to recording studios in Paris or Florida or Jamaica, we stayed with friends and famous people and sometimes we spent a week or two in our places in the UK, and occasionally visited our parents.
Just living out the dream... or our separate dreams.
Davey's was to be the guitar hero incarnate, but I think he knew even then that their heyday had been and gone. He got there just too late, in time to hit the wave as it started to collapse. He didn't play any worse because he wasn't getting the adulation he thought he ought to get; he may even have played better, trying harder, but I don't think he ever thought he'd fulfilled his dreams.
He didn't just want to be mentioned in the same breath as Hendrix or Clapton or Jimmy Page; he wanted them to be mentioned in the same breath as him. But the time to construct such legends had passed. He'd never quite be on the same level, even if he was as good (and he believed he was). So there was always something left for him to aim for.
At the time, I didn't envy him.
Perhaps it was some unfulfilled part of Davey's extemporising talent that sublimated itself in practical jokes and hair-raising stunts. He'd gone from being David Balfour, esquire, to Dave Balfour, to Davey Balfour to Crazy Davey Balfour. That was what they ended up calling him in the papers. For once, they were just about right.
Davey started doing things to hotels. He'd taken up climbing, and would occasionally swarm up the outside of the hotel rather than use the elevators. There's a hotel in Hamburg where they still talk about the time the mad Schottlander decided to set up a record for getting from lobby to roof, up the stairs, by motorbike. He did almost kill himself with that one; came down in the lift with the motor idling, and arrived back in the lobby half-stupefied with carbon monoxide poisoning.
On stage, for one UK tour, Crazy Davey had been Mad Man. This had been his own idea, not mine. What happened was that Davey would go offstage for ten minutes or so, and then reappear in a blaze of lights and dry ice through (if it was available) a hole in the stage.
He had a power saw strapped to each arm, screaming away with the trigger throttles taped on maximum revs; lit welding torches were tied to his knees and flaming blowtorches to his ankles. On his head he had a light crash helmet like the ones canoeists wear, with a couple of electric drills bolted to the top and running. Dozens of lights and sequenced flash units completed the immediate effect. He'd just stand there for a few moments, while the crowd, most of whom had heard of the stunt and had been waiting for Mad Man to appear, went wild.
Then stage hands would come up with bits of brick, steel, wood and plastic, and hold them up to Davey; who stretched out an arm, or flexed a leg, or just nodded; sparks flew and metal tore; dust rose and bricks disintegrated; sawdust showered and boards snapped; plastic burned. All the time, Davey was singing ('Afterburn') ... or trying to. The noise was bedlam, actually, full of interference, but it was effective.
It was an insanely dangerous stunt, and we had some problems with fire regulations, but what really killed the act were two things. First, Davey nicked a little finger on a drill at the Glasgow Apollo gig and had to have it bandaged; it was his right hand, so it didn't matter too much, though he still felt he was only playing at about ninety per cent; but nobody would insure his fingers while he was doing the act, and that did worry him. The other thing that killed it was Big Sam; the stunt wasn't right for us, he said; too violent, just not the right image.
The rest of us agreed, and Davey seemed happy just to have done it.
Then there were the practical jokes. There was one American tour when he took to sabotaging my hotel room every second or third night. It started out with unscrewing the door handle from the inside, so that it came away in my hand, but escalated to the stage that the guy must have been putting more effort and thought into how to surprise me that night than he was into playing for a stadium full of customers.
I'd almost got used to coming back to my room to find everything in it had been turned upside down, or that it was utterly bare, stripped even of the carpets and light fittings, when one evening Davey surprised me with a better trick; he lowered himself on a rope into my room, hung the television out of the window held only by a rope tied to the inside door handle, then took all the screws out of the door hinges.
I came back to my room, put the key in the lock and turned it, then watched the door go flying across the room to smash through the window and follow the TV down the six floors to the flowerbeds. The edge of the swiftly retreating key took a chunk out of my thumb, which I did not find funny.
Another time I couldn't get my door to open at all; I was getting wary by then, so I had the night porter come up and remove the door. When we got the door off eventually, we were faced with a blank, off-white wall, like solidified fog, except it was
Hotel managers hated Davey, but he always paid for all the damages, and he treated it as such a joke it was difficult to get really annoyed with him. Even the time with the foam-filled room, he'd booked me a replacement and moved most of my gear into it before carrying out the prank.
How they gave him a pilot's licence I'll never know, but they did. Davey bought a light plane, made sure his mansion in Kent came equipped with a grass strip and a hangar, and even went to the length of having a simulator installed to help him with his technique. I suspected he bribed somebody for the licence, but everybody I've talked to says that isn't possible. Maybe giving Davey a pilot's licence was the CAA's idea of a practical joke.
Mickey Watson seemed fairly normal compared to the rest of us; he turned up, drummed, went away again. He'd got married to a girl he'd known since primary school (a whirlwind romance nevertheless, on one of our sporadic returns to Scotland), and they were starting a family — that was why he wouldn't be at Wes' party that weekend; his wife had just gone into hospital to have their first kid. Mickey was always there when he was supposed to be; in the studio, at the rehearsal suite, on tour... but at the same time he seemed to be living on a different plane from the rest of us. To him, despite all the money and the fripperies, it was still just a job.
We took it seriously, in our own ways. We worked at being Rock Stars; not musicians, not even Personalities or ordinary Stars, but Rock Stars. It was a way of life, like a religion, like becoming a totally different person. We
Mickey took a different view. Occupation: drummer. End of story.
He's a farmer now, in Ayrshire, raising potatoes and wheat and big healthy children.
Christine was Christine. She achieved by accident what Davey was continually planning and striving for but never quite managing; they compared the others to her. Her voice had developed in range and power, but that was the least of it; what got them bouncing off the seats was the sheer guts she put into her performance. She growled and breathed and screamed her way through songs; always in control, still note-perfect, but bending and twisting her voice and the words and the tune into shapes and sounds I'd certainly never thought of. Took my breath away, and I heard it every night on tour; God knows what effect it had on anybody else, hearing it for the first time. Must have been like crawling out of the desert and being hosed down with iced champagne.
I think Christine could have sung a toothpaste jingle and made it sound quiveringly erotic, tearfully tragic or side-splittingly funny, just depending on how she felt that night; in her mouth, my words sounded like poetry, even to me. Just by changing her phrasing and the tone of her voice she could switch from making you think of a koala bear in tears to a wolverine on heat. Stunning. That was the only word that fitted. And she never lost it; even after the End, the Fall, when the band broke up, she just kept on going, formed her own band and more or less never stopped touring; singing and singing and singing.
Wes MacKinnon, one-time Hammond king, had taken, when on stage, to surrounding himself with vast numbers of synthesisers and organs and electric pianos and assorted other keyboards; banks of them, whole staircases of white and black keyed machines with coloured switches and blinking lights and LEDs. I sometimes wondered if Wes might have been happier as a drummer; he seemed to want to hide himself from the audience behind these ramparts of electronics (Mickey was heading in the other direction. He'd switched to transparent drums so the audience could see him better).
Wes didn't restrict his technophilia to the stage; he had a fetish, I think, about buttons and Light Emitting Diodes. He owned a succession of scientific calculators which offered longer and longer lists of functions Wes couldn't even pronounce let alone use, and a whole string of home computers, each one faster and more capacious and cheaper than the previous one; he had to have the latest, so as a rule he'd only just finished learning how to use one machine when he threw that out and bought a newer one.
He had an obsession with sound purity too (he now runs his own CD manufacturing plant and I think he's
