Friday 26 October 2007
boop-a-doop-boy writes...
Furious doesn’t even begin to describe the way I feel! All this time I have been surrounded by a nest of vipers, clasping the asp to my bosom and well and truly led up the garden path by a snake in the bloody grass!
“Fish and chips!” I yelled, “Fish and bloody chips! Thirty pieces of bloody silver, it should be!”
I was sitting in the lockup at the time, having had one filthy rotten day of it. So when Kevin turned up with cod and chips for me and hake and chips for Bert Snide whose lockup it is, I was in no bloody mood for polite bloody banter, I can tell you.
The day started bad enough when Zanya and the gorilla turned up at half past eleven. She’d seen my advert in the Melody Maker and so she phoned up yesterday to make an appointment.
“I feel I have all the talents for which you seek,” she burbled.
“I’m glad to hear it,” I wittily riposted, “All you have to do is wear a see-through bra and go ‘Shoo-bop-be-do’ every once in a while.”
She paused. I got the impression that a thought was struggling into life. Then she said, “Yeah, I can do that. Maybe not straight away. But once I’ve had a chance to rehearse...”
However, when she turned up for the interview, I knew right away that she was not my idea of a Raspberry Nipple. The girls I had in mind were young, creamy of complexion, rosy of cheek, innocent as the day is long... and if they also happened to have a pair of bazoomers that could poke your eyes out, that would be a distinct advantage.
Zanya, to her credit, had the bazoomers but in all other respects she was lacking. How can I put this gallantly? She looked like a trollop. The sort of girl you expect to see leaning in doorways in certain parts of Soho (which, I should hastily add, I do not myself frequent). She must have been thirty-five if she was a day and she had thighs that went up to her waist. Of this I was certain due to the fact that the mini-skirt she was wearing came to an abrupt end about two inches below her hips.
Nevertheless, being a gentleman, I might have been prepared to overlook her age and her gynaecological mode of dress. What I could not overlook was her minder, a man whose nose had been broken so many times it no longer seemed attached to any one part of his face but moved around it, slug-like, whenever he growled in my general direction - which, I have to say, was something he did with alarming frequency.
“Hi,” trilled Zanya, “I’ve come for the job.”
“The lady,” grunted the minder, “Has come for the job.”
“Well, I said, it’s not exactly a
job, you know, not a hard and fast guaranteed
job, I mean. It’s more by way of an audition.”
The complexity of the sentence seemed to defeat the minder. He glowered at me, wobbled his nose menacingly and repeated, “The lady has come for the job.”
Behind me, I heard something move and, turning, was just in time to see a monumental heap of elasticated corsets tumbling gently to the floor as Bert made an adroit exit.
But let me not depress you with the remaining dismal events of my miserable morning. Suffice to say that, somewhat against my natural inclination but with the firm encouragement of her large and hairy friend, I finally agreed to employ Zanya as the leading Raspberry Nipple (‘Posh Nipple’ we’ve decided to call her) at a fixed income of £200 a week with extras due to personal appearances and recording royalties to be negotiated at a later date. It barely needs to be said that I haven’t got £200 a week to spare and, even if I did, Zanya would not be my preferred way of spending it. Fortunately, I was careful to avoid giving her my name. The only phone number and address they have at their disposal is Bert Sneed’s lockup, so that’ll be something for Bert to deal with. He’s got a natural talent with gorillas and women of low morals so it should be a pushover for him.
Not that there is going to be anything to deal with, it now turns out - not in terms of Dolly Pop and The Raspberry Nipples, at any rate. That whole glorious vision of my future career in the glittering world of pop impresarioship has come crumbling down about my knees like an underbaked lemon meringue pie! And all thanks to Kevin!
“Take your bloody fish and chips and shove them where the sun don’t shine!” I hissed magisterially.
“I’ll ‘ave ‘em,” said Bert who, having already devoured a large portion of hake and chips, promptly snatched away the cod and chips intended for me which (I now discovered) came complete with a pot of curry sauce on the side. This, I couldn’t help but feeling, considerably spoilt the dramatic effect for which I was striving.
Now you may be wondering why it was that I was venting my spleen in this manner upon the despicable Kevin. I’ll tell you. It turns out that all this time while I’ve been labouring night and day to recruit an all-girl pop group,
Dolly Pop and The Raspberry Nipples, Kevin has been going behind my back and whipping the rug from under my feet. Or to put it another way, he’s been smooth talking (and not just
‘talking’, if you want my opinion!) Geoffrey - who you may recall is the A&R man whose record company is, or
was, so damn’ keen on Dolly P and the Raspberry Ns - and this same slippery Kevin has now persuaded the slimy Geoffrey that it’s not an all-girl group but an all-boy group that the record buying public craves. And need I tell you which boy Kevin has in mind as the lead singer?
So the upshot is that Geoffrey has now decided that
Dolly Pop and the Raspberry Nipples is a non-starter, dead in the mud and last year’s thing; and what the screaming hordes of spotty teenagers really want is
Reggie Burger and The Crusty Buns. That, incidentally, is to be the name of the group. Pure plagiarism. I mean, just because I came up with the ice-cream angle - the Raspberry Nipples - they have to come up with a hamburger theme - The Crusty Buns. Well, I tell you this: if Geoffrey knew as much about Kevin as I do, he’d know just how crusty those buns really are! And I don’t mean that in a nice way...
Ah well, let’s look on the bright side. I’m, well off out of it, I reckon. Show business, I mean. Pshaw! I shall return now, refreshed, to my true calling - investigative journalism.
So, let’s see what I’ve got lined up for the coming week. Oh yes, an interview with Jay from Bucks Fizz about her first childhood romance. And one with Limahl about his favourite school meals. All kissing, cuddling and spotty dicks then.
It’s at moments like these that I feel privileged to have been called to the great and noble art of Journalism. By Heaven, if journalism was good enough for Jonathan Swift and George Orwell, it shall be good enough for me!
Monday 15 October 2007
boop-a-doop-boy writes...
Auditions start today!
I managed to get a corner of Bert Sneed’s lockup for the day. Bert runs a sort of wholesale business north of Camden - washing machines, microwave ovens, hundredweight sacks of dried mango; you name it, Bert can get it. There was a huge roll of rubbery grey stuff lying in one corner, I noticed. “Industrial-strength bra elastic,” Bert says. He reckons it would stretch ten miles once it’s unravelled. I said, “Who’s going to buy ten miles of industrial-strength bra elastic?” He said, “You never heard of trampolines?” I’m not sure about Bert’s sanity, to tell you the honest truth.
I first got to know Bert while doing a photo-story with Tight Fit and bullwhips (the whips being supplied by Bert). It seems he has a keen interest in pop music, especially when it involves semi-clad young women, and even more so if the odd bullwhip can be fitted into the picture. When I told him about the auditions for the Raspberry Nipples, he was immediately enthused.
Anyway, I set up a table in one corner of the lockup, all nice and private, just behind a rack of Australian sheep and kangaroo dip (“Kills scab mite, blow-fly, ticks, keds and lice - dead!!!”), and waited for the applicants to arrive. Emma (or ‘Dolly Pop’ as I suppose I must now call her) was supposed to be there too but she didn’t turn up, which, I have to confess, did not surprise me. The A&R man, Geoffrey, did turn up - two hours late which, for an A&R man is probably as near as makes no difference to being on time.
We had six auditions to get through - the first was booked for 10.30, the last for 4 o’clock. The 10.30 one arrived at 11.30, and the 11.30 one arrived at 12.00. I took Geoffrey down the pub for lunch (he had two pints of Best and a Beef Stroganoff for which I paid as he’d forgotten to bring the company cheque book). After lunch, he scooted off for an urgent appointment with Mick Jagger (so he claims). When I got back to the lockup, there were two semi-naked girls wresting on a moth-eaten chaise longue nestling between a pile of rat traps and toilet plungers.
“Perfect, darling, perfect! Now, if you could just loosen that bra strap a little more...” - these and other, even less savoury, words of encouragement were being sputtered from between Bert’s wetly drooling lips.
“What the bloody hell!” says I, dragging Bert into a discreet alcove just behind a pile of ‘Big Boy’ gentlemen’s athletic supporters (“For the man who wants to stand out in a crowd”), “What the hell’s going on here then, Bert?” says I.
“They turned up while you was away,” says he, “So I auditioned them.”
“We’re supposed to be auditioning for a pop group,” I tell him, “Not for a Roman Orgy.”
“These girls,” he says, wiping a line of drool from his chin, “They’s got what it takes. You mark my words.”
I had a quick peep at them through a crack in the serried ranks of jockstraps. The girls were still at it on the chaise longue. It looked to me as though they’d given up auditioning and had started enjoying themselves.
“They’re too young,” I said.
“You’re never too young,” said Bert, “To be in a pop group, I mean.”
“And the blonde one’s too fat.”
“Well-built,” Bert insisted.
“But can they sing?” I said.
“I never thought to ask,” says Bert.
Anyway, the upshot is that they couldn’t sing a single solitary note between the two of them. So I sent them away, telling them I’d call them if we needed them - which is, however, extremely unlikely bearing in mind the fact that I forgot to ask for their phone numbers.
The 3 o’clock appointment didn’t turn up, which only left the 4 o’clock appointment…
She turned up bang on the dot and sang ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Kids In America’ and the Queen Of Night’s aria from The Magic Flute. She was a real professional with a wonderful voice. In fact, she would have been absolutely ideal if she’d turned up about thirty years earlier. As it is, though, fat middle-aged women who look like my Aunty Beryl on a bad day are not quite the style we are after for The Raspberry Nipples. To be honest, the five ‘girls’ I’ve seen today have all been uniformly dreadful.
Is she a potential Raspberry Nipple? The way things have been going so far, quite possibly...
I returned home depressed to find a message on my answer machine. It was Emma saying she couldn’t make it to the auditions because she had a cold (which is her way of saying ‘hangover’).
I am starting to wonder if entrepreneurialship is the life for me after all. Maybe I’d be happier just writing articles for Jackie, My Guy and Blue Jeans until I finally kick the bucket. I just don’t know how many more times I can ask pop stars about their first kiss or whether they used to have lumpy custard at school. Is this an entrée into serious journalism, I ask myself? Would Bernard Levin ask Harold Pinter for his thoughts on the lumpy custard of his younger days? Who knows - maybe the Jackie journalist of today is the Marcel Proust of tomorrow...?
I can but hope.
How French literature might have been so different if Proust had written for Jackie!
Saturday 13 October 2007
boop-a-doop-boy writes...
So anyway, there I was waxing my hair when who should come knocking on the door but Kevin. That boy does give me the gip sometimes! I tell him, “You can come in for five minutes and have a cup of tea but then you got to go again, I’m busy.”
He says, “Right-o,” plonks himself down himself down on the settee, pours himself a stiff Glenfiddich, pops on a Gina X Performance record and says, “I decided I want to be in the group.”
“Oh yes,” I say, taking another fingerful of wax and rubbing it into my fringe which I’m trying to get into a spike like that Flock Of Seagulls fellah, “And what group might that be?”
“Your group,” he says, “You know, Dollybird and the Tits.”
“The name,” I say, sternly, “Is Dolly Pop and the Raspberry Nipples.”
To tell you the truth, I don’t think that Kevin has grasped the subtle play on words involved in that name and, as I am not sure he has the mental capacities to understand even if I explained, I decided against attempting to illuminate him.
“And what is more,” I tell him, “They’re all girls. Which means that there is no suitable vacancy.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, “I know they’re all girls. That’s why I want to be in it.”
By now he has put me off my stroke with the waxing so I wipe my hands on a nearby copy of Smash Hits, screw the lid back onto the wax pot, turn to look at Kevin and fix him with my most baleful basilisk glare.
“Let me try to make this simple,” I tell him, “The group is all girls. Female. Not a single solitary male involved. You, on the other hand, are of the masculine gender. QED.”
From the way his mouth is hanging open with no words issuing therefrom, I deduce that the light of understanding has yet to burst upon his few and widely-scattered braincells. So I make it simpler for him: “They are girls,” I say, “Whereas you. Are not.”
A smile spreads slowly across his otherwise vacant face. Finally, with a pause sufficient only to refill his glass, he says, “Yeah, you got it! That’s just what I thought. They are girls. And I’m not. Great combination!”
I often wonder how on earth I ever got involved with an idiot like Kevin. Then I remember that fateful night in Camden Town when I got pissed as a parrot and somehow found myself being taken back home by him. My memories of what happened thereafter are, happily, non-existent. All I know for sure is that if ever anyone sees me puking in the gutter and offers to take me home in future, I shall run in the other direction. Or at least, I shall if I am capable of so doing. Which, if I am puking into the gutter at the time, I probably won’t be. Ah, such are the terrible ways of Fate!
Anyway, by this time I am starting to wonder why Kevin wants to be in a group at all. I mean, there was me thinking that he was set up nicely with his new job as the hand and voice of Flapjack the Duck on the soon-to-be-aired late night adult humour show, ‘Big Bazoomers!’
But it seems I was wrong! Apparently in a moment of blinding sanity, whoever offered Kevin the job in the first place suddenly realised that a man with his hand up a duck’s arse going “Quack! Quack! What a quacker!” might not be the height of late-night hilarity for the more sophisticated audience which they are hoping to attract. So they cancelled Kevin and hired a woman who shoots pingpong balls from her fanny.
Anyway, when he’d drained the last drop of my Glenffidich, I finally managed to push Kevin out of the door with a vague promise that we’d audition him for the Raspberry Nipples only if we don’t get enough actual girls for the job. In his inebriated state, he seemed to find that satisfactory, little knowing that I wouldn’t audition him for the job of toilet cleaner, let alone for a Raspberry Nipple.
I’m still not really sure about my hair, you know. I mean, I’ve got the ‘beak’ effect sorted out ok, with a pointy bit plastered down between my eyebrows. But I’m none too happy about the wings out the sides. The effect is a bit too much on the Ken Dodd side for my liking.
This is the image I am striving for...
...but this is the image I am achieving:
Oh well, it’ll just have to do. I’m off down The Camden Palace tonight. Probably have a word with Steve Strange while I’m there. Give him a nod and a wink about The Raspberry Nipples. He might be interested in featuring them at the Palace one night, I reckon. Mind you, I suppose he’ll want to know what sort of music they do. To be honest, that’s a problem that hadn’t really occurred to me. The group will need some songs, I suppose. Well, I could probably knock out a few, I reckon. How hard can it be? I see that Neil Tennant who writes for Smash Hits is trying to put together a band. Load of rubbish they are, that’s what I’ve heard. But anyway, if he can do it, I’m damn’ sure I can!
Wednesday 10 October 2007
boop-a-doop-boy writes...
Have you ever seen Boy George without his makeup? It came as a shock to me, I can tell you. He looks like a pickled onion in dreadlocks.
Boy George 'Before and After' - now you know why he wears make-up!
However, it is not Boy George of whom I wish to speak but of Kevin. I am pleased to say that the lad has finally seen the light, renounced his wayward ways and got himself back on the narrow if not exactly straight. Kevin, you will recall, having decided that the life of a butcher’s boy in Plaistow was not for him, had moved into the strange and shadowy world of show business, first as the voice and hand of everyone’s favourite avian glove-puppet (not counting Rod Hull’s emu), Flapjack The Duck, and, more latterly, into the bizarre world of what, in order to spare your blushes, I shall refer to as ‘exotic dancing’.
Now, heaven knows, I’m not a prude but, in my view, if you happen to the owner of the hand that is stuck up the rear end of everyone’s favourite duck, the last thing you want to do is to get yourself photographed with that very same hand shoved somewhere where you wouldn’t want it wrapping your fish and chips, if you get my drift. Kevin, unfortunately, is a boy of high spirits and low intellect. And so, when his picture (with discreet blobs placed over two significant areas of activity) appeared all over the front pages of some of our more lurid daily newspapers, the silly boy didn’t just go into hiding, keep a low profile and deny all knowledge - he actually phoned up the feature editors and offered to do interviews!
Lucky for him, then, that just as his scandal was about to take off an even bigger scandal came along in the form of TV starlet Frankie Fischer (the grannies’ favourite) who was snapped in a compromising position with his plumptious sidekick, the lovely Shirl.
The next thing you know, Kevin’s story vanishes from the newspapers while Frankie Fischer’s story is all over them. “Frankie Says It’s Wedding Bells!” says one headline; “In A Whirl For Shirl!” says another - and before you know it what started out as a minor scandal has turned into a heart-warming romantic tale which, alas, stretches credulity to breaking point. I mean, not only are we asked to believe that the wrinkled old queen, Frankie Fischer, is a red-blooded heterosexual but also that his luscious young assistant, Shirl, has fallen madly in love with him!
Anyway, the upshot is that Kevin has got off with his reputation only slightly tarnished and, moreover, he and Flapjack the Duck have now been snapped up to appear in a late-night TV show called ‘Big Bazoomers!’ which will, I am told, be a no-holds bared ‘adult’ version of the Saturday morning kiddywinks show in which Flapjack has hitherto featured.
Meanwhile you are no doubt asking yourself: but what of Dolly Pop and the Raspberry Nipples?
Well, I am at this very moment seeking the Raspberry Nipples. I’ve put some adverts for talented and good-looking singers in the musical press and I am now sitting here awaiting applications which (I have no doubt) will soon start rolling in. I shall have to conduct the auditions myself, of course. Not sure how to do that exactly. Just play it by ear, I suppose. I said to Emma, maybe I should buy myself a casting couch. I won’t tell you what she replied other than to say that I doubt whether it would be physically possible even if I didn’t have a bad back. Ah well, such as the demands of being a top-flight impresario. Stardom here we come...
Saturday 06 October 2007
boop-a-doop-boy writes...
Exciting news! I have become Svengali to Emma’s Trilby!
For the benefit of those who you whose bent may not be of the literary sort, I should probably explain that when I say Trilby it is not to the headgear favoured by middle-aged gentlemen from East Grinstead that I allude.
Let me clarify. Cast your thoughts back to Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis, Brian Epstein and The Beatles, Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols; not to mention Mad Bill Evans The Blood-crazed Butcher of Tonypandy and his protégé, Jack ‘Swivelhips’ Thomas, the crooning surgical support salesman from Ebbw Vale. Yes, the Trilby to which I refer is a dark-eyed, blushing waif who fell under the magnetic and evil influence of Svengali - a story with which I am familiar thanks to University Challenge. Have you ever noticed how books that nobody reads are always coming up on University Challenge? No matter what the question, ten to one the answer’s going to be Trilby, The Diary of a Nobody, Beowulf or the collected works of The Venerable Bede. Who the bloody hell was The Venerable Bede anyway and what did he do to be so bloody venerable? Does anyone apart from Bamber Gascoigne either know or care, that’s what I’d like to know... Well, no, on second thoughts, I don’t think I would like to know. In fact, I don’t give a tinker’s bloody toss about The Venerable Bede.
Anyway, the thing is that Emma has got emotionally entangled with an A & R man - ‘A & R’ being short for... well, never mind what it’s short for, the point is, he’s a talent scout and somehow or other he’s scouted out Emma; though as to which of her particular talents attracted his attention, I can only guess. Not her voice, that’s for sure. I mean, I’ve heard her singing, usually when she’s well under the influence which, to be honest (if a shade ungallant), is most of the time. If I said she has a voice like a constipated cow, I’d be doing the cow an injustice.
She has, however, got a passable figure. Unless you try to pass her in a narrow corridor in which case, the opposite would be true. What I am trying to say in my roundabout way is:
knockers. I have to be honest, I am not a knocker man. I mean, I know a fine pair when I see them and the finest three pairs I’ve seen to date would be (in ascending order) Dolly Parton’s, Honor Blackman’s and Emma’s. But while they leave me as cold as a kipper, the same is not true for a goodly proportion of the male population. Goggle-eyed, slavering and twitching at the extremities would be a better description of the typical reaction.
Oh, incidentally, I have further news of Emma. She and Norm are back together again. Emma assures me that her wayward exploits with strange and exotic men of the performing persuasion is all a thing of the past and, from here on in, a rose covered semi-detached and regular doses of Women’s Hour and The Archers while snuggled up to Norm wearing slippers with bobbles on and a tartan nightgown is all she craves.
Though I, as the Svengali in this operation, might have a thing or two to say on that subject… I mean, if Emma is to become the next singing sensation, the sultry sex symbol of her day, this generation’s Suzi Quatro, Olivia Newton-John and Diana Dors all rolled into one, I have to ask myself, is Norm really going to be good for her image? Should she not, instead, be dating pop stars, rubbing shoulders (or whatever) with film stars and being found by Fleet Street photographers cavorting indiscreetly in dodgy Soho nightclubs with minor members of the Royal Family?
For, dear reader, to summarise briefly, cut a long story short and put it in a nutshell: Emma has been signed up to a major record label and I have become her manager!
My first job will, naturally, be to groom her for stardom. The next will be to get someone to do the actual singing, teach Emma to move her lips in time to the words and find her a backing group. I haven’t decided yet on the appropriate sex for the group. Boys or girls, that is the question? My first thought was to get some hunky young men as backing dancers - you know, a bit like that Boys Town Gang. But the A & R man, whose name, by the way, is Geoffrey and who is a camp as a pair of knickers, says that people might think that was a bit gay. I said people might think Boy George is a bit gay but that doesn’t stop him selling records by the lorry load. But anyway, I can see what he means. Hunky backing singers might be a bit passé. Maybe we should go lock, stock and barrel for the spotty teenage boy market? Get a group of leggy girls wearing as little as Top Of The Pops will let us get away with and get the aforementioned spotty teenage boys spending their pocket money as fast as their hormones will let them.
And on top of all that, I also have to think of a name for the group. I’m thinking of going for an ice-cream theme - you know, get across an image of coolness, smoothness and, well, ice-creaminess. Emma could be called Dolly Pop. And her backing would be the Raspberry Nipples. Yes, I like that. It’s got class: Dolly Pop and The Raspberry Nipples.
I tell you what, there’s more to this Svengali-ing than meets the eye...
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