Dead Beat Read Free Page B

from a council flat in the Moss Side ghetto to a mansion in the Cheshire countryside.
    With consummate showmanship, he closed the ninety-minute set with a third encore, that first, huge hit, the one we’d all been waiting for. A classic case of leaving them wanting more. Before the last chords had died away, Richard was on his feet and heading for the exit. I followed quickly before the crowds built up, and caught up with him on the pavement outside as he flagged down a cab.
    As we settled back in our seats and the cabbie set off for the hotel, Richard said, “Not bad. Not bad at all. He puts on a good show. But he’d better have some new ideas for the next album. Last three all sounded the same and they didn’t sell nearly enough. You watch, there’ll be a few twitchy faces around tonight, and I don’t just mean the coke-heads.”
    He paused to light a cigarette and I snatched the chance to ask him why it was so important that I be at the party. I was still nursing the forlorn hope of an early night.
    “Now that would be telling,” he said mysteriously.
    “So tell. It’s only a five-minute cab ride. I haven’t got time to pull your fingernails out one by one.”
    “You’re a hard woman, Brannigan,” he complained. “Never off duty, are you? OK, I’ll tell you. You know me and Jett go way back?” I nodded. I remembered Richard telling me the story of how he’d landed his first job on a music paper with an exclusive interview of the normally reclusive Jett. Richard had been working for a local paper in Watford and he’d been covering their cup tie with Manchester City. At the time, Elton John had owned Watford, and Jett had been his personal guest for the afternoon. After City won, Richard had sneaked in to the boardroom and had persuaded an elated Jett to give him an interview. That interview had been Richard’s escape ticket. As a bonus, Jett had liked what Richard wrote, and they’d stayed friends ever since.
    “Well,” Richard continued, interrupting my reference to my mental card index of his past, “he’s decided that he wants his autobiography written.”
    “Don’t you mean biography?” Always the nitpicker, that’s me.
    “No, I mean
auto
. He wants it ghosted, written in the first person. When we saw him at that dinner, he mentioned it to me. Sort of sounded me out. Of course, I said I’d be interested. It wouldn’t be a mega-seller like Jagger or Bowie, but it could be a nice little earner. So, when he rang me up to invite us tonight and he was so insistent that you come along too, I thought I could read between the lines.”
    Although he was trying to sound nonchalant, I could tell that Richard was bursting with pride and excitement at the idea. I pulled his head down to mine and planted a kiss on his warm mouth. “That’s great news,” I said, meaning it. “Will it mean a lot of work?”
    He shrugged. “I shouldn’t think so. It’s just a case of getting him talking into the old tape recorder then knocking it into shape afterwards. And he’s going to be at home for the next three months or so working on the new album, so he’ll be around and about.”
    Before we could discuss the matter further, the taxi pulled up outside the ornate façade of the grandiosely named Holiday Inn Midland Crowne Plaza. It’s one of those extraordinary Manchester
    Suddenly, in the nineties, London was no longer the place to be. If you wanted a decent lifestyle with lots of buzz and excitement packed into compact city centers, you had to be in one of the so-called provincial cities. Manchester for rock, Glasgow for culture, Newcastle for shopping. It was this shift that had brought Richard to Manchester two years before. He’d come up to try to get an interview with cult hero Morrissey and two days in the city had convinced him that it was going to be to the nineties what Liverpool was to the sixties. He had nothing to keep him in London; his divorce had just come through, and a freelance makes