Some bad news

I have to take you back to 1987.

1987?

Yes. It’s 1987 and I’m standing on stage at the Guildhall in Portsmouth with the rest of Bad News, my spoof metal band.

We’ve made two documentaries of the band as part of The Comic Strip Presents, and just to be clear, we are not the ‘British Spinal Tap’, chiefly because we appeared a year before them.

It’s a monumental pisser when someone else covers the same subject matter with a bigger budget a year after you’ve done it, but heigh ho. And anyway The Rutles had come out in the late seventies so we’re all thieves. There’s nothing new. Inspiration is 90 per cent theft, and the creativity is often in how well you hide it.

But we’ve made an album for EMI on the back of the documentaries, and now we’re out on tour supporting the album release. The tour starts the day after the violent extratropical cyclone of 15 October – the one Michael Fish said was nothing to worry about – the one that felled 15 million trees and left twenty-two people dead. It’s not a good omen for the tour.

There have been highlights in the history of Bad News. We’ve supported Iron Maiden at the Hammersmith Apollo and we’ve done benefit gigs where Brian May, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck have come on as guests – I’ve swapped lead breaks with the guitar heroes of my youth. We’ve jammed with Motörhead and their guitarist Würzel gave me his skull ring in recognition of the fact that I can ‘play a bit’.

But in truth it all started to go wrong at the second gig we ever played. The first gig was quite literally to two men and a dog – a common expression made into a proper joke in ‘Bad News Tour’. The second was to 100,000 people at the Monsters of Rock Festival in Castle Donnington. It was filmed as part of the second documentary ‘More Bad News’.

We had cameras picking up audience shots throughout the day and constructed a narrative in the editing room to make it look like people were chucking stuff at us the whole time we were on stage. In truth they threw as much at Warlock and The Scorpions. Tommy Vance, the compère, wisely wore a baseball helmet to protect himself from the constant missile attack.

We also had an audience participation song called ‘Hey Hey Bad News’, which my character – Vim Fuego (named after a cleaning product and a Renault sport hatchback that came out in 1980) – took great pains to explain was definitely ‘hey hey Bad News’ not ‘fuck off Bad News’, which of course meant the audience only ever sang ‘fuck off Bad News’.

Audiences can be so easily led.

But back to the Portsmouth Guildhall.

I’m playing a specially modified guitar with a super-charged pre-amp inside it. The man who sold it to me said it emits the loudest signal of any guitar in the world. It delivers what I call ‘amazing crunch’, and along with an array of distortion pedals I’m making an extraordinary racket. I’m dressed like Joe from Def Leppard – Union Jack singlet under a leather biker’s jacket. My long blond hair flounces around like the girl flicking her hair about in the Timotei advert. We’ve got a light show. I’ve got an actual Marshall stack. I’ve even got an actual roadie for God’s sake, who will come and swap out my guitar whenever it goes out of tune. The gig is rammed. I am living the rock dream of my teenage years.

So why isn’t it as much fun as I thought?

Partly because I’ve just been hit in the face with a sheep’s eyeball. Some wags in the crowd were listening to us on the radio this morning riffing about the band’s leanings towards Satanism. They’ve heard us inventing comedic nonsense about the rituals we do with offal to summon the devil, who then helps us write the lyrics.

These wags, who probably work in a butcher’s shop, have decided it will add to the ‘fun’ of the event if they pelt us with bits of dead sheep. They keep chucking bits of liver, kidney, lung, duodenum, digestive tract, and sundry less identifiable body parts.

Pete tilts his cymbals up as a rudimentary barrier and manages to avoid the worst of it. Nige on rhythm guitar and Rik on bass are free to roam around – they can see the incoming organs flash by in the lights and take avoiding action. But unfortunately, because I’m playing and singing, I’m stuck at the microphone front and centre and therefore I’m the easiest target. Though to be honest, the barrage of offal isn’t as bad as the gang of youths at the very front of the crowd who are trying to spit in my mouth. Trying and occasionally succeeding.

It’s not what I thought life as a rock god would be.

The problem is that once you’ve led the audience to wherever it is you want it’s hard to take them back. We’ve made a rod for our own backs, and the audience are basically coming to throw stuff and shout at us. It’s like a violent, sweary panto.

There’s only so much of other people’s spittle you can swallow without becoming bad tempered. It’s only a short tour but it’s hard work. And this infects the mood in the band. We almost split over ‘musical differences’. . . We’ve made a Christmas single, ‘Cashing in on Christmas’, and Pete gets so angry about the way I’ve mixed it that we have a stand-up row in a hotel bar in Birmingham. He throws a pint of beer at me, I duck, and it hits the barman. Only the timely intervention of our tour manager Ian Day saves the day – smoothing out the problems with the soggy barman, and coaxing Pete to sleep on it and decide whether to quit or not in the morning when he’s sober.

The next summer we play Reading Festival. The crowd are slightly further away and there are no butcher’s shops on the site, making meat-based missiles less of a problem, but this doesn’t dim their ardour. They piss into empty two-litre plastic bottles and chuck them instead. Although one enterprising young festivalgoer has managed to throw up into his bottle – no mean feat given the size of the opening – and this crashes onto the stage and bursts with alarming olfactory consequences.

Rik, whose joke for Reading is to pretend to have a broken leg and be pushed around the stage by a roadie in a wheelchair, finds that once he’s driven through the vomit his wheels are covered in the stuff. The roadie abandons him as the barrage increases and Rik becomes marooned in a sea of piss-filled bottles – a sitting target whose only escape is to grab the puke-covered wheels and try to manoeuvre himself away. It’s the wrong day to have your leg in a fake plaster cast.

It’s the last gig we do.

Wow! You got so close to achieving your teenage fantasy of being an international rock god but it all went a bit Pete Tong.

Exactly! Except that . . .