OLD MAN ROOMY remembers…
Music | roomybonce | April 29, 2009 at 5:29 pmSwine Flu & The Spands
This must’ve been back in ‘83. I was on the road with Spandau Ballet - it must’ve been off the back of the ‘True’ album, a long player so massive John Keeble had to stand outside Tony Hadley’s door with a mace and a wild eye. I tell ya, some nights that slick iron ball’d be matted with all kindsa hairs - blond, brunette, even a ginge, and more than a few curly ones to boot - Holy Sheeeit those boys were hot.
I well remember that steamy Wembley night Hi-De-Hi star Su Pollard came knocking on Tony’s door. My oh my but she was frothin’ like a frisky fox in a trap. I turned her away. I said “Geet gone ya one-trick bitch, who’dya think you are, trying to climb the greasy pole of the next James Bond?” Lordy I thought she was gonna blart bigtime but she pulled out the stops, I’ll give her that. Started singing ‘Starting Together’. I kicked her ass down the stairs. It was all I could do not to buckwheat the bitch.
But Christ did Tony give me hell when he heard. Turns out he’d always had the hots for her ‘Peggy Ollernshaw’ character on the show. Said how his balls were like The Elgin Marbles whenever she’d come on and how he’d always wanted to ‘peg Peg’ bigtime. How the Sweet Mississip was I supposed to have known that? Anyways, Tony’s fury was somethin’ to behold so I didn’t have the heart to tell the guy The Elgin Marbles weren’t even freakin’ marbles, their sculptures for chrissakes, of horses n’ shit. Not that tellin’ him woulda stopped the sunnufabitch making me suck the spit outta Stevie Norman’s sax for a week neither.
But I loved that boy all the same. So much so, I started buyin’ him pigs for sex. Maybe he’d heard I’d been sourcin’ pork for Crosby Stills and Nash since the ’sixties, and maybe he just thought I reeked like the kinda guy who knew his Saddlebacks from his Chester Whites, but it was just as he was stepping off the stage at Live Aid that Tone first asked me to procure him a horny hog. I guess normal gals could no longer sate a man who’d just sang ‘True’ to 30 million folk. Hell, such heights could prime any guy’s old fella to pork the pork, no doubt about it. So I got him a lovely drop of Gloucestershire Old Spot.
Frenella, her name was, but he called her ‘Frenny’, and hooeey if he weren’t ridin’ that sow noon & night, even between encores, and how do I know that? Because I was the one who had to wipe the piglady juice offa the front of his pants before he went back on, that’s why. I musta got through at least a couple of handerkerchiefs before the tour was out, but I never complained, no sirree, because the boy was happy. Never seen him happier, truth be told. i think young Tony Hadley found heaven, balls deep in those rollin’ pink lips, oh yessir.
But then Frenny got sick. Real sick. I went into her one morning and she was coughin’ n’ wheezin’ and she couldn’t find her legs (although I figured that was down to the six hour rumpus Tony had given her just the yesterday evenin’). We got the Vet in but he said it was the Swine Flu, and that there weren’t much hope.
I tell ya now, I’d never seen sadness till I saw the look on Tone’s face when the Vet dropped that bombshell, and you’re listening to a man who watched his own mother prostitute herself to the Wasps Rugby squad every Saturday night for nigh on three decades, only to be locked outta Sudbury the first game they played back there in ‘23. Her face fell further than her titties that night, and I’d like to think Tone’s fell even further (his face that is, not his titties. Mr. Tony Hadley had no titties, no sir, not then at any rate.)
That boy wept right through that night and the next, and was still in bed the day they burned Frenny’s sorry carcass round the back of Chrysalis Records on the last day of the summer. Come the sixth day we couldn’t get him out of bed at all. Back then I guessed he was just sick in the heart. Now, with towering pyres of dead Mexicans burning both sides of the border, I wonder if Tony wasn’t the first human victim of Swine Flu.
I guess we’ll never know, but I wanna share Tony’s love for Frenny with each n’ every one of ya. Here, for the first time, is my personal backstage recording of Tone & Frenny getting it on during Stevie’s classic ‘True’ sax break. One day I hope you find a love so pure, if you ’aint already.
Be speakin’ to y’all again soon babies. Crooooon.
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Tags: Hi-de-Hi, pigs, spandau ballet, su pollard, tony hadley
