started to pick up instruments and form bands with anarchic sounding names – and my friends were no exception. They were called Bogus Sham.

Most of my Saturday nights as a 16 year old were following the less than melodic exploits of Bogus Sham in Youth Clubs, Working Men Clubs and anywhere else desperate enough to have them perform. They weren’t particularly talented but the legacy of this new musical direction meant that if they made enough noise it could be construed as making a sociopolitical statement. Their early discography consisted of a homage to those with red hair called “Ginger”, an instrumental interpretation of music that accompanies porn movies and a very scathing critique of those in society that wore army jackets and had poor hygiene routines lovingly entitled “Fuck Off You C*nt”.

Watching Bogus Sham was never going to satisfy my craving for decent music but I did now possess a love of the live music scene. The rawness of the sound, the throng of the crowd, the thrill of drinking Castlemaine lager out of a plastic glass whist still underage. I was hooked. But nothing I had experienced before had me prepared for my first festival with my friends in the Sham – Reading 1992.

By the time that August Bank Holiday came around one of the band had learnt to drive and had access to his parent’s car – automatically cementing his role as designated driver by default. For the majority of us, this trip was the first time we had been away from home and collectively we had very few life-skills. Most of us didn’t need to shave more than once a month and had never had any real experience with girls. In fact it became a cliched saying amongst us that we didn’t need to lose our virginity any time soon as we were “saving ourselves for Reading”. I spent that Summer stacking shelves for an extremely low wage daydreaming about the adventures we were going to share that weekend and when the day finally came to load up my friends parent’s Ford Sierra, the excitement was at a crescendo.

We arrived at the festival site excitedly early and pitched our tent – no mean feat when there wasn’t an ounce of common sense between us. We walked in to town and picked up all the sustenance we needed to get us through three full days of live music on tap perpetually . This largely consisted of Ginsters’ pasties, enough Walkers crisps to fill a bath and a couple of crates of Strongbow. Meat ✅, potatoes ✅, apples ✅ – we were pretty sure that covered all the major food groups. After dumping our provisions at base camp, we all put on a freshly laundered band t-shirt to create the appearance that we knew what we were talking about musically and went to explore our Rock and Roll playground for the weekend.

It was very quickly apparent that we this idealistic utopia we had been ‘saving ourselves’ for was nothing other than a pipe dream. The festivals of thirty years ago weren’t like you see streamed in to your living rooms these days – with everyone decked out in Top Shop, Ray Bans and smelling of Mint and Tee Tree shower gel. The doors of the festival had only been open a couple of hours and already there was a musty bouquet in the air. The revellers that had started to conjugate on site looked like they had been mothballed from the previous year, kept in stasis and then reanimated still smelling of stale alcohol and roll up tobacco. Lynx Africa was still three years from being invented in the laboratories at Axe products at this point. Despite the disappointment that our chances of meeting girls with a standard hygiene regime had dissipated, we still had three full days of the greatest music to look forward to – and Friday night’s line up was a corker.

By the time we walked in to the main arena to watch the Friday night headline acts, we had made a healthy dent in the first crate of Strongbow. Full of alcohol fuelled bravado, we pushed our way to the front of the stage as the first few bars of Ride’s shoe-gazing anthem ‘Leave Them All Behind’ reverberated in to the Berkshire sky. We had arrived. Our pilgrimage to our musical Mecca had truly started and we were going to savour every amplified note belted out with ferocious intent.

Ride had warmed up the crowd perfectly for the night’s proceedings. The band had cut an ethereal presence on stage – their hypnotic melodies and intense light show had the whole crowd nodding in unison. By the end of their set, everyone was in a harmonic trance with an appetite suitably whetted for the best live music of the day – and they didn’t get much better at that time than the next act on stage – The Charlatans.

As soon as Rob Collins effervescently played those first few psychedelic keyboard chords, any mesmeric order that Ride had instilled in the crowd had gone and bodies started to launch themselves in every conceivable direction. Within seconds I had become separated from my friends, caught in a human riptide as my teenage cadaver was being unceremoniously strewn from pillar to post. It was becoming increasing difficult to watch one of the UK’s seminal independent bands and concentrate on staying vertical simultaneously.

Then it happened.

I felt a shuddering blow to the side of the head, an intense ringing in my ears and the immediate need to fall to the floor that wasn’t related to my cider consumption that evening. A stray Doctor Marten from a crowd surfer had almost knocked me unconscious. Any disorientation I had felt prior to that blow was now amplified and my lifeless body was now being propped up solely by the throng of the crowd. Eventually, the human current generated by the collective managed to deposit me on the periphery of the writhing mosh and I slumped to my knees feeling extremely nauseous.

After a few moments on my haunches, I decided to take stock of my situation. I had become completely isolated from my friends, I couldn’t tell left from right and after looking down at the ground to try and regain some sort of orientation it appeared that I was also missing a shoe. Life Lesson learnt # 1 – always take more than one pair of shoes to a a festival. For what seemed like an age I found myself wandering aimlessly around the site – desperately looking for the exit so that I could get back to the tent and lie down somewhere safe. After eventually negotiating my way out of the main event arena, it suddenly dawned on me that looking for a specific tent in an ocean of several thousand tents wasn’t going to be straight forward – especially when I had a lump the size of a golf ball now pulsating from my temple. I needed help.

I made an informed decision to head back towards the main site. I desperately needed to locate my friends, a first aider or my right shoe. Any of those would make me feel a whole lot better right now. As I reentered the performance arena, a sense of curiosity suddenly overtook my overwhelming sense of wanting to throw up on the grass. At the very back of the site was a huge red tent and people appeared to be falling over themselves to get inside. Despite my obvious need for medical attention, I just had to see what was going on inside. I pulled back the heavy canvas and peered within. What I saw took my state of confusion to a whole new level.

Inside the tent were hundreds of people. Steam was rising off their backs and they all appeared to be chanting in the direction of a small stage at the front. My eyesight had been greatly impaired by the blow anyway, but as a desperately tried to work out who this crowd was shouting adulation at I started to make out that the object of their worship had an extremely large, misshapen head. Then a very nasal voice started to serenade the masses:

“Oh, guess who’s been on Match of the Day?”
“You have, in your big shorts” everyone replied in harmony.

At the very front of the stage, decked out in full football kit and paper mache head was Frank Sidebottom – a comedian who I had no prior knowledge of at that precise moment. For a while I stood there trying to rationalise if what I was experiencing was a sensory misrepresentation caused by a large whack to the noggin or I was indeed watching a man with an oversized head enchant a crowd with his anthemic nose ramblings and a Casio Tonebook keyboard. And then I just let go. I forgot about sense and reason, what was real and what just a shadow of existence and I no longer cared where my right shoe was. It didn’t matter anymore. What followed was the most surreal, delusional and yet amazing forty minutes of my life up to that point. Alone, concussed, devoid of a complete set of footwear in the middle of a field in Berkshire – yet still very much euphoric. I wonder if this is what taking acid must feel like?

It wasn’t until last year that I came to realise how seminal missing the vast majority of that Charlatans’ set due to an improptu head injury had been. I watched the amazing documentary “Being Frank” – which chronicles the life of the multi-talented artist Chris Sievey and his perpetual attempt to become famous. The dark irony is that he eventually does make it in to the public eye as comedian Frank Sidebottom, yet has to clandestinely conceal his identity to create the mystique behind his paper mache alter ego. Sievey unfortunately dies relatively young and doesn’t get to revel in the posthumous praise the industry has for his very obvious talent. And that Friday evening at the back of a field one summer’s evening in Reading appears to have been the zenith of his career.

But for a few fleeting minutes, heavily concussed and deeply questioning my perception of reality I can say that “I was there!” when Sievey had the rightful adulation of hundreds of fans hanging on his every word.

Or was I there?…