Excerpts from Paranoid: Black Days With
Sabbath & Other Horror Stories
1. New York, October 1980, where the
author is working as a PR for Black Sabbath
The limousine sat grumbling impatiently
outside the locked backstage gates at Madison Square Gardens.
One of the smoked-glass windows at the back slid open.
“What the fuck's going
on?” Paul, the tour manager, yelled at a passing flunky
with a laminated pass and a face like yesterday's love song.
“Gee, I guess the gates are
locked, huh, dude?”
“I can fucking see that! Go
and find someone to fucking unlock 'em! And hurry! I've got the
fucking band here!”
Suitably alarmed, the flunky hustled
off to find somebody. It might have been comical except that
the atmosphere in the back of the limo was already deathly. We
waited for what seemed like a long time. Nobody spoke. Then a
couple of kids in Blue Oyster Cult T-shirts came sloping down
the street. One of them had a brown paper bag with a bottle in
it and they were passing it back and forth. Seeing the limo,
they couldn't help but stare. Then one saw the window at the
back open and dropped the bag and ran.
The kid moved fast and managed to
shove his head and one grasping hand through the open window on
Tony's side of the car before any of us knew what was
happening. The kid didn't even seem to look, he just knew.
“TONY FUCKIN' IOMMI!” he
screamed. “TONY FUCKIN' IOMMI! BLACK FUCKIN' SABBATH!
MAN! I FUCKIN' LOVE YOU, MAN!”
“Ta, very much, mate,”
said Tony with a straight face. Somewhere else in the limo,
someone laughed, then stopped. Tony kept looking straight
ahead.
“TONY FUCKIN' IOMMI!”
the kid screamed again. “HEY, TONY! YOU REMEMBER ME, MAN?
YOU REMEMBER ME? HEY, TONY! WAR PIGS, MAN! FUCKIN' WAR PIGS,
MAN!”
“Yeah, all right, mate,”
said Paul, reaching over and very firmly pushing the kid's head
back out the window. “We remember you all right
…”
Just then a loud buzzer sounded
somewhere and the backstage gates began at last to swing open.
“Thank fuck for that,” said Paul. “Right,
mate, you're outta here…”
He gave the kid's head a last good
shove and almost all but his face returned to the darkness
outside the limo. His mouth was the last to go.
“HEY, TONY! DON'T DO THIS,
MAN! HEY, I'M YOU'RE BROTHER! YOU REMEMBER ME, MAN…I'M
YOUR FUCKIN' BROTHER!”
Tony glanced over at last. He was
then in his early thirties and still retained much of his
Brummy accent. The kid was maybe nineteen and sounded like he
came from the Bronx. Tony said nothing. His hand was already on
the button and as the smoky window began to slide back up
again, suddenly all you could see were the kid's lips, still
moving.
“BUT I'M YOUR FUCKIN' BROTHER,
MAN! YOUR FUCKIN' BROTHER, MAN! I'M YOUR FUCKIN'
BROTHER!”
Finally, the window slid shut with a
comforting thunk and the limo moved forward, the gates swinging
closed again behind us.
“Fuckin' nutters,”
muttered Tony. “We always get the fuckin' nutters
…”
2. Amsterdam, May 1987, where the author,
then presenting a weekly Sky TV show, Monsters of Rock, is
interviewing David Bowie for a Sky documentary.
I had read that Bowie had developed the
knack of always making his interviewers feel 'special',
delivering his lines in such a way as to make them feel they
were going away with a little bit more than what anyone else
might have got that day, only to discover, when the various
pieces were broadcast or published, that Bowie had given
exactly the same treatment -- along with almost identical
quotes -- to every other journalist he'd spoken to. So I was
half-expecting a bit of gush on his part when we met, but I
wasn't prepared at all for what actually happened.
As I entered the hotel room where
the cameras and mikes had been set up, Bowie was already in
there, standing with his back to me, peering out the window at
the street several floors below. I immediately thought of the
scene in The Man Who Fell To Earth when, as Thomas Jerome
Newton, he's in the lawyer's office and he looks out on the
Manhattan streets, watching them turn from night to day.
“David,” said his PR,
not the notorious Corrine Schwabb, which was disappointing -- I
had been looking forward to seeing the legendary battle-axe in
action -- but another, more junior skirt and blouse.
“David, this is Mick …”
He spun on his heel. “Mick
Wall!” he cried. “Lovely to meet you at last! I'm a
great fan of your work!”
What?
“Joey and I never miss a
show,” he said.
What?
“Joey, my sixteen-year-old
son, it's his favourite thing on TV. We watch it
together.”
“Really?” I said,
vibrating with shock and pleasure as I shook his outstretched
hand.
“Yes, we never miss it. And I
love that title -- Monsters of Rock! That's what we are, all
right! Monsters!”
“Like, er … 'Scary
Monsters',” I said like a dweeb, unable to think of
anything else.
“Yes, that's right!” he
laughed and I got a flash of his gold-fillings.
What the fuck was going on? I felt
dizzy, sick. I couldn't get my head round this at all. Then we
sat down and began the interview and my stomach started to
settle. What a great interview he gave, too. Sharp, witty, full
of fun, full of stories... He was an interview killing-machine.
I was pretty hot, too, actually. But
then we had a lot in common. Even though we'd never met before
I'd been living with Bowie's music, his mien, for most of my
life. As a kid, Ziggy had been my mainman. He was from the
future and I grew up believing 'Diamond Dogs' and 'David Live'
were the greatest, most underrated albums of the seventies. The
reason I started smoking cigarettes was because of the cover of
'Young Americans'. I went straight onto the Gitanes and stayed
on them right through 'Station To Station'. My first serious
drug comedown -- six months in 1977 spent recovering from the
psychotic after-effects of a year-long speed-binge -- coincided
with the spiritually wounded 'Low' / 'Heroes' period. Since
then, despite only recording one more great album, 'Scary
Monsters', in 1980, I'd always found it hard not to follow
whatever the Thin White Duke had been up to. Even as he
sold-out completely with designer-label dreck like 'Let's
Dance' and 'Tonight' -- the drab titles telling you all you
needed to know about the contents -- I couldn't help but wonder
sometimes where he was at.
By the time I finally got to meet
him, Bowie had been there in my mind for so long, there was
almost nothing left I wanted to ask him, except maybe: 'Why?'
And I knew even he would never be able to answer that one. So
we just danced around for the cameras and had some fun. I let
it drop that I had seen him on-stage in The Elephant Man, in
New York, back in 1980, told him it was his best ever acting
performance, in any guise, and he just opened up like a flower
and beamed at me.
“Oh, I agree! I'm so glad you
think so, too. It really was quite an amazing experience
…”
We could have danced all night.
The best moment though, as is so
often the case, came after the interview was over. We were both
standing outside in the corridor smoking cigarettes and I asked
him to tell me a little more about Joey, who his favourite
group was (the Beastie Boys) so that I could play a video for
him on the next Monsters … show.
“What about old Bowie
albums,” I asked for fun, “do you ever catch him
listening to any of them?”
“Um … sometimes,”
he smiled, unexpectedly bashful suddenly. “We've listened
to them together sometimes, you know.”
“What does he make of those
pictures of you as Ziggy and Aladdin Sane?”
“It depends. It seems to
change as he gets older. Like changing his name [from Zowie].
But I thought that was sensible.”
He looked at me. “I'll tell
you a funny story, though. We were at home together one night
recently, wondering what to do, whether to go out or stay in.
Then we noticed in the paper that the film of the Ziggy
farewell concert was on at the local cinema, and so for a laugh
we decided we'd go. Joey ran off upstairs to get ready and I
pottered around doing a few things first, then got ready, too.
Meanwhile, Joey was nowhere to be seen. I remember standing at
the bottom of the stairs calling him to hurry up or we were
going to be late …”
He paused and took a puff on his
ciggy, then exhaled and shook his head. “The next thing
was, here comes Joey down the stairs -- and he's got the full
Ziggy Stardust outfit on! He's been in the bathroom and dyed
his hair carrot red and gelled it all up and back-combed it so
that it's sticking up, he's got all the make-up on and all
these clothes, I don't know where he got them from, whether
they came from old wardrobes of mine or whether they were his,
I don't know … but I'll never forget it. The first words
out of my mouth were: 'You're not going out dressed like
that!'”
He burst into laughter. “Can
you imagine? He just looked at me and said, 'But Dad, this is
you!' And I had one of those really strange head things where
everything just zaps back and forth in front of you, your whole
life passes by before your eyes, you know?” He put his
fingers to his temples. “And I thought, wait, what am I
doing? He's right! How can I -- of all people! -- tell him --
of all people! -- he can't go out dressed like … well,
like me!”
