Read Online Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie by Jon Ronson - Free Book Online

One day in 2005 I was in the park with my little boy when my phone rang.
    ‘Hello?’ I said.
    ‘
HELLO!
’ yelled Frank Sidebottom.
    ‘ . . . Frank?’ I said.
    ‘
OH YES
,’ said Frank Sidebottom.
    We hadn’t spoken in fifteen years.
    ‘It’s been so long,’ I said.
    Between 1987 and 1990 I was the keyboard player in the Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey Big Band. Frank wore a big fake head with a cartoon face painted on it – two wide bug
eyes staring, red lips frozen into a permanent half-smile, very smooth hair. Nobody outside his inner circle knew his true identity. This became the subject of feverish speculation during his
zenith years. His voice, slightly muffled under the head, was disguised too – cartoonish and nasal, as if he was a man-child pretending to be a nightclub comic. Our act involved us doing
amateurish plinkety-plonk cover versions of pop classics such as ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ and ‘We Are The Champions’. Frank was all a little wrong, like a comedian you’d
invent in a dream – funny but not funny, meticulous and detailed but repetitive, innocent but nightmarish in a certain light. We rode relatively high. Then it all went wrong.
    And now Frank was on the phone. He was ready to stage a comeback. Maybe I could help by writing an article about my time in the band? I said of course I would. When I got home from the park I
tried to remember our lives back then.
    ***

    Frank Sidebottom.
    In 1987 I was twenty and a student at the Polytechnic of Central London. I was living in a squat in a huge decrepit townhouse in Highbury, North London. The students who rented
proper rooms ended up miles away in places like Turnham Green, while the squatters lived for free in salubrious places like Islington and Bloomsbury. It was an otherworldly life. You could find
yourself squatting in some abandoned mansion with ballrooms and chandeliers. One group lived for a while in the Libyan Embassy in St James’s Square. A staff member had shot out of the window
at an anti-Gaddafi protest and a policewoman had been killed. The Embassy staff fled and the squatters moved in.
    Most of the squatters were sweet-natured, but sometimes you’d find yourself living with chaotic people who were too frenzied for the mainstream world. In Highbury I’d stand in the
kitchen doorway and watch a man called Shep smash all the crockery every time Arsenal lost. He’d grab cereal dishes from the sink and hurl them in a rage across the room, his dreadlocked hair
tumbling into his face like he was some kind of disturbed Highland Games competitor or a Dothraki from
Game of Thrones
.
    ‘He is
SO
mentally ill!’ I’d think with excitement as I stood in the doorway. Arsenal were destined to lose 25 per cent of their games in the 1987/1988 season, finishing
sixth. Shep was a terrifying
Grandstand
football-score service. We were in for a tumultuous time in the communal kitchen.
    One time Shep noticed me staring at him. ‘What?’ he yelled at me. I didn’t say anything. I felt like a cinema audience watching an adventure movie, emotionally engaged only in
the shallowest way. I was just delighted to not be living in Cardiff any more.
    In Cardiff, where I had grown up, I’d been bullied every day: blindfolded and stripped and thrown into the playground, etc. It was the sort of childhood a journalist ought to have –
forced to the margins, identifying with the put-upon, mistrustful of the powerful and unwelcome by them anyway.
    I dreamed about becoming a songwriter. My handicap was that I didn’t have any imagination. I could only write songs about things that were happening right in front of me.
Like ‘Drunk Tramps’, a song I wrote about some drunk tramps I saw being ignored by businessmen:
     
    Drunk tramps
    Ignored by businessmen
    They walk right past you
    Don’t even see you
    But you’re the special ones!
    With pain but hope in your eyes
    Drunk tramps
     
    I did make some money busking on my portable Casio