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Booze, Bitterness & Butlins – The Horrifying Fall of Brian Connolly | Rock ‘N’ Roll Mysteries
The golden voice that had defined the sound of British glam rock was reduced to a whisper, then to nothing at all. Brian Connolly, the frontman of The Sweet, was ambushed outside a pub in Staines in early 1974, and the attack would not merely break his body—it would systematically dismantle his life, his career, and ultimately, his identity. The lead singer who had dominated the UK singles charts with anthems like “Blockbuster” and “Ballroom Blitz” was kicked in the throat by a steel-capped boot, a single, brutal act of violence that silenced the most distinctive voice of a generation. The assault was as sudden as it was devastating. Connolly had stopped his Mercedes outside a pub to buy a packet of cigarettes, a mundane errand that would become the defining moment of his existence. Three men emerged from the shadows, and one of them delivered a vicious kick to the singer’s larynx. According to bassist Steve Priest, who swore by this account for the rest of his life, a voice said with chilling clarity, “That should do the job.” The message was clear: someone wanted Brian Connolly silenced, permanently. Within a year, the soaring falsetto that had propelled The Sweet to international stardom was gone, stolen as surely as if a thief had reached down his throat and taken the only thing he could never get back. The band told the press that Connolly was suffering from laryngitis, a convenient lie that protected the fragile machinery of their success. No one was ever arrested for the attack, and the only person who supposedly knew who had ordered the hit was a roadie who took the truth to his grave. The mystery of who orchestrated the assault and why remains one of rock and roll’s most enduring unsolved puzzles, a dark cloud that hung over the singer for the remaining 23 years of his life. The incident marked the beginning of the end for a man who had clawed his way from the depths of abandonment to the very pinnacle of fame. Connolly’s origins were as murky as the circumstances of his downfall. Born on October 5, 1945, in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, his birth was shrouded in the kind of neglect reserved for children no one planned to keep. His mother, Frances Connolly, was a teenage waitress who left the infant in a Glasgow hospital and returned to her life, never to claim him. His father’s identity was recorded nowhere that anyone could find. The first two years of his life were spent in a care home before Jim and Helen McManus of Blantyre took him in at age two, a family that gave him their name and their hearth but apparently never completed the paperwork to make him their legal son. There was a persistent rumor, never confirmed but never fully denied, that actor Mark McManus, later famous for his role as the stern detective in “Taggart,” was his half-brother. The two men themselves noticed the resemblance. What is certain is that young Brian McManus grew up singing. “There was no television,” he recalled of those years, “so a boy with a clear voice was a kind of magic.” He was asked to sing at family gatherings, and he did, understanding early on that this was the best way to be wanted. He fell in love with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, took singing lessons, and briefly entertained the idea of becoming an opera singer. Those ambitions lasted only as long as it took for Elvis Presley to appear on a screen before him. The family had moved south from Scotland to Harefield in Middlesex, following the great post-war Scottish drift toward the money and noise of the London suburbs. At eighteen, while applying for a passport, he discovered a truth that reframed his entire sense of self: he was not, in fact, an adopted child at all. He reclaimed his mother’s surname, becoming Brian Connolly, a simple act of self-possession by a young man who had just realized the ground beneath his name was borrowed. He trained briefly and improbably as an engineer, worked for a time in the merchant navy, then came ashore in 1963 with a sailor’s appetite and no intention of committing to a regular job again. He returned to Harefield and did what every handsome young man with a good voice was doing in beat-mad Britain in the mid-1960s: he joined anyone with a van and a PA system. He passed through a few local bands, including The Gilettes, which recorded four songs no one ever heard, then made his way into a soul covers band called The Wainwright’s Gentlemen, taking over the microphone from a departing singer named Ian Gillan, who would soon become the screaming voice at the heart of Deep Purple. The Wainwright’s Gentlemen mattered for one reason above all others. Behind the drum kit sat a precise, perfectionist drummer who worshipped Gene Krupa, a man named Mick Tucker, and Connolly and Tucker recognized in each other two halves of a single ambition. In the autumn of 1967, the two came out together. They had already met at a band competition in Ealing with a clever, funny bassist named Steve Priest, who had been poached from a band called The Army. With guitarist Frank Torpey, they formed a new project in January 1968 and called it, bafflingly, The Sweetshop. By July, they had shortened the name to The Sweet and released a first single called “Slow Motion,” watching it vanish without trace along with the three that followed. They were dropped. Tucker drifted away from the band. A guitarist named Mick Stewart came and went, and the classic quartet was not completed until September 1970, when Welshman Andy Scott joined as guitarist. Four ambitious men who had reaped nothing from years of hard work but a reputation as a passable live band on the London circuit. What changed everything was a phone call from a songwriting duo. Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman were hit factories in human form, and together with producer Phil Wainman, they had a precise recipe for what the charts demanded. In 1971, they gave The Sweet a piece of pure sugar called “Funny Funny,” and it hit, and the trap closed, a trap that was glamorous and lucrative but ultimately unbearable. For two years, the hits flowed from a production line running at full capacity. They included “Co-Co,” “Poppa Joe,” and “Little Willy,” which crossed the Atlantic and hit the top three in America, then “Wig Wam Bam.” They were, as the band’s name suggested, sweets made to order, and the men who played them, who were notorious womanizers, drinkers, and loud players, hated staying inside that mold. Tucker said with withering contempt in 1974, “We were like four old tarts. We wiggled on ‘Top of the Pops’ and churned out mechanical pop songs, and we were vulgar.” “Everyone thought we were a bunch of poofs.” It was not a press release or politically correct statement, but it made the point clearly enough. They were seen as Chinn and Chapman’s creatures, handed songs like dishes to a waiter, and the humiliation gnawed at the band for years, even as the money flowed. Amidst this madness, Connolly began to sketch the outlines of a private life, marrying a young woman named Marlene in 1972. Their first daughter, Nicola, arrived on April 3, 1974, and press photos from that spring show the golden man pushing a pram, looking like he had everything in that moment. Because by then, the sugar had turned into something stranger and much better. At some point around “Wig Wam Bam,” the band discovered eyeliner and satin platform boots and raised eyebrows, and they plunged into glam rock with the spontaneity of men just given permission to be ridiculous, with nothing to lose. “Blockbuster,” released in January 1973, hit number one and stayed there for five weeks, their only single to do so. It was a mad thing built on an air-raid siren and a blues-derived riff. Then came a run of hits so consecutive it felt like pure arrogance. “Hell Raiser,” “The Ballroom Blitz,” and “Teenage Rampage,” each one stopping at number two, each one a rebellion pressed into vinyl. On “Top of the Pops,” the nation watched Priest, painted like a silent film star, blinking and stammering sarcastically through his one line, and Connolly was the one who ignited “Ballroom Blitz” with those words that every British person of a certain age still knows by heart. “Are you ready, Steve? Andy? Mick? Alright fellas, let’s go!” One writer described it as “so over the top you could pitch a tent in it and sleep overnight.” That Christmas, Priest wore a German helmet on the program, causing a minor national scandal. The four, brought before BBC cameras for a school documentary, were asked seriously whether the music industry was really glamorous, and they could barely keep a straight face. By the end of that year, they had sold 14 million records and were filling any concert hall in the country. Yet they remained resentful, convinced that the real band lay on the B-sides, in the heavy, uncommercial rock that teenagers skipped straight past. The mania had fangs. Wherever the four went, they were pursued by swarms of screaming girls armed with scissors, determined to snip a souvenir from those famous locks. “Ballroom Blitz” itself was born of an ambush, written after a night in Scotland when the band was driven off stage by stones from a hostile crowd….
Dropped, Stiffed, & Curtis Stiger-ed – The Fall and Rise of Nick Lowe | Rock ‘N’ Roll Mysteries
LONDON — A crumpled envelope, misdirected and nearly discarded, has altered the course of a career thought to be finished. In the mid-1990s, Nick Lowe, a man on the verge of being written out of music history, opened a letter that was not meant for him. Inside was a check large enough to change everything, a windfall from a song he had dashed off two decades earlier as a young man, a song most of the world believed belonged to someone else entirely. He has never even watched the film that made him rich. Lowe’s story is a peculiar brand of fortune that only strikes those who have stopped expecting it. It arrived late, uninvited, and with a touch of irony that suits the man perfectly. He was never serious, always lucky, and wonderfully entertaining. This is the tale of a British pop craftsman who was dropped by his label, divorced from his famous Nashville family, and left for dead by the industry, only to rise again on his own terms, armed with a quiet wit and a stubborn refusal to fade away. Born Nicholas Drain Lowe on March 24, 1949, in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, his life seemed scripted for adventure. His father, Geoffrey Drain Lowe, was a Royal Air Force wing commander who had flown bombing raids over Germany during World War II. In peacetime, he was known for dressing as an elderly woman at air shows before rushing from the crowd, climbing into a plane, and performing aerobatic loops above astonished spectators. His mother, Patricia, came from the world of English music halls, a vanishing realm of plate-spinning acts and performing dogs. Her father was a gifted pianist known as “Dod Vennier,” whose own mother kept him in short trousers well into adulthood, a humiliation that, as Lowe tells it, drove him to drink. Between aviation and theatrical performance, there was no chance of a normal job for the young Lowe. He spent stretches of his childhood on military bases in Amman and Cyprus, a military brat pushing toy cars on Jordanian tiles alongside a young King Hussein, who admired his father and would sometimes come by the house in his new sports car. His mother gave him a ukulele and a stack of records, including a strange Tennessee Ernie Ford single, “Fat Back Louisiana, U. S. A. ,” which the young Lowe learned phonetically, as if it were French, fascinated by lyrics about grits and black-eyed peas, all of it food that sounded disgusting to him. It was the first symptom of a lifelong condition: a British boy incurably in love with the sound of America. Sent to boarding school in Suffolk around 1963, he volunteered to play bass in a band, and a friend from woodworking class built him an instrument that had to be tuned with pliers. That group didn’t last. Lowe left school dreaming of becoming a war correspondent, fascinated by the hard-drinking, hard-living men with old typewriters who came to brief his father, but the dream quietly died at a local newspaper when he was sent to review a Disney film, got drunk, and slept through the entire screening. Journalism’s loss was music’s gain, though it’s hard to imagine the profession would have tolerated him. He returned instead to his old schoolmate Brinsley Schwarz, who had a mid-60s pop band called Kippington Lodge, and immediately issued a decree: “No more session players. I said, ‘This has to stop, chaps. We have to play on our own records. What kind of band are we?’” It turned out they were a band with a terrible sound without session players, and they were dropped instantly, but they persisted, drifting toward the informal Americana of Crosby, Stills & Nash and renaming themselves after their guitarist. Lowe grabbed the bass, the microphone, and the pen, and began writing the songs that would become legendary. Among them was a tune called “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love, and Understanding?” Then came the disaster that taught him everything he needed to know about the music business. In the spring of 1970, the band’s management concocted a publicity stunt of such magnitude it may never have been matched. They were to fly a plane full of British journalists across the Atlantic to see Brinsley Schwarz perform at the Fillmore East in New York, opening for Van Morrison and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Almost nothing went as planned. Three band members couldn’t get visas and had to sneak into the U. S. via Canada. The chartered Aer Lingus plane broke down on the runway at Shannon Airport, while more than a hundred journalists, already drinking free at the airport bar and heavily stocked with their own supplies, turned the flight into a raucous party at 40,000 feet once it finally took off. The band arrived at the Fillmore ten minutes before soundcheck, played on borrowed equipment to a crowd of drunks and skeptics, and woke up to headlines describing the entire event as the greatest publicity hype ever, according to Melody Maker. The one positive thing to come out of the fiasco, according to guitarist Brinsley Schwarz, was seeing Van Morrison, who played after them and was amazing. “We realized we weren’t in the same league, and we had to get much better.” They did, by shrinking their band. Feeling humiliated, they turned fiercely anti-commercial, moved into a communal house in Northwood, Middlesex, and began striving to become the best pub band in England. It nearly drove Lowe crazy. Around 1971, after years of heavy LSD use, he suffered a nervous breakdown. “I had to be led around literally for nine months. I was covered in lice, and I looked like a miserable hippie,” he later told journalist Will Birch. He cut his hair, swapped LSD for the more socially acceptable poison of alcohol, which was then considered a cure for addiction, and dove into the scruffy, simple pub rock scene that would later be known as the backlash against the pomp and arrogance of progressive rock. Every week, Brinsley Schwarz would learn the latest hits and play them alongside their own material. Every week, one or two nervous teenagers would approach the stage. One of them, a boy with glasses named Declan McManus, would later borrow the name of the King of Rock and Roll and become Elvis Costello. After five albums, the world remained notably indifferent, and in 1975, Brinsley Schwarz fell apart. Lowe, alone and broke, took anything offered. He toured America as a soundman for Dr. Feelgood, joined a California band called Clover, and released a cheeky, rude single in praise of the Bay City Rollers under the pseudonym the Tartan Horde, which, in a joke the universe clearly enjoyed at his expense, became a hit in Japan. Then two managers from the pub rock scene, fiery Jake Riviera and brainy Dave Robinson, founded a record label from a shop front, financed by a £400 loan from Dr. Feelgood’s Lee Brilleaux. They called it Stiff. Its slogans were “If it ain’t stiff, it ain’t worth a fuck” and other simple ones like “Play loud.” Its first artist, main producer, and reason for existing was Nick Lowe. The first single, catalog number BUY 1, was Lowe’s “So It Goes,” backed with “Heart of the City,” recorded on the cheap and released on August 14, 1976. Lowe had written it while managing a Graham Parker tour, worried about a descending guitar riff he’d nicked from Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town.” “There was that little descending thing that touched my heart, so I started singing, ‘So it goes, so it goes, so it goes,’ while I was walking around doing my tour manager duties,” he recalled. The record barely sold, though it easily recouped its paltry cost, and carried two messages etched into the run-out groove: “Earthlings awake” and “Three chord trick, yeah.” In the studio, he had already acquired the nickname that would stick for life. His method was speed and instinct, capturing the magic of a take before anyone could overthink and ruin it. He summed up his philosophy with characteristic boast: “Do it quickly and make it better later.” They called him “Basher,” and it stuck. What Basher accomplished over the next eighteen months is considered the bedrock of British punk and new wave, which is ironic, because he was its temperamental opposite, a gentle, sentimental soul raised on Sam Cooke and Tennessee Ernie Ford. On October 22, 1976, more than a month before the Sex Pistols could get an album out, Stiff released the Damned’s “New Rose,” recorded in one day at Pathway Studios, now considered the first British punk single….