Joe Jackson - The Admiral Drake

 

Hello. My story this evening is about The Admiral Drake, which is not a person, but a pub in my hometown, which is Portsmouth, which is a rather rough naval port town on the south coast of England. This was the scene of one of my early musical triumphs when I was 17. But just before we get to The Admiral Drake, just to give you a little bit of context, I did my very first gig when I was only 16. This was also playing piano in a pub. It's always a pub. [audience laughter] But it was a great success and it was almost too easy, as it happened. And this went to my head a bit and I was rather pleased with myself and I thought that I was launched on a glittering career as a gigging musician. 

 

It didn't work out quite like that, because the next few gigs I did were pretty disastrous. I'll give you an example. I was recruited by two much older guys, I was 17 by now, a bass player and a drummer who wanted to form a jazz trio. After a couple of rehearsals, the drummer announced that he got us a gig at the Portsmouth Irish Club. [audience laughter] What? [audience laughter] And I said, “The Irish Club? We're a bloody jazz trio. What are we doing at the Irish Club?” He said, “No, no, no. don't worry. They use it for all kinds of music and all kinds of people go there. It'll be fine.” 

 

Well, we showed up at the Irish Club. And the drummer was quite right about one thing. The audience was not Irish at all. It consisted of about 100 skinheads. [audience laughter] Now, skinheads in Portsmouth at this time were not really known for their appreciation of acoustic jazz trios. [audience laughter] For a while, they just stood and stared blankly at us, and then they started to throw things. [audience laughter] Nothing too dangerous. The purpose was really humiliation. So, they threw pennies, you know, peanuts, fag ins or cigarette butts to two Americans, [audience laughter] fag packets, more pennies. And after a while, of course, we were duly humiliated and scared shitless. 

 

So, what this did is it inspired in me a defiant determination. I thought, God, there's got to be one decent gig in this godforsaken town. I started to do a strange pub crawl where I walked into just about every pub in town just to see if they had a piano and usually walked straight out again. But I eventually found myself in The Admiral Drake, which was a shabby pub. And the landlord, his name was Charlie, was from Birmingham. I don't know if you know what a Birmingham accent sounds like, but a Birmingham accent, it's rather nasal and, you know, one of the most unpleasant accents in the UK, [audience laughter] it’s like that. So, this is how Charlie taught. 

 

And he said, not only did he have a piano, he had a 1902 Bechstein. [audience laughter] So, I tried the piano and it actually was a bit beat up. But it wasn't bad. It was playable. And Charlie was interested in having some live music in his pub a couple of nights a week. So, I said, “Great, great. Can I bring some mates in as guest musicians?” And he said, “Well, I can't pay you anymore.” I said, “Well, that's all right.” Slipping into my 17-year-old self there. [audience laughter] “That's all right.” Cheerful naivety, “That's all right, just pay us as much as you can and we'll split it between us.” To which Charlie replied, “Well, in that case, you can bring the fucking London Philharmonic [audience laughter] for all I care.” 

 

Well, I immediately called my friend, Martin, Martin Keel, who was one of the first musicians I ever worked with. He was a saxophone player. But to call him that doesn't do him justice, because he played every wind instrument you could imagine. He had a huge array of instruments, anything you could blow, you know, Martin could play. And not content with this, he would try to invent new instruments by taking them apart and sticking bits of different instruments together. [audience laughter] He was a musical Frankenstein. 

 

I always found this vaguely disturbing. I wasn't quite sure why, but he invented things like the Clario saxatrombophone [audience laughter] and things that just sounded absolutely bizarre. Anyway, I called him and he said, “Yeah, great, Admiral Drake, let's go.” And he called his friend, Phil the Mousely, [audience laughter] who played drums and that was the band. We soon rehearsed a very large and eclectic repertoire that was everything from jazz standards to Beatles songs to these dreadful old sing along pub songs that they have in England. [sings] Underneath the arches [audience laughter] I dream my dreams away,” these dreadful old songs. 

 

However, right from the moment we first started playing, we were a hit. And the main reason for this is that The Admiral Drake, as it turned out, was the watering hole of a team of local marines. They were the Royal Marines Field Gun Crew. And these guys were tough. They were like made of iron, you know, they were bullet headed, tattoos all over them. One of them I'll never forget had his name, which was Jock, [audience laughter] tattooed across his throat. These guys made the skinheads at the Irish Club look like nuns. [audience laughter] You know what I mean? 

 

Anyway, they liked us. So, we were golden. The Marines liked us. They sang along, they bought us drinks, they steered dangerous drunks away from us, [audience laughter] and it was just fantastic. We realized after a short while that we could do anything we liked. And no matter how silly it was, it was fine with them. Martin used to play wearing an 18th century naval officer's coat with a dummy parrot stuck to the shoulder. [audience laughter] And meanwhile, there was a real parrot. The pub had a resident parrot behind the bar. [audience laughter] And the only thing it could say was, “You bloody bastard.” [audience laughter] It was more like, [changes voice] “You bloody bastard, you bloody bastard” over and over again. 

 

So, things just got sillier and sillier. Martin's Frankenstein tendencies came out. He played things like a teapot with a trumpet mouthpiece attached to it. [audience laughter] Some of the other characters that The Admiral Drake included, the landlady was a great character. I think largely because of her, the place always seems to have a vaguely seedy red-light bordello feel to it. For instance, in the ladies’ room, there was a poster on the wall, a kitsch poster of Adam in the Garden of Eden wearing just a fig leaf. And the fig leaf was actually a little flap that, of course, was crying out to be lifted up. [audience laughter]

 

And when it was lifted up, there was a tiny notice underneath it that said, “A bell has just rung in the bar,” [audience laughter] which in fact it had. [audience laughter] Locals would line up outside the ladies’ room and jeer at whoever came out. This was considered great sport. Anyway, things got sillier and sillier. One particular night that I remember vividly, and one of the reasons I remember it so well, is because my brother was there. He was only 15 at the time, and not yet the connoisseur of pubs that he would later become. But he ventured into The Admiral Drake, and we both vividly remember we were requested to play the stripper. 

 

So, Phil the Mouse started a boom, boom boo boom on the Thomsons, and went into the stripper. One of the Royal Marines Field Gun Crew got up onto a table behind me and proceeded to strip. I couldn't really see what was going on. But there were more and more choruses were demanded, and the noise grew and grew to hysteria practically. Until I looked around and I saw a pair of naked, hairy Royal Marine buttocks just a few inches [audience laughter] from my face. This was followed by a deafening roar of approval, which was then followed by a deafening crash as the table collapsed. And just mayhem. Bodies piling on top of each other, beer spraying everywhere and the Marines mate struggling to get to his clothes before he could [chuckles] so they could hide them. And then, the bell was rung. “Time, gentlemen, please.” 

 

The evening ended with a rousing chorus of, We'll meet again. Don't Know where, don't know when. My brother came up to me, looking slightly shaken and white, and said, “Is it always like this?” [audience laughter] I know that I don't remember exactly how it came to an end, but I know it soured in various small ways. For instance, the crowd sometimes was so noisy that we could barely hear ourselves. We didn't have any amplification. I was pounding the piano so hard. At one point, I looked up and I actually saw a hammer come flying out of the top of the piano, [audience laughter] something I would not have thought possible. 

 

At the end of the evening, I said to Charlie, “Look, maybe the time has come to invest in a new instrument.” Well, this was the wrong thing to say. Charlie was mortally offended by this. “That piano,” he said, “is a 1902 Bechstein.” [audience laughter] And I said, “Yeah, I know. But it was a good piano once, but now it's just knackered.” And he said, “Well, if you was born in 1902, you'd be bloody knackered too” [audience laughter] and he stormed off. 

 

Anyway, things went downhill for one reason or another, and we eventually lost the gig, but not before I realized that it was possible to actually have fun playing music. The Admiral Drake has a special place in my heart, because it was then that I realized that I didn't really want to do anything else other than make music. It's still there, by the way. The Admiral Drake is still there. It's still a dump. But if you ever go to Portsmouth, there's just a little brief postscript to the story, which is that after we stop playing, my brother ventured into the pub again. 

 

He didn't know I hadn't told him that weren't playing there anymore. The Marines grabbed him and said, “Oi, where's your brother?” And of course, he said, “Well, I don't know.” And they said, “Well, never mind. You can play.” And he said, “No, I can't.” And they dragged him to the piano, and he was forced to play about a dozen choruses of the only tune he knew, for which he was rewarded with loud applause and free drinks for the rest of the evening. [audience laughter] That's my story. Thanks for having me. Cheers.