Well I know it sounds funny But I’m not in it for the money, no I don’t need no reputation And I’m not in it for the show
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I just want a hit record !
I write this on Friday 16th April 2021 as my sister Lucy (Lucita) Jules reaches number one in the UK Dance Chart with her feature cover of Optimistic with Brian Power (Michael Gray Remix). Woop de Doop !! It is a veritable moment. We are all full of joy from High Wycombe to Fort Greene, from Hailsham to Harlow. Here is the screengrab
It was the story of Jenny and I both opening shows on Broadway in 2019, and of my love for her. It is her favourite song and I wanted to honour her, and the song. And I would love to post Lucy’s brilliant version of it right here, but
I’d like you to buy it more. Keep it at number one. Get it into the Pop Charts.
All that.
Brian Chambers & Lucita Jules singing with David Gilmour in 2016/17
So I’ve chosen a song that has been dear to my heart for over 40 years. Raspberries’ “Overnight Sensation“.
I first heard the song in 1979. I was in my third year at LSE, doing a Law Degree. LSE only gave us two years in College Halls of Residence, you were expected to find your own accomodation by year three.
I’d spent the first two years around Fitzroy St W1, beneath the Post Office tower, a short walk down Charlotte St to Soho and the West End. I’d torn tickets at The Other Cinema on Scala Street, soon to become The Scala Cinema. I’d seen the Sex Pistols, The Ramones, and The Clash live onstage. Now in 1978 I moved out of Central London and dared to relocate south of the river, where fellow student Mike Stubbs rented an entire house on Canonbie Road in Honor Oak. SE23 for fuck’s sake. I had a bedroom (with a piano in it!), and shared the facilities – bathroom, kitchen, living room, garden – with Mike and his girlfriend Hilary, and her friend Rosie, who were both nurses. It was massively civilized, and very comfortable – by far the most well-appointed place I’d ever lived in, reminding me of the Korner’s Lewes house, or the Ryle’s place on St Anne’s Cresecent. Or come to think of it, our beautiful semi-detached place in Selmeston where I grew up. Honor Oak is a hill just to the south of Peckham Rye, and I caught the number 63 bus into the LSE every day, rather than walk through Bloomsbury down to the Aldwych as I had for the two previous years. It was all very grown up and rather shocking. I recall that at least some of the time I would stay in town with my girlfriend Mumtaz in William Goodenough House, Mecklenburgh Square WC1. Bloomsbury.
I was musically curious even then. Not content with punk and new wave I was exploring the deeper realms of Pop with the encouragement of Mike. He made me a tape – a C90 cassette – called Gotta Have Pop, which contained songs by solo Jay Ferguson (from Spirit), the later period Kinks (Celluloid Heroes), Supertramp, 10cc and Colin Blunstone. My classmate Lewis MacLeod and I were deep underground in the soul mine digging out ‘unknown classics’ from the record shops of Soho – Major Lance, Garnet Mimms, Lorraine Ellison, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland (see My Pop Life #28 ) or Millie Jackson.
And then there was Overnight Sensation. Piano-led pop music of a kind I find it very hard to resist. To name but a few – Lady Madonna, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, My Philosophy, My Life, Easy, Alone Again Naturally, Oh Babe What Would You Say, Alright, Court & Spark, anything by Ray Charles… This one is such an easy record to like, and it loses no points from me for that. It has a clever piece of engineering in the centre of the song when it suddenly sounds like it is playing on a transistor radio, and as the chorus loops over and over the sound swells, the bass rises, it’s like the sun coming out and suddenly the band sound like they’re in the room. Outstanding effect, and not being very geeky in a technical way (there are other ways) I have no idea what is going on there. Some form of compression I’d guess? I bought the record so that I could include it on tapes of my own and soon it appeared on any decent mixtape I was creating. It is what people call ‘meta’ – a song about making a hit record which is itself a hit record. The chorus refrain is
Hit record yeah (number one) gotta hit record yeah (number one)
Which is why it is so perfect for Lucy today. She gotta hit record (yeah). To have a member of the family in the charts is a proper thrill. Don’t get me wrong she has performed with many chart acts, appeared on many TV shows singing hit records, even Number Ones. But this is her record – her and Brian and Mike. It is a moment. (It happened to me once with a charity record called We Want Falmer which was part of the campaign for planning permission to be given for Brighton & Hove Albion’s new stadium at Falmer in 2005 – see My Pop Life #51 Tom Hark which got to number 17 thanks to football fans in Sussex and everywhere buying it in solidarity). I’ve no idea how records get into the charts these days, but I do know that one sale is equal to 1000 streams. Bet you didn’t know THAT. But these are the things they take into consideration when they calculate popularity in 2021. But Number ONE Flipping HECK !!! It is a moment of history. Lucy is such an incredible singer who has been content to hide herself behind the likes of Bryan Ferry, George Michael, Kylie and Sam Smith, preferring the anonymous life to the celebrity nightmare. I understand that impulse very well. It is a delicate balancing act, because you need to be successful to continue working. But perhaps now there will be a change and her star will be acknowledged by a wider community than those in the know. Her voice is utterly ridiculous – five octaves of power and sweetness and control, doubling, harmonies or ooh ooh aah aah. Whatever you want. She got it. I have been watching her and listening to her for 30 years now and she always nails it, always blossoms like a flower onstage, always sounds sweet.
Lucita Jules with George Michael’s Symphonica in rehearsal in 2012
Another overnight sensation.
Songwriter Eric Carmen wrote the Raspberries hit. Recorded in 1974 in Los Angeles, John Lennon was in the studio on the day apparently and maybe had a hand in helping. Eric went on to have solo hits, in particular the great pop ballad All By Myself the following year which was based on Rachmaninov‘s 2nd Piano Concerto (I kid you not) and Raspberries’ 1972 song Let’s Pretend.
This song is a celebration of my sister’s success. Sending biggest love. So proud of you Lucy.
I am a cat-man. I have always had a cat or two or three, and I understand them. A little. Cat Man Do. My reward for good behaviour (miaow!) has been to have used up only a third of my 9 lives… Two I have written about already : Falling Out Of A Van Going At 50 mph On A Scottish Road (see My Pop Life #232 – C’Mon) and Drowning When Drunk At Dawn In A Las Vegas Swimming Pool (see My Pop Life #235 – You’ve Got A Friend). The third attempt was more recent than these two teenage incidents and will have to be entitled Being Dropped In A Cage From A Boat Into 30 Metres Of Shark-Infested Seawater With No Oxygen Etc.
It was 2010. It was – in all seriousness – the second time that I had given up acting for a living. My way this manifests itself is as follows – I call my agent – in this case Oriana Elia – and inform her that I will no longer audition for anything, and will in fact be quite happy if I never work again. It was a kind of petulance, a kind of release, and a kind of sanity that swept over me that spring. I cannot remember the details that pushed me over the edge, but within four months I was in Cape Town doing a film with Halle Berry.
But first a little matter of a World Cup. I won’t write about it here, but Jenny and I have been to every World Cup since USA 1994 when we lived in Los Angeles as a special treat and these adventures are memorialised in My World Cup Blog.
The World Cup in June of 2010 was in South Africa. While we were in Johannesburg for the latter stages I received word of a job – in South Africa – in July/August. Their winter, our summer in England. A straight offer. Thank you casting director Gail Stevens. A special lady. I was back in the game.
I decided to go home for two weeks rather than stay down there, and thus it was for the 2nd time in a month that I arrived in Cape Town in July and checked into the Waterfront Apartments. It was actually my third time in Cape Town because I’d been filming here in 2006 (see My Pop Life #117) on The Flood, and spent one day off at the Khayelitsha project of our first aider Kerryn Pitt. My first stop on this visit was to drive out there and see how they were doing.
Kerryn Pitt
Table Mountain from Khayelitsha Township
They were doing well. They still had their World Cup flags flying over the township. Kerryn was on good form and had been building a Guest House for the project, alongside the orphan’s school & kitchen. Township Air B’n’B. We chatted, I took photos and vowed to return.
That night I met the director John Stockwell for a drink. My worries about the script were aired and then turned to more general worries about the film when he asked me to re-write it. I decided not to get involved at that level. Perhaps I asked for more money, I truly can’t remember. It felt like much of it might be improvised. The schedule was to be improvised, everything was weather dependent so we had to be ready to shoot any scene at any time, and we’d all be working every day. And there were no rehearsals, so the first time I met Halle Berry was on the first day of filming, down in Simons Town on False Bay. I’d made a major fluff of my first meeting with another female lead actor – Sigourney Weaver back in 1991 on Alien 3(see My Pop Life #171) so this time I had a plan – smile, make friends, be charming. Not too difficult because being the first black actress to win an Oscar was completely historic and inspiring and I told her so. She is gracious and kind and friendly. It’s going to be fine. So far so good and my other co-stars Sizwe Msutu, who stayed ashore, Olivier Martinez, Luke Tyler and Mark Elderkin all seemed untroubled by delusions of grandeur and I rather hoped for a decent shoot.
Me, Halle, Olivier, Sizwe in a dinghy going home
Luke Tyler & Mark Elderkin
John Stockwell
Olivier Martinez
The film by the way remains one of the very worst-reviewed films I’ve ever had the privilege to have been in. It’s called Dark Tide and it scored a fairly unique 0% on the website Rotten Tomatoes. But rubbish films can still be good fun to make (and of course the opposite too – good films can be a fucking nightmare on set and off !)
It is set almost entirely on a small boat at sea. There are six of us on it. I play a British millionaire who brings his son (Luke) on a shark weekend – Halle is a shark whisperer who owns the boat and whose business is going bust. Mark played the skipper and Olivier her partner. Oh. That makes five.
Anyway.
What is a shark weekend? Well in South Africa, Mexico, Australia and other areas of the world it is where you rent a boat and climb into a cage and get lowered into the water to watch them up close. Cage Diving With Sharks. What could possibly go wrong?
In fact Luke Cresswell, my buddy from Brighton who co-created Stomp along with Steve McNicholas was just down the road in Gansbaai, filming Great Whites from a naturalist’s angle and he generously took me out on my first free afternoon to watch the water. A preview of what was to come. What strange coincidences life throws at you, and great to see him.
Luke on his shark boat
Luke and Great White Shark off Gansbaai
And I had a wonderful drive back along the Garden Route to Cape Town at dusk
I’ve written a little about the shark experience, especially the sea-sickness angle in My Pop Life #37 – A Salty Dog. Halle rented a house nearby with her daughter and nanny, the rest of us were in apartments on the Cape Town Waterfront and were picked up at 5.45 every morning. My driver Hans was a large Afrikaaner who resisted stereotype yet was a huge fan of Meatloaf. We’d have an hour’s drive into the dawn, playing my music, playing his, playing the radio, then into unit base as the light arrived.
Simons Town, False Bay
Costume change & make-up plus breakfast at unit base then down to the quayside and board the boat V.S. Volante at 8am and start the engine which produced a very particular kind of smell – of oil – then out to sea and shoot all day til the light faded at 6pm. Six days a week. Lunch was brought alongside by a rubber dinghy. We often anchored up near Seal Island, which is where we were that day.
Green Point at the top was near the Cape Town waterfront. Simon’s Bay was base camp about an hour down the Cape.
I’ll just digress gently and note that while we were filming, guys were chumming the water on either side of the boat. Throwing bucketfuls of dead fish overboard to attract Great White Sharks in other words. Then if one came near us we would film with it behind us, or even try and get it to approach the boat. Some of these were large – the females we were told, some were smaller and whip-flick irritable – these were the juvenile males. Of course they were. We were not expected, naturally, to get into the sea with these beasts, we had a stunt crew for all that. But apparently we only had three sets of oxygen tanks, and they, naturally, were for the stunt crew.
Seal Island
On the fateful day in question, it was decided that Luke my son and I would do a scene with skipper Mark just before we go down for our first cage dive. This involved being fully dressed for scuba diving – masks, fins, weights, tanks. The tanks weren’t full of oxygen. They were props. Fair enough, we weren’t going underwater. We were doing some chat then climbing into a cage which went up to waist height off the back of the boat. And cut. The stunt crew with the real oxygen tanks were at least a 45-minute boat ride away. Halle and Olivier were inside the Volante resting. Olivier was actually affecting a tremendously French couldn’t care less attitude while clearly staying available. Halle’s favourite.
Lunch arriving. Be honest, it isn’t a large boat. See cage on the stern.
We were shooting off the back. Sorry, the stern. As we waited for the camera I looked at the cage, suspended from a frame by a rope and pulley. We would climb in via a door in the top of the cage. I noticed something. “What’s that blue rope?” I asked marine co-ordinator Jason Martin alongside me. I hadn’t seen it before. “That’s a safety rope” he answered,
“in case the pulley breaks but that isn’t going to happen“
“Right thanks” I said.
Luke was sitting on the other side of me and hadn’t heard this exchange. “Hey Luke” I said, “you see that blue rope there? That’s to stop the cage from plunging onto the ocean floor when the pulley breaks. Which it won’t“.
“Good to know” he said.
We got into position. Line-up. Ran the words. Camera ready. Actors ready. Boom op ready. Turn over. Speed. Mark it. 247 take one. Crack! And the stage was ours. We did the words and climbed into the cage. The water was quite lively and as Luke climbed down into the cage beside me a huge wave went over our heads. “I’d better hold my breath” I thought. And the wave stayed there. And stayed there some more. “Hang on“‘ I thought, “I really need to hold my breath here“. Then Luke just disappeared upwards through the cage door above us, and so did I, breaking water to a crowd of alarmed and panicked faces looking down, reaching out to take our arms, hauling us back onboard where we sat down in a puddle.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The pulley snapped” someone said, “The safety rope stopped you from dropping down 30 metres onto the sea bed.“
I looked round. Sure enough the blue rope was the only thing holding the cage. There had been no big wave. Below us was the rocky shelf of Seal Island – not that deep, I had dived in Egypt down to 20 metres. But that was with oxygen. Plus the speed we’d have dropped would’ve given us the bends. And then where the shelf drops into the depths, the underwater cliff edge, is where the sharks hunt for seals, which is actually why we were anchored there. You couldn’t drop an anchor onto the ocean floor anyway, the chain wasn’t that long.
Everyone was really shaken up. John the director was apologising to Luke and I. People were bringing tea and biscuits. We would be taken inside and they’d shoot something else. Drama and panic. Are you guys OK? I lit a cigarette. Luke and I conferred. We were happy about the blue rope (which isn’t in the photo above I’ve just realised, must’ve been added after that day…) but unhappy about the pulley snapping.
For the rest of the day we were placated. I think we were both in shock and in the dinghy ride back to shore I said I would speak to my agent. Film sets are notoriously unsafe spaces in many ways – I remembered the accident on Alien 3 with Linda, Sigourney’s make-up lady – but this seemed to be a many layered accident with plenty of possible ways to die or be seriously injured. There’s always an insurance angle on films which is often the reason why a film isn’t greenlit – they can’t get a bond. The fear of the insurance doubling rippled through the production – and I’d like to think there was also a concern that two actors might have been lost, and thus the film, because they wouldn’t have gone back and re-shot everything with two new actors. Would they?
It was decided that Luke and I wouldn’t do any more work in the water, most of it was going to be done in Pinewood Studios later in August. But in fact that scene was eventually re-shot a few clicks down the shore from Simonstown, in the sea. The ghost lingered but we got the scene.
Sorry babe I’m already happily married
After this drama a kind of rhythm was established. The day was based on how seasick we felt, how quickly the ginger basket was emptied of sweets and biscuits and drinks. Scenes and sharks came and went. We couldn’t find the right stormy conditions for the final sequence so in the end it was decided to head south and round the Cape of Good Hope into the open Atlantic to get some churning seas. That was a day of sickness and drama as Olivier (in character) ordered me to sit down as the waves started kicking the boat around and I (in character) refused. In make up the following morning Halle came to my chair and started whispering in my ear about making up with Olivier because he was still screwing about it, and would I mind apologising to him. “I was acting a scene” I objected but Halle had my earlobe between her thumb & finger and was gently rubbing an affirmation out of me. Olivier and I made up but he still insisted that if we did fight, he would win.
One weekend I invited Halle, Olivier, Luke, Mark and John to the Indlovu Project in Khayelitsha, and we spent a precious couple of hours in the township where the kids danced for us, we were fed and watered and chatted and took photos of each other. Halle later donated a generous sum to their project and Olivier supplied them with punch bag and some sets of boxing gloves.
As the film drew to a close whatever feelings we had about the story we were telling was slowly but inevitably being subsumed by the wild beauty around us and one by one we surrendered to the surroundings. There was an afternoon of behind-the-scenes interviews where we all mucked in and watched each other’s clips.
Luke holding the screen for Norma Hill-Patton’s interview, Halle Berry watching. I’d worked with Norma before on ‘Buster’ the train robber film (1986). Life is long.
Effortless grace and lucky guy
We wrapped up and I flew back to Brighton and Jenny and Chester and Mimi. Dark Tidereconvened in the Paddock Tank in Pinewood Studios. My oxygen tank didn’t work there either when I was inside the cage one afternoon, so I did the pointing to my mouth thing and my guide diver found me and gave me an emergency oxygen feed as we swam to the top of the tank. It doesn’t count as a life though if you’re counting. Never in danger. It was the Paddock Tank where I’d previously shot the underwater sequence in The Boat That Rocked/Pirate Radio in 2006 (see My Pop Life #205). I was starting to feel like a veteran underwater actor. I’m not a great swimmer but I have no fear of being underwater despite nearly drowning when 19 – I learnt to swim in Hornsey Road Baths when I was 25 years old and the first thing they made us do was go underwater and stay there for ten, then twenty seconds.
Halle came out for dinner one night with Norma to meet Jenny and our friend Martina Laird in the Groucho Club. They both loved her. She is a real sweetheart who doesn’t pick the best men. Olivier lasted six years and they have a child together.
The handsome couple were married 3 years later
All through that summer I was listening to the radio, to the sounds of South Africa. I didn’t need my comfort music around me for some reason, and delighted in the new sounds of that new nation. They were obsessed with house music and a fella called Black Coffee. In 2006 when I’d shot The Flood in Cape Town I became hooked on a song called Mdlwembe or Umdlwembe (see My Pop Life #117) from the Tsotsi soundtrack which actually dates from 2000. Ten years later it was house music which dominated the airwaves and this DJ in particular who stood head and shoulders above the pack. His album Home Brewed was released in 2010 and you couldn’t escape from it’s silky rhythms in bars, restaurants, taxis and on the street.
My favourite memory of the shoot was this moment :
My favourite shot of Halle was this :
I write this from lockdown in New York City where the numbers suggest that we have been plague central for six weeks. 99% of the citizens wear masks outside in a huge act of compassion to protect the vulnerable and the elderly the diabetics and the asthmatics. My wife Jenny is one of the latter. She hasn’t gone out. I don mask and gloves and stride out to the shops, intrepid and steeled, keeping spatial distance from the other explorers. The shop has its own rules and lines, screens and bagging procedures. We are at war. When I get home, the shoes are left in the hallway, the vinyl gloves unpeeled and trashed, soap and water, bleach wipes on all bags, all produce, all shopping, keys, cards.
Death is just out there. I will trade in my remaining 6 lives for my wife’s.
Everything is shit. I don’t know about you lot, but I fucking hate life. What’s the point of it all. Everything I do turns to ashes. I’ve got a cold, I’m injured, My eyesight is going, I’m lonely, I’m depressed, no one is interested in me. Is it me? I’m so tired of being alone. So tired of it. I’m so fed up with my buttons not doing up first time around, I always have to have two goes. At least! At everything. I pick something up and it falls out of my hand. I go to open a cupboard and it slides out of my grasp. I pick up a cat toy from the floor and it drops from my fingers. Infuriating ! Rage the size of Niagara courses through my veins, popping from my eyeballs and I feel a clench in the heart of my being, my voice gets tight, I am not like water, I am a rock, I am banging my hand against the wall, I am banging my head against the mirror. So sick and tired of all these pictures of me. I mean what is the actual point? Heh?? Atomic frustration on a mini-level, the atoms themselves defy me and re-organise each moment to frustrate my every move. Self sabotage. Self hatred barrage. Nigel Farage.
Have you given up on hope? I could be your antidote
Are you lost in a state of anxiety? Just let it be
I’m stuck basically. I’m full of self-loathing, vicious contempt that I should suffer from baseless anxiety when there are suffering millions across the globe who shame me with their fortitude and courage, their focus and their sheer damn hard work, all I have is a spineless capitulation to the icloud of depression that always hovers on icloudy days, provoking me with its basic formulaic symbolism, jeering at my dependence on the sun for joy and happiness, refusing to allow a smile across my miserable features unless a beam from the mote of a star caresses my carefully moisturised skin. The depression that tells you that hey, bro, yes, that’s right – THIS is Reality, playing magic tricks – look over here, up there – because the rest of the time you are merely distracting yourself with flim-flammery, with culture, with art, with sport, with food, underneath all these doubtless pleasurable fripperies which fill your neverending daisy is a giant iceberg called Reality and once you’ve spied the tip of it, better watch out boyo because the other 90% is gonna drag you under by the shark-tailfin of your chequered cab and I can’t sit down I’m going overboard in this heathen town.
I cannot enjoy and appreciate the simple things of life. Despite a culture of gratitude around us, the simple pleasures have curdled and become stale, the deadly filter over my eyes has turned it all rotten, shaded all beauty with decay, rust and dust. It is a tiresome repeat of so many dear dead days, that waking up becomes a burden, a heavy tread downstairs for catfeeding, tea and the bastard internet as I contemplate my entirely unstressful life with a baleful eye and a frozen soul that can only see Reality, pain, failure, humiliation, extinction, pollution, cruelty, greed, sickness and death. Nothing ever matters. Nothing really matters. To me. Ennui. But wait.
Excuse me, please I’m just so happy I could scream
Adjust your mindset, do the same All that you lost will be regained
One phone call. One message. One walk down the street to the pharmacy, one social interaction. One glimmer… As Kacey Musgraves country singer she say – if you’re looking for a silver lining, gonna have to be a cloudy day. Straighten up and fly right, tighten the core, chin up, purpose, direction, focus. You have life you have love you have nothing to complain about, I am blessed I am comforts I am whole got my arms got my legs got my hands got my feet got my brain got my eyes got my mouth I got my smile said Nina Simone, you have friends and flavours projects and zoo animals in your house. Books and records and everything ever written or painted or recorded in history at your fingertips. But it’s
NEVER EVER ENOUGH
it’s never enough, Is it ever enough, when it’s just enough? If it’s never enough, why do we hang up on hope? Enough is enough, never enough
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Róisín Murphy
Boris Dlugosch
She’s an Irish lass who studied in Manchester then met Mark Brydon at a party in Sheffield (“do you like my tight sweater? See how it fits my body!”) then formed the pop band Moloko around 1994. Their first album was called Do You Like My Tight Sweater? They were reasonably popular & successful until a song called Sing It Back was mixed and remixed by Todd Terry and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all and all until Mr Dlugosch got his housey hands on it and it became a massive hit reaching number one on the US Dance Charts in 1999.
Rather than pay the fella, Róisín co-wrote his next song called Never Enough and it was another big hit in 2001. That’s all you need to know really I reckon. Because whatever it is, it’s never enough.
Róisín Murphy
Rather than pay the fella, Róisín co-wrote his next song called Never Enough and it was another big hit in 2001. That’s all you need to know really I reckon. Because whatever it is, it’s never enough.
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