ABSOLUTELY SWEET STEVE HARLEY

By this stage, we had have been working for Steve Harley, for nearly three years. This was something like our eighth tour with him, and by this stage we had got it down to a fine art. Even when you're only flogging T-shirts and magazine, there's still an enormous amount of planning to go into a road trip which could last anything up to a couple of months. This particular jaunt was only going to last for a couple of weeks, but leaving aside my hidden agenda, the precarious finances of my household dictated that we would have to bring at least 300 quid home with us if we were going to survive over the next few months. We had to pack an enormous amount of stock as well as our clothes and sleeping things, and the burgeoning supply of second-hand records, which we were determined to swap for more and more books to add to my ever-growing Fortean library. Finally, that day of the tour dawned. We kissed Lisa goodbye, patted the dog on the head, and headed off in our battered and rather ancient Ford Transit van up the A30 in search of adventure.

I look back at this particular tour as being probably the peak of the time that I spent on the road with Steve Harley. His performances on this tour were transcendent - possibly the finest rock music that I have ever heard. He had a particularly fine band that spring, and the set lists effortlessly mixed old and new songs together to produce two-and-a-half-hours of peerless entertainment. At this time, Steve and I were friends. I had managed to break through the barrier which separated fan from friend, and in the long hours before sound checks, and when the technical people and the backline crew were doing their own inimitable thing, Steve and I would often talk. He told me about the early days of his career - when as a young reporter on a Colchester newspaper he dreamed of forming a rock band, which would be a glorious mixture of the Beatles, Marc Bolan, Bob Dylan and his own peculiar vision. He told me how once, tripping on acid, he had seen an old tramp in the park, and how he when their eyes met had been inspired to write one of my favourite of his songs  - Tumbling Down. We often talked about our own tastes in music - particularly Smokey Robinson and Bob Dylan, and on one unforgettable occasion he strummed at an acoustic guitar and we sang You Really Got a Hold on me rather badly - but in some semblance of harmony - together. He also told me how - in the days before Cockney Rebel had got their first record contract  - they had recorded some demos, mostly of their own songs but also Bob Dylan's glorious Absolutely Sweet Marie.

It was a song that could have been made for Harley's nasal, estuarine drawl, and all tour I had been badgering him to try his hand at singing it again. Harley always refused, but our long and rambling conversations would continue. He had always been my biggest influence as a musician and as a songwriter, but it was on this particular three weeks sojourn in the provinces, that he taught me everything that I know today at about the way that the media works. He was in a unique position - he had been both a journalist, and the target of journalists. He had been the hunter and the hunted, and he had become an expert at beating the media at their own game. Although he had been my favourite pop singer since I was 14 years old, it was only on this tour that he became my mentor - joining Gerald Durrell as somebody who upon whom I had modelled my life. Looking back over the last 10 years, one can see both Harley’s and Durrell`s figurative fingerprints writ large upon the way that I have run the CFZ, and indeed my life. Neither man was a saint. In both their cases their feet of clay are sometimes spectacular, and I see know that I have inherited some of their bad points as well as some of their skills. But if it were not for these two men I would not be where I am - or who I am - today.

I lost my old tour diary notebooks years ago, so am unable to recount exactly where this tour took us. I remember playing Bolton, I remember playing at least two shows in the north-east, and I know that at the end of the tour there was an extraordinary performance in Glasgow. I suppose we must have played of the cases, but after a gap of more than a decade, I'm afraid that the nuances of individual gigs are now lost in the mists of time. For me, after all, the highlights of that tour was always going to be the show in Aberdeen, because this was the show after which we were going to drive to Loch Ness.

I remember Aberdeen as been a particularly strange place. It was completely made of great, grey, blocks of granite. It was quite a stately town, but as Paul drove us down the main street, all I could see out of the window where these huge buildings like mildewed cathedral walls towering above us on either side. One thing, which I found most peculiar, was the fact that although it was a Friday night - and as everywhere on Friday night - gangs of young men roamed to the streets looking for beer, girls, and trouble – not necessarily in that order - in Aberdeen they did so wearing immaculate pin-striped suits. It was almost as if a convention of five or six thousand juvenile delinquent bank clerks had picked this particular night to go on the razzle.

We were late arriving at the venue an

d we assumed that the soundcheck would have been over hours before, and be was surprised to see the distinctive for figure of Steve Harley pacing up and down outside the backstage entrance with an impatient frown on his face. As we pulled up he flashed just a mischievous grin and disappeared. We unpacked the van and went inside to set up a stall. We had only been there a few minutes, when Roy - the impossibly thin, and very elegant sound man - strode menacingly out into the foyer to find us. With a stern frown on his face he told us that Steve wanted it to speak to us urgently and immediately. My heart dropped. The look of panic and consternation on the faces of my wife, and our two companions told me that they were thinking exactly the same as me. What the hell had we done? Our sins were not a very serious ones, but we had never actually asked permission to use concerts as a venue to swap second-hand records for books on cryptozoology, and nobody had ever sanctioned my completely unofficial flexible guest-list policy which had allowed various friends, cronies, and associates of ours to get into the shows for nothing. Maybe this was it and maybe the game had run its course. The four of us walked into the auditorium convinced that we were about to be sacked. However, as soon as we set foot into the cavernous room, the stage lights flashed on, there was a shout of "one-two-three four" from Steve - centre-stage - and the band leapt into a frenetic tune that seemed oddly familiar. Then Steve started to sing:

" Well, your railroad gate, you know I just can't jump it

Sometimes it gets so hard, you see

I'm just sitting here beating on my trumpet,

with all these promises you left for me"

Steve Harley was singing Absolutely Sweet Marie just for us.

It was a magical moment. To paraphrase P.G Wodehouse, the sight of me dancing is enough to make one re-evaluate the concept of man as the pinnacle of God's creation, but dance I did. It was probably the only time in my adult life when music are managed to inspire me to uncontrollable terpsichorean excess. All four of us danced, but I was like a man possessed...

Well, I waited for you when I was half sick

Yes, I waited for you when you hated me

Well, I waited for you inside of the frozen traffic

When you knew I had some other place to be

Now where are you tonight, sweet Marie?

It is very difficult to describe this magical moment. On one level it was merely Steve doing something nice for a bunch people who had been working for him, and following him on tour for several years. However on another level - for me at least - it was something far more magickal. At the risk of sounding like an old hippy the experience itself was so affirming that it gave me the inner strength which I knew that I needed in order to carry out my - entirely covert - tasks which lay ahead.

"Well, anybody can be just like me, obviously

But then, now again, not too many can be like you, fortunately."

Back in those days I still believed that somehow rock music had healing vibes that were going to save the world. Looking back from a far more rational, less drug-addled, and far more cynical viewpoint, I am more than a little embarrassed to admit this. However, as far as is possible, I'm making this memoir an honest one, and I am sure that to some readers a belief in the healing power of music is no more bizarre than some of the ideas about surrealchemy and ritual magick that I was to pick up from Tony Shiels only a few years later.

We continued to dance. Steve continued to sing and it was as if he was somehow channelling the spirit of something far greater than all of us. We were all dancing, but I was whirling like a dervish - it was as if I was a man possessed. As I span round and round, images of the deep, dark, water of Loch Ness filled my inner eye. Steve Harley, his band, and my three companions may well have been in a purpose-built local council leisure centre in Aberdeen, but I was somewhere far stranger.

Well, six white horses that you did promise

Were fin'ly delivered down to the penitentiary

But to live outside the law, you must be honest

I know you always say that you agree

But where are you tonight, sweet Marie

Bob Dylan's arcane wordplay was a perfect counterpoint to the visions I was seeing as I danced. As Steve spat out the lyrics in a gloriously vitriolic estuarine howl, I was chanting the words of Aleistair Crowley's invocation. As the band thundered to a climax and I spun around and around like a gyroscope on methedrine, I could see the dark waters before me parting and the great head and neck of an antediluvian creature looming up before me with its eyes ablaze and its mouth open.

Then...........

Suddenly it was all over. Steve grinned at us and Roy ushered us out into the foyer where we continued setting up our stall for the evening.