Anecdotes and extra stuff
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. 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 clomped about 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 kindly reached down and helped 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 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 and shouted in true rock-star fashion: 'Hello COLUMBO'.
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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 pendant 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.
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Vincent Crane used to have a jacket with long fringes attached to the sleeves. When he played Hammond organ with his band Atomic Rooster 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 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.'
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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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In spring 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 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 minds 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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In summer 1969 shortly after I had joined White Myth we heard about a free music festival in a park in a nearby town - I think it was in Bolton. 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 and I seem to remember them finishing with Johnny B Goode. Two years later White Myth supported Queen at St Helens Technical College 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 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.