USUAL SUSPECT PRODUCTIONS Presents Life of Brian Part 1
Interview with Drew Murphy - Drummer with BC Sweet
I remember once asking Drew what it was like working with Brian and he answered tongue in cheek: “It was a love and hate relationship. He loved me and I hated him, hahaha.”
I have never met Brian and we thought it was time to find out what he was like this blonde rock God who could do no wrong in our opinions. Does the myth stand up to scratch? You’re about to find out.
Cheryl and I met up with Drew one Sunday evening down the Anglers to hear more about his working relationship with Brian.
Henrik: How did you meet Brian? How did it start? How did it happen?
Drew:
The Rising Sun pub in Greenford. There I was playing away and he got
one of his cronies to ask if I would do some gigs with him and I said
I would.
Cheryl:
What year was this? And who was in his band at the time?
Drew:
About mid 80’s…..1985/86 somewhere around there. He had various bass players because he wasn’t happy with any of them. He used to throw bass players out more than drummers.
Henrik:
Weren’t there the Farmer Brothers?
Drew:
Yeah, the Brummie twins. Brian picked up musicians all the time.
Cheryl:
Why was that? Because he was difficult or particular?
Drew:
Yes he was difficult. You either had to understand him or just be a complete Sweet fan. He could be very, very hard to work with. You gave as you got, he respected that and sort of calmed down. I think we had the first English tour, we went all over the place and Brian was a lot fitter and better then, he could actually hold a note as opposed to come on shaking and God knows what else, he could actually move around the stage a bit I was always getting sacked, ALWAYS. Another week would go by and he’d get another drummer, who couldn’t hack it or didn’t want to be in the band anymore so he’d ring me up and back and I went.
Henrik:
How much were you paid in those days?
Drew:
Oh God. It went from £30 to £150 a gig over a period of time but Brian chose how much he wanted to pay you. I remember a time, not long before he died, they all went off to going to Dubai/Bahrain and he only paid them £125 for the whole trip and when they asked for more he said ‘well I paid for the tickets, you’ve had a holiday out of it haven’t you?’ That was him all over. He must have pocketed about £20,000 out of that and he paid them peanuts and said you had a holiday out of it. (Laugh). The people that he’d got was Steve on keyboards, who was very loyal, he would not leave and towards the
end the guys I played with were the guys out of the band Kenny whose biggest hit was ‘The Bump’. They had really high voices.
Cheryl:
So when did you leave the band finally?
Drew:
Finally, I left about 1996, hard to remember exactly, before the documentary was made by Channel Four. Me and Dave Glover have always missed playing at the same time, just missed each other.
(At this stage Drew gets off on a tangent about other matters in the world of Sweet/Slade tribute bands etc, we will spare you for this, until Cheryl draws Drew back on the Brian Connolly track again- Henrik and Cheryl)
Cheryl :
There were stories about the name BC Sweet. Dave Glover has always said that he heard Brian say one version of events that he would have liked the band to have carried on without him. Would you know the story behind this?
Drew:
Nobody knows who owns the name of Sweet. I assumed it was a band thing whoever carried on to call it Sweet. Brian never had a contract written anywhere. It was called Sweetshop before the Sweet came out. I don’t know, I really don’t know. You see if you call yourself Sweet and people come to see Sweet and realise it’s not Sweet they may say ‘oh shit’ we’re not coming to see them again’. You call yourself BC Sweet or AS Sweet, they know that Brian Connolly is going to be there or Andy Scott is going to be there. OK. I could call it the Drew Murphy Sweet. Who am I? Might as well call yourself Joe Bloggs’ Sweet. I think it was in agreement with the four of them. Mick didn’t
care. Mick didn’t mind if it was called BC Sweet, the Sweet or whatever. Mick was like that. Andy was the same. (Not sure about that, Drew-Henrik) What do I care, doesn’t matter to us anymore. It was a name and we are not anymore. But because Brian and Andy were still performing I guess they both had a little bit of a grudge against that. They hardly spoke to each other anyway as we all know.
Henrik:
Andy had a grudge against Brian because he felt that Brian’s band was not delivering. This was 10 years ago.
Drew:
Yeah 10 years ago everyone was going to make it. Make a comeback.
Henrik:
I think they have become more realistic now. Andy’s band has become a tribute type of band now supporting Rubettes and Showaddywaddy. I mean that says everything doesn’t it? He realises that he’s not going to make it now.
Drew:
I don’t particularly like Andy Scott either purely for the hatred that he had for Brian and Brian had for him.
Henrik:
Did Brian ever tell you any stories about him and Andy? About their relationship?
Drew:
Not really, no. Not that he told me but I know that he told people like Les Grey from Mud and various other people that were closer to him than I was. Les Gray and Brian were very close. They had a lot in common with the drink and drug thing. I remember we were doing a gig, Skegness or one of the Butlins and Brian, because he used to shake, and Les had a skin complaint. If he rubbed his hands all his skin used to fall to the floor. I used to call them ‘Shake and Flake’(raucous laughter). I walked into the dressing room to change and there they were chatting away. I said ‘oh fu** me look, Shake and Flake” and with that a bottle of beer or something was aimed at my head. I said “I’ll go then”. They just laughed. Les is a pisshead. Everytime he falls off the stool he breaks something. An arm, wrist or his neck. He buggers off to Portugal, recuperates and comes back a bit easier. He is in a mess now. You wouldn’t know these people. If he walked through that door now you wouldn’t know him.
Henrik:
I’ve seen him once and he looked quite ill.
Drew:
This is just a personal thing but I believe what goes around comes around. Now this is all the outcome of what they used to get up to in the early days. Like Brian if he could have got up to what he did. I have seen him eating cornflakes with vodka. You know pouring vodka as if it were milk, looking at the camera laughing. Who’s laughing now? Shame. Real shame. We got on really well when we were together. I’d piss him off and he’d piss me off. He was a character. We were sitting in his living room one day. We had a band rehearsal and a couple of hours previous he had someone from Birmingham or Manchester press turn up. The British tour coming up. This guy from the press said “would you go upstairs, we’d like to take some photos of you and come down in your stage gear”?. Brian went into one and said “Arrrrrr I’m not on stage! This is my fu**ing house. Get ‘em out Drew, get ‘em out of my house” and he threw the coffee table over. I said ‘you’ve got to go gentlemen” The guy said ‘what did I say wrong?’. I said ‘well he’s right, he’s in his house. If you want to take photos take photos”. He didn’t have his hair done and that, he didn’t look like the Brian we knew. He had all flat hair and tea down his shirt. Anyway they left and he never got a good write up by the Birmingham News or whatever it was. He was funny.
We were doing an interview for Germany when a girl came over and was writing. Brian was sitting there in a pair of shorts and his nuts were hanging out to one side. We were sitting there. This girl was looking at him straight in the eye knowing that his old tools were hanging out and we were laughing so much we had to get out and he didn’t know. He didn’t realise.
I said ‘put your bollocks away. I can’t take it anymore’.
Arrrrrr he said. That’s all he said. Arrrrrr. He was very funny.
Cheryl:
Did his illness used to get him down a lot?
Drew:
Yes. Yes it did. He used to take sleep tablets. Tablets to wake up.
Cheryl:
Did he cope with it?
Drew:
Well yes, you do don’t you? You’ve got to cope with it. See he never thought he was as bad as he was. I always believe that the documentary killed him. Because he saw himself, he ACTUALLY saw himself. The videos we had of him on stage he’s not doing anything. He’s just standing on stage. Alright my voice is going a bit but I’m getting older type of thing as we all progress in life.
Henrik:
He didn’t realise that he looked that ill?
Drew:
It’s how he saw himself. As he was walking down the corridor right at the end on his own at the end of the programme, whistling away. He saw himself and he thought ‘fu**ing hell’. That was really sad.
Henrik:
Did Brian have to tour for financial reasons or could he have retired?
Drew:
He could have half and half I think. He enjoyed the touring part. He enjoyed what he did.
Henrik:
In the documentary he says before a gig, “I am really nervous now. I am tired”.
Drew:
He used to get like that. Every now and then he would have a little bit of, you know (Drew motions like Brian sniffed coke).
Cheryl:
What? He actually did it in later years?
Drew:
Oh yeah. I used to go to him, “wipe that stuff from your nose” and he’d say arrrrrr and wipe his nose with his hand. I was around his house one day and he said ‘I’m hungry’. I said ‘What do you want’? He said ‘I fancy a curry’. I said ‘you know you’re not SUPPOSED to have curry. You’ve got ulcers’. He said “Arrrrrr”. He gave me a £50 note and said “Go into Uxbridge and get me a curry and get one for yourself”.
There we are I’m dishing up and said “Do you want me to dish up for you”? He said “What do you think I am? A cripple”? I said “No. But you are taking your time aren’t you”? I said “come here let me help you”. We were sitting there an hour and a half later and he’s finished his curry, half the curry down his t-shirt. You couldn’t say anything to him. He knew what he was doing. There was no point pointing it out.
Cheryl:
Do you think he ever blamed his lifestyle for the way he became?
Drew:
I think you will find. If you ask that question to a lot of them they would say it’s part of the job, I mean in any entertainment world, you will attract a certain person to you. You will attract that type of crowd who will say “take that. That will make you feel better” or “take that if you are doing a weeks tour and no sleep”.
Henrik:
Have you been offered anything?
Drew:
Oh fu**hing thousands of times. Yeah. I don’t need it. What do I need it for. I’ve never smoked a joint or anything. I don’t want it. I had a relation, an aunt a long time ago now. She was offered a purple heart. She was a bit down one day and her mate said ‘take that’ she took it and got hooked. She eventually, years later died of an overdose. Lying on the kitchen floor, in the nude, she didn’t know where she was, what she was doing. I grew up with that. I was always anti and I didn’t want to do it anyway.
Henrik:
Did you know Mick very well?
Drew:
I knew Mick towards the end. Andy Scott’s Sweet did a gig. I knew Mick a long, long time ago when I first started with Brian and then I hadn’t seen him for years. I said to Andy one night “How’s Mick doing these days?” and he said “You can see him for yourself he’s behind you.” He wasn’t the Mick I knew. He was very thin and his face was drawn. The loneliest time I saw Mick was when he was standing behind the mixing desk on his own. It was a big theatre. He was standing behind mixing desk with the lights coming out towards us, and you could see the outline of his body through his white shirt. It was so, so sad. He was watching someone else do his links. His little drum links. I really, really felt for him but what can you do?
Henrik:
So when was it you saw Mick like this? When he was with Andy Scott then?
Drew:
No. I think Brian had just died.
Henrik:
Mick was suffering from leukaemia and had been in hospital around that time.
Drew:
Yeah he was out in America and all sorts getting all that sorted out. He wasn’t at Brian’s funeral because he was in America getting treatment. So it was around that time. He was very, very ill. But then it’s all self infliction. You know. If he was still alive today he had been down at The White Horse downing a few glasses of white wine.
Cheryl:
Again I guess it was the lifestyle that they lived.
Drew:
Yes that’s how his lifestyle went so that’s how he lived. That’s how he knew life I suppose. But if it was me I am afraid. If someone said to me, you are an alcoholic you are going to die. I think, I THINK, I would stop.
Henrik:
Did you do any recordings with Brian?
Drew:
No. No I never actually recorded anything with him.
Cheryl:
Which tracks did Brian prefer to sing? Did he have a favourite?
Drew:
He liked doing all of them. He loved doing them all. He used to get very confused between Wig Wam Bam and Little Willy because if you listen to the records they are very very similar. So when we’d start Wig Wam Bam off, all of a sudden we’d get ‘Little Willy Willy Won’t’ (laugh here) “So somewhere along the line we would mould it around Brian”.
Cheryl:
So you’d fit in to whatever Brian was singing? (laugh)
Drew:
Yeah, somewhere along the line. You see the musicians he had with him, blowing my own trumpet, but they were all good enough to know that he’s not going to do it the way he used to do it so we’ll all follow him. Normally a band will watch the drummer for stops, starts, breaks, etc. But we used to watch Brian because we never knew what he was going to do. It would be like playing with Screaming Lord Sutch. You never knew what the hell he was going to do next.
Henrik:
Did you do the Winter Gardens, Margate in 91? That was when I saw them last.
Drew:
No. The last gig I did with Brian was the Bottom Line in Shepherds Bush, London. I can’t remember what it was for but there were these two huge speakers either side of the stage. Nothing in them, no speakers in them, But they looked good. Brian was complaining that he couldn’t hear himself in the monitor but what we used to do, we used to have an engineer, Porky, he was obviously a skinny little fellow. He knew Brian inside out as far as the music was concerned. He knew him quite well. He knew all the echoes, all the stops and starts. He knew everything and without him Brian was almost lost because somebody would have to do the repeats like on Fox on the Run. Porky would push the button and get Brian’s repeats perfectly. He didn’t have the team behind him that he was confident in that would get him from A to B for the gig although he had bloody good musicians playing with him.
I had some good times with Brian. He was a very funny man. He didn’t know it, but he was a very funny man. He used to get one of the girls, I think it was Nicola to do his hair for him. Used to wash his hair and Jean, they had a row one night. She only had a little mini car and he upset her. It was very embarrassing for her. She got in her car and went. He would regret it afterwards. She rung up and said to Brian, “I can’t stand it anymore”. He said “Where are you? I’ll come and get you”. It turned out she was at the Grapes pub, Hayes. He said ‘I’ll come and get you’. I said do you want me to go and get her, you’ll be all fu**ing night’? He said ‘Yeah you go and get her’. So I went down and met her and she poured her heart out. I bought her home. They had another row and she went up to bed after that and that was the end of that night.
Cheryl:
Sounds like they had some fun and games.
Drew:
We used to watch him go to sleep. He used to shake in his sleep. He used to
take a tablet before a tablet to knock him out so he’d wake up otherwise he
would go into a coma. His internal organs were completely shot to pieces. They
did say if you touch another drop of alcohol you will die. He died about a
dozen times on the table and they brought him back. It’s a well known fact that
next morning, there he was, he woke up and was asking for fish and chips. That
was Brian. What killed him was that he had a stroke, the doctors told him he
would never walk anymore, he never touched the tablets anymore, he went into a
coma and died.
Henrik:
He stopped taking the medication?
Drew:
Yes. He stopped taking the medication. Yes that’s what happened. He had a small stroke and with the condition he had anyway a small stroke was devastating.
Cheryl;
So he stopped taking the medication leading up to the stroke?
Drew:
No. After the stroke. They told him he would end up in a wheelchair and he didn’t want to do that. He stopped taking the pills. Hit the bottle again.
Cheryl:
How long after he stopped taking the medication did he die?
Drew:
Months. His body wouldn’t have been able to sustain without medication for very long.
Henrik:
We talked earlier that he didn’t see himself, as most of us did. But other than that did he see where he was in the big picture or did he still see himself as a 70’s rock God?
Drew:
No. He was a 70’s God in the umbrella of Butlins. If you go to Germany, the touring, it is 1972. You are watching Sweet, Mud, Alvin Stardust. Under that umbrella again you are back in the 70s. That’s the way it should be because it’s like an act to get in to your character. It’s a form of acting. Come out of that umbrella going home and he was Brian Connolly shaking at the wheel.
Cheryl:
Was he the Brian we knew at home?
Drew:
No. No he weren’t the Brian on stage. He was Brian at home. That’s why he kicked the reporters out. He wasn’t getting into his stage gear. ‘I’m Brian at home’. He had his feet firmly on the ground to a certain extent but when he was under that umbrella he WAS Brian Connolly again.
Cheryl:
Did you go to Brian’s funeral?
Drew:
Yeah. Stevie was there. He’s a good man is Stevie. He’s probably the best to talk to, he would always say ‘I don’t want to talk about the 70’s’ where the rest of them would.
Henrik:
That was always my impression of Steve.
Drew:
Steve is in the 90’s (2003 you mean-Henrik) now. That happened then not now. Let’s talk about, I don’t know, computers. They didn’t have computers in the 70’s lets talk about them. He’s down to earth.
Cheryl:
You were at Mick’s funeral too weren’t you?
Drew:
Yes. They are up there laughing at us now aren’t they. The last time I saw Mick we were at Jan’s birthday. He looked alright. I tell a lie. Last time I saw him was up here. It was the Sunday before he died, I’m sure it was. He looked as white as that radiator over there (Drew points to the radiator over there)
But he used to put make up on to try and hide it.
Henrik:
We saw him a few times when we were down here. He never got up to play the drums.
Drew:
He went exactly the same way as Brian. It’s how your body copes with the lifestyle. If your body, you don’t know it at the time. I mean look at Status Quo. What’s been up their nose but they are still out there doing it right? They are from the same era. Brian’s body couldn’t take all that. Neither could Mick. Maybe Andy’s body could handle it. Had some good times with old Brian, had some not so good ones too.
Henrik:
Tell that money story you told before Cheryl arrived.
Drew:
We were at Swansea and we were due to go to Bahrain. He had £2000 and the gig was £2000 and he owed us money. So I took the £2000 of Ian Moore and said I’ve taken my cut, do you want me to pay you? Tell him I’ve paid you and he said oh no, no we are going to do Bahrain. So I went in and said to him, look I’ve taken my cut. He said you can’t do that, you can’t do that. I said I’ve just done it, there you are, see you tomorrow. So anyway I didn’t go to Bahrain because of it and when I asked the boys when they came back what they earned they got £120. He said well you had a holiday out of it. Brian earned about £20, 000 out of it for the one night.
At this point Elliott shouts something about tonight’s gig is about to begin and Drew joins him on stage.
Thanks to Cheryl for the all her hard work typing it up.
Cheryl and Henrik