ROCK TOUR DAY-OFF

TAKEN FROM A CHAPTER IN MY BOOK 'I'M COMING TO TAKE YOU TO LUNCH' ABOUT TAKING WHAM! TO CHINA.

During Wham’s tour of Japan in 1985, our first day-off came in Kyoto. The weather was miserable. We were stuck in the hotel with rain bucketing down outside.

In the lobby I bumped into Tommy Eyre, our keyboardist, looking lost. ‘The bastards went without me,’ he said, referring to his normal drinking partners from the band.

‘So let’s go somewhere for a beer or two,’ I suggested.

We borrowed a couple of big umbrellas from the front desk and found a bar in a small road behind the hotel. When we opened the door the barman tried to stop us coming in, waving his hands and saying ‘No open’. But Tommy had a winning way with him. He just sat down and smiled.

‘Beer,’ he told the man several times. ‘Japanese beer – very good.’

And since the only reason that Japanese try to keep foreigners out of their bars is to avoid embarrassment and trouble, and since it was quite obvious to the barman that to make us leave was going to cause more embarrassment and trouble than allowing us to stay, he gave us the beers.

‘Not great weather for a day off,’ Tommy commented as he got stuck into the first bottle. ‘Reminds me of a tour of the States I did with Joe Cocker. Thirty days in a row we played and everyone was begging for a day off. Then when it came it was in Billings, Montana. Have you ever been to Billings? There’s just a broken-down Holiday Inn and a bar in the middle of town where they still have a place to leave horses.’

The barman came across and pointed at his watch. ‘Closing in ten-minute,’ he told us, which seemed a strange thing to do at twenty-to-one in the afternoon. He just wanted to get rid of us, but unfortunately for him a group of Japanese businessmen arrived, obviously regulars, and settled down in a corner, overriding his decision.

Once he’d delivered their drinks to them he approached us and again pointed his finger at his watch. ‘We are now close.’

‘He doesn’t really think we’re going to leave, does he?’ Tommy asked.

‘At school they learn everything by rote,’ I explained. ‘They’re taught that repetition is good because its consequences are predictable. Accordingly, this barman thinks that if he repeats himself often enough we’ll finally leave.’

The barman was still standing next to us waiting for our response so Tommy pointed across the room, guiding his eyes to where the five Japanese businessmen were drinking happily in the corner. ‘Yes – closing – very good, we like it,’ Tommy said. ‘Two more beers please, Yoshi.’

The barman simply went and got them.

In the corner a TV was showing scenes from some vicious student riots that had taken place in Tokyo the day before – an unusual sight in Japan. Youths ran around breaking shop windows and setting cars on fire and there were thousands of police with batons knocking them off their feet and spinning them into the air with water cannons. One picture showed a student walloping a policeman on his riot shield, knocking him to the ground.

‘Whooeeee,’ Tommy said in a satisfied way, for he was a typical Scot and not a great lover of authority.

One of the Japanese businessmen from the corner was passing by us on his way to the toilet, a serious-looking man in his mid-forties with horn-rimmed glasses. ‘Yes, it is very good,’ he agreed in rather good English.

‘Really?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘People should protest while they’re still young. That way, when they leave university and get jobs, the protest will all be gone out of them and they will become better citizens, better Japanese.’

He continued on his way to the toilet.

‘Funny lot, these nips, aren’t they?’ Tommy said, finishing off his second bottle. ‘But they make good beer. Ready for another, are we?’

The Japanese businessman passed us on his way back from the toilet. ‘What are you people do in Kyoto?’

‘We’re on tour with a rock group,’ I told him.

He drew a deep, excited breath, ‘Aaaah, loku-gloop.’ And he called out to his friends on the other side of the room.

Suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of a party. The stuffy besuited businessmen bought us beers and began asking questions.

‘You ever meet the Beatle?’ one of them wanted to know.

‘You know Lolling Stone?’ another one asked. ‘When I at university I ruving Keith Lichard.’

Having recorded with almost every British rock act there ever was, Tommy had met them all. When he told the Japanese, they went mad. One of them played some frantic air guitar and explained, ‘We all big loku fans since university. Today is my birthday so we come cerebrate. What the name of your gloop?’

‘Wham!’

‘This is not good name for loku-gloop.

‘You’re wrong,’ I corrected him. ‘It’s a very good name indeed.’

‘When are you play?’

‘Tomorrow night.’

I had a bunch of tickets in my pocket so I gave them one each. Then it was party time till 2 p.m. when our new friends announced they had to get back to work.

‘What do you do?’ I asked.

‘Banking,’ one of them replied. ‘We all are bank manager but all at different bank. Today we come early to lunch to cerebrate Ishi’s birthday. Now we must go back.’

‘What are your names?’ Tommy asked.

They replied like a school roll-call. ‘Ishi’, ‘Tats’, ‘Kazu’, ‘Dennis’.

‘Dennis?’ Tommy and I echoed simultaneously. ‘How can you be called Dennis if you’re Japanese?’

‘My father live in England for ten years. He fall in love with clicket. He call me after his favourite clicketer – Dennis Compton.’

Outside it was still bucketing but the five of them tottered off umbrella-less through the downpour, blind drunk, ready to run the city’s banks for another afternoon.

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