“HOW I BECAME
 A CRUISER”

HOW ALAN CLAYSON ACCEPTED AN INVITATION TO JOIN THE BOYS WHO BACK THE MAN IN BLACK...

After a decade as a working group, Alan Clayson and the Argonauts, in which I was chief show-off, played its final date - as ‘special guests’ to the Nashville Teens at the Half Moon, Putney on 20th January 1986. By then, we were over, a memory, a tattered news­paper clipping. However, there are a few people around who’ll tell you that we were the greatest group that ever walked the planet.

I thought so too, and, after a full-page Melody Maker article in 1976, I’d spent the next two years expecting to be on Top Of The Pops next week in a sweep of events that involved more live dates than could possibly be kept, a Radio One In Concert and headlining at places like the Marquee, Amsterdam’s Melkweg and any number of university hops. Among those second-billed to us were what later became the Eurythmics.

The underside of these marvellous achievements was that, though I was ‘in a premier position on rock’s Lunatic Fringe’ (Melody Maker), I was running a provincial operation from the phone box down the road. All I could promise an Argonauts in constant flux was a more glorious tomorrow. When it didn’t come, our van turned into a traveling asylum as ears strained to catch muttered conspiracy.

After the issue of a godawful one-shot single on Virgin - against my better judgment -a voyage to a lower circle of hell began. Yet there was always enough to feed hope. An Exeter-based independent label put out a Clayson EP, and an album, What A Difference A Decade Made, got rave reviews in both Folk Roots and The Observer. Nevertheless, to quote from Tony Hancock’s suicide note, ‘things seemed to go wrong too many times.  The morning after we played before an audience of twelve in High Wycombe, I received an agitated call from our road manager to say that, while he was loading up, £500-worth of borrowed equipment had been stolen.  

Among existing contracts to be honoured was a support spot to Dave Berry. As far as I ever had boyhood heroes, he’d been one of them since he burst from Sheffield into the mid-1960s charts, notably with The Crying Game.

Twenty years on in a frowzy dressing room in Bath, Dave expressed interest in recording a number he’d just heard the Argonauts perform. Then he cut off in mid-sentence to burst into Memphis Tennessee through a microphone that had been lying on a table. Its lead stretched thirty feet to where his backing outfit, the Cruisers, had been cranking out a recurring introduction. With the spooky deliberation of a dream’s slow motion, Dave made a suspensory Grand Entrance riven with the expected hand ballets. Time unwound as, unbelievably, he looked as lean, saturnine and outrageous as he had on Ready Steady Go back in the Swingin' Sixties.

 As autumn leaves continued to fall on the Argonauts, there was an initial ‘twinning’ of our two groups when several Clayson compositions - and productions - were taped for 1986’s Hostage To The Beat, a critical cause celebre of a Berry album. During the sessions, he asked if I’d be interested in being demoted from captain of the Argonauts to deckhand with the Cruisers  in an unaccustomed role of keyboard player - for a brief trip to the Netherlands in February. 

If stuck on the Sixties nostalgia circuit at home, Dave Berry had remained the Elvis of the Flatlands since swamping its Top Twenties with up to three entries at a time in 1965. These successes included This Strange Effect which turned out to be Holland’s biggest-selling 45 ever. 

Dave had rated too in the punk explosion when the Sex Pistols did one of his B-sides, and Glen Matlock’s post-Pistols combo, the Spectres retrod This Strange Effect.  Adam Ant too was an avid Berry fan. It was, therefore, far cooler to be a Cruiser than, say, one of Gerry’s Pacemakers, Moreover, I was to be paid what was a cash-in-hand Kings ransom compared to the most cast-iron Argonauts fee - and, after my previous vexing office as a group leader, it was pleasant to know that the transport, accommodation and much of the thinking was laid on too. 

That being so, I offered no immediate advice when the transit containing we rank-and-file packed up on the Belgian-Dutch border. As powdery snowflakes thickened, a local AA patrolman grunted ‘eez no good’ under the bonnet, and abandoned us with a valedictory verbal insult delivered in the grave precision of one using a language not his own.

The English weren’t popular just then, owing to a lethal outbreak of UK soccer hooliganism in Brussels the previous summer. Moreover, garages in neutral Holland opened at 9am. Therefore, we repaired to a nearby cafe where the desultory repartee of our coffee circle - me and three blokes who I hardly knew - stretched into graveyard hours lent piquancy when I’m Gonna Take You There, one of our employer’s ancient Euro-smashes dribbled from the Tannoy.

After what seemed like endless centuries later, a breakdown truck arrived to tow us and our wretched vehicle to safely. The grease-monkey’s expert diagnosis was depressing -‘lucky you didn’t have an accident ... new parts not available for two days ... three hundred guilders before I even start  At journey’s end in a twilight blizzard, the gear was lugged from a hired minibus up four punishing staircases to a citadel of ‘qualily’ entertain­ment just outside Amsterdam. Come Showtime, we Cruisers, thirty-six hours without sleep, gazed fiery-eyed from the stage at bow-tied tuxedos, and pearly cleavages as the MC - a fat buffoon in a custard yellow suit - completed his build-up. I’d been building up for a lot longer, having practised thoroughly each musical nuance of the set for weeks, and spent ages agonizing over what to wear and how I’d conduct myself on the boards as a Dave Berry Cruiser. I’d wanted every moment of the next hour to linger. Instead, it passed in a blur as indistinct as murmurs from a seaside couch.

reproduced from with thanks from "The Beat Goes On"

Copyright Alan Clayson