Alfie Read online

  It was a pretty safe working environment except for the time I nearly got blown to pieces. There was an engine room where they tested out engines. They’d mount an engine on a plinth, and the exhaust would fire into this steel box. There was a brick box around the steel box, and a huge chimney with an Xpelair fan to take the fumes out of the building, and we always used to know when they were testing these engines because it made an unholy racket. They used to scream, those engines. One day they fired one up when I was right next to the box. I was masking up a door, and they hadn’t turned the Xpelair fan on, and within seconds of my brain registering that something sounded odd, the engine backfired and there was an almighty explosion. I was a foot away from this steel box, which burst like a balloon, bricks flew everywhere, and I got hit, thrown about 20ft. I grabbed the door I’d been working on to shield myself and bricks were smashing into it, one smacked my leg. The door was practically destroyed. One brick whacked a guy on the side of the face. There was a huge ball of fire, flames everywhere, incredible. And the foreman, Mike Penny, said, ‘Come on, get back to work, don’t piss around. Things like this happen, get off the floor.’ Didn’t seem to give a damn about anything except turning the cars out. Now you’d get sued. I’m sure I damaged my eyes, because I had to wear glasses for a bit after that. Nice work if you can get it.

  Turning those cars out was clearly a big deal to Mike Penny, because when I started we were turning out 16 a week, and then they doubled it to 32 a week, but didn’t increase the manpower. So inevitably the quality of the cars went down. They were powerful cars, 5-litre engines, 5000cc engines, proper racing cars. People would come from Manchester and London to buy them, because they looked beautiful, truly stunning. But ridiculously fast. Scarily fast. And it was scary, because I’d finish a car, and we’d see it get driven out of the factory by some 25-year-old kid whose parents had bought it for him. We’d think, ‘That’s gonna be back in here within a week, all smashed up,’ and it was. The front end would have gone, and you could tell if he’d survived or not by the state of the driver’s seat, if that was smashed up too – it was horrible.

  I went out with a girl who worked in the offices there, my first serious girlfriend. Sally Sanders. She was a gorgeous girl, tall, blonde, blue eyes. She used to come round showing customers the factory floor and all that, and I would chat to her a little bit, and I asked her out to see me play in the Battle of the Bands I was doing with Whisky Train. Beautiful girl. But what a witch. Evil. Spoilt as anything; her parents really doted on her. I really doted on her. Whatever I did for her, she’d just take it and she’d want more. I bought her jewellery, spent all my wages on her. A year of that. And I didn’t get anything in return.

  She treated me so badly, she’d shout at me so much, she was so cruel. The last straw was when she started complaining about our Annie. I was singing in a competition at a cabaret club called Talk of the Coast, in a hotel in Blackpool, which I’ll talk about in a bit, and she said, ‘I really don’t like your Annie, she’s horrible.’ Our Annie’s salt of the earth, but she says what she wants and what she means – she doesn’t hold back. She won’t say anything to intentionally upset anybody, but she speaks her mind, which I think is really admirable. She’s lovely like that. I can’t remember what conversations she’d had with Sally, but when she said that, that was it. And I finally got over my infatuation with her.

  She was the first torment in my life. It was awful – I couldn’t cope with it all. When I finally finished with her she wrote me an 18-page letter, which I didn’t even read, because Mum said, ‘Don’t read it, don’t read it, because you’ll just screw yourself over. You’ll go round and round in circles, you’ll be back to where you were, and she’ll keep tormenting you.’ And she was right. I started reading it. ‘Dear Alf, I think it’s really unfair that . . .’ and I couldn’t handle it. I threw it in the fire.

  Chapter Eight

  GETTING THE BUZZ

  Regardless of my Lottie Dawson débâcle, it had at least given me a buzz, given me the bug. I wanted to sing, I wanted to get on stage again, I wanted to pull more girls. I looked around, found and joined a company called Thornton Cleveleys Operatic Society, just outside Fleetwood. We did Oklahoma, and the only move I had to do through the whole show – the dancing thing has been the bane of my existence, I could never dance – the only move I had to do was cartwheel over a haystack. And I tried, and I failed, landed flat on my face, in the middle of the show. Complete wipe-out, it was pathetic. But while I was with that lot the conductor, Frank Salter, asked me if I’d go down to the opera company he ran, Preston Opera, with a view to performing in their next production. So I sang to him round the piano and he said, ‘You’re a tenor. I want you to join the tenors’ chorus.’ That was the first time I’d really sung any opera, and certainly the first time I’d been told I was a tenor.

  Preston Opera was an amateur company and I was only in the chorus, but it was my first real opera work and I really loved it. It was music I’d not sung before and it was a release, really fulfilling to realise I could sing like that. I did a couple of operas for them, Il Trovatore and Carmen in the Charter Theatre, and they were simple productions – you basically walked on stage, stood there and sang, walked off. But it was interesting to develop that side of my singing, because I did start to push myself a bit with it, the singing and the acting. Frank was giving me half-hour singing lessons every week, helping me out vocally. I was gonna do Nabucco for them too but I had to skip out on it because by then I’d started working on my apprenticeship at TVR. I was about 18, 19, wanted to work, wanted a career, and I thought I’d better stop with all the singing because it was taking up too much of my time and I wasn’t really considering doing anything with it, it was just for kicks. So I packed it all in, the singing lessons, the opera company, and just worked in the garage, on my trade, to try to make a success of it, thinking that that was all I had in my life.

  But something wasn’t right. To a certain degree I’d really thrown myself into my work at TVR, but I quickly got sick of riding there on my bike every day, sick of the same trudging, sick of painting cars black. I was always singing around the factory, along to the radio and all that stuff, and they loved it. Sometimes, obviously, Mike Penny would hear me singing and he’d say, ‘Stop fookin’ larkin’ around, Alfie. Get on with your fookin’ work! Stop your fookin’ yackin’ and polish a few cars!’

  ‘Sorry, Mike . . .’

  And one morning I was cycling to work and I got this thing in my head where I felt, ‘I need to do another show.’ Something inside me had just ignited. I just needed to sing again, to perform. Anything. And the only person I knew who I could talk to about it was an old friend from the Thornton Cleveleys Operatic Society who I’d been in a show with. I spent the entire day thinking about it, and I sped round to her house on the way home and asked if she knew of any companies that were looking for people to join a show. She said, ‘Yeah there’s a company in Preston who are going to do a production of West Side Story. Why don’t you come along next Friday night?’ So I went along, borrowed my sister’s Mini, and immediately joined the company as one of the Jets, I don’t think they even heard me sing. All the lads there were complaining because they hadn’t been given the opportunity to audition for the principal role, Tony, because, amazingly, it had already been given to this 40, 50-year-old fella who was the local star of amateur operatics. He was always the lead role of the company, so nobody else really had a look-in. But they were making such a noise about it, the musical director Philip Wooley said, ‘OK, alright. Stop all your bickering, stop all your arguing, we’re gonna hear you sing. Everyone, all the lads get in the back room now, let’s sing “Maria”. You all know it; bring your scores.’ So we all went into this back room and started singing. I’d grown up listening to the Johnny Mathis version, seeing my sister Maria getting so elated by this beautiful song really irritated me. It haunts me now when I sing it live. She fancied herself as Stevie Nicks, Maria. She sang that so
ng to death, that and ‘The Power of Love’ by Jennifer Rush: unbearable. So I knew ‘Maria’ all too well and started singing it with the rest of the lads.

  There are two ways you can do the bit towards the end of that song. You can either keep repeating the name Maria over and over again, or just sing it once on a huge high note which takes you over the whole phrase. And that was the only version I knew, to hold that top note. So all the other lads were repeating the name Maria, Maria, Maria, over and over again, and I hit this note and held it. And when I came off the end of the note, everyone else had stopped singing. I didn’t realise because I was so into the song, I’d just carried on. And when I stopped, the musical director asked everyone else to leave, and he asked me to stay and sing some more. And he offered me the role of Tony. The other guy had never even turned up to rehearsals, assuming the part was his. So I did it. We did a full week, seven shows, again in the Charter Theatre. It was wonderful, it gave me an amazing buzz, and that was really the performance that told me I could do something with this, despite my dismal attempt at an American accent. I was getting a lot of advice from members of the cast, people telling me I should audition for things, to go and study at the Royal Northern College of Music. That was the first time I started to seriously consider singing as a career.

  At the same time I started drumming for the backup bands in the Blackpool working men’s clubs. I wasn’t drumming in rock bands any more, I’d had my fill of Whisky Train, but I lived over the road from a keyboard player who worked the club circuit, and I hooked up with him, had a go drumming with him in the Blackpool Central Working Men’s Club. And it was hilarious, drumming for these 70-year-old women who thought they were Tina Turner. A lot less melodrama on that scene, none of the ridiculous teen-rock politics, and you got paid, £20, £30 a night – it was good money. In the big clubs you could get £40 for a session. Every night there’d be a singer, a keyboardist and someone like me on the drums. They’d give me the music but I couldn’t read dots, so I’d ask them what the songs were and learnt them pretty quickly. Got them all locked in my memory. The amount of times I drummed along to ‘Simply the Best’ by Tina Turner. So many times. ‘Please, not “Simply the Best” again.’ Tom Jones’s ‘Delilah’ was wheeled out the wrong side of regularly too.

  And I started mixing it up, I wanted to try singing to those crowds too. So I entered a competition in Talk of the Coast – the night I had my upset with Sally Sanders about my sister – I sang some stuff from West Side Story, and Buddy Holly’s ‘True Love Ways’, and I came second. It was a pretty major thing for me to perform in front of an audience like that. I’d never really played a Blackpool crowd, or even a club crowd. And it felt like I was doing something productive with my singing, taking it to another level, or somewhere at least, somewhere that might lead to something exciting. Talk of the Coast is a weekly cabaret night in the Viking Hotel, which back then was compèred by a fella called Georgie King, who ran a little agency with Stu Francis from Crackerjack, the kids’ TV show from the ’80s. Stu was a really nice guy, very funny. I couldn’t believe I was hanging out with Stu Francis from Crackerjack. Crush a grape. ‘I could rip a tissue. Wrestle with an Action Man.’ Georgie was a dodgy bloke though, bit of a shark; you never knew if you could really trust him. But they put some good nights on, and they wanted to be my agents, not that they could do a heck of a lot. They did get me involved with a local folk band called The Houghton Weavers, who started in the 1970s and are still going. They were a good band, played some really cool songs, back in the ’80s they had their own regional BBC TV series called Sit Thi Deawn. I’d go and see them every year at the Marine Hall with my family. They used to put on charity celebrity golf tournaments, which were fantastic, and also involved good piss-ups. Georgie and Stu got me a spot singing at their cabaret nights in the evenings. I did that a few times throughout the summer season, lots of fun.

  Those Blackpool clubs could be pretty miserable. Backstage would be a little room with a mirror and a single 25-watt bulb swinging from the ceiling. Dodgy curtains that had been there for decades, smoke-stained walls. Beer-splattered carpets. Always smelt of beer. Stale beer. And you’d walk out onto the stage and be engulfed by a cloud of cigarette smoke. Lights right there in front of your face, really close to your head, so hot, practically burning your face off, and the same old colours every time, reds, blues, greens, tangerine-orange. Those clubs had aspirations to be like Las Vegas, which was ambitious. It was hardly Sinatra at The Sands. Old geezers with their dyed comb-overs, satin shirts unbuttoned down to their belly buttons, big fat beer-guts, medallions and sovereign rings, gold chain bracelets. Little grannies with no teeth sitting in front of you, smoking their cigarettes, just staring up at you, people talking throughout. But I got good responses from those crowds, and it was bloody good training for me because you never knew what was going to happen while you were singing. Fights breaking out, something landing on the stage, a glass swinging past your head, drunks coming up to you on stage. I did a bit of musical theatre, and because it was that sort of audience I did a lot of ’60s ballads, Buddy Holly, couple of Elvis songs, some Sinatra. And I was really enjoying that scene. I got to meet loads of the old comedians and celebs. One night when I was singing at Talk of the Coast, Little and Large were on the bill, coming on after me. I finished singing and the audience were going crazy, and those two were backstage, about to go on, and as I walked off Eddie Large leant over to me and went, ‘Alright, we fookin’ heard ya. We fookin heard ya.’ Nice.

  I loved hanging out with the comics though. Billy Pearce was around a lot. I met Frank Carson at a charity gig in Blackpool – he lived around there. Great comedian and a sound fella, really nice guy. He gave me probably the best bit of advice I’ve ever been given in my career. He said, ‘Alf, the only bit of advice I can give you, son, is when you’re not working, rehearse. Whenever you’re not working, practise, train, study, rehearse.’ And I’ve always stuck to that, from that day on that’s what I did. I found songs, I learnt the songs, I found the lyrics and I practised performing, practised my stagecraft. How to handle an audience, how to work the crowd. It was an incredible bit of advice and I respect him and thank him for that. I remembered that moment when he died a few months ago. Thanks, Frank.

  These were old-school comedians – they’d done it all, the whole business. They’d done the shitty dives, played The Royal Variety, the lot. They’d been up there at the top and way down there at the bottom. They’d been cheered and booed. They knew every side of it, every bit of that world. And when you meet somebody like that all you can do is try to get as much information out of them as you can, or as much advice as you can. Frank was a comedian, not a singer, which is a completely different ball game, unless you find my singing hilarious, but it’s still performing, you’re still up there on stage working with an audience. And that’s there in the way I handle myself on stage today, the way I involve the crowd, the jokes, the inclusion. I always try to have fun with it all. You know, you can take the man out of Blackpool . . . So that was something I really respected him for, that little bit of advice. And that cabaret scene was a big deal to me. You could be up with a comedian who was on telly the night before in London, big names. I was in the factory spraying cars all day in my overalls, then putting on a shirt and trousers and getting up on stage and singing my heart out – it was a real escape. It gave me a taste of what I could turn my life into. Every time I sang I just got more and more thrilled and overwhelmed by the response I was getting from the audiences, and I wanted it more and more.

  Chapter Nine

  OFF TO THE OPERA

  People in the TVR factory would talk to me about my singing, because I was always belting something out while I was working, much to Mike Penny’s annoyance. Customers who’d seen me in West Side Story would ask if I was going to be in more shows. Workmates who’d gone to see it told me to stop wasting time spraying cars and go and take up the singing somehow. One customer, who had some involvement in th
e record industry, was very emphatic about it. He heard me singing as I was polishing his car, and we started talking. I told him what I’d been up to. He told me to get down to London and audition for a company called D’Oyly Carte, which didn’t mean a lot to me. D’Oyly what? Who the hell’s a D’Oyly Carte? ‘If you want it to happen you’ve got to get out of here. That’s where it’s gonna work for you,’ he said. I’d been looking out for local opportunities in the ad section of The Stage and Television Today, this trade paper that came out every Thursday, and as I was going through the job sections that week – cruises, auditions, male dancers for Cats – I saw this advertisement: ‘D’Oyly Carte Opera Company,’ as the customer had mentioned. They were holding open auditions in London for their next UK tour chorus members, and I went to the factory with it playing on my mind all day, spurred on to do something about it. I had a lot of time to think when I was working on that job. Your mind tends to wander when you’re just squeezing a trigger and pointing paint for eight hours.