Copyright © 2005 Martin Newell Pepys 0.1 Blogware © Steve Dix
He stands gawping straight at the camera, mouth open, his eyes fathomless pits. It's somewhere in Paris in late April, 1990 and it's nearly time to come home to England and face the music. He's 37 years old and the game is up. His last band broke up when his musical partner joined New Model Army. A couple of weeks earlier, there'd been a traumatic row at home with his partner and her two teenage kids. There'd been a lot of shouting, during which time his own dog had bitten him. In his despair he'd thrown some stuff into a pannier, got onto his bike and then taken a train down to Brighton to see his good friend Captain Sensible.
A few beers, a bit of walking around and a nice chat with his friend and he'd calmed down a bit. The next Saturday morning, he was thinking about heading back to Essex. But it was the Captain's birthday. "I don't suppose," the Captain said, "That you fancy coming out to France with us?" The record company was doing a bit of a promotion, you see. TV Smith and his band, Captain Sensible and the label manager, Andy McQueen were going to Paris. There would be photos, the odd press interview and a week's live residency in a club just off the Pigalle. Oh, and he'd really love Montmartre, where they would all be staying. Since Martin's band, the Brotherhood of Lizards, even though, it had just broken up, had a new album on the record label, did he feel that he could come out and do a few live spots? They could borrow or hire some gear. There wouldn't be much money but there'd be lots of beer, a really reasonable hotel and, the Captain warranted, it would probably be a frightfully good wheeze. We wouldn't have to go by plane or anything. As a matter of fact, there was a nice little ferry from nearby Newhaven, to Dieppe, followed by a spring breeze of a train journey across Normandy, right to the heart of Paris itself.
In those pre-terrorism days, Martin Newell would easily get himself a week's temporary passport from the Seven Dials post office up the road. His two pieces of ID consisted of his Network Railcard and one of his early album covers. That was all he had. It was all it took.
Half an hour later, on a bright Saturday morning in April, he was standing by Sensible's bed, on which he'd thrown the new passport, saying," Happy birthday, Capt. Against my better judgement, I've decided to come!" Much jollity followed by a read of the paper, a long wait for Sensible to get out of the bath and the inevitable trip down the shops ending in a visit to the pub. No contest really, was there? Go home to patch up the row, followed by a wobbly future which would alternate between making yet more demos for people who probably wouldn't listen to them, whilst doing a gardening round, in order to pay the rent. Or: one last blaze of glory in a foreign city, with some thoroughly personable punk rock oiks?
Now there was all this. Look again at the photo. There were no drugs involved. He'd packed all that malarkey in years and years ago. No. This is a picture of a man who's probably drunk rather too much cheap French beer, and has simply had rather too much of an exhilarating time. He has also been completely hypnotised by Paris in April. Everything that everyone had ever said about it was true. He has played his little heart out, every night and sometimes during the day too. He's been in brilliant company. He's been absolutely spoiled by the French people, who've made a great big fuss of him, when he most needed it. He was feeling less than worthless when he left Essex, nearly two weeks ago. Now he feels valued – liked, even. And having done an afternoon gig in a fabulous Fifties-style rock cafe, the world is his friend. He is high, if this doesn't sound to trite, on life itself. He's also completely exhausted, lost in his own world and probably, if he only knew it, on the edge of a mental breakdown.
"You were definitely unbalanced for a while, there." his friend Sensible would later admit to him. Rock life, though, for now anyway, is coming to an end. There's no road there. Nor, however, is there any road back.
When he finally does get home, he will sit at the front room table talking candidly with his partner. She will ask him, rather penetratingly," How much longer, do you think you can keep doing this?" (She means, trying to kick down the door of music biz success) . He will reply. "Christ, I dunno. But I've got some ideas..." She is quietly outraged at this and says: "It's been years, now. It's almost destroyed you. They keep knocking you down. And yet, you just keep getting back up again!" She is incredulous. He explains that he has some contacts. Good friends, who might help to manage him. And anyway, he'd been on telly a lot the last few months, hadn't he? That had to be worth something. He could start again. He still had £150 left. He was going to spend it on phoning people, and seeing people and if, in a couple of weeks, he hadn't made any headway, he was just going to give it all up, put his instruments away– except for maybe one acoustic guitar and be a gardener again. He would be happy being a gardener. He would be sane. What did Confucius say? "If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a year, get married. But if you want to be happy for the rest of your life, become a gardener."
Quite right too. Three weeks later, with the money gone and everyone who'd promised to help, now having let him down, blocked his calls or simply vapourised, he was finished. No royalties were due. The tour was not going to happen. Every positive lead had dried up. There was nothing. He came back from his last futile trip to London late one sunny afternoon in May. He went purposefully upstairs to dismantle his studio and store all the effects units and instruments. He put everything away, as he had promised himself that we would do. In an hour or two, he'd turned the tiny former sail-loft into a room for reading and writing in. It no longer looked like his recording studio. Now he went downstairs and put the lid down on his piano. He placed books on it. It was symbolic. He'd done with the music biz. He'd bloody well had enough. What a mug! Twenty years of rock'n'roll and what had it come to? Well, he was going to be a good gardener. They couldn't hurt him there, drive him mad, tell him that there was money when there was none. They couldn't tell him that they'd do this or do that for him, when they'd actually done nothing. No-one would be the guv now, apart from him. At least he'd be happy now.
In the ensuing few months of being a lawn dog and hedge-cutter, however, how little he really knew. Within a year, he'd have done his first gigs as a performance poet. He'd have had his own first little collection of poems I Hank Marvinned issued. Captain Sensible, John Cooper Clarke and another old friend, Howlin' Wilf– now better known as R&B star, James Hunter – would all be at the launch. He'd have had his pop poems published in a national broadsheet. He would have been on national radio and appeared on TV. It was all only was just only around the corner. But – and you must first go back to that spaced-out photograph taken by a French rock photographer – Martin Newell, the man in that picture, has no idea that any of this this will happen to him. For it is the yet-to-be-revealed denouement in a story which goes right back to May of 1975, when quite another earlier pop life came to an end. Now read on.
Triple brandies all round. You know I don't often do this sort of thing. But yesterday, two months after following my commissioning editor's suggestion to submit for the EDF/ East of England Media Awards, held in a large hotel on the Essex/ Hertfordshire border, I found myself being presented with the gong for Columnist of the Year. It was a triple whammy because our photographer, Alex Fairfull got the photographer gong and our editor in chief Terry Hunt then collected the Best Daily Paper award for our own East Anglian Daily Times..
This was not some self-created awards ceremony. The people there were mostly hardened TV working news journalists, editors, producers and photgraphers, all of whom had been judged by a gimlet eyed panel in our capital city. To get an award is great. I think. Though, I don't know because to date I haven't had that many. To get one from your fellow professionals is just the best. The competition was stiff too. There were some really impressive entries. Our photographer commented on this.
For me to go to into this large conference hall in an international hotel had initially been like trying to get a dog into a bath. Several people needed to gently persuade me that it might be a good idea. I'm glad I did it. And you don't know how you're going to react when this sort of thing happens. You think.you'll be cool, witty, diffident. When my name was called out, I was actually like a rabbit caught in headlights. No amount of previous stage experience can prepare you for such a thing. Good job there wasn't a microphone near me, because I;d definitely have done a Gwyneth. I went up onstage in a kind of daze, had my snap taken and went back to my table mouthing the words: "F***** Hell!" followed by "Wow!" Then I sat there, completely numb for twenty minutes..
A weird twist of fate: While rooting around in a cupboard, before Christmas, I found a 25 year -old forgotten diary there from 1985. In it at the time are entries about my life as a broke 31 year old musician. A record deal cancelled and a part time washing-up job.All of this against a domestic backdrop of a large run down house during very cold winter. I was physically run-down too. I see from another entry that I'd made an appointment with a doctor. Things have to be bad for me to go that far. Having been published for the first time in The Guardian six months earlier, I was desperately entering writing competitions, and writing letters to various people, asking for work. On Saturday 9th of March, I see I'd written letters to The Guardian, Channel 4 the BBC and The East Anglian Daily Times suggesting ideas, and with the latter, asking if they'd be interested in a small regular column about my region. Ten days later on March 19th, I received a rejection letter from them. Times weren't good. About 23 years later on, they changed their minds and took me on as columnist. That's the thing about us country folk, we can take a while to think about things. Funny old game, innit? Yaaay!
An emotional Ms. Paltrow accepts her award
Among you taking notes, as ever, I did find it extraordinary the effect that last week's winter weather had upon the general populace. It was interesting, for one thing, because of the news which we didn't get. The climate change doom-mongers were oddly quiet. Nobody, so far as I know, wrote in to say that various botanical species were blooming far too early, or that the birds were already laying eggs. Flu scares abated too, the folk wisdom being that a good winter will 'kill off all the bugs'. We've just had a very good example of a season doing exactly what it says on the tin.
The spectacle of people inching cautiously along the town pavements as if they'd just undergone some particularly embarrassing surgery was a common one. The pavements were indeed tricky to negotiate. One sentiment expressed was that this was the council's fault for not gritting them. The gritting teams, in my area at least, actually did very well under the circumstances, as did our bus-drivers. To have kept the main roads as clear as they did and to have run a bus service too was pretty impressive. Even the local trains, mostly, seemed to work. But the pavements were a problem. So, with snow having set in by Wednesday morning and having a bit of spare time, I decided to do an experiment. I went out with spade and yard broom and cleared most of the pavement on one side of my street. A helpful council worker said that I could go and get a bucket of grit from a pile behind the council offices if I wished. So, after I'd cleared, I gritted. A couple of hours work left me glowing, limbered-up and, as with gardening, I found the work strangely satsifying, since I could see where I'd been.
In Germany, it is not the government's job to clear the pavements, it falls to the citizens. They are required by law if it snows, to clear the pavement outside their house and that of their neighbour's too – if the neighbour is elderly or infirm. The responses of passers-by while I was sweepng and shovelling, varied. The most common reactions were: “Thank you.” or “You're doing a grand job.” Often, too, people stopped to talk. Two or three people said that I was taking a risk, since I could: 'be liable if someone fell over'. I'm pretty sure that this is nonsense, and anyway, it would be interesting to be prosecuted for clearing snow, because in such an unlikely event, I would probably appeal and then, drown my opponents in all the circumfluences of a European court.
My snow-clearing, which continued for four consecutive mornings, was to maybe plant the idea in other's heads that they, too could be doing such a thing. If this were to happen, and everybody just cleared the area in front of their house and perhaps, one of their neighbour's, our pavements would all be traversible. I later heard the distant sound of shovels, though, usually, it was only people trying to dig cars out of their drives. One heroic neighbour, though, off his own bat, took a wheelbarrow and gritted a large part of our sidestreet – which is on a hill. The pavements, however, mostly stayed snowbound with fresh snow mounting up on hard-packed ice. The same people who would probably complain about Nanny State's interference were now miffed that Nanny hadn't personally turned up outside their house with a shovel. With so many people off work, my point, I suppose, is that if you're not doing anything else, you could probably give it twenty minutes or so outside with a brush each morning. You soon warm up, it's not hard work and it's cheaper than using Wii-Fit .
In my local Co-op store, meanwhile, which did its valiant best, despite late-running supply lorries, I stood for some time behind a woman in the queue who'd just bought three loaves and what I estimated to be about a gallon of milk. She laughed: “Well, that's my bit of panic-buying done, I can go home and watch telly now.” Now I waited while she had six Lottery tickets processed and all those of her neighbour's too. Naturally, despite regular if late-running deliveries, the shop's shelves were regularly stripped of milk, bread, eggs and vegetables soon after being refilled again. I allowed for those townsfolk who didn't feel able to drive to Tesco but there did seem to be an element of unneccessary stocking-up going on. A friend of mine said she'd sat with some other people on the bus home from Colchester, all twittering excitedly: “We managed to get some food!” She also learned that those hardier souls prepared to walk a couple of miles up the track had found that the local farm shop was as well-stocked as usual.
Now look, it wasn't a crisis as such, it wasn't climate change, it wasn't the council's fault and nor did Gordon Brown mastermind the whole thing in order to draw fire away from his own predicament. Essex just had a bit of old-fashioned, old money January weather, that's all. In 1963, an older local recalled, the Army had to use explosives in order to blast holes in an iced-up River Colne, just so that the ships could get moving. Now that's an extreme weather event. Can we all do a bit better next time, please?