Seize the Day (13 page)

In the early summer of 1987, Gary Davies and I fronted a special series of roadshows, the Twin Towers Rock & Rolls Tour. As you’d imagine, given that we were starting in Blackpool, the rock was the edible variety, not the musical genre, measuring 10 feet long by 16 inches in diameter, weighing a quarter of a ton and needing 335 pounds of sugar. It was a far cry from George Formby’s ‘Little Stick of Blackpool Rock’, and in fact was a world record, verified by the
The Guinness Book of Records
. To make the title of the show work, we had a brace of Rolls-Royce cars, and we would use them to drag this great, calorific lump of pink confectionery from the Blackpool Tower to the Eiffel Tower, stopping at various points along the way. Why? I really don’t know. I suppose because we were raising money for the charity Insight, fund-raisers for the blind. I guess the rock played some part. The great and the good from the music world (as seen from a 1987 perspective) joined us at each roadshow. Pepsi and Shirley performed at Heaton Park, as did Marillion, while Tom Jones helped us pull a record crowd of some 30,000 at Birmingham. Sam Fox appeared at Woburn Abbey, and Steve Van Zandt and Rupert Everett, then essaying a musical career in case the greasepaint lost its allure, joined us at Dover. In Paris Kim Wilde was our guest. I seem to remember we were having dinner when the news came through that she was number one in the States with her version of ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’.

My 1987 roadshow week kicked off at Berwick-upon-Tweed, where I went for a world record. As soon as the roadshow was over at 12.30 my producer Paul Williams whisked me over the golf links to the gladiatorial arena of the tennis courts. The idea was that I’d play against 1,000 opponents. Not all at once, obviously. Anyone could appear on court as many times as they liked as long as they re-joined the queue and paid their token coin each time, which went to charity. I must have delivered my first serve sometime after midday and finished at seven in the evening, exhausted but exhilarated. I wondered what the heck I’d been thinking of when I agreed to this mad escapade, but I’d done it. So why didn’t we make
The Guinness Book of Records
? We had the correct adjudication and the qualifying forms from Guinness, and everything was recorded according to the rules. Who knows? Anyway, it was time to head off to Portobello on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where we had a police escort.

This was the spawning ground for the young Sean Connery. From one-time lifeguard at the local swimming pool to international movie star: not a bad career path, unless you’re a great swimmer and lousy actor. Among the massive crowd were a couple of lads with guitars who appeared at the back of the roadshow with a CD containing a couple of their demos. They seemed very normal, down-to-earth and enthusiastic. My shows were always seat-of-your-pants affairs, so I suggested they came on stage and played live. They were awesome. They sang those kinds of harmonies that you only get from siblings, or people that are on exactly the same wavelength. I was seriously impressed by their talent, songs and attitude – they wore horn-rimmed glasses and wore them with pride. This duo was worth championing. I played the demos on my radio shows, so when they got a record deal I was up for pushing their first single. I even attended a playlist meeting, but the record got knocked back by several producers, one calling it ‘woolly-jumper music’. I went to two more meetings (unheard of for a DJ), whereupon they relented.

‘All right, we’ll put your mates on the playlist.’

‘My mates? They played on my roadshow but I don’t really know them.’

‘Yeah, yeah. We’ll stick it on the C list for you.’ The C list was the bottom rung of the playlist.

‘You’re not doing it for me, you’re doing it for a couple of talented singer-songwriters.’

‘OK, we’ll see what happens, shall we?’

What happened? The song went top three and Charlie and Craig Reid, the Proclaimers, had a string of hit singles and albums spanning twenty years.

Job done at Portobello, we headed north to Arbroath and then across to the west coast. 130 miles of fabulous scenery which necessitated regular stops to scribble poetry. By the time we reached Helensburgh the poem was finished.

At various times during the week I’d made a point of telling a couple of Smiley’s sidekicks how the water in Loch Lomond was so pure that
you could drink it. I let the fact permeate. I bided my time. When we arrived at the loch I let the conversation drift naturally towards the quality of the water.

‘I wouldn’t like to drink that,’ said my producer, right on cue.

‘It won’t hurt you. £20 says you won’t drink a glass of it.’

‘Not a chance.’

It was going according to plan. Someone had passed on my false knowledge to Smiley that the water was absolutely pure.

‘Twenty quid? I’ll do it.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘Give me a glass.’

One glass. Into the water. Out of Loch Lomond and into Smiley. ‘No problem. Twenty quid please.’

I paid up, but the psychological fun I had, when he learned that it was no different from any normal lake water with its animal matter, dead fish, rotting plants and things unmentionable, was worth £20 of anybody’s money. He asked serious questions of his internal plumbing for the next two or three days.

At Helensburgh we stayed by Gare Loch, but I resisted pulling the same trick twice and instead got my old pal Stuart Henry on the phone from Luxembourg, much to the delight of the crowd, as he’d done the roadshow here many years earlier. He enjoyed being there in spirit.

I saved the week’s physical stunt for the final day at Ayr. After interviewing former Small Faces singer Steve Marriott, I set about Smiley. On stage we discussed his new many-wheeled roadshow vehicle. ‘Many-wheeled, yes, Smiley,’ I said, ‘but not many-tyred.’

The crowd parted to show his truck sans tyres. Storm clouds spread over his usually sunny countenance. Something that sounded uncannily like ‘You bastard’ issued from his lips.

The local Air Sea Rescue had played ball. Their helicopter rose on cue, flew out to sea and dropped six tyres into the ocean. Smiley was livid. He was steaming. I’d be receiving a bill that very evening. The crowd roared their approval. At the stunt that is, not the impending
invoice. He was so angry that it was a struggle to get him back on stage for the finale.

‘Wait a minute, Smiles, how the heck did that happen?’ I pointed. The crowd parted again. The tyres were back on the vehicle. He’d been living on anger and adrenalin for the last hour, now he was a broken man. His tyres had been safe all along, those dropped into the sea being throwaways. The Air Sea Rescue later recovered them as part of an exercise. Unfortunately, in these straitjacketed days of health and safety no one would be allowed to even entertain such an idea.

Weston-Super-Mare was always fun. The lovely Hilda (some eighty-plus years young) would turn up with cakes and presents. I’d make a point of getting her up on stage as she was a real hit with the crowd and bought records to help the groups who appeared on the roadshow even though she didn’t own a record player. She always got a lot of press and would call me her favourite DJ. Radio One really was a family station then, broadcasting and not narrowcasting.

In Weston we always stayed at the Atlantic Hotel, where on one occasion I organised for Smiley’s room to be changed. A pretty feeble wheeze? Hold hard. I moved every single item to another room but put them all in exactly the same place they had been in his original room. Reception even swapped his key, which wouldn’t work for the old room but opened the new room. A bewildered Smiley asked anyone and everyone, including reception, which room he’d been in and, being well briefed, they all played along. He began to question his sanity, something the rest of us had been doing for some while. As any decent oceanographer knows the tide scoots in pretty rapidly at Weston, so during this diversion with the rooms, we’d appropriated his car keys and moved the Range Rover onto the beach. When this was pointed out to him at an appropriate moment he broke several British sprint records in one panic-stricken burst of speed, hitherto unknown in the Miles family. It was terrific viewing from our grandstand seat in the hotel. Through the waves he ploughed as the surf broke over the top of his wheels, but there was icing on the cake for us voyeurs. He
fumbled with his keys and … they fell into 2 feet of incoming tide. We couldn’t see the expression on his face as he dropped to his knees and thrashed around in desperation, but we didn’t need to.

Weston is also tinged with a sad memory. At each town we were expected to be available for local press interviews and on this occasion I was asked to give an interview to a local reporter out on the seafront. It was one of her first interviews and although she professed to being a little nervous, she was actually pretty confident and very professional. We sat on the railings, did the interview and had a good laugh until some half an hour later Paul Williams appeared, shouting from the hotel doorway that it was time to eat. I asked my interviewer if she wanted to join the crew for supper where she could get a few more views on how the roadshow ran and even try to interview Paul. She said she’d love to join us, but then decided she’d better get back and write up the interview. It had been one of Jill Dando’s earliest assignments and years later she admitted that she desperately wanted to come and have a laugh with us but realised that she had absolutely no money and if she’d been asked to pay for her dinner would have been acutely embarrassed.

Summer 1988 got underway at Great Yarmouth, and it was while driving from there to Skegness that I stopped at an intriguing junk shop in a small hamlet. It was crammed with everything from stuffed parrots and milking stools to hundreds of paintings and piles of old furniture. Not knowing where to start on this alluring Aladdin’s cave of things that I couldn’t possibly fit in the car, I made straight for an old photo album. I have no idea what made me select that item out of the thousands arrayed before me, but I opened it to find that it contained the relatives of an early girlfriend of mine, Gillie Palmer. There was her grandmother as a young girl in an Edwardian landscape, early cars, family gatherings and many other atmospheric images. They were astounded when I presented them with the long-lost photo album.

Obviously buoyed up by my find I later screeched to a halt in the middle of nowhere. My subconscious had registered something a mile
or two back. I turned the car round and re-traced my journey. What the hell could it have been? Then I spotted the sign: ‘Ferrets for sale’. A gift from roadshow Heaven. The following day they made their public debut. Come to think of it. I’m not sure whether there should be an ‘l’ in ‘public’ as the little chaps went down Smiley’s shorts. If you think
he
struggled, you should have seen the ferrets. The crowd pleaser of the furry duet brought the roadshow attendees to their feet as it pushed down Smiley’s zip and poked its head out. You couldn’t have written the script.

At Bridlington Captain Sensible and I battled it out for hours one evening on the crazy golf. No hedonistic orgy of personal destruction for us. We knew how to have fun. A pair of white shorts each, a pot of tea and an old-fashioned seaside town and we were flying. Brand us pleasure-seeking sybarites if you must. I recently wrote a rather decent song with the Captain, the lyric failing, rather significantly, to make any reference to Bridlington.

At Cleethorpes Boating Lake Paddock Smiley hired a huge crane which gently and elegantly lowered my green MGB into said boating lake. After being dunked like an oversized green digestive it re-emerged with water pouring from every orifice. Fair enough; after all I’d had a hairdresser attempt to dye Smiley’s hair blond the previous day and it had turned the colour of my car. I can understand a high level of peevishness dominating his vengeful thoughts. I then brought forth an Indian elephant called Bully, which Smiles was forced to ride, but I was subsequently attacked by six tarantulas. It’s a wonder we had time to play any music.

On the way there I’d phoned ahead to a garden centre. I began explaining my simple needs.

‘That could only be Mike Read.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I can’t think of anyone else who’d ask us to turn a hotel room into a beautiful garden.’

Fair point. The target this time was producer Ted Beston, who’d
had the misfortune to be assigned to this roadshow week. Not being my usual producer, Ted had obviously drawn the short straw. While the garden centre got busy turning his room into an exhibit worthy of the Chelsea Flower Show, we staged a lengthy game of rounders on the beach. Nicky Campbell was with us, and if I’m not mistaken, it was his wicked swing of the bat that Smiley took on with his face. The bat won and an ambulance was called. As they wheeled him up the beach Ted called an end to the game. Knowing that we desperately needed more time for the completion of the garden, Smiley, ever the trooper, spat blood as he insisted, ‘No, no you must carry on, carry on … in my name.’ A little melodramatic, I felt. I mean, he wasn’t exactly slipping away having copped a packet in the trenches. We stretched the game out for as long as we could. It was enough. The front pages of the local and regional papers carried photographs of a beautifully turfed room with wall-to-wall grass, flowerpots a blaze of colour, hanging baskets, ferns, small trees and a wee herbaceous border. The only discordant colour came from the bruises on Smiley’s face.