I’ve been re-reading Eric Idle’s excellent The Greedy Bastard Diary: A Comic Tour Of America, his 2005 semi-memoir.
Nominally a diary of his 2003 tour of North America performing Monty Python classics, original songs and a little stand-up, Idle frequently diverges into accounts of his life and encounters with the famous over several decades.
George Harrison is a particularly frequent face. Here’s one of Idle’s tales about George:
When my first marriage broke up I went off to Australia. It’s where English people go to have emotions. It’s summer in the winter and there are beautiful half-naked sheilas on the beaches. George said to me, ‘You’re going to Australia?’ Yes. ‘So you’ll be flying over India?’ Yes. ‘That’s pretty heavy,’ he said. ‘I’m going to give you something!’
So I’m on my way to the airport and a beautiful package arrives with a peacock feather-and it says ‘Not to be opened until over India’. Wow! So ten hours into the flight look down and there’s this huge brown land mass and I think, right, it’s time. So I take down the package and I’m thinking this is great: the meaning of life from the spiritual Beatle-and I open it up and pull out a little card and there in George’s handwriting it says, ‘Shag a sheila for me!’
Good to see both gentleman embracing that vintage Aussie slang sheila.
Anyway, these insider accounts are great, but as ever when folks are recalling events from decades past and the drinks were flowing freely, it pays to double-check on the important details.
Here’s a case in point that jumped out at me as soon as I read it.
Backstage I was visited briefly by Ann, a British folk singer from Renaissance who reminded me of the first time we met at Warner Brothers Records in Soho in the late seventies. I had popped in with Carrie Fisher for a social visit to see my pal Jonathan Clyde when in came Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, totally elated that their song ‘Brass in Pocket’ had just gone to number one. They insisted we join them in an instant celebration. Champagne corks began to pop, and there was some very odd behavior as the party grew riotous. I remember Chrissie fiddling provocatively with the front of guitarist James Honeyman-Scott’s pants, which seemed to inspire Carrie into a kind of testosterone challenge, and soon both American girls were in each other’s faces seeing how wildly they could dance at each other. It was odd and strange and kind of wonderful: two of the ballsiest American women engaged in a wild contest from which neither would back down.
The issue? ‘Brass In Pocket’ didn’t get to number one until January 1980. Yes, I’m being a pedant, but that isn’t the late seventies.
Further details confirm that this is definitely January 1980, with the unexpected mention of another Beatle:
The party drifted on to my house in St John’s Wood as parties in those days tended to, and we drank on and danced to my jukebox. At some point the news came through that Paul McCartney had been arrested and thrown in jail in Japan on charges of possessing marijuana, and Ann reminded me that I instantly got on the phone to the Japanese embassy to protest this. I demanded that unless he was released at once we would all boycott Japanese restaurants. That should have scared them.
Paul McCartney was arrested on 16 January 1980. ‘Brass In Pocket’ was announced as the #1 for the week on Tuesday 15 January – the charts covered sales up to the previous Saturday, and collating the data wasn’t so fast back then.
So it makes sense that the Pretenders crew were celebrating on that day, and the news of the arrest would indeed have emerged the next morning in the UK (Tokyo being some 8 hours ahead of London). The dates all line up – but they don’t line up in the 1970s.
These kinds of issues happen – check out the account of The Tourists and Doctor Who for another example.
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