Anarchy? I’d rather have tea with Cliff
SICK ON YOU
by Andrew Matheson
(Ebury Press €17.99)
THE musical Fifties and Sixties have been chronicled to great effect r ecently in thumping biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis and Ray Davies of The Kinks.
Now it’s the turn of the Seventies, colourfully and often hilariously evoked in this rollicking memoir by Andrew Matheson, frontman of the Hollywood Brats. And if you’ve never heard of them, nor of the song from which the book takes its arresting name, well, that’s the whole point.
For they were the nearly-men of Seventies rock, described by The Who’s Keith Moon as the greatest band he had ever seen, but destined to fizzle out in the most poignant of hard-luck stories. Matheson, born in England and raised in Canada, arrived in London in the summer of 1971, aghast to find at No.1 ‘a song that makes you want to drive spikes into your ears’ — namely Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by the aptly named Middle Of The Road.
He’d been singing in bands since he was 13, and began auditioning from the moment he landed. An advert in Melody Maker for a ‘violent, extrovert vocalist’ started him on a career trajectory with four musical kindred spirits and fellow hellraisers: the splendidly named Casino Steel (a Norwegian called Stein Groven), Wayne Manor (the name of Batman’s mansion), Lou Sparks and Eunan Brady. During their
fleeting brush with fame, they rubbed shoulders with men who would be, or already were, music biz legends.
And not only shoulders. Having called their band The Queen, largely because they l i ked the i dea of headlines such as ‘The Queen in Riot’, Matheson was approached one night in 1973 by a guy with teeth ‘ like a particularly alluring camel’.
He introduced himself as Freddie and forcefully asked Matheson to give up the name Queen because that was the name of his band, too. Matheson took exception to the request and landed a punch flush in ‘this twit’s lethally protuberant gnashers’.
Freddie Mercury went flying in an explosion of blood and teeth, but he got his way. Matheson had already decided to change their name — and it was as the Hollywood Brats that they began to forge an edgy reputation, with an androgynous look inspired by Marc Bolan and a manager, Ken Mewis, whose acts included Black Sabbath.
Unfortunately, Mewis had a business partner, a menacing fellow called Wilf with ‘LOVE’ and ‘HATE’ tattooed on his knuckles, who turned out to represent the still buoyant commercial interests of the incarcerated Kray twins.
Another failure was not recognising the star-making qualities of a young entrepreneur called Malcolm McLaren, whose strange girlfriend ‘was cadaver pale and wore an orange silk frock that had obviously been run over by a lawnmower a few times’.
This was Vivienne Westwood, nicknamed ‘Vivisect’ by Matheson, who recalls the ‘severe expression on her face, as though she had been condemned to perpetually gnaw a mouthful of thistles’.
McLaren sent two of his proteges, Mick Jones and Tony James (later of The Clash), to tell the Brats he wanted to manage them and Westwood to dress them. They declined, not very graciously, so he focused his attention on a gang of aspiring reprobates calling themselves the Sex Pistols.
‘I thought the Sex Pistols were sub-standard, derivative posers and Malcolm McLaren was a weak-minded, possibly insane, fantasist,’ writes Matheson, claiming he was right in the first assessment — and quite wrong in the second. He also claims to have been present, with just four others, at the Pistols’ first performance.
With glorious improbability, their short and, by Matheson’s account, ghastly repertoire included Steppin’ Stone, a song made f amous by the entirely wholesome boyband prototype The Monkees.
John Lydon won’t thank him for that revelation. Even more improbably, the Brats were befriended by Cliff Richard, who invited them to spend a weekend at his handsome Tudor pile.
They turned up to find Cliff was away but, even so, Matheson’s description of the head- on clash of lifestyles between the hard- drinking, drugtaking Brats and Cliff ’s virtuous, hymn-singing hangers-on makes this book worth reading. There seems no doubt that, with a fairer wind, and perhaps with McLaren behind them, the Hollywood Brats could have been the world’s first great punk band, and their song Sick On You the movement’s definitive anthem.
Maybe we should all feel slightly relieved that they weren’t, and it wasn’t.