24. the man hugg
Socially I was still spending a lot of time with Bernie.
When we weren't eating at the Excelsior, we were in the house he shared in Howard Street, birthplace of an atrocious band.
The only vegetarian I knew knew what he liked. In the years that followed, Bernie Cook worked abroad a lot. New York, Singapore, Australia. Presented with the cuisines of the world, a cornucopia of non-meat possibilities, he feasted on...omelette and chips. Occasionally fried egg and chips, but he knew the best omelettes in top hotels on four continents.
He eventually bought a miniature deep-fat fryer, so he could have chips at home. Then one of the first microwaves, which cooked a baked potato quickly but didn't crisp the skin, so it looked raw.
But what he cooked for me in Howard Street was cauliflower cheese. Who says he didn't vary his diet?
One of them was more of a cheese soup and they were always enormous. I may even have had one just before Alan Huggins came round. An evening to remember.
Bernie's house was owned by his friend Roger Wickstead, who put our band's first ad in a local paper. Alan Huggins was one of Roger's mates. They wrote songs together.
Huggins was big, with straggly black hair and glasses. Bernie thought he might've been mixed race, but I didn't clock that at the time. He came round with his wife, who was small and slight and adoring.
I'd heard something composed by the Wickstead-Huggins partnership. They called it Heron Rising, I think, but that's just the one phrase I can remember. An electric keyboard made a kind of space-age wobble, going up in in pitch and volume to match the voice:
Heron risiiiiiiiinnng.
That's all they'd worked on, and we've chuckled about it since, but I thought it had possibilities.
What made that evening so memorable was the confidence Alan Huggins had in himself. Matched only by his wife's reverence. Ooh Alan, remember the poem you wrote on a napkin at Uddin's Manzil Tandoor? Yes, tandoor, not tandoori, named after the oven.
When Mrs Huggins said this, I made sure I didn't catch Bernie's eye.
If her husband's poetry matched the writing in Uddin's, it must've been something. I'm going to have fun with indian restaurant owners operating in a second language, so brace yourself. The signs in their window included various misspellings, especially the immortal line 'Eat hare or take away'. If it was me doing the same in hindi, I'd expect indians to smile.
I don't know what Alan Huggins wrote for his Mrs in Uddin's, but he held his output in high regard. He'd written reams of poems and songs, filling big lever-arch files. We'd been chatting about them for a while when I asked if he ever planned to play live.
He waved the notion away, as if being on stage was beneath him.
Oh no. But if someone else wanted to use my lyrics, I'd give them permission. Genesis, say. Or Yes.
Yes, he actually said Genesis. He might deign to send in a few words and they'd turn them into songs for their next albums.
Now, all the way through this conversation, Roger Wickstead is eyeing me like a vulture. To my eternal credit, I keep a perfectly straight face. I discuss the possibility of allowing Peter Gabriel to sing your poems as if it's not deluded in the slightest. I know Roger's squirming behind his fixed grin, but Bernie and I never crack.
Even this high end of vainglory might've been remotely excusable if I hadn't read parts of the Huggins œuvre. So vivid I can still remember some of it.
Leaping and a-bopping till six
Me and my baby in a groovy fix
Leaping and a-bopping till four
She turned round and asked for more
Probably not Peter Gabriel's thing. Or Jon Anderson's, or Waters and Gilmour. The two words in Heron Rising were better.
But Alan Huggins was dead serious. And I knew what I was doing was better than that.
We've all written poems we think everyone will be dying to publish. I did that with someone I knew at St John's, gave them to Robin's dad the writer. He passed them on to an agent, who gently slapped us down.
Meanwhile thousands of people jam with their mates in a back room (e.g. Bernie and Roger). To me, being in a band meant being on stage. If you did that, you were for real. If you didn't, you were Alan Huggins.
That sounds crueller than I mean it to. Yes it's easy to take the piss. You're duty bound to take it in this instance. Bernie and I still do. But Alan Huggins wasn't the only one.
When I left university in the summer of '77, I didn't know what I was going to do next. I wrote the start of a truly terrible novel which had no middle or end in my head, visited a girlfriend I'd met at college, and generally bummed around until I got a job in advertising and moved to London.
Even before I started a band, I used to read NME from cover to cover. Steve and Bernie did the same. And I'd see small ads offering to turn your words into songs which would be passed on to surefire contacts in the recording industry. Send us your deathless prose and we'll make you rich and famous. For a small fee.
Took me a while, but I fell for it, mainly because I didn't have anything else to occupy my mind. They sent me back a music sheet, but Bernie said they'd spent no time on it and it made no sense. It was a scam, of course, a waste of a tenner. Alan Huggins probably wasn't taken in by that kind of thing. He had loftier ambitions, and there's nothing wrong with aiming high.
I showed Bernie the couple of songs I'd written, and he thought one of them was worth tinkering with on the piano. Elton John also collaborated with someone called Bernie, though their roles were reversed. Our bid to match their success lasted about an hour. The song started with the single word 'Road' and didn't go anywhere. It became another of Bernie's phrases for things not working out. To highlight some folly or other, he'd occasionally chant 'Road' like a mantra, spread over several seconds.
Put it together with Heron Rising and we'd have been a very different kind of band. At least we'd have written our own stuff.
*
give over
We did try to do different things. The odd tweak - which is a good description for Bill's choice of material.
He had his solo on Jailhouse Rock, but twelve-bar is pretty routine for a drummer, and I knew he liked different kinds of music. So I told him to go away and think about it, come back with a track he fancied, and we'd cover it.
No, don't worry, I'm fine -
But I insisted. Anything he wanted, we'd have a go. We were already doing the dreaded Can't you hear me knocking, picked by Pat and Bernie. What could be worse than that?
Well...Bill Drysdale went off and had a ponder. Next rehearsal, he says he's come up with something.
Good. What is it?
Move Over.
That's when I realised drummers are beyond salvation.
Move Over is a Janis Joplin song. The ultimate leather-lunged blues-rock shouter of the Sixties, howling like sex in dracula's castle or the death of a first-born. She's also a member of the tragic 27 Club, dying of a massive heroin overdose.
Bill, this is Janis Joplin.
You'll be alright, he goes.
What? Of all people for my voice to take on.
Well, nothing daunted, we tried. Naturally I didn't try to imitate her, and Patrick could do the guitar part. But what made this an even weirder choice was the drums. They don't do much. There was nothing for Bill to get his teeth into.
If he'd picked a jazz number, I'd have understood. Or reggae or big band. Anything. But Move Over just trundles along in a straight line - bat bat bat bat, bat bat bat bat - and even the changes aren't difficult. We ran through it a few times but Bill wasn't unhappy it didn't get into the live act.
Pick something else, William.
But he was happy as he was. We were gigging, and that was enough for him.
Then make the drum solo longer.
Now that's just silly, he said.
*
Another attempt at a change came from a band who'd never played together.
Before forming Milkins, Bernie had travelled to Abingdon four times, carting his equipment by bus, to listen while Will Pickup explained why they wouldn't be rehearsing that night, or any night.
One of the people who hung around not practising was a slim young sax player called Martin Hindley. Bernie brought him down to the hallowed basement at 88 Banbury Road, and we auditioned for each other. We didn't make it, but at least he got to actually play for once.
At the end of the session, he suggested we might look into becoming one of those new punk bands that were starting up. This was his way of saying we weren't competent enough even for twelve-bar! Trying to fit a saxophone into our version of Baby come back was too much for any man.
I never saw him again, so I don't know if he played in bands around town. I didn't care about having a sax player - we managed Honky Tonk Women without Bobby Keys - and we didn't need him for our next bash, which put us at the top of the tree. A small tree, but another one we'd never expected to climb.
*
Meanwhile, over in darkest London...
Don't know how many times we'd broken up in the last few months, let alone the year before that. The girlfriend and me.
There was a friend of Patrick's at one of our gigs, and he lost it completely when she came back inside to me after letting him believe he had a chance with her. I can still see him standing on the stairs looking up and shouting he wouldn't leave till she told him to fuck off, she had to use those exact words. Bernie issued him a Yorkshire warning, but it was her doing. Flexing her flirting muscles. She was visibly unnerved by the result.
Couple of years later, I met the same guy with Patrick when we were all working in London. Asked how he kept his hair back without gel, because mine kept drooping forward. No-one mentioned a certain night in Oxford.
Here in March '76, she takes me to a party in London, and there's someone there from her college, and he kisses her openly in front of me. It's the drink rearing its head, but here we go: time to split up again!
Except on the way home she tells me her feelings for me have grown. It's taken eighteen months, she says. It never happened for me, and I wasn't convinced by her either. When he kissed her, she didn't push him away.
Still, I filed it under No Attention Needed as usual. You got used to those episodes.