Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie Read Online Free Page A

Paula, answered the
door. I can’t remember what she said to me but I recall being struck by how smart and funny she was in that dry, dour Manchester way. She told me to go to the spare bedroom. I walked up the
stairs, passing the bathroom door. It was open. I glanced in. Staring back at me from the sink was Frank’s head.
    ‘In here, Jon,’ I heard Chris shout from a room at the end of the corridor.
    I opened the door. And stopped. Things were different – ominously so. A new man was standing there. He wore a maroon shirt tucked smartly into neat black jeans. A bass guitar hung around
his neck. As I walked in he started playing a tight soul-funk riff with seeming nonchalance, like it was just something his fingers did, but I understood it to be an act of aggression. He was
marking his territory. Chris looked impressed by the man’s adeptness.
    ‘Don’t you manage that shit band The Man From Delmonte?’ the man muttered indifferently.
    ‘Who . . .
are
you?’ I said.
    ‘I’m Richard,’ he said. ‘From The Desert Wolves.’
     

    The Desert Wolves, Richard is top right.
     
    The Desert Wolves were an ’80s indie band in the vein of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions who wrote songs with lyrics like ‘We could go driving down Mexico way / The wind in your hair /
You look lovely this time of year’. I’d like to say that during the twenty-five years that have passed since Richard took an instant dislike to me in Chris’s spare bedroom, a
dislike that only intensified during the months that followed before the band imploded, and climaxed in him yelling at me during one tense soundcheck that he’d like to break my
‘keyboard playing fingers’, he went on to have a disappointing life. But he didn’t. He became one of the world’s most successful tour managers, looking after Woody Allen and
The Spice Girls, and he currently manages the Pixies.
    Richard was not the only proper musician Chris brought in to make us more professional-sounding. A skilful guitarist and a saxophone player turned up in the spare bedroom too. Mike counted us in
with his drumsticks. And it began. We sounded like an excellent 1980s wedding band – the kind of band that could do note-perfect versions of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ and ‘Girls
Just Want To Have Fun’.
    Chris told me to book us the biggest tour we’d ever undertaken. Thirty dates in thirty days. We’d play every venue that had ever had us on. He choreographed it so I would begin the
show. I’d walk on stage, alone, into a spotlight, and play a powerful C with my left forefinger. The synth brass tone – the most stirring of all the Casio tones. This lone note could
last a minute or more – it would be up to me to judge at what point the audience were at a peak of anticipation – and then I’d play with my right forefinger, G, F, G, A, F, G.
‘Born In Timperley’ (our version of ‘Born in the USA’, Timperley being the Manchester suburb where Frank and Chris lived).‘Born In Timperley’. This would be the
cue for the rest of the band to join me on stage for our power-rock reimagining of the song.
    The day the tour began we hired a people-carrier instead of a Transit van and we set off to our first venue. The mood en route was noticeably more pumped. The old Oh Blimey Big Band members had
a certain frail avant-garde loucheness to them. But this new band: I felt like I was in a college sports team. We soundchecked. The audience arrived. The place was packed. And then I walked out
into the spotlight.
    And in the space of that first song – that single ‘Born in Timperley’ – the audience veered from fevered anticipation into puzzlement into hoping we were playing a weird
joke on them into realizing with regret that we were not. What had become of our beloved plinkety-plonk sound? We were Mrs Merton being backed by Survivor. I did my best to covertly sabotage the
musical direction from within, being as plinkety as I could muster, playing lots of bum