Winter Tour 1987
I think it happened in Mannings, a favourite haunt of punkers, goths and anyone else who couldn't get in anywhere else. I was approached by The Adicts and asked if I'd like to go to Germany, France and Spain for two months. I was still heavily involved in As Is mk. 1 at the time, but fancied the prospect of some experience and thought that perhaps a few contacts could be made. And apart from all that it sounded like quite a giggle. Paul Read had agreed to come along as a roadie to keep me company, so it would be a grand adventure for the two of us.
Now I'm not a natural bass player (that was the vacancy), but they were the first live band I ever saw, and I must have watched them dozens of times since as well as attending their weekly rehearsals fairly regularly when I was younger! I suppose we all figured I'd get my head round it. There were two main problems in playing bass for The Adicts; number one was that you simply couldn't ever stop....it was all 16 to the bar (at least) and if the bass stopped there was a big hole where the sound used to be! The other was that, in the tradition of all great bands, the songs tended to stick around the same few keys, so the riffs were often similar...a problem if you've had a couple of bevvies backstage. Which we tended to.
Well, The Adicts...what a
complicated bunch of lads...Monkey (Keith Warren) - staunch Suffolk lad, keen on
ITFC and the gee-gees, with a phenomenally under-used intelligence, outwardly at
least - and an alarming mixture of high humanist morals and filthy depravity.
Life was never boring with Keith around, except when he lay cocooned and farting
in his sleeping bag until 3pm on days off. Then there was Kid (Michael Davidson)
and his brother Pete Dee (nee Davidson), two Sunderland brothers who'd spent
their formative years in Ipswich with father Geordie (sic), who managed the
band. The Davidson clan have seen their fair share of misfortune over the years,
not least the death from cancer of Geordie's wife Kitty, who was a delicate but
strong and loving matriarch to the family. The three chaps were roped together
by that curious blend of love and hate that I'd heard about but never really
seen in action. They'd be twatting each other one minute, and getting the beers
in the next. The end result was that everyone else was an outsider, which may
explain their huge turnover of bass players over the years (about 12 I think!).
Monkey got around it by keeping his head down and not getting involved too often
- mostly feigning sleep or finding someone 'interesting' to talk to.
I kept a diary throughout the tour, but there's just too much detail; I've had to pick bits out......so here goes....we travelled by DFDS ferry on 14th October 1987, Harwich to Hamburg on a choppy sea and onto an even stormier tour.
The venues ranged from the
intimate clubs such as The Hardrock in Mannheim to the somewhat
larger 
Alabamahalle in Munich,
with a few youth clubs thrown in for good
measure. The crowds could be madly disparate, and on one memorable evening in
Wiesbaden we played to a hall split right down the middle, with boppy punk
rockers to our right and a seething mass of Germany's newest National Socialists
on the left. The night seemed to pass without incident, mostly due to the
patience of the ones that did have hair. The evening was also marked by a bottle
of 'Texas Fire', a chilli schnapps made by the club owner and clearly offered to
anyone stupid enough to try it. Of the six of us that had one tiny sip each, three spewed up
the minute the stuff hit the back of their throats; I spent the next 40 minutes
dry-retching and hiccoughing in the toilet, Monkey went missing and Kid....he
who drank Worcester Sauce like it was mineral water...well Kid went back for
another one.
Warning signs vis-à-vis the general health of the tour started to show up when a couple of Swiss gigs were cancelled and the promoter, a man of dubious personal habits called Peter began to be unavailable for a; comment and b; collection of wages. We spent quite a few nights and days in a flat near Stuttgart, which was shared by Peter's brother and an ex-Hell's Angel called Skipper. Skipper did three things - he fucked his understandably weary looking girlfriend, he did skag, and he imported and sold pistachio nuts. I'd never even seen pistachio nuts before, but I reckon I ate around 10 kilos of the bloody things, especially as time wore on and that was all there was.
But for the first two or
three weeks we had a bit of dosh, and we spent quite a bit of time at a bar/restaurant
called 'A Jour', where Skipper worked occasionally, leading him to undertake heroic
attempts at the manufacture of Baked Beans with nothing but a kilo of haricot
beans, a couple of tins of peeled plum tomatoes and 4 tonnes of chilli powder.
We had a few beers
every now and then, with Paul famously becoming lost night
with only a lampshade for company (I stayed in to do everyone's
washing.............what???!!!!..... I was bored and all the clothes were
dirty!!!!!). Dear old Reado had been left behind somehow and elected to walk
along the autobahn in the general direction of wherever it was we were staying.
During his no doubt very jolly perambulation, he came across a hotel with a
dozen belisha beacon-type lamps outside. The perfectly round and opalescent
shade (or perhaps diffuser??) called to him....."Unscrew me" it
said...."Then you can wear me on your head and show the lads, or perhaps
play a quick game of footie with me or something ". Duly 'borrowed'
from its rightful place on the end of a pole, Mr. Smooth White Baldy-Head as he
was now no doubt known, joined Paul in his utterly hopeless search for a road
through the cabbages which looked like all the other roads through the cabbages.
The timescale is fuzzy, but
perhaps 2 hours later, he was found by the Polizei, who politely asked him to
put the lampshade down and explain what the hell was going on. Paul,
non-German-speaking and indeed by now, non-English-speaking, managed to look so
pathetic that the two rozzers merely poured him into the back of their car and
drove him around for a further hour or so until he recognised where he was. No
arrest, no bother, just get him off the bloody motorway and back in the flat
before he hurts someone.
More and more cancellations followed, as the promoter became more and more AWOL, I buggered off to Paris for 5 days to see my girlfriend, who was visiting pals there. There was talk of a trip to the studio to touch up a live album we'd recorded at the Munich gig, but I took a chance...and wouldn't you know it, that didn't get done either - well not in Germany and not in 1987 anyway!
We did do a few gigs in North-eastern Spain and the Catalan region, which was an education...I saw my first tumbleweed! One of the least memorable events was one of the nights when we weren't due on stage until 2am, at a club called M-tro in Barcelona. The last thing I recall is falling backwards down a flight of concrete steps with the contents of a Jack Daniels bottle inside me. I'm told I had a shower in my clothes, which sobered me up sufficiently to play...but it may be hearsay. I do remember buying a packet of Ducados cigarettes for about 20 pence...I think I managed about three drags before giving the remainder of the container, barely 60 seconds old, to a suitably gravel-throated female sound engineer with a face to match her larynx.
About halfway through the
tour Michael started to do what I later found out he always did on tour. He
started
drinking 2 or 3 bottles of Tequila a day. He became someone else
entirely, from a fun-loving piss-taker into a snide, nasty little brat. He
decided to pick on Paul for a few days; with the last straw being when he
decided to pour around a pint
of beer over Paul's head as he tried to sleep in the van after a
long day's roadie-ing work. Paul decided to go home before one of them got a
smack in the mouth. Sorry as I
was to see him go, it made sense. I still had another mate out there, also
called Paul, who I'd suggested we draft in from Norwich for his guitar-tech
skills. He put up with it all a bit better, probably because he didn't attract
so much stick and didn't give a shit when he did!
We continued to do most of the gigs, we visited Konstanz, down in the south, the Berlin Wall, The Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, Nuremberg, all that sort of stuff. I felt horrifically awed to be at the erstwhile venue of the Nuremberg Rallies, trying to comprehend what had gone on there only 45 years previously. To their credit, the Germans had just left the place to fall down and installed a couple of million football pitches in the middle.
The museum at Checkpoint Charlie (when the checkpoint was still there!) was a chilling experience...when I went back as a more traditional tourist after the wall had gone, the chill had gone with it. Ten short years made a hell of a difference.
Then the tour basically
fell apart; Peter the promoter had vanished entirely, some said into the arms of
the police on fraud charges. We ended up sleeping on punters' floors, and
doing a last gig in Hamburg in one of the famous squats, the Hafenstraße Besezt
(left).
The door proceeds went straight with us to the DFDS office in the morning, where
we explained that it was all the money we had and could we please get on the
boat please pretty please? They let us on, and we straggled back to Blighty,
knackered, hung-over and no richer, but quite a bit wiser than when we left.
The live album came out some months later, I'm not credited on the sleeve, at my own request (I didn't want anything to confuse what As Is were doing), but most of the bass is me, thudding away. It's called Rockers Into Orbit, but I don't suppose you'll see it about much now. S'quite good actually, apart from the hideous mistake that was the overdubbing of screaming girlies from the 'Cheap Trick Live At The Budokan' on to it.
If you can be arsed to wait for it to download, here's the first page of the itinerary for the tour, kept for the whole two months and many years since...
****
I did another three weeks with the Adicts a couple of years later, touring the west coast of the US...now that WAS fun - and I even got paid. There were a few tawdry shows in England too, at some god-awful 'punk revival' bashes...not terribly seemly. They did ask me to do another tour around the States, but Helen and I had just accepted a the job of running a pub in Bishop's Stortford, and my musical days were about to be behind me.
Music Index Bloody Fingers Cyclo-Hexane The Retarded Panorama In Black Bane As Is mk. 1 The Adicts