Redemption Song

I wrote this about Pete and Kev about three years ago, before the new incarnation of Dexy's got together.  But, what with them winning a Q Icon Award, it seemed appropriate to post it now. 

Redemption song

It is 1982. I am at the school disco, a party at the village hall or at Cinderella Rockafellas in Gloucester. I have sat out as Duran Duran have been down to Rio, Spandau Ballet have gone in search of Gold, but then there is that familiar opening three beats on a drum and bass before the fiddle kicks in and everyone, me included, gets to their feet and heads to the dance floor, because Dexy’s Midnight Runners are being played. Me, yes, I always preferred the earlier, harder sound of Geno and Dance Stance, but it is 1982 and everywhere, but everywhere is the sound of ‘Come on Eileen’, its infectious Celtic melody getting under our skins and making us dance!

It is 1992. I am in Dudley, at a party in the summer back garden of a friend. I am being introduced to a man I have never met but somehow feel I already know. He has about him an easy, calming charm that I am drawn to and want to know more about. I offer him a cigarette, he accepts and I ask him how he spends his time. ‘I’m a musician’, he replied. I probed a little further and discovered that he was the bass player in Dexy’s Midnight Runners. I didn’t quite drop to my knees, bowing and chanting ‘I am not worthy’ but I did say ‘wow’ and ask him more. Pete Williams joined the Dexy’s in 1978 and was an integral part of the first incarnation of the band that recorded ‘Searching for the Young Soul Rebels’, one of the great albums of the Twentieth Century. He had played Top of the Pops more times than he could remember and had very, very much enjoyed being a pop star. Then, at the back end of 1981, exhausted and skint, three quarters of the band walked out on Kevin Rowland, the front man of the band because his ego had just gotten too big. Kevin quickly assembled a new line up of more compliant musicians and set about recording a song that the old band had been working on for a few months. It was called ‘Come on Eileen’.

Pete was the single most talented man I ever worked with, and for six short years, was also one of my best friends. He was a brilliant performer and a wonderfully creative partner on a variety of shows that we wrote, produced and toured during the middle of the decade. In the car on the way to gigs, or in the hotel afterward, I would always get him to tell me again about what it was like being a pop star and he would patiently tell me stories I loved to hear. But his tales were always tempered by a certain unspoken, gently burning resentment, especially of Kevin who had engineered the politics of the band so that only he, Kevin Rowland, made any money. ‘Geno’ in particular, although not in the league of ‘Come on Eileen’ had been a massive hit single, the album too sold very well and there were Greatest Hits packages and other compilations that should have seen Pete doing very well out of mechanical, if not publishing, royalties. He never got a penny and spent years living only just above the bread line. There had been talk of lawyers, but he had been advised that success in the courts would cost him as much as he was likely to receive in back payments, such was the Byzantine nature of the tangle that would need to be unravelled. But despite his reservations and an itch at his core, he never openly bitched about Kevin, never really complained about the fact that he had seen no reward for his efforts. Rather he chose to remember the laughs and the drugs and the girls. But his eyes gave him away.

It is 1999. I am living in Brighton. I have recently returned from America and am building a new life on the south coast. There is no room for people from my old life so, on the way back on the ship, I had ripped pages and pages out of my address book and threw them into the Atlantic Ocean. Pete’s was one of them. There was no bad feeling, just an acknowledgement that it was time to move on. And then, somewhat surprisingly, I find as I am in a seaside café having an all day breakfast, that I am sitting at a table next to Kevin Rowland. I am gripped by an overwhelming desire to push his face into his soup, only bringing him up from his tomato choking to ask him just what he has done with my mate’s money. I know the answer of course – he has shoved it up his nose- for it is a well documented fact that Kevin had a serious cocaine problem, but nevertheless I wanted him to know that I knew that he was a thieving little shit. I was furious: all the controlled resentment that Pete had looked after for nearly twenty years was having its expression in me. I didn’t do anything though. I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him very hard in a way that meant ‘I am not staring at you because I know who you are, but because I know what you are.’

It is 2003. I am standing at the front of the crowd at the Warwick Arts Centre. On stage are Dexy’s Midnight Runners and it is the final song of the night and they are singing ‘Come On Eileen’. On the left, Kevin, in a pin striped suit, and there, on the right, amazingly, is Pete. During the introduction to the song, he looks down and sees me. He gives me a lovely, big smile, his eyes light up and he mouths ‘Dave!’ and gives me a thumbs up. The band has been touring for a few months and they are tight and hot and everyone is dancing. Pete is as brilliant as ever (he is actually a much better singer than Kevin) and he is plainly having the time of his life. And then, half way through the song, Kevin starts to busk some lyrics and he sings. ‘It’s twenty one years since I sang this song, but now I’m back again to right all the wrongs.’ When they walk off, they have an arm round each other’s shoulder and they are smiling and I realise that something redemptive and good has happened: the power of forgiveness is so much bigger, so much more joyous and good than that of bitterness and resentment.

The next day, Pete phoned me and as he sat around on a coach waiting to go to Finland for the last leg of the tour, he told me how it came to be that he and Kevin are once again sharing a stage. ‘He phoned me out of the blue’, said Pete. ‘He said that he was very, very sorry and that he would like to try and get the original band back together to record some new stuff and go out on tour. He knew what he had done was wrong. It’s nice to be able to sing ‘Eileen’. I never got the chance first time round.’

It is 2009. I am at the Village Hall Christmas Party. ‘Come on Eileen’ comes on and everyone gets up to dance. Me included. Our friends and neighbours smile as they dance and I look at Helen and I smile as we dance and I remember Pete and Kevin smiling at each other at the end of their redemption song.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBmKYS8fOFo


David Izod December 2009

Does anyone have a contact for the Farrelly brothers?

I ask, because if you do, you might consider sending them the following as a treatment for one of their forthcoming films. I swear every single word is true.

Last Saturday afternoon, I started to feel a bit peaky. I was tired and listless but put this down to having had rather a good lunch with my brother in law and a few glasses of a rather excellent Provencal rosé. And I had spent a hard week decorating the living room, working pretty much non- stop from 7.30 am to 8pm so I forgave myself for dozing, somewhat rudely, on his sofa. I felt no better when I got home however and by the time the poker players arrived at 7.30pm I was starting to realise that this might be a bit more than just tiredness. I was feeling, well, ill.

I knew I wasn’t well when I started to lose money. I don’t lose money at poker. By 8.30pm I was in for £120 and couldn’t seem to find a way to get back into the game, so I sat quietly not really taking much notice of the cards, feeling steadily worse and worse until a little before midnight. At that point, I got up, poured myself a glass of water and suddenly felt as cold as Titus Oates did about an hour after he popped out. I sat down and immediately began a full on rigor: my teeth and jaws clattering like a train over tracks and my body going into spastic shakes. I have to say that this did not unduly bother me for it is my standard reaction to infection. As soon as the bugs bite, my body temperature shoots up and I shake like a bastard until my anterior hypothalamus catches up, works out just what the fuck is going on and re-sets itself.

That said, the blokes round the table took a slightly different view. I looked up from the A/9 off suit I had just been dealt (my best hand for hours) and saw a look of fear and bewilderment in their eyes. They had obviously never seen anything like it and were not at all convinced that this was not the immediate precursor to my death. ‘Are you all right?’ said one.

‘No. Feel like shit. Let’s play cards!’ I replied, and, bless them, they did, even though for the next hour I continued to sit amongst them – or rather move amongst them for my convulsions were so severe at times they thought I was going for a walk – and make a variety of rather terrifying noises. I am pleased to say, by the way, my A/9 held up and I won back £98 of my money.

The next day a couple of texts arrived. They went like this:

‘So glad you didn’t die. Jo wouldn’t have let me play again if you had.’

‘I was all for beating you to death to put you out of your misery, but they talked me out of it.’

It’s poker. You expect it.

By Sunday, it was obvious what the problem was: I had picked up some kind of infection in my lower gastric tract and I was really, really suffering. Fortunately, the Gods of sick had decided not to give me the both ends treatment but throughout Sunday and Monday it was impossible for me to be more than five seconds away from the bog, which was fine by me because to be honest I felt so disgustingly wretched that I only wanted to be in bed anyway. Feeling only a bit better on Tuesday, by which I mean I was now sometimes as much as an hour between my rusty water boarding, I decided that I ought to go to the GP to rule out anything major, so I made an appointment.

Before I go on, there is one contextual detail you need to be aware of: anything of detail less than six feet away from my face becomes progressively more blurry the closer you bring it until anything requiring fine motor skills close up also requires halogen lighting and precision engineered optical assistance. To assist me I have two pairs of glasses, one at work, and one at home so that I should never be without a pair. Needless to say however, that the ones at home are always upstairs when I am downstairs and vice versa.

So, it is Tuesday morning and Helen is going to drive me to the GPs. I trundle downstairs, still stinking from three days of the most profuse sweating, and drop myself into the passenger seat of the Peugeot. As we drive away, Helen says to me: ‘Have you got the sense to be able to listen to an instruction?’

I nodded.

‘I’m going to drop you off after your appointment but go straight on to take Isabelle to Toddler group so I need you to do a really simple thing for me. You know it is Dad’s birthday tomorrow?

I nod.

‘Well I have made him a chocolate and hazelnut swirl cake. I need to ice it later and I am going to use up that chocolate fondant icing I made too much of when I made Isabelle’s cake. There is a freezer bag of it defrosting on the draining board. All I need you to do is decant it into a bowl and put it into the fridge when it’s ready. Is that all right? Can you do that?’

I nodded.

At the GP’s, the nice young lady (all of 16), re-assured me that I just had to ride it out but said that just to be on the safe side she would like to collect a stool sample, for which she passed me a small pot. I examined it to discover it had an aperture about the size of polo mint and contained a small shovel/spoon thing that would have been most useful for any Borrower who wanted to knock up a bit of concrete.

‘Best pop to the kitchen and get a ladle’, I said, ‘It’ll be more use’.

‘Try with that.’ She said.

Returning to Berry Cottage, (Helen having duly driven off to take Isabelle to her Toddler group), I realised that my timing had been impeccable. I had managed to avoid any unpleasantness at the Dr’s but the hour (make that ‘five seconds’ for that was all the notice I was getting) was at hand, so, armed with my Borrower’s trowel, but not with my glasses for they, as usual, were on the wrong floor of the house, I plunged into hell.

What happened next was recorded by seismologists. Indeed, there were some that thought that that thing under Yellow Stone Park that has been threatening to go pop for forty thousand years had finally blown, that a generation of Pacific North Western Americans had been wiped out and the planet was in for a period of serious climactic change. I actually heard my neighbour in her garden say, ‘What on earth was that?’

I simply cannot begin to describe the volume, the pressure nor the stench, and given that I had had my hand ‘round the back’ (having realised that the trowel really was of no use whatsoever) in the hope of directing something into the absurdly small pot, the direct hit on my hand and the splash back on my undercarriage meant that I was, frankly, in a mess. I looked at the tiny hand basin in the down stairs loo and realised that it was of no use to me whatsoever, so I shuffled out of the downstairs loo like a half blind penguin, trousers and pants round my ankles ,my arse, my hand, the pot and most of my clothes covered in shit. I shuffled into the kitchen and thought,

‘I’ll use the sink. It’s nice and big and I can sit in it. I just need lots of clear space to work. Now what’s that on the draining board?’


David Izod

Fat

There are many things about modern life that I am afraid I don’t understand. My lack of comprehension is not borne of stupidity, old age or any other such state: rather I don’t understand some things because they are simply beyond understanding. For example, I don’t understand why people enjoy Formula One, I don’t understand why people like horses (except to eat, which is an experience I have never had but which I would like to try) and I don’t understand why there is a massive multi billion pound industry surrounding human beings wanting to lose weight. The reason I fail to understand the last of these is because there is a very, very simple equation that is within the grasp of even the most stupid of stupid people: if your calorific output is greater than your calorific intake, you will lose weight. If the reverse is true, you will put weight on.

Now it is true that there are fine tunings that can take place within this: some foods are more likely to be stored as fat, it is better to eat bigger meals earlier in the day etc, but the simple truth remains that when the Allies liberated the Nazi Camps at the end of the Second World War, the people they found that were left alive were thin to the point of emaciation. This was because they had had very little to eat for three or four years and had been working very, very hard throughout the same period. Strangely, there were no fat people who had trouble with their glands.

I say that I fail to understand, but in truth, that is not the case. I do understand why there is a diet industry, I just despair of the fact that there is. I understand that what people want is for someone to make it possible for them to continue to eat doughnuts and have a size 10 figure. I understand that people want to eat and eat and then take a pill and have all that food just simply disappear. And, of course, we are moving towards a situation where that is likely to be possible. This is being driven by the Americans of course who can’t countenance the possibility of their consumers actually consuming less, so what the boffins are doing is synthesising a drug that will make it possible to be fat and still very, very healthy. Years of research demonstrate that over-weight people are more fertile because mother nature understands that there is food for all and allows for a population explosion and the fact that the fatties are inherently unhealthy doesn’t matter because the genes have done their job in making sure that there is another generation of carriers to take their place. The same research shows that people who are just slightly under-weight are likely to be much less fertile (not enough food to go round so mother nature does not allow for more mouths to feed) but are likely to be super-healthy: all available nutrition goes not into fat storage, but into keeping all vital organs in the peak of condition to ensure the survival of the gene carrier until such time as there is plenty of food again. Inevitably, what the American scientists have decide to do is not to educate a nation into eating less, but rather to synthesise a drug from the hormones released from slightly underweight people. This drug will be available in pill form and will fool the brains of fat people into thinking healthy thoughts.

All that, so a nation of fatties can carry on eating doughnuts.

I mention this now, because I have lost a stone and a half and I am proud of myself. I have lost a stone and a half since Christmas through a simple process of removing 3500 calories a week from my diet, which means that I lose one pound of excess stored fat per week. This will continue until my reduced body weight requires fewer calories to fuel itself and I will reach an equilibrium, hopefully somewhere around fifteen stones. This will mean my total weight loss will be a smidge over two stone and I will have done something that I have never managed to achieve before without massive emotional trauma (divorce is a great way to lose weight).

I don’t wish to sound sanctimonious and I am not saying it is easy - I had to stop drinking alcohol on three days a week for heaven’s sake! – but the fact is, that like giving up smoking – losing weight is an undertaking that is entirely within the grasp of absolutely everyone.