The early days of UK Alternative Comedy… with Alvin Stardust?

Vivienne and Martin Soan breakfast in Leipzig

Yet more memories of the early days of British alternative comedy, this time from Vivienne and Martin Soan who run the Pull The Other One comedy club in London and Leipzig.

People say if you can remember the 1960s, you were not there.

Perhaps the same can be said for the early days of alternative comedy in the 1980s.

“He was a black cab driver,” Martin began.

“An Afro-American?” I asked.

“No, he was the driver of a black cab,” said Martin with, I thought, a hint of weariness.

“Anyway,” said Vivienne, “what he used to do was drop off comedians as fares. That is how he got to know all the clubs and then he started doing open spots himself.”

“He came on stage,” said Martin, “and all he had was a glove…”

“He was naked?” I asked.

“He used to come on stage,” said Martin with, I thought, a hint of weariness, “fully-clothed and wearing a glove. It was a pastiche of sorts of…”

Alvin Stardust & his glove – or maybe it was Michael Jackson

“…Alvin Stardust,” said Vivienne.

“…Michael Jackson, I think you’ll find,” said Martin.

“Anyway,” said Vivienne, “he had a glove with studs all over it.”

“Rhinestones,” said Martin. “Rhinestones. He didn’t really have an act but he had rhinestones and, at some point, he would get a CD played and he did some sort of naff Michael Jackson…”

“He just used to stand and stare at people,” said Vivienne.

“Yeah,” said Martin. “He was bad. Every now and again, depending on where he was in London, he used to drop off his fare, run into a comedy club and say Can I do an open spot? Very often, they’d tell him to Fuck off! because they’d seen his act before. But me and Vivienne were doing this gig…”

“No,” said Vivienne, “I don’t think you were there, Martin…”

“Oh no,” said Martin. “I wasn’t.”

“I told you about it,” said Vivienne. “It was a feminist gig at the time of Women Only and I was playing with a band called Sax Machine in a pub called something like The Pied Bull in Camden”

“Islington,” said Martin.

A black cab racing through London with no sign of any glove

“Angel,” said Vivienne. “It was very well known. All the people in there were women, but some of them looked like blokes.

“Oh! I was playing with a band called the Nine Bent Bob Notes or something like that. And suddenly this guy stormed in and he looked slightly confused as his eyes went round the room and he felt there was something different but couldn’t quite work out what. He got onto the stage, got his glove out and practically got lynched by all these women shouting Get off! Get off! He shot one look at me – because he knew me – pleading with his eyes but, like Judas, I turned away. He literally got dragged out by his feet.”

“He stopped performing,” said Martin, “and we all forgot about him – he was a flash in the history of alternative comedy. But, years later, I was coming out of somewhere and – a very rare occasion – I had some cash and flagged down this black cab in fast-moving traffic. It screeched to a halt and the cabbie yelled Jump in! Jump in!

”I warned him: I’m going South of the River.

“Brilliant! he shouted. You don’t remember me, do yah!… I’m The Glove! I’m The Glove!

“He took me all the way home, god bless ‘im,” said Martin. “I asked him: Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?

“Nah, he said.

“How much do I owe you?

“For you, nothing. Just remember… Tell them – You got in a cab with The Glove! You got in a cab with The Glove! and he screeched off down the road. I’ve never seen him again.”

“And all that,” I said, “had nothing to do with Alvin Stardust.”

“Well, it was Alvin Stardust’s glove,’ said Vivienne.

… MORE ABOUT THE GLOVE IN MY NEXT BLOG HERE …

What the taxi driver told me about the prostitutes and the criminal families

It was exactly fourteen years ago today.

It was in the very early hours of Bloomsday – the 16th of June.

I had flown back from Rome to Stansted on Ryanair.

Delays on the flight back to London had escalated to the point that I only narrow managed to get the delayed last train out of Stansted to Liverpool Street station… but, by the time I arrived there, I had missed the last tube train to Kings Cross.

This is what happened, as I wrote it in my diary when I got home:

______________

A few of us followed the signs for the taxi rank at Liverpool Street station – temporarily by Platform 15 – arriving just as a taxi picked someone up. No other taxi appeared. After about ten minutes a British Rail man, who must have seen us on the security cameras, came and told us taxis would not be coming to the rank because it was after the last train. But, if we went and stood outside the Broadgate office development they stopped there.

“Don’t go to the ones on the left,” he told us. “They just hang around to rip people off. I know the bloke who runs the scam. Turn right where there’s a real rank.”

Sure enough, outside to the left there were about six black cabs with men hanging around looking hopeful. We went to the right and waited while taxis circled: some passed, some stopped and took the first person in the queue, some asked for people going in specific directions.

When I got to the front of the queue, a cab drew up and the driver asked if I was going north; I said yes – either to Kings Cross Thameslink for the next train (in about 2 hours) or, I asked: “How much would you charge to take me to Borehamwood?”

“How much are you offering?” he replied.

“Thirty quid?” I suggested. (I knew it was about £25 on the meter from Heathrow.)

He paused, then said, “Alright,” almost with a shrug, as if he didn’t care.

The cab driver was short but broad and had hooded eyes which he blinked slowly in the mirror, as if he was aware of controlling them. He said he didn’t specialise in stations or in any particular area and he’d always worked nights because it was more interesting. Like many a cab driver, he fancied himself as a bit of a philosopher.

“People have two faces they wear,” he said to me through the glass, “and the one they put on in the wee small hours of the morning – in the dark in the night in a cab – is their real one. No-one ever puts on their real face at work, do they? I mean, I do, because I don’t care – people can take me or leave me. But people show the real person they are when they’re in a cab and it’s night and they’re talking to the back of your head.”

He told me he had been looking for anyone going north because he had someone to pick up near Camden in 90 minutes.

He eventually told me that he was involved with two ‘escort girls’…

“I’m not their pimp or anything,” he said, “I don’t get involved in that side at all. I just drive them to places and I’m around if they have any trouble. I don’t wait around while they do whatever they do, but I stay fifteen minutes after I drop them off and I’m there fifteen minutes before they’re going to finish.”

The girls, he told me, charged £300 per hour for a minimum four hours. If they were only wanted for an hour, they would still get four hours pay. Some other girls charge £1,000 per hour with a minimum four hours.

“I didn’t even ask what they did the first two or three months. I mean, I knew – I’m not stupid. But it’s just business. I do it for the money. They pay me a decent amount – if they paid me less, I wouldn’t do it – and they give me a bonus if I sort out any trouble for them. I’m not tied to them. It’s not like they keep me or anything.”

The two girls he knows are not just on ‘call-out’; they often arrange parties with other girls for what he called old age pensioners – old men – mostly Jewish and Asian old men, he said, many retired, he said, who can afford it.

“They specialise in…” the taxi driver told me, “…what they specialise in.”

“After a couple of months,” he said, “one of the girls asked me if I could sort out any problems that came up for them. I said I preferred to sort things out by just talking to people but, if I had to do any more, I was OK on that.”

I mentioned there used to be a brothel in the countryside just outside Radlett (next to a Little Chef restaurant which has since been demolished). It had occasionally been mentioned in the local paper. They even reported when it finally closed down: the madam had decided to retire.

“It seemed a strange place to run a brothel,” I said.

The cabbie told me there still was one in Radlett. But, he said, I’d be surprised how much use is made of big country houses at weekends.

“Lots of parties,” he said.

I mentioned I had heard Xxxxxxx Xxxxx and his friends had had a big party at a hotel near Tower Bridge when they were planning the alleged £800 million ATM robbery and they’d brought in British Airways stewardesses for the party. The driver said he’d heard it was Virgin stewardesses.

We agreed Xxxxx was a clever man.

“I mean,” said the cabbie. “He doesn’t need to do any of that for the money or anything.”

The cabbie said he had heard Xxxxxxx Xxxxx had been involved in some made-to-order insurance robberies. The owners of the houses agreed with Xxxxx that burglaries would take place and specific very valuable insured items would be taken. After the robberies, the owners would be given back the main items; the burglars would keep some relatively unimportant minor items; and Xxxxx would split the insurance money with the owners. There was never any problem getting the insurance pay-out because there really had been a robbery.

I said I had read that one of the five youths allegedly involved in the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence was related to a well-known South London criminal family but I did not know which one.

“Oh,” the cabbie told me, “One’s a member of the Cxxxxx family who are related to the Lxxxs – they’re gypsies. The gypsy families are very violent.” He said all five of the Lawrence ‘suspects’ were ‘well-connected’. When I got home, I looked the names up in a couple of very thoroughly indexed books: the Cxxxxxs go way back to the days of Jack Spot in Soho, but there was no reference to the Lxxxs. None of the Lawrence defendants have the surname Cxxxxx, though they could still be part of the family.

Perhaps the cabbie was making it up. Perhaps he was repeating a new urban myth. Or perhaps it was true.

He told me he lived in Hastings with his wife, but was only there at weekends. During the week, working in his cab, he stayed at a flat he had in Potters Bar, just off the M25.

He said he got regular work out of ferrying the two girls around and it filled in the gaps picking up fares in whatever area he took them to. This explained why, unlike other cabbies, he did not specialise in any particular area of London.

When I got home there was an e-mail from Tara TV asking me if I could go to Dublin to do some work for them. I thought about how much the world had changed since James Joyce wrote Ulysses about Bloomsday in 1904.

But then I thought Maybe it has not changed at all.

Cabinet minister Chris Huhne and the convent-raised comedian

I mentioned in a recent blog that comedian Charmian Hughes was one of the first small intake of six girls at Westminster Boys’ School. The person who suggested she go there was her childhood chum Chris Huhne now (well, at the time of writing he still is) a Government Cabinet Minister. He is currently having a spot of bother over claims by his furious estranged-wife that he got her to accept penalty points for speeding when, in fact, it was (reportedly) he who was driving the car.

“I was driven in a car by him,” Charmian tells me. “He used to have a London taxi in his gap year before university. He must have been 18 and drove it to Turkey. But, alas, he didn’t take me to Turkey… Alas.”

He did give Charmian her first snog though and, back when Charmian first knew him, his preferred mode of transport was pedal-powered. She was about 10 when the two of them used to ride their bikes through a South Kensington mews. “It was such a genteel area,” she tells me. “The neighbours shouted at us because they found it a bit threatening and noisy.”

“His family were always extremely kind to me,” she says. “His mother – an actress – was the first person ever to take me to the theatre. It was The Mermaid Theatre. I think Marcel Marceau was miming something or other. Chris’ family were nice to me when I was persecuted by my own family. His mother said I was very artistic and special whereas my own family said I was twisted and strange because I wrote poems.

“When he was in the Sixth Form, he started a school paper called The Free Press for London-wide free distribution and didn’t have enough paid adverts for the first one, so the first edition was in danger of looking very bare and amateur. His friends were all making up ads he could stick in. I was about 14 or 15 and I wanted to impress him like mad and I remember we were sitting in a tube train on the Circle line when I suggested: How about an advert for Madame Hughes, Maison de Plaisir with my mother’s phone number? That would be good!…

“I didn’t really think he would do it, but he did. I forgot all about it until one day the phone rang. I picked it up and a husky male voice said: Is that Madame Hughes? My blood ran cold, my stomach sank. I was terrified my mother would hear me talking to the man on the phone and I whispered: It’s all a ghastly mistake. A joke. I’m a school girl. The man was very understanding and rang off. My mother was and is a terrifying person with a terrible raging temper.

“The next phone call was from a tabloid newspaper reporter investigating ‘the schoolgirl brothel’. My mother answered. I heard her Medusa-like voice shrieking and threatening and the reporter scampered away never to ring again. When I told her what we’d done, she summoned Chris round.

“Are you going to sue me? he asked in his most sophisticated timbre. Sue you? my mother sneered, A silly stupid little arrogant schoolboy like you? You must be joking, but I’m going to speak to your parents…”

Charmian’s first snog was with Chris Huhne when she was around 15 and he was around 17.

“I was at a convent boarding school,” Charmian tells me, “so it was hard to cop off.

“Later it was Chris who suggested I went to Westminster Boys’ School, but,” she adds dolefully, “by the time I’d got there, he’d left. Once he was at Oxford I hardly saw him. He was a very glamorous and sexy figure. We all adored him. He was brainy and cool and sophisticated. I think he only snogged me to put me out of my misery.”

Then she adds mysteriously:

“I also gave Frank Skinner his first avocado.”