Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie (3 page)

‘Did you see Frank Sidebottom?’ they asked him.

‘He went that way,’ said Chris.

Frank wasn’t the only outsider artist on our circuit. There was Edward Barton, a quiet, bearded man who would stand on stage and scream, ‘I’ve got no chicken
but I’ve got five wooden chairs.’ He was the son of a Royal Air Force officer and he maintained the polite, formal bearing of his upbringing. He kept his belongings in a tiny satchel.
He travelled home with us one night and we dropped him off in the early hours in his neighbourhood, Hulme – a desolate housing estate near the city centre. Hulme was an exceedingly failed
1970s experiment in social housing. The idea had been to make it a kind of Brutalist Bath – Georgian crescents reimagined in raw concrete. They called the crescents Charles Barry Crescent and
John Nash Crescent, names that had taken on a savage poignancy by the late 1980s now that Hulme was crumbling, infested with cockroaches laying their eggs amid the asbestos. The heroin addicts had
moved in – including, unexpectedly, Nico from The Velvet Underground. The walkways in the sky were police no-go areas. But the most apocalyptic thing about Hulme was the packs of wild dogs
that roamed the crescents, feeding on God knows what. You’d hear them howling in the darkness as you’d run frantically home from a night at the Hulme Aaben cinema. We opened the van
door to let Edward Barton out. As he climbed down, with his satchel clutched to his chest, the clasp broke and it opened, all his possessions falling onto the floor.

We drove off, but I kept looking at him from the back window. He made no attempt to bend over and pick up his belongings. He just stood there, his head bowed, staring at the scattered debris. It
seemed like I was watching a man at exactly the moment he had reached his nadir. I was confused. From where I stood, Edward Barton was living the dream. He was a decade older than me and had
managed to become a fixture on the circuit. He was secure. If he wanted to play Burberries, he could play Burberries. The same went for the Witchwood, Ashton-under-Lyme; the Leadmill, Sheffield;
the Duchess of York, Leeds; the Citadel, St Helens . . . As I looked at him I felt a sudden flash of alarm. Was this not enough? Should I have more ambition? Should I be aiming higher? But the
feeling quickly passed. I was in the Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey Big Band. These were halcyon days. The Transit van turned the corner.

We carried on crisscrossing the north of England. Our hard work and long hours were paying dividends. The audiences of 500 in every town had grown to 750 and sometimes even
1,000. It was consequently baffling for me to become aware of a growing sense of discontent in the van.

Chris had been in the habit of asking his friends and relatives to perform cameos between the songs on his records. They’d take the form of little skits – conversations between Frank
Sidebottom and his milkman or grocer or whoever. In this spirit he had asked his brother-in-law’s friend Caroline Aherne – a secretary working at the BBC – to voice the part of
Frank’s neighbour, Mrs Merton. Afterwards, Caroline decided to keep Mrs Merton going. She somehow got her own TV show,
The Mrs Merton Show
. She won a BAFTA and a British Comedy Award
for it. Her follow-up series,
The Royle Family
, won about seven BAFTAs. The
Royle Family
Christmas Day specials attracted audiences of 12 million. A poll organized by the British Film
Institute voted
The Royle Family
the thirty-first best television show of all time. And meanwhile we were crisscrossing Manchester and Bury and Leeds and Sheffield and Liverpool in our
Transit van.

Chris’s disgruntlement wasn’t that Caroline had
robbed
him of Mrs Merton. She hadn’t. As Mike Doherty told Mick Middles: ‘She was really funny .
. . a natural. All she took was the name. I have no doubt that, somehow, Caroline Aherne would have made it to the top. It just so happened that she did it with a Frank character’s
name.’

The band’s guitarist Patrick Gallagher added to Middles: ‘It wasn’t Caroline’s fault. Chris was totally out of control. Whereas, say, Caroline Aherne had a single vision
and could just pursue that, Chris might have a fantastic idea, spend some time gaining interest and developing it and then, just as the point where it might actually get somewhere, he would spin
off onto something completely different. That’s OK for a while but it tended to piss people off because they never knew where they stood.’

Chris never accused Caroline of plagiarism, not even in private. The worst I ever heard him say was that maybe she could have given Frank some recognition in interviews. By then she was forever
on the front pages of the British tabloids, under headlines like:

A very fragile superstar

When she surveys the lights of London’s West End from her new £800,000 penthouse flat off Carnaby Street, Caroline Aherne ought to feel as if she really has reached
the top. The daughter of Irish immigrants Bert and Maureen, she grew up on a council estate in Wythenshawe, Manchester, and her first job was answering the phones at the BBC offices in
Manchester.

Today, she is acknowledged as an original and immensely talented writer and actress. She is now a wealthy young woman, garlanded with awards and hailed as a comic genius.

She has, of course, had her problems. A broken marriage, a drink problem and a string of failed romances drove her to a suicide bid, intensive therapy, and eventually escape to Australia.

It is a year since she left Britain, saying that she no longer wanted to be famous. ‘I’ve played the fame game long enough and I just want to disappear,’ she said.

Alison Boshoff,
Daily Mail

It was hard not to feel jealous. And it wasn’t only her. Suddenly everyone around us was becoming famous. My next-door neighbour Mani had a band. They became The Stone Roses. Our driver
Chris Evans left us to try and make it in radio. By 2000 he was earning £35.5 million in a year, making him Britain’s highest-paid entertainer (above Lennox Lewis at second and Elton
John at third). Edward Barton, who I’d last seen staring at his scattered belongings in Hulme in the middle of the night, wrote the song ‘It’s A Fine Day’. It was covered by
the group Opus III, became a huge hit, and was sampled by Kylie Minogue in her song ‘Confide in Me’. And we kept crisscrossing the country, playing to 1,000 people, sometimes 750,
sometimes 500. Still, there were happy times. Like when we played in London and on the way to the venue our driver said the funniest thing I’d ever heard anyone say. He pulled the van up on
Edgware Road and wound down the window.

‘Excuse me?’ he said to a passer-by.

‘Yes?’ the man said.

‘Is this London?’

There was a silence.

‘Yes,’ said the passer-by.

‘Well where do you want this wood?’ he said.

***

There is always a moment failure begins. A single decision that starts everything lumbering down the wrong path, speeding up, careering wildly, before lurching to a terrible
stop in a place where nobody is interested in hearing your songs any more. With Frank I can pinpoint the exact moment failure began.

‘Chris wants to have a rehearsal,’ Mike told me over the phone one day.

There was a silence. ‘Chris wants a
rehearsal
?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Mike said, after a moment.

‘Why would Chris want to
rehearse
?’ I said.

‘To take things up a level,’ Mike said.

‘Take things
up
a level?’ I said. I paused. ‘
Where
are we going to rehearse?’

‘At Chris’s house,’ said Mike.

Mike was trying to sound enthusiastic. But I think he was worried too.

Chris’s house was in a normal, nice, modern cul-de-sac a long walk from Altrincham station. His children were playing in the street outside. His wife, Paula, answered the
door. I can’t remember what she said to me but I recall being struck by how smart and funny she was in that dry, dour Manchester way. She told me to go to the spare bedroom. I walked up the
stairs, passing the bathroom door. It was open. I glanced in. Staring back at me from the sink was Frank’s head.

‘In here, Jon,’ I heard Chris shout from a room at the end of the corridor.

I opened the door. And stopped. Things were different – ominously so. A new man was standing there. He wore a maroon shirt tucked smartly into neat black jeans. A bass guitar hung around
his neck. As I walked in he started playing a tight soul-funk riff with seeming nonchalance, like it was just something his fingers did, but I understood it to be an act of aggression. He was
marking his territory. Chris looked impressed by the man’s adeptness.

‘Don’t you manage that shit band The Man From Delmonte?’ the man muttered indifferently.

‘Who . . .
are
you?’ I said.

‘I’m Richard,’ he said. ‘From The Desert Wolves.’

The Desert Wolves, Richard is top right.

The Desert Wolves were an ’80s indie band in the vein of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions who wrote songs with lyrics like ‘We could go driving down Mexico way / The wind in your hair /
You look lovely this time of year’. I’d like to say that during the twenty-five years that have passed since Richard took an instant dislike to me in Chris’s spare bedroom, a
dislike that only intensified during the months that followed before the band imploded, and climaxed in him yelling at me during one tense soundcheck that he’d like to break my
‘keyboard playing fingers’, he went on to have a disappointing life. But he didn’t. He became one of the world’s most successful tour managers, looking after Woody Allen and
The Spice Girls, and he currently manages the Pixies.

Richard was not the only proper musician Chris brought in to make us more professional-sounding. A skilful guitarist and a saxophone player turned up in the spare bedroom too. Mike counted us in
with his drumsticks. And it began. We sounded like an excellent 1980s wedding band – the kind of band that could do note-perfect versions of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ and ‘Girls
Just Want To Have Fun’.

Chris told me to book us the biggest tour we’d ever undertaken. Thirty dates in thirty days. We’d play every venue that had ever had us on. He choreographed it so I would begin the
show. I’d walk on stage, alone, into a spotlight, and play a powerful C with my left forefinger. The synth brass tone – the most stirring of all the Casio tones. This lone note could
last a minute or more – it would be up to me to judge at what point the audience were at a peak of anticipation – and then I’d play with my right forefinger, G, F, G, A, F, G.
‘Born In Timperley’ (our version of ‘Born in the USA’, Timperley being the Manchester suburb where Frank and Chris lived).‘Born In Timperley’. This would be the
cue for the rest of the band to join me on stage for our power-rock reimagining of the song.

The day the tour began we hired a people-carrier instead of a Transit van and we set off to our first venue. The mood en route was noticeably more pumped. The old Oh Blimey Big Band members had
a certain frail avant-garde loucheness to them. But this new band: I felt like I was in a college sports team. We soundchecked. The audience arrived. The place was packed. And then I walked out
into the spotlight.

And in the space of that first song – that single ‘Born in Timperley’ – the audience veered from fevered anticipation into puzzlement into hoping we were playing a weird
joke on them into realizing with regret that we were not. What had become of our beloved plinkety-plonk sound? We were Mrs Merton being backed by Survivor. I did my best to covertly sabotage the
musical direction from within, being as plinkety as I could muster, playing lots of bum notes, but my influence was limited, drowned out in an onslaught of ’80s rock. After a few nights the
NME
savaged us in a live review. By the end of the tour we were playing to almost empty houses. Chris returned to Manchester to a court summons. He owed £30,000 back tax. On the day of
his court appearance he stood up in the dock. The judge told him it was a very serious matter and had he considered a payment plan?

‘Would a pound a week suffice, m’lud?’ he asked.

‘No it would not!’ the judge shouted.

Chris never actually said to me, ‘You’re fired.’ But I began to notice in the listings magazines that he was doing a lot of solo shows – just him and a
keyboard. They were in the same venues we used to play, and then in smaller venues, and then eventually there were no shows at all.

I moved back to London.

***

And there I was, two years later, twenty-five and presenting a terrible BBC2 television show nobody remembers called
The Ronson Mission
. After leaving Frank’s band
I’d become a radio presenter at KFM in Stockport and a columnist for
Time Out
magazine in London. My old college lecturer Frank Hatherley had approached the BBC’s Janet Street
Porter on my behalf, suggesting me as a presenter, and they’d given me a chance. Now I was sitting in the corner of the editing suite watching the producer, director and editor work on an
interview I had done in Bournemouth with a Conservative town councillor. For most of the interview she’d been perfectly nice. But at times – when irritated by my line of questioning
– she’d become screechy and short-tempered. In the editing suite they were carefully stitching together her screechiest moments, whilst meticulously deleting the normalness.