Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [15]
And what a night he chose for a baptism of live music. Sets by the Fun House, then a scarcely known punk and ska outfit, had been described by journalist Harry Fenway as: ‘Nights of complete mind and bodily abandon, where crowd surfers hovered like coffinless icons’.
Barry dropped out of school the next day. He got work in a record shop and glimpsed something of the future, the nature of obsession, how people lived through a leather-clad rock star or piano-playing diva. And that for some, a disc of grooved vinyl gave more meaning to existence than work, family, or God.
No more than a pub with a backyard, the Dog and Gun was a venue with soul, jamming the crowd against the stage, the crooked redbrick walls of the adjacent brewery funnelling sound through the heaving audience. It was here Barry witnessed the conception of ‘Thunderstruck’, ‘Fuck the Money’, ‘Stormy Monday’, and not forgetting the brief but sonic boom of ‘Snipers on the Roof’.
Now approaching his eighteenth birthday, Barry was not just under the influence of music. He began experimentation with drugs that never reached a conclusion. Speed before the gigs, weed and whiskey on the comedown. It was during this clichéd apprenticeship of sex, drugs, and, yes, rock ’n’ roll, that Barry’s home life disintegrated.
If not at work, listening to records and thumbing through stock for lost classics, he was busking on the street. But the pavement became his best friend. Kicked out by his stepfather, with just his beloved Les Paul and the clothes he was wearing, he slept in the storeroom of the record shop, on the floor between stacks of forgotten LPs by forgotten artists. Each morning he woke and looked at the faded sleeves, the dog-eared albums nobody listened to any more. He vowed never to end up a dust-covered singer at the bottom of a box.
Strut, a local support band playing covers in working men’s clubs, hadn’t even reached the stage of forgotten record. Barry heard them play in a Battle of the Bands and thought them nothing special, just another collection of young men clunking through the numbers. Then he realised in fact they were perfect, the foundation to launch more spectacular sounds, missing everything he possessed.
On a rainy Monday evening, before an audience of nineteen, the Notorious was born. During the Strut soundcheck, while the Feeney brothers tuned up and Ronnie Strong adjusted his bass pedal, Barry took the stage and plugged in his guitar. He ripped their opening number into a scintillating burst of gravel and gold. The voice of a whiskey-beaten choirboy that would fill stadiums on every continent stopped them dead.
‘I was there,’ brags doorman on the night, Tony Mann. ‘And I thought, fuck, this kid’s something special. I probably should’ve been checking his ID, but once he started singing all I could do was stand there and listen.’
Though younger than the rest of the band, with no experience of gigging, getting up before an audience, dodging bottles and pool balls, Barry naturally took the spotlight. He riffed zest into stale songs, put words to music as easily as he breathed.
Only a week later, after three rehearsals in a garage, they debuted at the Dog. Gigs boomed exponentially. Fifty, one hundred, two hundred, four hundred fans outside in the cold, climbing fences and back walls, already a bootleg passing hands, all for the boy wonder and his band.
Ronnie Strong nicknamed Barry, Billy the Kid, fastest fingers on the frets. This then shortened to Billy K, and the day he signed with Gecko Vinyl, Barry Fulton died. He never used his given name on a contract again. CEO Ricky Wise gushed to the press, ‘This is the sound discovery of the summer, the year, in fact the decade. I have nothing to do for this band. No delay-release strategies, no bartered playtime with tin god DJs or blowhard promoters. The music, Billy K and the boys