Bruce Dickinson - What Does This Button Do?

‘All night if you want,’ I replied.

I could see him leaning back to dial a phone number.

Phil played bass and had called his big brother, Doug, who played drums. Together, we all listened back at four in the morning. I had never double-tracked, or harmonised with myself, but I did that night: three-part ascending choir vocals, big doubled choral pieces. If only the owner of the three-bedroomed semi whose garage it was knew what he started that night.

‘We’d better start the band, then, I suppose,’ said Doug.

I was most impressed by the fact that they had a battered blue transit van. It performed parcel deliveries by day, and at night it would turn into the most exotic four-wheeled magic carpet, transporting our merry souls to la-la land until dawn, when we all went back to the pumpkin patch with the rest of humanity. But before we could sprinkle fairy dust into that petrol tank, we had to find a guitarist.

So an ad was put in Melody Maker : ‘Guitarist wanted for pro recording band. Good prospects.’

My God, I came over all a twitter. Pinch yourself, Dickinson, here comes the Big Time.

Speed was not so speedy anymore. We had all moved and were spread across East London. Varying degrees of work plus geography put paid to us, and in any case our drummer couldn’t get off from his job in Catford. Plumstead became Glumstead as we played our last gig, but not before a puzzled audience saw me disembowel Snoopy on the stage at the People’s Palace. I knew they were puzzled because I could clearly see the bemusement on the six faces in the cavernous venue. Perhaps they thought they had encountered a strange art installation, or they were simply so appalled that they stayed to see the car crash.

Actually, we weren’t that bad – just not that good.

Doug and Phil lived in a rather swish rented mansion block in Battersea in south-west London. In the seventies – and the eighties, for that matter – rents in London were affordable, and houses were cheap. One enterprising lad on a social-sciences course actually bought a flat during his time at university, using his grant as a deposit. Smart cookie.

I did something quite different with my grant money. I spent most of it on a PA system for the new band. It consisted of two large pieces of furniture with 2 × 15-inch speakers buried in the cabinetry. Sat atop were a pair of integrated double 12 inches with a tweeter on top, powered by four 200-watt valve amplifiers, designated as slaves, powerslaves, in fact. I had upped the ante in the microphone stakes and now gripped a gold AKG-something-or-other, with a cannon plug at one end and a jack plug at the other. I was halfway to paradise at least.

All of which depleted my bank account to almost zero. The nice people at Barclays had given me a chequebook, a bank card and what seemed to be a free overdraft, which was how I fed myself. I was also responsible for not paying my rent. I managed this by not being present between the hours of nine and five, Monday to Friday, or if I was present, I hid behind the cooker.

After a couple of terms of this, letters started to arrive. Quite a lot of letters, really. Never mind , I thought. One day all of this will be in a book .

In the meantime I manned the telephone in the rather swish mansion block in Battersea and waited for prospective guitarists to phone. By day three I was losing the will to live. If auditioning disciples was like auditioning guitarists then no wonder Jesus ascended to heaven. At first I listened and they talked, and talked …

I had maybe a hundred names, and we booked them in over three days at a rehearsal studio above the Rose and Crown in Wandsworth. I made notes on their stories and their influences and styles.

‘Well, I think I’m as good as Jimmy Page, but maybe not as clever.’

‘I like to think of myself as a cross between Ritchie Blackmore and Mozart.’

‘I think the guitar is, for me, an extension of my entire personality.’

Phil and Doug just jammed on a couple of chords and we watched as the helpless, the hopeless, the hapless, the naive and the outright lunatic failed to negotiate any musical material or collaborate with any rhythm at all, not even their own pulse.

At the end of three days, and after nearly throwing myself off Albert Bridge into the Thames in frustration, two shiny nuggets appeared. Both were over 30, which seemed an impossibly distant age. There was a fantastic Irish guy who had played in showbands, a total pro. Music was like flicking on a light switch for him. But then in walked Tony Lee. Tony was a chilled-out Australian with presence, and when he played, which he did effortlessly, he gurned in a most-agreeable manner. He was 30 years ahead of his time as far as facial hair was concerned. In short, he looked great and, boy, could he play guitar.

We called ourselves Shots, but we could have called ourselves Anal Catastrophe and only had to change one letter. It was the era of punk, after all. I thought it was a rubbish name as well, but I couldn’t think of a better one.

We set about rehearsing material and creating an image. Not being experienced at either past-time, I went with the received wisdom. After rehearsals, or lengthy discussions over vats of tea in Battersea, I would bounce around trains, tubes and the 277 bus before arriving back at the Isle of Dogs.

One random night, I unsuspectingly fell under the evil spell not of bell, book and candle, but of glass, resin and matches. Marijuana had arrived, and in the finest tradition of toilet archaeology, shit was about to happen. I had been hammering on the keys of the dilapidated piano when there was a knock at the door.

Peering around the door handle was my grinning, pixie-faced flatmate, he of the Afghan coat and John Lennon specs.

‘Fancy a glass?’ he said.

I had no idea what he was talking about but, in the spirit of ‘What Does this Button Do?’, I feigned nonchalance.

‘Why not?’

I tentatively followed him into his lair. It was full-on hippy-headband, joss-stick heaven: carpets on the walls and ceiling – even on the floor. It was a male boudoir, and a temple to a fragrance I couldn’t quite identify. He giggled a lot. He was still giggling when he took a badge from his lapel (students always wore at least 10 or 15 badges) and laid it down, bending the sharp end of the pin to vertical. This was intriguing behaviour.

He then crumbled a piece of a brown mud-like substance away from its bigger brother, and rolled it into a greasy lump. He impaled it with great care on the badge like a surgeon would treat a fragile liver before transplant.

Suddenly he lit the lump, swooped a glass over the top of the whole issue and, lifting the edge of the inverted glass, inhaled the resulting smoke before going very red in the face. I was nonplussed. Finally, he exhaled. The glass was still full of the joys of combustion.

He nodded at the glass.

I inhaled to maximum effect. My lungs felt singed, my epiglottis ravaged by a Brillo Pad, but for some reason I rolled on my back, put my hands and feet in the air, and I was suddenly on the ceiling looking down at myself. I had a few more puffs, and by now had figured out that this was a resinous form of marijuana. Things became funny that were not so before, and I spent several hours perforating the fabric of the universe looking for the joke. Though I am loath to admit it, that little puff of dope opened what They Might Be Giants would have called the little ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’. That and a desire to eat doughnuts.

I never got the chance to thank my flatmate because the police arrived and took him away a few days later. He was a generous soul, and had sent a large lump of hash in the corner of an envelope via Her Majesty’s postal system. Whether impaired by his own fumes, or simply impaired in his judgement, he addressed the envelope to the wrong house. The recipient opened it, called the police and kindly gave them the name and address of the sender, helpfully provided within.