Mick Wall - Devil Music

I hate having to go to Top Of The Pops. I used to think it was a great place to pull chicks, and I suppose it is, if you like your eggs runny. Talk about amateur hour. I mean, these are fans, you know what I'm saying? They still believe in Santa Clause. Fuck one and you become a stepping stone - to the band and to the dream - and then it's major fuckin hassle time, especially for you, having a kid about the place, messing things up…

No, balls to that. Been there, done that, declined the fuckin T-shirt, thanks a mill. Now it just pisses me off, the whole dreary Top Of The Pops vibe. It's such a drag, having to hang round for hours making happy-face for the band. But it's the only TV there is, apart from the Old Grey Whistle Test, and you only go on that when you can't get on this.

The Heroes are a bunch of wankers from Wales I stopped listening to the day they told me they were going to be “bigger than the Beatles.” Yeah, right. At the moment, I would happily settle for them becoming as big as Mungo Jerry.

There's not really an album worth talking about in them, but Felix and I have agreed that if we can scrape two or even three hit singles out of the little taffy sphincters, we can cobble at least two chart albums, plus a greatest hits and maybe even a live album out of the deal as well. Before dumping the whole caboodle from a very low height indeed. A two-year jobby, max.

“So, Joe,” the singer chirps up, a doe-eyed cunt in a tinfoil jump-suit with a lightning bolt across his face. “What was it like working for Hennndrrrrrix then?” The word spills out of his mouth in that horrible loping Welsh twang, like something you want to step on. “One long trip I bet, eh, bach? Still get the old acid flashbacks, do you?”

He is being funny and I allow him his laugh. Him and his spangly little bum-chums. The singer, after all, is meant to be funny. Especially to the record company man. Mr Cigar and Chequebook. But for a moment, I don't know why, I feel like he's actually taking the piss. Or maybe I just don't like to hear a drastic little dickhead like that throwing Jimi's name around...

“Of course, people who never really knew him always go on about the drugs,” I say, matter of factly. “But the really cool thing about Jimi was there was always a lot of amazingly foxy chicks about the place. Always a lot of chicks around Jimi, man. No dogs allowed, you know what I'm saying?”

That throws him a bit. He starts to come back with one of his own but I talk him down. “What I mean is, the guy was a fuckin chick magnet.” I gesture round at the all-male dressing room. Just me, the band and their arse-faced manager. “The trouble with you glam guys is you only want to fuck yourselves.”

“You what?” he says, still smiling cos there's a joke in there somewhere, eh, bach?

“You're like the Monkees,” I say, “you all sleep in the same bed.”

“The Monkees?” he repeats with genuine astonishment. “Fuck off!”

The sheer arrogance of your average musician - it shouldn't amaze me anymore but it still does. Like he could ever be as good as the great Davey Jones! I kid you not: the day these fuckers come up with a 'Daydream Believer' or 'Last Train To Clarkesville' is the day me and Felix throw in the towel and become bus drivers.

“You're right,” I say. “You're not the Monkees - the Monkees had hits all over. And they only pretended to sleep with each other.”

“Did you hear that, Gaz?” he sneers, turning to the guitarist with the dress on and pointing. “According to him, we're not even as good as the bloody Monkees!”

Fortunately, Gaz - another visitor to this planet with a lightning bolt across his mush - is so lost for words at this outrageous pronouncement that it gives me the moment I need to pull myself back together. What's the story here anyway? Since when did I let a bunch of clueless arse-bandits get the march on me?

I breath in, out. Then turn and start making reeling-in-a-fish gestures, a convincingly manufactured smile on my face, and they are reluctantly forced to concede that I am, in fact, only joking. Just a little wind-up, like.

“You wanker,” he says. “You nearly 'ad me going there…”

I find an excuse to leave - pampered BBC arses to lick - and get the hell out of there before I start to do some real damage. Was a time I used to laugh shit like that off. How many times, though, can you laugh at the same old jokes before you finally break down and cry? And that's when you lash out, putting some cunt straight good and proper…

The fact is, the Heroes are the least of my worries right now. It's the kid. It's all about the kid. He is starting to become a major fuckin hassle. Him and his two-bob tape. Christmas Eve, we signed the fucker. Now here it is almost the summer and still nothing in the can. Nothing useful, anyway. Just a lot of what I call Testcard music. I don't know what he calls it, but Top Of The Pops it ain't, you know what I'm saying?

Now God is on my case. Big time.

“It's very simple, Joey,” he had told me. “If you can't handle this kid, then I'll just have to take over. He's had the good cop, see how he gets on with the bad…”

I'm not having that. No way, hozay. Felix takes over and the kid starts having hits, I lose everything. Not just the points and bonuses, but all the kudos that go with discovering a bona fide superstar. And that crack about me being the good cop… is he saying I don't have the balls for something like this? That I don't have what it takes?

I decide there and then, I'm not having it. No way...

I walk into the studio to find them taping a slot with some monstrous old ham in exactly the same sort of tinfoil get-up as the Heroes. Well, you don't come to Top Of The Pops expecting to find originality. They pump up the volume so the chicks dancing down the front catch the vibe and it sounds all right, actually, in a dumb, bubblegum sort of way. Big booming beats, simple catchy chorus… I don't see the NME diddling themselves in front of it but, hey, I smell a hit.

I spot a rep I recognise from EMI - one of the regular McCartney guys - and jokingly ask him if the mirrorball is his.

“No way, hozay,” he says, like I've grown a second head.

I look at him with his Jason King tash and hair; his pleated bell-bottoms and Krishna beads. A real Paul-lover, if ever there was one, in desperate need of putting straight…

“Right, right,” I nod, earnestly. “You only do really deep shit like… what was it? Oh yeah, 'Mary Had A Little Lamb'. A real Macca classic, that one…”

He looks at me, goes to say something, then thinks better of it.

“He's one of the Bell boys, I think,” he says, looking away again, refusing to take the bait. A smart arse. He thinks.

I pull out my ciggies, light one and put them away again without offering them.

“The bell boys?” I say, smoke curling from my nostrils. “Who the fuck are they?”

“Bell Records, you know? Bell Records? They buy up all this cheap indie shit and sell it on through Columbia? Lee Dorsey and all that. You know?”

“Never 'eard of 'em.”

“Well, whatever, now they're signing their own acts.”

“Yeah?”

I look back over at the stage. The singer's not exactly a dream to behold. Overweight and older than he'd let on, probably, but what's new? More of a novelty act than the real thing, though. Still, that beat…

“What's the cat's name?”

“Gary Glitter,” says EMI and this time we both smile.

“You're yanking my chain…”

“No, no, it's for real. I tell you what else, Joe, he's gonna be number one.”

“Yeah, right…”

I walk off with a little knowing smile on my face, but I am intrigued. Rule number one: you'll never meet a record company man who doesn't tell you his latest signing is going to be big. But when one of the breed who didn't sign the act tells you that it usually means something else: that for once these shysters are actually telling it like it is.

Well, well. Gary fuckin Glitter. So it's come to this. I knew glam had reached the high-street, I hadn't realised it had already fallen into the gutter. Kind of like when Cliff Richard first came on as the English Elvis. Essentially rubbish - none of the nervous edge of the original, just the badman sideburns and tight trousers. But catchy rubbish, nonetheless. The sort of thing people who knew nothing about rock'n'roll would think was rock'n'roll. A seller: proven fact.

This Gary Glitter clown, he's like that. Suitable for kids. But I watch him go through his little routine - all jutting Norman Wisdom elbows and perpetually astonished Benny Hill face - and I feel the track beginning to lodge itself in my brain…

'Rock and roooooooollllllllll! HEY!! Rock and roll…Rock and rooooooolllllllllll! HEY!! Rock and roll…'

God, it's dipshit. But the best often are. It's like I keep telling the kids in the office, all this sitting round in the dark with your lid flapping open, listening to all this trippy shit, it's all right for what it is - head music, man. But for a real-deal hit single you need something that isn't about what you think; you need something that will get an almost physical reaction. Like a snort of good coke. Or the flash of some wondrously horny chick's panties as she climbs out of a car on a hot afternoon in May, her skirt riding up around her thighs right there on the trembling, agonised street. It doesn't matter what the lyrics say, or don't say, or whether or not the silly pricks can even play, a proper hit single isn't about that. It's about that uncontrollable rush of blood to the groin. Zap! Pow! And now for something completely different…

Which is why Sixties leftovers like the Kinks and the Who have now lost it big time. It was all there in the opening seven seconds of 'You Really Got Me' or 'I Can't Explain', only these cunts were too far up their own arses to see it. So now all we get are their dreary fuckin concept albums. The sound of men trying to suck their own cocks. I mean, bollocks to the deaf kid, man. Let's face it, if it hadn't been for that stinging, electric D-chord Townshend repeatedly bangs like a gong on 'Pinball Wizard', nobody would give a fuck about 'Tommy', cos it's the only bit of excitement on there. Do you know where I'm coming from? continue reading