14. Five Go Mad in Farnham - PART TWO

CONFESSIONS OF A STUDIO RAT

One afternoon, they all disappeared after lunch, and arrived back in the studio after an hour or so. Turns out they’d all gone into town to visit the local chemist (pharmacy). We’ve got a party planned at the weekend for the birthday of one of the band members, and they all decided they needed to be prepared with condoms. (Oh, the optimism of youth).  I would have loved to see them all marching into the pharmacy, each buying a small pack of condoms, especially as they could hardly speak any English. Anyway, here’s how the story was related to me when they got back.

“We wanted to get condoms for the party, so we went and bought some, and we got back and we tried them on to check size”. “You tried them on each other?” I remember joking. Yes, came the reply, clearly not really understanding. Mark and I roared with laughter, but the best was yet to come, when I was asked “Do they come in sizes? These are all too big!” Well, I had no words….

This gave me a great idea for the birthday party coming up at the weekend. I went out and bought a finger glove, a small one-finger sheath designed to protect a cut finger from getting hurt when doing dishes (I imagine). We took that tiny thing and put it in a gift box with elaborate wrapping; bows and ribbons and such. This gift looked great.

At last it’s Saturday night and its party time. We had invited all the studio staff plus a few friends to join us for champagne and gift-giving. The “Birthday Boy” was the band’s musical director for the project. He was a very well known guitar hero in Japan and the boys were still just a little in awe of him.

I should note that the band’s drummer was an intensely shy guy, and he spent the entire evening hiding in a corner behind the television, armed with a video camera. He would rise up from his hiding spot with the camera, film what was going on, then “down periscope”, would sink back down to the floor. Watching this guy raising and lowering to the floor with his camera was hysterical by itself, but it was nothing compared with what was to come.

I presented our Birthday Boy with our gift from all the studio, in its beautiful box. When final unwrapped, he held up his Birthday Condom, all 2” of it, while I explained it was a very special alternative to the standard English condoms.

At this point the party went from mildly silly to absolutely surreal. The studio manager had arranged for a “strip-o-gram” to come in as a special treat for this guy. The band had no idea, they only knew that a woman in a uniform was suddenly in the room, and she was very angrily accusing our Birthday Boy that his passport was invalid and he had to leave with her, immediately! The poor guys had no clue what was going on, they thought it was a for-real bust. The stockings, stilettos and the fact that the uniform was actually for a Meter Maid did not give the game away. As the “police woman” proceeded with her act, she eventually broke out into a big smile, produced a huge birthday card, and wished the very confused victim a happy birthday. The look on this man’s face went from sheer panic- (he actually went and got his passport thinking he was about to be deported)- to a look of immense relief with the realization that this was some kind of a joke and there really was not a problem. He could relax. BUT, it was at this point that the police woman started unbuttoning her blouse, trying to put his hand on her body, and making a grab for his trousers. This is when the true panic ensued.(The poor guy’s blood pressure!!)

The band and the rest of us were all screaming with laughter at this point, but for the hapless victim of the prank, this was beyond out-of-order. All he wanted to do was run from the room and lock himself away in his bedroom. The closing shot on the video was probably him trying to get away from this mad woman who by now had her hand on his belt, trying to get his pants down (unsuccessfully). It was quite some time after the woman left that the band was able to persuade the Birthday Boy to come out and join us again. Somewhere in Japan there is a video of all this, unless of course the Birthday Boy got hold of it.

(BTW, despite all this mayhem, I did get to return to Jacobs Studios after this!)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

7. JINGLE FEVER

  C onfessions of a Studio Rat One mans journey through a world of recording studios and musicians in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s – without a net! London (1980) I engineered many advertising jingles during my career, in major studios like A&R in New York and Marcus Music, my base in London. In London I was picking up a lot of work from a music company called Air-Edel, the British arm of HEA in New York with whom I also spent countless hours recording jingles. Air-Edel had their own little demo studio where their writers could present jingle ideas to their advertising agency clients. It was no big deal as studios go. Perhaps there was a small Soundcraft board and multitrack, a vocal booth and a couch and coffee table in the back for the clients. They needed to make their demos as presentable as possible, so they would employ the services of the engineers with whom they would normally work on the “real” dates around town. I was part of that cadre of off-duty mercenaries, and it w...
Read more

18. The Mermaid in Topanga (1990)

Image
  Topanga Canyon, CA (1990) My wife Claire and I were living in the mountain community of Topanga Canyon in southern California. The location was magic: while it was commuting distance to Hollywood and downtown LA, it was still remote enough to retain the trees, creeks, animals such as bobcats and coyotes,   and general woodsy feel. Artists and musicians loved it, and there were parties and crazy scenes going on all over the place. Many famous entertainers lived there, well, the ones who preferred something other than Beverly Hills luxury. A great many of the properties were originally built as vacation homes, cheap and cheerful but don’t look too closely for adherence to building regulations! For example, if we ran a hair dryer in the downstairs bathroom, a circuit breaker would pop in the upstairs apartment, which wasn’t even our accommodation! We once had an entire window fall out-frame and all, because someone foolishly tried to clean it. I guess it was never properly in...
Read more

6. BACK IN THE (SWEDISH) HIGH LIFE AGAIN (1979)

    LONDON (May 1979) I was working in the little studio in Worcester with my friend Pete Green (a.k.a. Daniel Boone), and he said to me “You know, I heard Abba are opening up a studio in London and they’re looking for engineers”. I was ready for a change from the present routine, and a big new shiny studio in London had a certain appeal. I somehow made contact with their studio manager Chris who confirmed they were still building the place but definitely interviewing for staff engineers. An appointment was set up, and on the given day I took a very early morning train to London from my in-law’s house in York. The place would be known as Marcus Music UK, and it was a sister studio to a very beautiful facility of the same name operating in Stockholm. The Swedish studio did in fact count ABBA as a client, but the band did not have any part in the ownership of Marcus Studios. The owner was a Swedish bandleader named Marcus (oddly enough) who was very popular in that part of...
Read more