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Dan Kennedy (1:21)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. Hi, I'm Dan Kennedy. The Moth features true stories told live without notes. All stories on the Moth Podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York and Los Angeles and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org this week's story by Joe Jackson is an old favorite from our archives. It was recorded at the moth mainstage in April 2002.

Joe Jackson (1:50)

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. And this was the scene of one of my early musical triumphs when I was 17. But just to 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 and this was also playing piano in a pub. It's always a pub. But it was a great success and it was almost too easy as it happened, and this sort of 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. And after a couple of rehearsals, the Drummer announced that he got us a gig at the Portsmouth Irish Club. What? 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, it's not. 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. Now, skinheads in Portsmouth at this time were not really known for their appreciation of acoustic jazz trios. For a while they just stood and kind of stared blankly at us. And then they started to throw things. Nothing too dangerous. The purpose was really humiliation. So they threw pennies, you know, peanuts, fag ins or cigarette butts to you Americans. Fag packets, more pennies, you know. And after a while, of course, we were duly humiliated and scared shirtless. But then they all just got tired of this and walked out, which was a blessing, you know, it could have been a lot worse. So what this did is, it inspired in me a sort of defiant determination. I thought, God, you know, there's got to be one decent gig in this godforsaken town. And I started to do a strange sort of pub crawl where I walked into just about every pub in town just to see if they had a piano and usually walk 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 is sort of rather nasal and, you know, one of the most unpleasant accents in the uk, sort of like that. So this is how Charlie taught and he said not only did he have a piano, he had a 1902 Bechstein. So I tried the piano and it actually was a bit beat up, but it wasn't bad. It was. 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. 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 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. He was a sort of musical Frankenstein. I always found this vaguely disturbing. I wasn't quite sure why, but he invented things like the Clario saxatrombophone 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 Mouse Mousely, who played drums, and that was the band. And we soon rehearsed a very large and eclectic repertoire that was everything from jazz standards to Beatles songs to these sort of dreadful old sing along pub songs that they have in England. You know, underneath the arches, I dream my dreams away, you know, 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. I mean, 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, tattooed across his throat. These guys made the skinheads at the Irish Club look like nuns, you know what I mean? Anyway, they liked us, so, you know, we were golden. The Marines liked us. They sang along, they bought us drinks, they steered dangerous drunks away from us, and it was just fantastic. And 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. You know, Martin used to play wearing an 18th century naval officer's coat with a dummy parrot stuck to the shoulder. And meanwhile there was a real parrot. The pub had a resident parrot behind the bar and the only thing it could say was, you bloody bastard. It was more like, you bloody bastard, you bloody bastard over and over again. And, you know, so things just got sillier and sillier. Martin's Frankenstein tendencies came out and he played things like a teapot with a trumpet mouthpiece attached to it. And some of the other characters at the Admiral Drake included, the landlady was a great character. She was a ravaged ex hooker, or skate bait, as they would have called him in Portsmouth. Skate was local slang for a Sailor. A sailor was a skate, so she was a skate bait. But she was well past her prime. She had unnaturally jet black hair that kind of went like this and eyebrows that looked like they'd been drawn on with a magic marker like this. And I think largely because of her, the place always seemed to have a sort of vaguely seedy red light kind of bordello feel to it. For instance, in the ladies room, there was a poster on the wall, a sort of 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, crying out to be lifted up. And when it was lifted up, there was a tiny notice underneath it that said, a bell has just rung in the bar, which, in fact, it had. And 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. And one particular night that I remember vividly, and one of the reasons I remember it so well, is because my brother was there, and 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 on the Tomtoms and we went into the stripper and 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, like, hysteria practically, until I looked around and I saw a pair of naked, hairy Royal Marine buttocks just a few inches 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 Marine's mates struggling to get to his clothes before he could so they could hide them. And then the bell was rung. Time, gentlemen, please. And. And 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? Well, things went from the sublime to the ridiculous after this. Martin, for instance, became the only musician, as far as I know, ever to perform a solo on a toilet. He salvaged a toilet bowl from a demolition site, and to this he connected a length of hose pipe and a Trombone, mouthpiece. And he actually played it, the piece de resistance. It sounded, by the way, what did it sound like, you ask? It sounded so like a French horn might sound, if a French horn could fart. But the piece de resistance was the sort of bluesy wah wah effect that he got from opening and closing the toilet lid as he was playing. So, you know, this was the Admiral Drake. This was a typical night at the Admiral Drake. What happened after that? Oh, yes, there were loud demands once again for the stripper. And we said, no way. But we were bribed, I think, with vast quantities of beer. But this time, the featured artiste, as the tom tom started. Boom, boom, boom, boom. The featured artiste was the landlady, the old dragon herself, who stripped down to her black bra and panties, which is a more shocking sight even than a naked marine. And she had to be physically restrained by her husband from going further. Meanwhile, the parrot is screeching, you bloody bastard. You bloody bastard. And where could we possibly go from there? Well, the only way, of course, was down. And I know that I don't remember exactly how it came to an end, but I know it sort of soured in various small ways. For instance, the crowd sometimes was so noisy that we could barely hear ourselves. I mean, we didn't have any amplification. And 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, something I would not have thought possible. At the end of the evening, I said to Charlie, look you now, maybe the time has come to invest in a new instrument. Well, this was the wrong thing to say. I mean, Charlie was mortally offended by this. That piano, he said, is a 1902 Bechstein. And I said, yeah, I know, but, you know, 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. 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. I think this is the point. What's our theme? Rock and roll saved my life yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Rock and roll saved my life Folks, 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. And 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 stopped playing there, my brother ventured into the pub again and he didn't know I hadn't told him that we weren't playing there anymore, and the Marines grabbed him and said, oi, where's your brother? And of course he said, 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. So that's my story. Thanks for having me. Cheers.