About half way through my autobiography now - 45000 words so far. Heres another little snippet. The true story of the only manager I have ever had. For one gig. Its set about three months after I began performing as Attila. And then, in January 1981, after about six gigs, I got my first press feature. In the Harlow Gazette. ‘CITY GENT’S MANIC TOUCH’ was the headline. ‘By day a mild mannered worker in a London stockbroker’s office, he changes into his alter ego Attila in the evenings, playing ‘manic’ folk’. (‘Mild mannered’? Me?) But this local journalist’s attempt to rewrite the Superman story in local hackese bore immediate fruit: I got a call from a young wannabe impresario called Ray Santilli, who said he’d like to manage me. There and then, he promised me a showcase A&R gig at the famous Dingwall’s jazz club in London and an interview with the Daily Mirror, though he’d neither seen me, met me nor heard me perform before. ‘Yeah, right’, I thought. The next thing I knew the Daily Mirror were on the ‘phone wanting to do a photo session with me, in my suit - and a bloody Viking helmet. Then I got confirmation that I was booked at Dingwalls, and Ray Santilli said he’d pay for a coach so that the local punks could come and cheer me on, to impress the A&R people (jazz A&R people?) he was inviting to come and see me. I couldn’t work out why he was doing all this, and I thought it was time to meet him. (Though I didn’t say so, I thought the Viking helmet was a really, really naff idea as well). ‘But Ray’, I said. ‘You’ve never seen me do a gig. You don’t know any of my stuff. It’s not jazz. It’s left wing performance poetry and rude, loud, very primitive punky songs, thrashed out on three chords on a cheap little electric mandolin put through a phaser unit. It’s indescribable really. I can’t sing, the mandolin sounds really tinny, and I’ve only been doing this for four months and about six gigs. I’ve got an awful lot to learn! No-one’s going to sign me, honestly! Especially not if they’re into jazz!’ ‘It doesn’t matter what you do’, he said. ‘You’ve got a great stage name, and it’s a great story. Leave the rest to me.’ ‘Well, Ok, I’ll do the photo session for the Mirror, and the gig, but I want free beer for the Harlow Front Line punks as well as the free coach to Dingwalls!’ I got it. I did the photos, in my suit and a Viking helmet. I looked a complete and total plonker, and even though you might think that a national newspaper feature four months after my first gig would be everything I could have ever wanted, I was mighty relieved when the editors decided not to run the piece. The gig? A Monday night showcase at a cavernously empty Dingwalls. Fifty Harlow punks (the entire audience, apart from a posse of bemused A&R types) polished off Ray’s free beer on the coach trip down and went absolutely berserk all the way through my set. They cheered my poems to the rafters and sang along to ‘Willie Whitelaw’s Willie’ as though their lives depended on it. Some invaded the stage to sing backing vocals on ‘The Spencer’s Croft Cat’. ‘Dead, dead cat – and it’s got MAGGAT!’ they shouted. ‘Bury the cat. Bury the cat. BURY, BURY, BURY THE CAT!’ The jazz A&R men left half way through, shrugging their shoulders in disbelief, and Ray Santilli disappeared soon after. I know he didn’t know what to expect, but I’m sure he didn’t expect what he got, if you see what I mean…. But there is a rather large postscript. One day a few years ago, remembering that strange episode and thinking that I had heard his name bandied about somewhere recently, I put ‘Ray Santilli’ into Google. Here’s what I got: ‘Ray Santilli is a London-based film producer, who on 5 May 1995 presented for the first time his alien autopsy footage to media representatives and UFO researchers. It was suggested that the body belonged to one of the aliens picked from the supposed Roswell UFO crash site in 1947.’ It soon became apparent that this whole scam had become the film ‘Alien Autopsy’ starring Ant or Dec out of Ant & Dec (please note: I’m not interested in Ant & Dec and I haven’t seen the film) as Ray Santilli. With Ray Santilli as producer. He probably designed the costumes as well. And it is, indeed, the same bloke. The same bloke who persuaded the Daily Mirror to take pictures of me in a Viking helmet. The same bloke who tried to persuade London’s top jazz impresarios to take under their wing a foetal, nay, embryonic Attila the Stockbroker about 6 gigs old, shouting poems and thrashing a tinny, out of tune electric mandolin while ‘singing’ about a dead cat and Willie Whitelaw’s Willie. Why wasn’t the alien’s photo in the Mirror, Ray? It wouldn’t even have needed to wear a Viking helmet. And it’s a shame it was dead. You could have got it a gig at Dingwalls …
Posted on: Tue, 14 Jan 2014 15:57:37 +0000
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