For about the first seven years of my professional career, the BBC refused to trust the Attractions or any other groups to play their instruments on most of their pop shows, citing “technical problems” to excuse their incompetence. Due to Musicians’ Union rules protecting session players who had performed on hits, we were all supposed to re-record our singles during a three-hour studio session and then mime to that recording.
In reality, the charade worked like this: we’d arrive, set up, and the engineer would busy himself with bogus preparations. At this point, a promoter would suggest taking the union rep to the pub. By the time they returned, suitably refreshed, the rep would be presented with a new version of the song, which was of course simply the original dubbed on to a spool of tape.
It was an incredible waste of time and resources. Very occasionally, a teetotaller would be sent to oversee the session; or, simply out of perversity, we’d record a new version – speeding up the tempo or changing the arrangement, adding an unexpected drum break just for mischief, none of which endeared us to the director, who would have lined up his shots according to the original record.
The whole process of appearing on Top of the Pops had more than an element of school antics about it, as pop musicians were barely tolerated in Television Centre. The main excitement was the chance of encountering the Legs & Co dancers in the hallway. They were long-suffering and more than able to swat away the attentions of various spotty herberts. Then there was the sport of taking the piss out of rival groups by standing behind the cameramen and trying to put them off their cues. We’d watch Generation X and, when we sensed Billy Idol was about to leap up and strike a rocker pose, we’d all jump in the air half a beat ahead.
Following rehearsals, there would be the sport of trying to get into the BBC club and get drunk enough to enjoy ourselves on stage later that evening. At the door, there was a uniformed commissioner who sported an impressive handlebar moustache and a chest full of medals and ribbons. He guarded the entrance as if his life and the empire depended on it. By the time I’d enjoyed a fistful of subsidised gin and tonics, my ability to mime our record became questionable. For the first few appearances, I tried memorising the order of red lights that indicated the active camera, staring down the lens, looking suitably intense or manic, until someone pointed out that I looked bloody stupid.
Not perhaps as “bloody stupid” as I looked when I traded in my £7 suit for a succession of terrible pop star threads. During my “Pop Star Period: 1978-79” I was a fashion disaster of checkerboard eyestrain. I wore powder-blue and pink suits, turquoise lamé jackets and pointy red leather Chelsea boots, but I usually appeared pretty glassy-eyed and shiny under the hot studio lights. No wonder the girls all swooned.
If we couldn’t make it on to a TV pop show, they might show one of our cheaply produced video clips instead. These were usually filmed with a fish-eye lens, giving me a more bug-eyed appearance. My head seemed triangular and my feet appeared tiny, while the director would have quickly discovered that I could walk on the sides of my ankles.
That was a trick I’d learned at the hands of a vaguely sadistic doctor. When it was determined that I had flat feet as a child, I was first told I would never make it in the army. Then I was taught to pick up a ball of socks with my feet like a monkey and walk on my ankles to strengthen my arches. I even had my feet placed in bowls of water, through which the doctor ran a mild electric current. It was the kind of treatment that would now have you arrested for child cruelty. Soon it became my calling card, like a comedian’s catchphrase. A hotel clerk in Stoke once challenged me to prove my identity. “If you’re him,” she said, “do the funny legs.”
Things reached new heights of absurdity when I arrived to perform I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down and was met by what looked like a circus strongman holding a length of stout rope. Our promo man, Spanner, gently persuaded me to don a pantomime harness so I could be hoisted up on a wire and down again, right on cue with the title line from the chorus. This was the kind of entertainment licence-payers were demanding from the corporation back then.
Two things stood in the way. One was the holes the hooks of the harness would have to punch in my favorite thrift-store trousers, and the other was my fear of heights. A trip to the BBC club took care of the latter: by the time I returned to perform, I wouldn’t have cared if I’d been asked to wear harem pants or Bermuda shorts. I was a rubber man, so when the harness returned me to earth, my legs buckled under me. I suspect that the cameraman was already doubled up with laughter, as he completely bungled the shot.
It can’t have been entirely accidental that almost every appearance on Top of the Pops caused our record to go down the charts. Once the audience got sight of us, they liked us a lot less. During one performance, the director ordered the cameraman to frame Pete Thomas in a tight close-up, as we had done in the run-through, only this time our tipsy drummer pulled a goofy face into the lens and played the final drum part on his head.
When taping ended, a stern voice came crackling over the public address system. “A representative of the Elvis Costello group” was summoned to the foot of the iron stairs leading to the production gallery. Being the only vaguely responsible person on hand, I presented myself at the headmaster’s office. The producer emerged, apoplectic with rage, and attempted to give me a dressing-down for Pete having ruined the illusion of a live performance. I shut him down immediately.
The drummer from Tight Fit had got up during the middle of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, walked forward and bent over – so his bandmate could beat out a marimba solo on a keyboard printed on the arse of his loincloth, while his drums magically continued to play. The shattering of illusions was the least of their problems.
The BBC preferred us to go through the motions in studio rather than screening Evan English’s unusual video for I Wanna Be Loved. It’s one of few such short films that I really like. Evan placed me in what appeared to be a photobooth in Flinders Street station in Melbourne. The record was played, but my voice was also heard singing along with it softly, as various people entered the frame from each side to kiss my cheek or whisper in my ear, beginning with a small child and continuing with a cowboy, an elderly couple, and various actors, models and freaks.
The effect was both unsettlingly comic and rather upsetting. Not knowing what was coming next and being so far from home during the final unravelling of my first marriage, I found that the experience of shooting repeated takes was my undoing. My tears were not glycerin. The I Wanna Be Loved clip was one of the few occasions in which the surrealism of miming conveyed any real emotion.
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