FULL FRONTAL 27

A CHAPTER FROM MY MOST RECENT BOOK, ‘SOUR MOUTH, SWEET BOTTOM’, PUBLISHED BY UNBOUND BOOKS

In 2014 I directed a documentary called 27: Gone Too Soon. It was my brother who suggested the subject, and to be honest, when he did I was against it. I knew about the six famous rock stars who’d died at twenty-seven and the talk of a ‘27 Club’ but I thought it was all hooey. Later, though, when I investigated further, I found it wasn’t.

Twenty-seven is the age at which the frontal lobe of the human brain becomes fully grown. Among other things, the frontal lobe is what brings us a sense of cause and effect. As teenagers and early twenty-somethings, we often take outrageous gambles with our lives, which is why regular soldiers are recruited from that age group. Only at that age will they be prepared to run up a beach into machine-gun fire holding nothing more than a bayonet sticking out the end of a rifle. Once they’ve got their frontal lobes in place they’ll be a lot harder to persuade. Military commanders know that all too well, which is why regular soldiers are young while recruits for the SAS have to be over twenty-seven, because awareness of cause and effect is one of the most important criteria.

Similarly, the music industry knows that an offer of a recording contract will nearly always tempt kids at university to throw up their studies and risk everything on a career in pop, even though the odds are no better than the lottery. Whereas singers over the age of twenty-seven are far more difficult to railroad into the industry’s grossly one-sided contracts, as record companies know from their renegotiations with artists whose initial contracts have expired.

I also learned that many ancient tribes around the world considered twenty-seven to be the age of adulthood. All of which is why psychoanalysts nowadays understand that between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-eight, young people are particularly prone to mental health problems − depression, despair and suicide. Which brings me back to the ‘27 Club’ and the film my brother proposed.

Having found my research interesting, I went ahead and made it and in due course it ended up on Netflix. Unsurprisingly, during the course of production it was inevitable I should think back to my own situation at that age.

To begin with I couldn’t recall having had a bad patch. But after a while I remembered I had. It was just when everything was going at its best. Shortly after my twenty-seventh birthday I became extremely depressed without any obvious explanation. And I was drinking ridiculously too much.

Everyone was saying how brilliantly I was doing, how I was the new bright thing in the music business. ITV was making a documentary about me; I was the manager of the Yardbirds; I’d written ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ for Dusty Springfield; and I was making lots of money. On top of that, I had a posh penthouse in Pimlico overlooking the gardens at Buckingham Palace where I could see the queen feed her flamingos their breakfast while I was eating my Shredded Wheat. Yet I felt strangely unhappy with it all.

Managing artists involved endless arguments; writing hit songs felt more like luck than a job; producing records meant sitting all day in a darkened recording studio. What I liked best was to travel, to be outside in nice weather, to eat in good restaurants and to find pleasant companions to spend the night with. I’d had two relatively long-term relationships but they’d both fizzled out. I needed to get away for a few days and have a good think, by myself.

I packed a small bag, took a taxi to the airport and looked to see what planes were leaving. There was one departing in forty minutes for Agadir, which I’d never been to but had heard was quite nice. So I went.

As a result, at seven o’clock that evening I was in the lounge of the Royal Atlas hotel, slouched comfortably in a corner of the horseshoe bar with a glass of wine in my hand, feeling morose and rather enjoying it. The only other person in the bar was directly opposite me, about twenty feet away, an elderly man dressed in a white tropical suit, sipping what appeared to be a pink gin.

As I looked across at him he caught my eye, then suddenly shouted − quite forcefully − ‘I say, are you British?’

I hesitated, displeased at having had my mood broken. But realising I had to answer, I nodded. ‘Yes! I am actually.’

 ‘Well, dammit then,’ he shouted. ‘Sit up straight, for God’s sake.’

And I did. It was impossible not to because of his military demeanour.

But then he burst out laughing. And when he took off his glasses it turned out to be the actor Denholm Elliott.

 ‘We’re here shooting a film,’ he explained. ‘Sorry about the joke, I couldn’t resist it. How are you?’

I’d got to know Denholm when I was working on Clive Donner’s film Nothing But the Best. We’d got to like each other and I was surprised I hadn’t recognised him, but it happens to me often. All it takes is for someone to change their hair style or grow a beard or wear new glasses and I’m completely lost. And Denholm had done all three.

 ‘Join us all for dinner,’ he suggested. ‘It’s our last night.’

And bang went my solitary self-healing weekend.

It was quite a gang – the director Gerry O’Hara, the film’s female lead Elsa Martinelli, British actor Leslie Phillips, and the sound and lights and camera crew.

Denholm, I think as a joke, sat me next to a huge-bodied, bearded Berber tribesman in traditional costume who was one of the local security men. All through dinner he kept touching my leg.

And if that wasn’t enough, Elsa Martinelli was flirting across the table at me, which greatly annoyed one of the film crew who had thought he was in line for having a fling with her. So I did what I usually do in complicated situations: filled myself up with wine, a silky Moroccan red from a seemingly bottomless carafe.

The next morning I had a hangover as bad as the one that had sent me off to Agadir in the first place, but at least the film crew were gone; the dinner had been their end-of-shoot celebration. So I went back to being alone and depressed, which was more to my taste.

I decided it might help me work out why I was feeling down if I were to make a list of all my good and bad qualities, then analyse them. So I sat by the pool with a pen and pad and wrote them all out. It wasn’t a long list. It seemed I didn’t have many qualities of either sort. Even so, one thing struck me...

All the good qualities could just as well be seen as bad qualities. And vice versa.

Bad quality: flits from idea to idea but never completes them.

Good quality: lots of ideas and happy to delegate them to others to complete.

Bad quality: not interested in changing the world.

Good quality: always accepts things as they are.

Bad quality: doesn’t spend long enough on serious decisions.

Good quality: makes difficult decisions quickly.

And so on.

Somehow - and I have absolutely no idea why - having this simple fact revealed to me cheered me up no end. So I checked out of the hotel and got on a plane back to London.

That was probably the weekend my frontal lobe started functioning.

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