Alfie Read online

  I said, ‘Well you’re not. You’re rubbish. You can’t play, you can’t sing, and I don’t wanna be part of the band. What’s the problem?’

  He said, ‘Well your Derek thinks I’m alright.’

  I said, ‘Well Derek’s an idiot.’

  So I left, and they pretty much disbanded, they didn’t get another drummer. Derek became a police officer.

  I then auditioned for a band in Preston, The English Roses. I saw an advertisement saying they were going on tour and needed a drummer. So I turned up to this town hall and met this two-piece band, a guitarist and bass player, another drummer was already there trying out for them, and I really liked their sound, that sort of late ’80s British indie music. I set up my little white kit and they started up a song and I seemed to fit right in. We improvised constantly for about an hour and it really worked – I knew where they were going, they knew where I was going. And they offered me the job, but it was a big tour, a proper tour; they were supporting The Mission. I was only 15, I was in school, these guys were 19, 20. They didn’t know I was 15 – I looked older. So I couldn’t do it, and I stuck to playing in local Fleetwood bands. I joined one called Roadhouse, with two brothers, Peter and Jon McLoughlin. They were a couple of likely lads, real funny fellas. I’d known Peter, the singer, from a coach firm I worked at when I was 11. At my first rehearsal with them I was drumming away and Jon was going, ‘Hit yer drums harder, I can’t hear ya!’ And I was really bashing them. He said, ‘What sticks have you got?’ They were good sticks, regular sticks. I told him he needed to turn his amp down. That’s why he couldn’t hear me, he was standing in front of this amp, turned right up, blasting out. He said, ‘Get bigger sticks!’ So I got these big sticks, they were practically baseball bats, and I really gave it some. Bashed the hell out of the drums, and he was still going, ‘I can’t bloody hear ya!’ He just wouldn’t turn that amp down. Peter was your archetypal ’70s rocker, and he hasn’t changed one bit, still got the long curly hair and the skinny jeans. Their bassist had a motorbike accident and lost some digits, played the bass with two fingers. They’re still doing it, they have a band now called Hooker. Their logo’s a naked woman. Oh yes. They shafted me anyway. I got this awful glandular fever, my throat felt like it had two tennis balls in it. I was flat out, and while I was ill the bastards got a new drummer.

  I sold my first kit to a lad for £150, and Mum and Dad bought me new cymbals and a proper five-piece kit, really great. I was around 17 by this point, working in a car garage, and I joined a band called Whisky Train. We were just a cheesy covers band, but we were pretty good. We did ‘Live and Let Die’, the Guns N’ Roses version, ‘Paradise City’, ‘Hard to Handle’, all that stuff – 1990, you get the picture. The lead singer fancied himself, wanted to be a bit like an Axl Rose, had the bandanna on his head and the tight jeans, real show-off. And we got into Battle of the Bands, I think it was in the ICI club in Thornton. There was a good vibe for us because we were playing songs that everybody knew and wanted to hear. Roadhouse were on the bill as well, and some band called Dr Bone, both playing original material, so the only time the crowd got up and danced was when we played – we really got them going. I think we came second or third. Roadhouse were playing after us, and their new drummer Alan Smith tried to take my cymbals. As I was packing my kit away he asked to borrow them for his set, then later as he was packing his stuff away he stuck my cymbals in his case.

  I said, ‘Hang on a minute, man.’

  He said, ‘No, you said I could borrow them.’

  I said, ‘Yeah, just for the set.’

  He said, ‘I’ve got a gig tomorrow night and I want to use them.’

  I took them back. That’s what that little group were like. And they’re still Fleetwoodites, still hanging around. They play a pub called Deaduns. Well it’s called The Royal Oak, but everyone calls it Deaduns, because back in the day, fishermen used to go in there and drink till they died. Literally died. Get carried out.

  There was a band there that night at Battle of the Bands, I can’t remember their name, but later they asked me to play with them for a bit, and I went along to a session and they got weirdly technical about it all. They were just kids sat in a room drinking Coke, and they said, ‘So, Alfie, what we want you to do is to really connect with John, our bass player here, really get the rhythm together, get it tight . . .’ I thought, ‘This is really, really weird,’ telling a teenage kid to connect with the bass player so the rhythm was right, it didn’t feel very rock and roll. And when they started playing they were crap. I stopped playing in bands at that point, more or less. I did a few more gigs with Whisky Train, and then I started drumming in the clubs in Blackpool, the cabaret circuit, getting paid to do the backup for whatever woman was singing dodgy Tina Turner covers that night. And by that point, I’d started singing as well.

  Kits come and kits go. You always keep your cymbals and your hardware, you never sell them. The older the cymbals are, the better they sound. I own some earth-toned cymbals, they’ve been buried in sand, which gives them a darker, warmer quality; they’re beautiful. You shouldn’t even dust them properly. Drums are a different matter, they’re replaceable. But I really wish I’d kept hold of that first kit Dad got me. I wish I still had it. It was a lovely little kit, but it’s sentimental more than anything, because Dad had bought it for me. I can’t find it. I can’t find it anywhere. At one point I knew where it was, in St Nicholas Owen church at the top of our road in Fleetwood. The guy I’d sold it to had sold it on to a vicar, and I went in there and saw it once, but then they sold it on somewhere else. And I haven’t been able to find it since. I’m sure it’s broken and battered and bruised and discarded now.

  Chapter Three

  MADE IN FLEETWOOD

  Dad was a dancer. Not by trade. He’d whip the bread board out after a drink and clog-dance on it. I used to copy him, there’s cine film somewhere of me in my little clogs doing a jig on the patio. Singing and dancing, always after attention. I used to imitate sounds I heard, used to do a Tommy gun. When I was four, ‘Mull of Kintyre’ was played on the radio 29 times a day and I used to walk around strumming along with my sister’s tennis racket. Mum would say, ‘Sing “Mull of Kintyre” for me, Alf, while I’m cooking the dinner,’ and I’d say, ‘Mum, I’m tuning my tikar.’ Couldn’t say guitar. I sang ‘Mull of Kintyre’ in a concert in Devon once, and it went down really well, except with the other singers who thought it was stupid. But that was my song.

  Dad did like a dance, that’s how he met my mum, quickstepping at the Marine Hall in Fleetwood. Doctors practically prescribed it, to keep him on his toes, because he had flat feet, fallen arches, after suffering a pretty horrific accident when he was a kid. He’d been playing football with his mates, or so-called mates, climbed over a fence to get the ball, got stuck going over the top and got both his ankles caught in the wire mesh. He was bent over the top of the fence, hanging upside down from his ankles, his feet twisted in the wire, and they left him there screaming for help. Someone eventually got him down, and he was operated on a couple of times, doctors broke his legs to try to straighten him out, he was in a wheelchair for a bit. He went out with some friends in that wheelchair, to the top of The Mount, this hill that overlooks the beach, and they let him roll down. He jumped off at the last minute as the wheelchair crashed into a wall and smashed to pieces. So the legend goes. He was born and bred in Fleetwood, and a good kid. Alf Boe, hence my name. He wasn’t the eldest son but pretty much brought up his family on his wage, worked at the Co-op delivering groceries, and brought most of the money in because his dad was away with the Navy most of the time. His brothers and sisters used to call him “Our daft Alf” which would really upset him, because he was working damn hard to make sure they were all clothed and fed, yet they treated him so disrespectfully sometimes. Out of order.

  Chris, his father, wasn’t a particularly likeable guy, so I’m told. Nobody really spoke about him much to me, possibly for good reason. I figured a
few things out: he was a big drinker, a bit abusive. His own father was Norwegian, which is where the name Boe comes from. He sailed into Fleetwood and settled, we think. Chris married Evelyn Jones, the only grandparent that was alive when I was a kid. She was a darling, my dad’s mum, always smiling, always laughing, always singing, lots of fun. At Christmas she’d come over and empty a massive sack full of toys onto the floor. Her grandfather, Alfred Jones, there’s a man I would have liked to have met. When Buffalo Bill’s Wild West circus came to Manchester to perform for Queen Victoria in 1887, Alfred joined the circus as stage crew, then travelled to Canada with them as a rider, re-enacting Cowboy and Indian fights. He got kicked in the face by a horse and grew an enormous handlebar moustache to disguise the scar. Another of the circus horses became blind, and he stopped them from shooting it; he wanted it. As the story goes, some months later they were all riding on a mountain trail and got lost in the fog, couldn’t find their way back. Alfred took charge and his blind horse led the way, sensing its way back down the trail. There’s not a lot of performer blood in my family, but Alfred Jones seemed pretty cool.

  My mum grew up in Fleetwood, as well as my dad. All the local kids used to play on Arden Green, where she lived, and Dad insisted they used to play together, but she doesn’t remember meeting him. It sounds like he’d had a crush on her forever.

  Mum’s parents were Irish, and although they were both gone by the time I turned up, I felt like I knew them, because she always talked to me about them, made me feel like I’d actually spent time with them. Her mum, Annie Mulligan, was a beautiful woman, generous, kind, and by all accounts a very good singer, a soprano. She sang all day while cleaning the house, washing up with her dolly tub and posser, in those pre-washing machine days. When my mum was a baby, Annie stuck her in the tub to keep her safe, away from the kitchen boiler, and sang away. The neighbours would come in and say, ‘Give us a song, Annie,’ and she’d regale them with a bit of ‘Danny Boy’. Mum said she could have gone professional. I love that; it’s great to think that that’s maybe where I get my voice from.

  Mum’s dad, Samuel Dutton, was born in Irlams o’ th’ Height, Salford, from farming stock. He ran away from home as a teenager, went to sea as a cabin boy, and became a stoker on the ships. He ended up in Fleetwood and met Annie, who refused to marry him unless he stopped going to sea because so many of those trawlermen lost their lives out there. So he became a stoker at the gasworks in Fleetwood, a foreman eventually. They both got tuberculosis, but while he recovered, poor Annie died when she was just 45. Mum was 12. He re-married, a lady called Jane, who didn’t see eye to eye with my mum at all, just didn’t seem to like her. Doesn’t sound like she liked anyone much, was prone to throwing tantrums, generally very abusive. One afternoon Sam asked Jane to go to the cinema with him, and she didn’t because she said she wanted to get on with the ironing. He said, ‘OK, I’ll bring Pat,’ and he went to get his hat and coat. And Jane leant over to Mum, held the hot iron right close to her face – she could feel the heat – and said, ‘You get your coat and I’ll brand you for life.’ That was the type of person she was. Mum still says, ‘God rest her soul.’ But I look at photos of her and wonder why on earth my granddad married her.

  My mum, Patricia Dutton, was born in 1932. The priest who baptised her, Canon McKenna, was a local legend, he’d saved a lot of lives when Fleetwood was swallowed by an enormous flood in 1927. A freak tidal wave came over at midnight and the whole town went under. And Canon McKenna got an upturned table, rowed it about and whisked a lot of people to safety before getting hold of a boat and saving more lives. That story was so vivid to me when I was a kid, visions of this priest in a long black gown, on a table, paddling up Fleetwood High Road. Very biblical.

  Fleetwood was booming when Mum was a kid. The Marine Hall, where everything that was anything used to go on, was built in 1935. Back then, before everyone could sod off to Majorca, Fleetwood was a pretty attractive tourist spot, competing with Blackpool to some extent. It was a big fishing port in those days, and remained that way up until the 1970s. There was even an old slogan, ‘Fleetwood: Recommended by the medical board,’ because the sea air was good for your lungs. Get some good solid fresh air in you, go to Fleetwood. It’s not like that now. My parents had the best of it.

  Saying that, Mum was a really sick kid, she spent most of her teenage years in and out of hospital. Pneumonia was rampant, she had it three times. She stayed at home a lot, had to leave secondary school after just a few months because she was ill, they didn’t want her infecting the rest of the kids. She was happy though, despite growing up ill and during the war. Then when her mum died, she had those problems with her stepmum, and was never really happy again until she met my dad. She felt very unstable at home, told the parish priest she wanted to be a nun, went to a nursing home in Blackpool to look after the sick for a bit, then went off to be a postulant in a convent in Romsey, near Southampton. She was just craving stability really; she hadn’t thought of being a nun before. And she speaks very fondly of her time there; she’s still in touch with one of the girls, who did make the grade. Mum scrubbed floors and washed dishes, learnt dressmaking and knitting, cooked. She says it was God’s way of training her for the job she had to do – i.e. raising nine kids – which is a cool way of looking at it.

  But she was only there for eight months because she too got tuberculosis, and was sent to a sanatorium in Surrey, where she basically spent a year in bed being given injections and tablets, painting and reading Agatha Christie books. Her brother Joe visited her once, the only visitor she had the entire year she was there, because she was so far away from everyone. After that she was moved to a sanatorium near Fleetwood, and was discharged just before her 21st birthday, desperate to get home to see her dad, who was ill. He was never the same after my nan died. He married Jane because he wanted Mum to have a mother again. He later died of a heart attack – his heart had been weakened by bronchitis, most probably from the decades of stoker work, but his death certificate did indeed state that he died of a broken heart. It actually said that.

  Shortly after that was the time my dad, still an errand boy cycling around Fleetwood for the Co-op, saw Mum walking down the street and fell off his bike, hurtling everyone’s vegetables all over the road. Maybe it was the surprise of seeing her again after she’d been away so long. Poor Alf, with his crush on my mum, yet to properly meet her. She didn’t even see him fall off that bike, carried on walking, oblivious, while he scrambled around on the ground. Apparently he said to one of his friends, ‘I’m gonna ask that Patsy Dutton to marry me,’ and they told him he’d better stay away or her brothers would get him. But he wasn’t frightened of anything, or anybody, Dad.

  They finally met a few months later, ballroom dancing at the Marine Hall. The big bands used to play there, Joe Loss, Edmundo Ros, Mum used to go with her brothers. And Dad impressed her with his dance moves. He’d taken the doctor’s advice and had been to dance school. He won medals for his dancing; I’ve got them. He cut in while she was dancing a quickstep with someone else. ‘I heard this “Excuse me,” he tapped this other kid on the shoulder, and we’ve been dancing ever since,’ says Mum.

  Her dad met him at the garden gate. Alf had come along to ask her for another dance the next Saturday, and he ruffled his hair, gave him a slap, and said to her, ‘He’s a good lad you’ve got there. Don’t make a fool of him.’ And she said, ‘Alright, Dad.’ And she married him, three months later, 31 March, 1954. They had a ball. Fleetwood was thriving, great butchers and bakers, fresh fish, no trouble, lots of fun, lots of dancing. Mum was working as a housekeeper for a pretty wealthy family called the Prestons, and wanted to leave to start raising kids. Mum and Dad always wanted a big family. But she didn’t know how to tell Mrs Preston she was leaving, so Dad went and told this woman, ‘You don’t pay her enough and you don’t treat her well enough and this is the last time that she’ll ever work for you.’ And that was that.

  Dad got a job at the b
ack of the docks building two enormous cooling towers, since demolished, that everyone in Fleetwood called Gert and Daisy, after a comedy duo who were big radio stars at the time. When Mum was in hospital having Joseph – my eldest brother, their first baby – someone shouted up to Dad, who was sitting on top of one of the towers, legs dangling over, eating his sandwiches. He shouted, ‘Alf, you’ve got a son,’ and Dad threw his sandwiches in the air and slid down the ladder, feet either side, and bombed it down to the hospital. He was such an Action Man, my dad. He never used to open the garden gate, he just used to jump over it. He’d grab the top of the fence and jump over, like he was Starsky and Hutch. And he always cleared it. I never saw him fall once.

  They finished building Gert and Daisy, and Dad’s mum told him to get a job at the ICI factory, to get a better wage, and he did. Mum wasn’t overjoyed to have her husband working at a chemical plant. And he did get gassed a few times there. We nearly lost him a couple of times. He was working with chlorine gas, and sometimes there’d be an explosion and the gas would escape and he’d inhale it. He said it was like an elephant standing on your chest, he couldn’t catch his breath. He was hospitalised a number of times. And there was no compensation back then, just, ‘Get back to work.’ He once saw this fella stealing mercury from the factory and shoving it in his bicycle frame. What the hell he was doing with mercury, who he was selling it to, I don’t know. Making a lot of thermometers? They found him out because as he was cycling through the factory gates, the bike was so heavy he fell over, and couldn’t pick it up again. And the staff went over to help him and they found this mercury.

  Dad’s legs were always really rough because he used to work with powder that burnt his skin if it came into contact with sweat or moisture which, naturally, it did all the time. At least his bad feet got considerably better, those dislocated ankles of his, because Mum insisted he had an inside piece put on his heels to support the inner foot. And all the dancing was helping. One night every week they’d get a babysitter and go to the Catholic Club in Thornton for a dance with another couple. And he was a bit of a flirt, my dad, but a harmless one. It was just in his nature, he was a chatty guy. He loved people, he loved everybody. He’d say, ‘I’m just going down town,’ and would return with stories of all the people he met. The wife of this other couple they were out with one night saw him talking to a friend of theirs and said to Mum, ‘Look at Alf, he’s flirting with that Alice over there.’ Mum said, ‘Yeah but he’s taking me home tonight.’ As she puts it, he made ladies feel like ladies. And all my sisters were his princesses.