Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Read online

  ‘Just go down to City Hall, queue up, give them your details, they give you a licence. Then you go to the church, hand in the licence and you’ll be married in five minutes.’

  ‘That easy?’ I said. ‘How much did it cost you?’

  ‘Twenty-eight dollars. If you want a car it’s thirty dollars. Fifty dollars if you want a ring and the car. And sixty-five dollars if you want to be married by Elvis Presley.’ It sounded like Argos. A bit tacky, but at least it was quick and cheap.

  Back in our suite, I took Helen in my arms. ‘Do you want to get married?’ I asked her.

  ‘What, now?’ she said, her eyes widening.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘No.’

  Helen took a step back to be able to look me straight in the eyes. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Gosh.’

  Helen hadn’t said yes, but she didn’t need to accept my proposal. I knew she wanted to get married and that I’d taken her so much by surprise that she didn’t know what to say.

  ‘We’ll have a look tomorrow night,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ Helen said with a look of shocked surprise. ‘We’ll do that tomorrow, then.’

  On 30 April 2001 we took a taxi down to City Hall and for two hours stood in a queue of gooey-eyed couples, each of them holding hands and grinning inanely. Inevitably, it got us talking. ‘Ehh, what’s he doing with her? Will you look at the face on him. She could do a lot better.’ Or: ‘He’s old enough to be her grandfather.’ And even: ‘Is that two lesbians there, holding hands?’

  Eventually we reached an office with a row of six desks. Behind one of the desks, a clerk asked us our names and our dates of birth. We signed an application form, paid the fee and that was it. We were licensed to get married.

  Back at the hotel, I rang George Forster, my manager. ‘We’re getting married,’ I said.

  ‘You what?’ George gasped. ‘Getting married? Well, I couldn’t think of a better woman, but what’s she doing marrying a funny bugger like you?’

  We chatted for a while, then George rang off. A short while later, the phone rang. It was George again. ‘What time you getting married?’ he said.

  ‘Six o’clock.’

  ‘Right. And where will you be before then?’ I thought George was going to send some flowers for Helen.

  ‘We’ll be in the foyer until about quarter to six,’ I said. ‘We’ll have a drink and then we’ll get a taxi down to the little church. We’re getting married at the Little White Wedding Chapel.’

  ‘Oh, right. Well, good luck, then,’ George said. ‘I hope it goes well.’

  Helen and I took our time getting dressed. I put on a white suit with a white silk shirt, a white tie and a white trilby. I thought I looked like a proper Mississippi gambler. And Helen, also in a white suit, looked a million dollars. On the dot of six o’clock, just as Helen and I were finishing our glasses of champagne in the foyer, a little bloke with silver hair and a moustache approached us.

  ‘Chabby, innit?’ he said in a thick cockney accent.

  ‘Yeah?’ I said, wondering what this little east Londoner was doing in the Mirage.

  ‘My name’s Dave,’ he said.

  ‘Er, hello Dave,’ I said, still flummoxed.

  ‘I’m Tom’s driver.’

  ‘Right … pleased to meet you.’ I hadn’t a clue who Tom might be.

  ‘Tom sends his very best wishes.’

  ‘Oh right, right,’ I said, ‘Tom who?’

  ‘Tom Jones,’ Dave said. ‘I’m Tom Jones’s driver.’

  ‘What, the Tom Jones?’

  ‘I’ve got a couple of tickets for the show,’ Dave said, nodding. ‘And I’ve got a limousine outside.’

  Dave drove us to the Little White Wedding Chapel, where we were given the choice of being married by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis or Marilyn Monroe lookalikes. We thought it made a farce of marriage, so we chose the bog-standard wedding – a bloke in a dicky bow. We signed a register, walked into a little room and stood behind a black couple who were getting married before us. The woman must have been forty stone. She was so over-weight that she had to sit through the entire ceremony. The groom was as thin as a rake. From behind they looked like the number ten.

  And then it was our turn. It was over before I’d blinked. In a couple of minutes we went from Roy and Helen to Mr and Mrs Vasey. We posed for a few photographs outside and paid ten dollars for a video. In all, it cost us less than a decent meal.

  Then Dave whisked us in the limo to the MGM Grand Hotel and led us backstage, straight through to the green room. And there he was. Tom Jones. Standing there, sipping a drink, and looking like a proper superstar.

  ‘Hello there, Chubby, how’re you doin’?’ he said. It was a shock. He had a lilting Welsh accent. I didn’t expect him to talk like that. I thought that living in America might have rubbed out his accent, but he sounded just like a lad from the valleys.

  ‘Congratulations to you both,’ Tom said. And he gave Helen a big hug and a kiss. Helen is a massive Tom Jones fan and I could see she was on a different planet. And as for me? Well, I was gobsmacked. I was thinking I was going to wake up any moment. This is fucking ridiculous, I thought.

  Tom opened a bottle of champagne and gestured to a buffet table piled high with a mountain of shrimps and enough roast beef to feed twenty people. ‘I had this put on for you,’ he said. ‘Have something to eat, then I’ll sort out a table for you at the show.’ While we tucked into the buffet, Tom disappeared to prepare for his audience. A few minutes later one of his staff tapped me on the shoulder and led us through to the auditorium where a table was reserved for us centre stage, right at the front.

  The lights dimmed, the band started up and Tom came on. I knew he was good, but this show was amazing. What a voice. And the band! The drummer was something else and the bass player was superb, really loose and funky. From the moment Tom started singing, everyone was on their feet. It was a magnificent show. When the curtain came down we were ushered back into the green room, where a new bottle of champagne had been opened. About a dozen young lasses, all top-class pussy, were milling around. Tom walked across the room towards Helen and me.

  We chatted for a while, then Tom said: ‘The first time I saw you was on a tour bus after a show in Munich. One of the crew put your tape on and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I said: “Who the fuck is this?” Once I realised what you were all about, I was in hysterics. Since then, every year we’ve had your video on the tour bus. My son’s a big fan as well.’

  Tom told me how he’d had a phone call that afternoon from his son Mark, who had been playing golf in Spain with my manager’s son, Michael. Between them they’d hatched a plan to surprise Helen and me with a couple of tickets to Tom’s show.

  We chatted for a while, then Tom left, and Helen and I were left looking at each other, not quite believing what had happened to us.

  ‘It’s telling everybody, isn’t it?’ Helen said when we got back to our room. ‘Who’s going to believe that? Who in their right mind is …’

  ‘If I tell the lads we spent our wedding day with Tom Jones,’ I said, ‘they’ll go “Fuck off! Tom Jones my arse! More like fucking Tom Pepper!” They’ll never believe it.’

  I kicked off my shoes and Helen got straight on the phone to her mother, her sister and all her friends. ‘Just run up the phone bill,’ I said. ‘Aye, go on.’

  She was on the phone for about two hours. ‘You’ll never guess … Tom Jones … and he gave me a kiss … went to his show …’ I could hear the excitement in her voice.

  Tom invited us back to his hotel the next day but I thought it was time to make ourselves scarce. We were grateful for what we got and we’ll never forget it. It’s a memory Helen and I will always share, but I knew we had to recognise the rules. Don’t get too familiar. Celebrities like Tom Jones, they’ve got fifty million in the bank and a whole different lifestyle to t
he rest of us. I’m not in that league, but I’ve learned that money creates big divisions. It’s like the lottery winners who come off council estates and think they’re going to keep the same friends. They’re not. They’ll move to bigger houses next to bank managers, surgeons and lawyers. They’ll lose touch with most of their old friends. It’s just human nature, a fact of life.

  And there was one thing about which we’d been absolutely right. When we got home, many people wouldn’t believe that we’d met Tom Jones and that he’d put on a wedding buffet for us. A few weeks later, I was talking to a chairman from one of the working men’s clubs in Middlesbrough, a club I’d played dozens of times when I was starting out. Like many committee men, he was incapable of believing a word any act would say. He was one of the old school; he had no fingernails where he’d been scratching his way out of the coffin that morning and he couldn’t pay anyone a compliment.

  ‘I remember when I booked you for fifteen quid,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I nodded. It was a familiar refrain, that peculiarly British habit of chopping down tall poppies. And club chairmen could be the worst offenders.

  ‘How you getting on?’ the chairman said.

  ‘Oh, fine, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve just been to Vegas. We got married.’

  ‘Aye.’

  I pulled out a photograph. ‘You know who that is, then?’

  ‘Tom Jones,’ the chairman said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Aye,’ the chairman said, looking at me with all the suspicion of Quasimodo. ‘Were you at Madame Tussaud’s, then?’

  ‘Madame Tussaud’s?’ I said. ‘That’s the real fucker, you daft old bastard. That’s Tom Jones, one of the biggest stars in the fucking country.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ the club chairman said. ‘Well, you didn’t do very well when you last played our club.’ And then he walked off.

  Aye, I thought. Welcome to the big time.

  Sitting in Dr Martin’s surgery that afternoon, trying to come to terms with having cancer, it felt as if I’d come a long way since the days when I was at the total mercy of club chairmen. A lot of it had been fun, but just as much had been a hard and unpleasant struggle. Now, thanks to Helen, for the first time in my life I had true happiness. I was financially secure and the work was going well. The gags were flowing, the material was good and I was working on my music in my studio. I felt on top of my game and the future looked rosy. But right then it looked like everything for which I’d worked so hard and for so long was going to be taken away from me. I’d come a long way and suddenly it seemed all in vain.

  On a Saturday afternoon, three months before the end of the Second World War in Europe, not far from a bomb crater that marked the site of what two years earlier had been a factory warehouse, a scream pierced the air and I took my first gasp of Grangetown’s filthy air. Born on 3 February 1945, I first saw the light of day in the main bedroom of 78 Broadway, a two-up, two-down council house at the end of a terrace in the shadow of a steelworks that belched stinking fumes and dark smoke all day, every day, over the poorest and roughest of Middlesbrough’s run-down suburbs. The milk bottles on our doorsteps were always covered in dust and you couldn’t hang out your washing on the lines. The fumes from the coke ovens choked us and turned brass doorknobs blue. The air seemed to be permanently cold and damp. Even on a summer’s day the sun would be blocked out by smoke and clouds of dust. And at night it would never really be dark because of the eternal glow of Dorman, Long & Co’s steel furnaces and coke ovens at the end of the street. In fact, it was impossible to escape the steelworks. The streets were named after the pioneers of the steel industry, men such as Bessemer, Vickers and Laing. And if you looked beyond the streets to Middlesbrough in the west or Redcar on the coast in the east, steelworks, petrochemical plants and slag heaps stretched right across our horizon for twenty-eight miles along the south bank of the Tees.

  Of all Middlesbrough’s industrial suburbs, Grangetown was the most isolated. Boxed in by the massive ICI chemical works and the North Sea to the east, the steelworks to the north (and beyond the steelworks, by the foul Tees river) and the Cleveland Hills to the south, the only way out was through a tiny subway that cut under the railway tracks running all along Grangetown’s western edge. More than 12,000 people lived in those enclosed few square miles, all of them working class, all living hand to mouth, and all white. I didn’t see a black or Asian person until I was in my early twenties. And neither did anyone I knew. That was just the way things were back then.

  Recently I went back to Grangetown and it’s even more desolate now than when I was a kid. Back then, Grangetown was known as Cardboard City on account of the many rickety buildings and prefab constructions that dotted our neighbourhood, but Cardboard City is no longer. Most of the terraces have been demolished, leaving a grid of deserted streets running through derelict wasteland. Where once nearly 10,000 men worked in steel mills and coke factories, now the most prosperous industries are prostitution and drug dealing. Many streets have roadblocks to prevent joyriding and the street corners are dotted with tall poles with wire shrouds housing CCTV cameras that spy on the residents.

  Grangetown has become an empty, soulless place in which to grow up, but it wasn’t like that when I was a child. Maybe it was the brutal industrial environment, maybe it was the fact that most of us were descended from the thousands of Scottish, Irish and Welsh immigrants who came in search of work at the steelworks after Grangetown was established in 1881, or maybe it was the grinding hardship of a life with little chance of escape, but we were a tight bunch. Everyone knew everyone’s business and we all led a common life. All the kids went to school together, all the dads worked at the steelworks and the mothers washed, cleaned and went to the bingo. The families were large – twelve kids in the McElroy family and the Harlems had nineteen – probably because nobody had owt and there was little for adults to do after work but go to the pub and get pissed or stay at home and fuck each other. Everyone had loads of kids – I used to think it was about survival – which made the Vaseys’ small brood very strange by Grangetown standards. Just my mam, my auld fella, my sister Barbara, and me. Mam was one of the Grangetown Taylors, a well-known family with four girls – Ivy, Alice, Mabel and my mother, Amy – and three brothers: George, Bill and Herbert. George played the squeeze-box and Aunt Alice was such a good pianist that we used to say she could play fly shit. If a fly landed on a plate, we would joke, then my auntie Alice could pick a tune out of the black dots it left behind.

  My mam was a real Hylda Baker, always getting things arse about face. ‘Splash some Durex on them walls,’ she’d say, meaning Dulux paint. She once announced that our neighbour Margaret had gone into hospital ‘to get the contradictive pill’. Fortunately, Mam had a quick wit and could laugh at all her malapropisms. She also always needed to have the last word. When I was older and when my mam’s legs started giving her trouble, I remember the doctor coming to the house.

  ‘You’ve got arthritis, Amy,’ he said. ‘I think what we’ll have to do is get you to do some exercise with your arthritis.’

  ‘Well, what else can we do with arthritis?’ Mam said.

  By all accounts, my mother was a very attractive woman when she was younger. All I can remember from that time is that she wore a pinny and had a perm. I could see that I’d inherited her eyes, button nose and good teeth. However, when the photographs were brought out and shown, other people would make remarks. ‘She stands very well, your mam,’ they’d say and I’d wonder what they were getting at.

  But my mam’s beauty, wit and common sense had little effect on my father. A tall man with a thick lick of dark curly hair, parted down the middle and slashed back, Colin Vasey had only one true passion in his life. He was a good cricketer, he loved his tennis and snooker, and he liked to breed Alsatian dogs, which he sold to the police force, but all that paled in comparison to his devotion to the club. It was his life. He was a drinker and liked his booze, but even more than that he just
loved being at the club. He went to work at half past seven in the morning, the clack of his nailed boots joining the echoing clatter of thousands of workmen making their way towards the belching chimney stacks of Dorman, Long, the steelworks at the end of our street. For eight hours a day, Dad toiled as a chart changer in the dark mill sheds. Each of the sheds was several miles long with a furnace at one end, out of which huge molten steel sheets would come tumbling. Dad would run along the steel every hour, changing the charts that recorded the temperature of the steel as it cooled, until the wail of the factory siren heralded his return at home at four-thirty p.m. He’d eat his tea silently in the kitchen, beside the fire grate where his underpants and socks would be hanging next to Mam’s pies and cakes, then fall asleep in his chair. An hour later, he’d wake up and head upstairs to his domain: the bathroom. Dad was the only family member who got to soak in a proper bathtub. He’d use most of the hot water in the boiler tank, so Mam would fill pots and kettles to heat enough water for my sister and me to wash in the tin tub in the kitchen, with a brick underneath one end to make the water deeper where Barbara sat. After his bath we’d hear Dad upstairs, getting changed. Then there would be a rumble of footsteps as he thundered down the stairs and a bang as the front door slammed. Dad was off to the club in his suit and flat cap, his hair parted in the middle and slicked back with Brylcreem, a Woodbine wedged between his lips like a proper Andy Capp. Come seven o’clock, that was his routine. Every day, including Christmas, New Year, our birthdays and holidays. He’d organise trips for pensioners and kids to the seaside. He’d book acts for the concert room and be a pillar of our local community, while my mam sat neglected at home. At half past eleven, Dad would reappear, always in a good mood, often singing and usually with a wrap of fish and chips, or a packet of crisps and some lemonade, or some other scran under his arm. We’d tuck into it before bed, so it’s no wonder I’m a fat bastard. It’s the way I was brought up.