Anecdotes

One of my earliest concerts with Mott The Hoople was at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden. I hadn't yet quite become aware of the importance of the backstage pass so I didn't think twice when I left it in the dressing room and ventured into the press area in front of the stage. The New York Dolls were the support band and I began eagerly taking photos of them with my little plastic Brownie 127 camera, rubbing shoulders with the professional photographers with their state-of-the-art equipment. I felt a large hand on my shoulder and turned to see a burly security guard demanding my pass. I said: 'it's OK, I'm a member of the band. I left it in the dressing-room.' Seconds later I found myself out in the alleyway alongside a couple of dozen other young people trying to blag their way in by claiming to be friends or relations of the band. I begged the security guard to go to the dressing room and speak to Stan Tippins our tour manager. Growing increasingly desperate I said pathetically: 'Look we're an English band and you can hear I've got an English accent. He replied: 'I don't care if you're Winston Churchill - if you ain't got a pass, you don't get in.' A young David Bowie look-alike believed my story and joined in my protests, perhaps hoping that in return I would get him in as well, but he only succeeded in hardening the security guard's attitude. After about twenty minutes one of our road-crew happened to look out of the door, did a double-take and shouted: 'Mick, what are you doing out there.' It still took some negotiation but I was eventually allowed back in and never again made a move without my precious backstage pass. And no, the New York Dolls photos didn't turn out.

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1970s footwear could be quite hazardous. I bought a pair of denim platform clogs which were almost impossible to walk in - I couldn't keep them on my feet and sometimes I would just fall off them - and it was a long way down. Mott The Hoople's bass player Overend Watts also used to have a few problems with his footwear, although to describe his magnificent thigh-length boots as mere footwear is an insult. As I remember it, he had quite a problem bending his knees, which was fine onstage - it gave him quite an imposing appearance as he stomped around the stage in them. But actually getting on and off the stage could be difficult. I remember one occasion which I'm sure he wouldn't mind me recounting. It was at the Tiger Stadium in Massilon, Ohio where we were playing an outdoor concert. There was a steep ramp leading up to the stage. Overend just couldn't get up it on his own - try walking up a steep hill without bending your knees - and the audience were treated to the sight of him leaning backwards and being pushed slowly and very carefully up the ramp onto the stage by a couple of roadies. It's quite ironic that in two recent editions of Two Miles From Heaven, the Mott The Hoople Appreciation Society magazine, there are a couple of excellent articles by Overend called The Man Who Hated Walking in which he describes his adventures on a gruelling 52 day trek on the hilly South West (England) Coast Path - presumably not wearing those famous boots.

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Dodgy footwear isn't the only onstage hazard. At my first concert with Mott (at the Aragon Ballroom, Chicago) I stood in the wings watching the support act, Joe Walsh and his superb band Barnstorm. When they finished I walked towards their pianist Rocke Grace in the half-darkness behind the stage to congratulate him. As I approached him I tripped on a thick cable and fell flat on my face. I had intended to shake his hand but instead he reached down and grabbed my hand to help me up. Kevin Rowland of Dexys Midnight Runners had a rather more dramatic fall onstage at the Dominion Theatre in London. He walked backwards into a monitor and from the point of view of the audience he must have simply disappeared over it leaving just the soles of his shoes visible resting on top of the monitor. Strangely enough Paul Brady almost fell over a monitor in exactly the same position in the same theatre a year later. He was running around the stage during one of the livelier numbers when he saw that he was heading straight for the monitor. He tried to jump over it but clipped the top, rather like a racehorse hitting a fence. As he hit the ground on the other side he just about stayed on his feet, perhaps motivated by the fear of damaging his Takomine acoustic guitar, and, professional as ever, he even managed an ironic bow to the audience.

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Mott The Hoople were playing at Ohio State University in COLUMBUS, Ohio. As we walked onto the stage one member of the band - who shall remain nameless - strode confidently up to the mike, punched the air and shouted in true rock-star fashion: 'Hello COLUMBO'. Maybe he had been watching the TV detective series in his hotel room.

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The very first gig I did with a band was in late 1969. The bass player knew someone in a local church and he suggested that we play while the congregation were having sandwiches and soft drinks in the church hall after the harvest festival celebration. Sounded like a good idea at the time - we would get our first outing in front of an audience and they would get something to make the young folk think that church could be fun. Our first song was Martha and the Vandellas' Dancing In The Street and by the end of it that's where most of the audience were. By the end of the second song Evil Woman by Spooky Tooth (which contained the line 'evil woman the devil is a-calling you') the whole congregation had left and we were playing to the cleaner as she swept the floor.

Evil Woman was no less inappropriate at our second gig - a wedding reception. We only had about half an hour's worth of material so we played the whole set three times. The guests were too drunk to care though and the evening finished with me accompanying the father of the bride as he whistled Danny Boy into the microphone. Things could only get better.

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An old hippy friend told me that when he attended gigs at venues like the Marquee and the Roundhouse in London back in the 1960s he would sometimes carry a roll of adhesive tape. I asked him why and he told me that he used to wear a jacket with small Indian bells attached. These would jingle merrily as he walked down the street, but when he arrived home in the early hours of the morning he would tape them up before creeping into the house so that they wouldn't wake his parents.

He told me recently that he went along one evening in 1967 to the Ricky Tick Club in Hounslow, West London, not knowing who would be appearing. A three piece-band took to the stage fronted by a black guitarist with long straggly hair wearing a military style black and red jacket - an early appearance by Jimi Hendrix, whom I unfortunately never got to see.

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I first saw Vincent Crane when I played with White Myth at Manchester College of Art and Design on December 9th 1970. We supported Atomic Rooster and Kevin Ayers. I remember Vincent starting his set with Atomic Rooster by sitting down at his mighty Hammond and slowly cranking up the volume, making it scream and roar at almost unbearable volume as he moved his arms randomly up and down the two keyboards. When I was with him in Dexys Midnight Runners he played piano and I sat alongside him at the Hammond. We both enjoyed our time in the band - we were given lots of space to improvise and I particularly remember us having fun trading piano and organ riffs on a long improvised section of a song called The Occasional Flicker. He was an excellent piano player and it was great to play alongside him, re-acquainting myself with my favourite band instrument - the all-powerful Hammond organ. We became good friends and he used to tell me hilarious stories from his time with The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown and Atomic Rooster. I have forgotten most of them, though I remember that many of the Arthur Brown stories involved the singer nearly setting himself on fire.

One story that I do remember involved a jacket with long fringes attached to the sleeves, which I think Vincent was wearing when I saw him in 1970. It used to look pretty impressive under the lights as he flailed his arms around - we were easily impressed back then! He told me that at a certain point in the set he used to take the jacket off and throw it across the stage to a member of the road crew who would catch it and stow it away safely until the next gig. One night in the 1980s at a festival in Yugoslavia he flung it to a new member of the crew who caught it, looked at it and hurled it in a graceful arc as far as he could out into the audience. Several eager pairs of hands reached up and it was never seen again. Maybe he thought Vincent intended to throw it into the audience but missed. The story ended, like many of Vincent's stories, with the words; 'of course I had to sack him.'

Vincent Crane - sadly missed.

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Woody Woodmansey told me that at a workingmens' club in the north of England the doorman watched him carrying his bass drum in and said: 'you won't need that big one in here - it'll be too loud.' After he had set up his kit he was bashing around the drums when the concert secretary came up to the stage and shouted: 'turn them drums down, they're too loud'. So Woody started hitting his snare drum repeatedly beginning loudly and gradually tapping it more softly while turning one of the tuning keys on the rim of the drum as if it controlled the volume. When he had 'turned his drums down' to an acceptable level the concert secretary said; 'right that'll do - make sure you don't turn them up again.'

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During the 1990s I played in piano bars throughout Norway. I quickly found that the Norwegian version of a piano bar was the very opposite of what you would expect to find in other parts of the world. Instead of As Time Goes By just audible above the hushed conversations and the tinkle of ice against glass it was Great Balls Of Fire, What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor and especially Rawhide hammered out until my fingers bled, accompanied by hordes of blonde muscular six-foot-plus Vikings belting out the chorus and swinging glasses of beer in time with the music. And that was only the women. Every few minutes someone would yell: 'Hei, Skaal' and everyone would crash their glasses together in unison. In the Gammelbrygga bar in Harstad, a small town two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, I gradually became aware of an argument between a young couple standing next to the piano. I knew enough Norwegian to discern that she was telling him he had had enough to drink. Finally she took his beer glass away and handed him a cup of coffee. Someone shouted: 'Hei, Skaal' and without hesitating he swung his cup in the air spilling scalding coffee over himself, the piano and his neighbour, who fortunately was too drunk to notice.

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I was rehearsing with the Paul Brady band at the Factory rehearsal rooms in Dublin in 1991. I could hear a band playing in the room next door and I said: 'listen to that, yet another band desperately trying to sound like U2'. Paul replied: 'actually Mick that is U2'.

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On April 9th 1965 I attended a show at the ABC cinema in Wigan at which there were rows and rows of empty seats. I suppose it could have held 1500 or more but on that night there were no more than 100. It was the Tamla Motown Revue - the first time that Tamla acts had toured Britain and I'm happy to say that I was among the first to see them. A few months later the same line-up would have packed the place out. It was Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, Smokey Robinson And The Miracles, Martha And The Vandellas - all backed by the superb Earl Van Dyke Band. Georgie Fame was the guest artist. Despite the poor turnout they all sung and played their hearts out and I can still see in my mind's eye the whole cast strung out across the stage at the end of the show singing the Smokey Robinson song Mickey's Monkey. As there were so few people there I was able to sit anywhere I chose, so I sat alone in about the tenth row right in the centre. The rest of the audience were all scattered behind me so it felt as though all these great acts were playing just for me.

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When I was in New York city with the Paul Brady band, I went for a walk in Times Square with the band's other keyboard player, Trevor Knight - and encountered probably the worst example of customer-service I've ever seen. Trevor wanted to buy a camera, so we entered a shop with shelves up to the ceiling laden with cameras. The guy at the counter was getting rather impatient as he came down from his ladder for the third time with a camera for Trevor to examine. As he handed it back and said politely, 'no, I don't think so', the shop assistant smiled at him and said (in a broad New York accent), 'hey, that's a real nice T-shirt you're wearing. Let me just feel that material.' He leaned forward, grasped a lump of skin through the shirt, twisted and squeezed it hard and shouted, 'Get outa here, do you think I got all day to spend going up and down that ****** ladder.'

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In 1972 I was a member of a band called Clockwork Orange. Our manager Ray rented a rather salubrious first-floor flat in Kensington, London for us to live in. We had a wonderful summer writing songs at the upright piano he bought for us and sitting out on the balcony strumming guitars, but when the money eventually ran out we decided to do a midnight flit to avoid paying the rent. In the dead of night we crept silently down the stairs past the landlord's ground-floor flat loading our stuff into a waiting van - but then we went back for the piano. With two of us at each end we lifted it very slowly and carefully down the stone staircase. We had almost reached the ground floor when someone lost their grip and it clattered down the final few stairs and landed with a great crash and twanging of notes in the hall. The landlord emerged dazed and confused in his pyjamas and realised immediately what was happening. One of us had the nerve to say: 'it's OK we're just taking it to be tuned'. Eventually he accepted two very cheap acoustic guitars in lieu of rent - Ray persuaded him that they were rare and very valuable American imports and that we were heartbroken to lose them. Or maybe he was just relieved to be rid of us - we used to rehearse our songs over and over through the night and I had a habit of stamping my foot as I played the piano.

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In summer 1969 shortly after I had joined my first band White Myth we heard about a free music festival in a park in a nearby town - It was August 25th in Bolton, Lancashire. So we put our meagre equipment in a couple of cars and turned up hoping to play. We didn't get to perform but one thing sticks in my memory from that day. The final act was a band called Ibex and the lead singer was Freddie Mercury. I don't remember much about their performance except that they mainly played cover versions including Communication Breakdown by Led Zeppelin and Jailhouse Rock - and I seem to remember them finishing with Johnny B Goode. Two years later White Myth supported Queen at St Helens Technical College, Lancashire and a couple of years after that when I played with Mott The Hoople on a UK tour, Queen were our support band. After one concert I noticed that someone had scrawled 'Mott are dead, long live Queen' in the dirt on the back of the bus (which we shared with Queen, if I remember rightly). That certainly wasn't true at the time, but that tour was the last time Queen supported anyone and within a few months they had their first hit single and were on their way to mega-stardom.

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For many years I supplemented my income by playing piano in pubs in the east end of London, often accompanying customers who would get up to sing. A few were excellent singers, but for the majority I had to learn how to accommodate sudden unexpected key changes and shifts of rhythm - always aware that if things went wrong I would get the blame! I once accompanied a huge elderly man who had worked in the London docks all his life. He gave a highly emotional performance of his chosen song and as he approached the end I built up the volume to goad him into a big finish. He raised one hand in the air, and summoned up all his lung power to bellow out the final line which was also the title of the song, 'When I leave this world behind'. As the applause began he started to fall slowly forwards off the low stage. His knees didn't bend and he kept his arm raised aloft all the way down until his forehead hit the polished brass foot rail in front of the bar. It resounded with a B flat, which by a happy coincidence was in tune with the final chord that I was still holding on the piano. I thought, 'what a way to go, he really has left the world behind,' but he got up rubbing his head and leaving a slight dent in the rail. I remember the landlady shouting, 'oh blimey, there goes another one', which I thought was a strange comment.

In another pub a man told me about his daughter who was learning to play. He said that he had bought her a keyboard - 'one of those mood sympathisers, like they play in groups'. He told me that she had been learning to play Beethoven's Moonlight Sinatra.

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A non-musical story. A few years ago I was driving around the Victoria Monument just outside the main gates of Buckingham Palace. I was in the middle of the usual jumble of cars, buses and taxis jockeying for position as we gradually approached the top of The Mall. A few yards ahead I saw a burly policeman walk out into the centre of the road and raise his hand to stop the traffic. I waited patiently expecting to see the arrival or departure of a member of the royal family, a visiting politician or some other VIP. After a minute or two I saw the reason for the delay - a procession of nine very small VIPs - a mother duck waddling proudly across the road leading her eight ducklings in perfect single file. The big policeman waited until the last tiny ball of fluff had successfully hauled itself up onto the pavement, then he smiled at the waiting drivers, waved them on and proceeded to walk alongside the procession making sure they reached St James' Park and the safety of the lake.