Carl Bevan

A tribute - of sorts - to my maverick, genius friend Carl Bevan, who died this week aged 51.

You can tell how fresh a nugget of sheep shit is by the shade of green it leaves on your face: dark oily green and it’s been in the field for a couple of days; the fresh apple green that was smeared on Carl Bevan’s cheeks as he noticed the early rising dog walker crossing this field, and it was freshly lain.

Maeshafn is an idyllic, sleepy village between Mold and Ruthin. It’s peaceful, untroubled, and the only anger it’s seen in recent years flares briefly, and apologetically, when hikers into the surrounding Clwydian hills take up space in the pub car park, but not its patronage.

The residents who aren’t the local farmers are nice, middle class, probably teachers and GP’s, a couple of commuters into the nearest Notropolis of Chester, in itself the least Gotham-like city in the known universe.

The right-leaning broadsheets sell out on a Sunday morning. It’s Picturesque and Desirable; walkers paradise not Gangsta Paradise. You get the picture.

My producer Jane lives here. She’s an excellent human being: friendly, whip smart, a very good neighbour. I imagine. Tonight, though, she’s invited the gremlins in. And fed them a full banquet after midnight.

It’s 1994, I think, and 60ft Dolls are on their first UK tour. They’re the greatest band you might not have heard about, but if you have, you already know that they were a topmost echelon entity, having the rarest, most combustible and thrilling chemistry about them. I loved them hard from the first moment I heard them. I wrote about that here, and I could spin still more superlatives and metaphors to try and capture their seething glory, without getting close.

They weren’t Britpop and they weren’t Cool Cymru. They were real and they were other. A sublime fistfight of a band. They came from the streets of Newport. They weren’t Suede scrapbooking Bowie; Blur reappropriating The Kinks or The Cardiacs; Elastica’s simulacra of Wire. They were 60ft Dolls.

I’d been playing them on the radio since the very beginning. And - yes - I had the t-shirt. I wish I still had that t-shirt. It’s the coolest one I ever owned.

Jane had invited them to stay because they were up in the north to play a couple of gigs. I think one of them was at the Lomax in Liverpool… the original one, where it was a bit like watching a band on a shelf, such was the odd shape of the venue.

She’d been to the supermarket and bought a lot of booze: wine, lager, vodka, gin… enough to last the three or four days the Dolls would be staying with her. Enough fags to keep homophobic Americans laughing into the next century. The fridge was groaning, The shelves were buckling.

All that booze was gone within a few hours of The Dolls arriving.

They were rapacious for alcohol. I drank some of it. Jane did too. And her boyfriend. And her brother. And the Dolls’ manager Huw and his partner Tash. But most of it was siphoned up in a tornado of fag ash, amphetamines and crackling energy by Carl and Mike.

Singer and guitarist Richard demurred, as far as I can remember, and had an ‘early’ night. God bless his wisdom on that front, and others. He obviously knew what was coming even if he couldn’t predict the exact shape. No one could.

There were outlandish stories that had nothing to do with music. In fact, for some of the finest musicians I have ever known, they were the least likely to talk about music. They liked mischief, people and taking the piss. We watched an old Tom Jones video in Jane’s front-room and laughed til we couldn’t see the screen anymore. Carl and Mike were sodium in water, explosive, incorrigible, so much fun to be around. Their carpe diem left fingermarks on the night.

I so desperately wanted to be like them. To be this unafraid and this alive. It’s only in retrospect that I can see the booze wasn’t just a fuel for Carl and Mike, it was their haemoglobin. I tried to keep up but fell asleep on Jane’s living room floor.

Everyone else had gone to bed. Carl and Mike just carried on… laughing, fucking about, slurping, entertaining themselves. They were like this when the only audience was them. This wasn’t a front, some faux rock ’n’ roll posturing, or - worse - a rugger braggadocio hazing ritual. Hedonism was their survival mechanism in this weird world they’d found themselves in.

I blacked out.

I remember hearing the front door slam shut and another maniac cackle. I could see watery first light through the curtains.

Jane shouted from upstairs, “Adam, keep an eye on them!”

So I did my best. I stumbled out onto the road, watching Carl and Mike bouncing off parked BMW’s and just-about-justifiable jeeps. An alarm went off. Mike stood, appalled, Shaggy as schoolteacher, and told it to ‘shhhhhhhhh!’. It was such a ludicrous image as the curtains started twitching. I think I threw up because I couldn’t stop laughing.

Their little odyssey, with me trailing behind, led us to a gate into a field. This seemed like safer, if somewhat tussocky, ground. Carl and Mike, Mike and Carl, they’d both become pretty interchangeable in my addled mind, jumped, fell, rolled off over or through the gate. I don’t know what they were looking for. They didn’t either, but in the early morning dew it was exciting enough to be outside. Especially when they found the tree.

It wasn’t a great, proud tree. It was more apologetic, really. Half tree, half bush, almost a hedge but not quite. It wouldn’t have wanted to be climbed, but climbed is what was happening to it. Carl and Mike scaling up its branches, hooting, still laughing. I was convinced there was going to be the sound of a siren, at some point.

“Does anyone have anything in their pockets they shouldn’t have?” definitely doing a creditable Velma.

The tree didn’t like the shaking or the hooting, this punk rock monkey business, so it shed the branch that Carl and Mike were swinging on and dumped them on the ground, into the mud and the sheep shit.

“You faaaaackkkkarrrr!” neither of them was happy with the other for inviting gravity to the party. Carl picked up a rock and went for Mike with it, looking like a thrift shop Rambo with the sheep turd camo smear on his face. He chased Mike around the tree. They hollered. I just wanted to get them back home before the residents’ association drew up a petition for Jane’s eviction, or before the police arrived.

I couldn’t tell whether there was real intent for murder flooding through Carl’s veins, or whether I’d fallen into a Newport-accented Tom and Jerry.

Oh fuck. There was a man opening the gate that we’d come through earlier. A grown up. He had a coat and a hat on and was walking a dog. I can even remember that it was a black Labrador. I have to leave Post It notes in my office to remind myself not to forget important meetings I’ve already marked in Calendar on my computer, but this I can remember…

The man hadn’t noticed the hullaballoo by the tree. Why would he? A rational brain would try to ignore chaotic, corduroy-wearing, shaggy-haired, sheep shit-smeared outsiders as best it could.

Carl stopped chasing Mike. Mike stopped being chased. Carl still had the rock - a big round one - in his muddy hand.

They’d gone meerkat and were craning their heads round to the interloper as he made his way across the field.

Please don’t see us. Please don’t see him. Please don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. I was paralysed with a mortal fear that my boss would be embarrassed and I would be held responsible.

“Adam, keep an eye on them!”

They just stood silently by the tree. Because of the sheep shit and mud smeared on their faces and otherwise outlandish clothing for a stint in a field, perhaps they were camouflaged. Perhaps everything was going to be ok, after all…

The man and his beautiful black Lab, probably called something sensible like Max, were almost parallel to us now, still 15 or 20 yards away in the brightening morning. But they still hadn’t seen…

“HELLOOOOOOO!” shouted Carl, loud as a pneumatic drill, scaring a flock of wood pigeons up from the field in a tattoo of wingbeats. My heart did a kamikaze dive through my stomach.

The man carried on. Obviously things like this didn’t happen in Maeshafn, so couldn’t be happening at 5:30am on a Tuesday.

But Carl wasn’t to be deterred. Carl was never deterred. By anything. Ever. You’ll hear a lot of stories about that over the coming weeks, months and years, no doubt.

“HELLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! MR BOLLOCKS!”

Then Mike joined in, because of Yin and Yang and their telepathy as a rhythm section clearly extended well beyond the practise room or stage.

“GOOOOOD MOOOORNING! MR BOLLLLLOOOOOCKKKKS! COME AND SAY HELLLLOOOOOOO!”

The shock, fear, appalling sense of wrongness on that poor man’s face is still imprinted on my memory, where so many faces and names have been forgotten. Almost including my own.

His volte face was balletic. Even Max was too shocked to bark. They made the gate in double quick time, pursued by Carl and Mike who - clearly - just wanted to make friends.

“MR BOLLLLLLOOOCCCCCKS! I JUST WANT TO STROKE YOUR DOG!”

Carl didn’t remember to put the rock down until we got back to Jane’s front door. He and Mike curled up and went to sleep for ten hours before waking up wondering why they smelt of farmyards, and starting all over again.

I was long gone by then.

It took me a while before I had the courage to return to Maeshafn.

The man and Max sold up and moved to Chester.

Jane might have invited The Dolls round to stay again but I think our paths diverged - at least where Maeshafn was concerned - as the band went on to burn out but not fade away.

Carl Bevan is the greatest drummer I have ever known. A polymath, a huge-hearted soul and a friend. I forgive him his Rush fixation. He is a remarkable human being and I - and all of us who had the pleasure of knowing him - will miss him to the stars and back.

Don’t wish that he rests in peace. It’d be like trying to stick a supernova in a matchbox.

My deepest sympathies and love to Bev and Connie.