Adventures of a Waterboy Read Online Free

Revival played first. They were twenty years older than us and their set featured all the middle-of-the-road groaner songs of the day: Neil Diamond’s ‘Red Red Wine’, Peters & Lee’s ‘Hey Mister Music Man’ and the high pinnacle of middle-of-the-road naffness, Daniel Boone’s satanic ‘Beautiful Sunday’. The busloads of fans lapped it all up, cheering and applauding like football supporters. Revival finished to rapturous response and even played an encore, something I’d only ever dreamed of.
    Half an hour later, after moving our gear on stage in front of the bemused gaze of Revival’s fans who stuck around for the fast-becoming-inevitable crowning of their favourites as the night’s champions, we began our set. After the first number my self-proclaimed status as a teenage rock visionary was sorely punctured when I was approached by a middle-aged woman and handed a slip of paper that said: ‘Play “Simple Simon Says” for the Grimmet Farm girls.’
    And it got worse. Between songs women came up and complained, ‘We cannae hear the words!’ or ‘Can you no’ play somethin’ we ken?’ while the menfolk turned their backs and ignored us at the bar. The Grimmet Farm Girls, determined to enjoy themselves whether or not we played Simon Says, started doing jigs, linking arms and dancing cheerfully while we bashed out a doleful version of ‘Waiting For The Man’. Staying in doomy rock mode while happy people are having a good time ignoring you is very hard to do, and we were sufficiently charmed by the girls’ display to play a loopy Scottish march for them. Responding to the calls to ‘Dae one we ken!’ I even sang them an a cappella verse of ‘Love Me Tender’. But the battle of the bands was lost, and after our last number, for which we reverted to type with a long and incomprehensible (to them), heroic and revolutionary (to us) version of Patti Smith’s ‘Land’, we wheeled off our gear to no applause whatsoever. A few minutes later Revival were proclaimed winners by a Stalinesque margin of votes and our humiliation was complete.
    We were fleeing the scene, dragging our amps through a corridor to the boot of my mother’s waiting car, when one of Revival, a cheerful moustached fellow of about thirty-five, gregarious in his hour of victory, cornered me before I could escape and gave me some friendly advice: ‘Get yourself a pedal-steel player, son. There’s money in the cabaret business.’
    During the year of its existence White Heat played a grand total of ten shows around Ayr, and despite playing music people didn’t want to hear, and the weekend violence that was an inescapable part of local culture, we never got beaten up. To get publicity we hustled the writer of the Ayrshire Post ’s pop column ‘Discoround’ until he sent a photographer to my house to take pictures of us in the living room where we rehearsed. One of these, with a tiny accompanying article, appeared in the paper the next Thursday. Inspired by this thrilling success we decided to send pictures of ourselves to the national music press. So we found a mate with a camera and embarked on the grand folly of all teenage bands: the photo session in a cemetery.
    The cemetery was on a hill behind my old school, and we mugged and gurned around the gravestones, thinking we were pulling off some natty poses. Next Saturday at rehearsal we saw the results: exactly thirty-six holiday snapshot-sized photos, for our mate, being an amateur, had shot only one film and hadn’t thought of enlarging them. The pictures were fascinating, though not in quite the way I’d anticipated. We looked like guys from four different bands: a mod, a chubby biker, a tanned bon viveur and a hairy rock starchild. Nor had we managed to project a unified attitude: if three people looked tough the fourth was simpering; if two were smiling, the others were grimacing. Or somebody had his eyes closed. Or somebody looked glazed. And our outfits and body language