Billy had secured us a residency at the ‘Grand Prix’ night club in Sea Point - an area of Cape Town situated between Signal Hill and the Atlantic Ocean.
Lea and I setting up at the Grand Prix...note the Chequered flags and crash helmet on the wall behind
The Grand Prix was owned and managed
by an ex racing car driver from Johannesburg named Mimmie Demetrius - hence the
name of the club. We were booked to play from 8 p.m. to 1.00 a.m. Monday
through to Saturday with Sunday off. I can’t remember how much we got paid but
I’m sure it wasn't much. But we had a residency which was the main
thing. Also Billy had also managed to rent us
a cheap place to live, an attic in a large three storey Victorian town house on Loop
Street - in the old part of Cape Town.
A guy named Roly Woods had bought the place as a derelict wreck for a dirt cheap price and single-handedly converted it into the "Woodsville" boarding house.
All three floors were set out the
same. Each had a corridor running the full length flanked by bedrooms and a communal bathroom and toilet at the end...not many hotels and boarding houses
had en suit bathrooms in those days.
Along with the bathroom and
toilet the far end of the third floor corridor there was a set of rickety
stairs which led up to up to ‘The Chequers’ garret - attic.
Roly may have converted and refurbished the rest of the boarding house to a passable standard but he had stopped at the attic – there was no reason to 'tart' it up. I’m sure it had never entered Roly’s head to actually rent it out until he was approached by Billy.
For starters there was no door at the bottom of the stairs or at the head of it for that matter, which meant anyone could wander up to our attic room as they pleased.
No proper flooring had been laid just bare boards with the odd patch of lino. Hours before our arrival five beds were hurriedly installed, wedged between roof joists, chimney stacks and pipes, wherever there was space which meant we required a high degree of athleticism and suppleness to actually access them...oh yes, and I kid you not the beds also had grass growing under them. God's truth.
Then there was the mold, various genus of which clung limpet-like to the walls... it gets better in a bad way. Above our heads, forget a proper ceiling; there were the exposed original Victorian slate roof tiles pinned to strips of wooden crossbeams. A large 'curtain-less' dormer window missing most of its glass gave a panoramic view over Loop Street and through which the Coca Cola neon sign on the roof top of the ‘Ace Of Clubs’ rock venue opposite flashed metronome –like throughout the night projecting a pulsing red glow on the attic wall.
However, despite all this and much, much more - or maybe because of it - we loved our garret home, and not just loved it, we were actually proud of it. Maybe living in such squalor gave us a certain bohemian kudos...least in our minds anyway, though saying that, members of other rock groups were rendered speechless when they checked out our groovy pad.
The street outside the Woodsville boarding
house had its own professional beggar and I use the word ‘professional’
advisedly. The guy was at the top of his game, a highly skilled practitioner.
Skilled in as much as that although he appeared to be suffering from
innumerable disabilities there was absolutely nothing wrong with him...with the
possible exception of his moral compass which was definitely out of kilter. In
other words the man was a professional charlatan.
Every day without fail would find
him out on the pavement plying what appeared by the volume of the coins deposited
in his begging bowl, a lucrative trade. He would never let a passerby pass by
without adding to his pot... or making a donation as he put it. He would plead,
sweet-talk, flatter, embarrass, humiliate, abuse and berate them into handing
over their loose change.
We never knew what we’d find when
we stepped out the boarding house. One day he would be blind the next he’d have
no arms, on other occasions one or both legs would be missing. He wore clothes
which cleverly concealed limbs. He had also acquired props to help substantiate
his disabilities, white sticks, crutches, callipers, I even remember seeing him
in a rusty old wheel-chair.
If you saw “Trading Places” the
con man character Edie Murphy played in the movie is our man. We knew the guy
was an immoral cheat and who prayed off people’s emotions ... but we couldn’t
help having a soft spot for him. He was certainly a character...but once we
moved out the boarding house we never saw him again.
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