That Boogie Beat Damn Killed My Soul: An autobiographical account of my early life as a muso…

By Brian Gill

I have been involved in the music business in various roles since 1961. I was bought my first guitar when I was 12 years old, on which I slogged away for a year. In 1962, I joined my first band, the Phantoms. Then the Sparticans came for me in 1963, then in 1965, I was invited to join the Nomads, who were local pop stars!
This began a life in which I would meet many of the good and great in the music industry, including a Beatle, with whom we made a record. In 1979, with my friend, old bandmate and future business partner, keyboard player John DaCosta, I decided to open a music shop – the first of many we would open in the coming years. After an epic roller coaster ride of ambition and excess, it all came crashing down for me in 1994 and I was forced to rethink my life. Today I live a complicated but thoroughly enjoyable life in Thailand, still playing the guitar and writing songs, but no longer trying to run music shops…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jul 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788230315

Brian Gill

Brian Gill was born in Woodford and lived in Essex for some years before moving to Glastonbury. He has been married 3 times and has 5 children. He has been a musician since the age of 12 and played in numerous bands. He now lives in Thailand and commutes to and from England, where he still has family and friends. He still plays the guitar, sings and writes songs.

Book preview

Chapter 1—My First Faltering Steps

on the Ladder to Stardom

The first real musical experience I ever had happened when I was about nine. I had just seen the film Forbidden Planet, an off-planet adventure in which an intrepid Earthling flying saucer travels to a strange, mysterious planet, the sole human inhabitant of which is a brilliant scientist. The scientist also has a beautiful, but naïve nineteen-year-old daughter, who predictably falls in love with the captain of the saucer. He somehow discovers that the planet has an awesome power, a remnant from the visitation of a species of aliens with a vastly superior technology, who died out many eons before. This power manifests itself, among other ways, by the creation of a huge, virtual fiery tiger which attacks the flying saucer and is generally threatening and unpleasant.

The crew of the flying saucer surround the ship with their 4 barrelled electrical cannons and when then tiger creature appears, unleash volleys of withering electrical energy and only then are able to gradually repel the creature. The energy beams the cannons fired was unlikely to be photons as Star Trek would not be invented by Hollywood for another 10 years!

I decided to emulate this epic battle scene using some props that I had available. Firstly, I needed an approximation of a Virtual Fiery Tiger, so I stuck my Sooty Bear glove puppet astride an empty milk bottle. Next task was to build a passable flying saucer and the best I could come up with was the dog’s metal dinner plate, which when inverted and placed on one of our corn flakes bowls provided the basic shape. It would never fly, of course, but that didn’t matter; it only had to look convincing on the lounge floor!

I would need a crew. I had a large selection of toy soldiers, so I looked for the most suitable—I discounted the Red Indians knowing somehow that they would be miscast. I settled for two groups; American WW2 Marines and British WW2 Infantry. These two groups were easily distinguishable. The US Marines were big, strong, very well equipped and looked supremely confident; The British Infantry, on the other hand, looked sad and bedraggled, with haunted eyes and practically no equipment, as if fresh from some new disaster in Europe!

The best I could do for the cannons was to take my mum’s entire inventory of egg cups, which turned upside down with a four-pronged fork placed on the square base served adequately. I then blazed away at the Virtual Fiery Tiger or as I called him, the VFT (I may have borrowed some military-speak from the US Marines) with my improvised cannons, which may not have looked the part, but I did my best to make sure they at least sounded like the real thing. It became necessary to send out patrols, which task usually fell to the poor British Infantry, who always seemed to get the stickiest jobs. I remember one of their number had just been shot; the pain was etched on his plastic face. His arms were thrown up in supplication, but he still doggedly held on to his rifle.

Although extremely moribund, I found that I could make some use of him too. He had no difficulty in aiming his rifle at the enemy if placed in some awkward and unnatural poses; it wasn’t always pretty, but I rationalised it by thinking ‘well, he is dead’. He certainly knew his duty, that soldier. After most of an afternoon, the VFS was finally vanquished to cheers from the crew and all the combatants…and not least of all from my mum, who was screaming for her kitchen utensils back.

Now what? I then raided the pots and pans cupboard and arranged them on the floor of the lounge to resemble a kit of drums. I took a metal tray and placed it in the middle of my improvised drum kit and proceeded to beat the hell out of it, deafening everybody in our house and probably the two houses either side for an hour until I’d virtually driven my mum to despair and she came in the lounge at a rate of knots and forcibly removed all my—her—paraphernalia and put it back in the cupboard. I had been quite happily banging and crashing and waving my head around, like a man possessed, which is what I imagined drummers did; it was not too far away from the truth.

I also had an old ukulele, which was bought for me in Woolworths, fine musical establishment that it was, but I never really took to it; somehow it just seemed unfit for purpose, which, of course, was making an awful racket.

Several years went past and in October 1960, a month after I’d started my new school, West Hatch Technical High School, and four months away from my twelfth birthday, I finally persuaded my dear old mum to buy me a proper guitar. After all, I’d only had my old two-bob ukulele to play on since I was nine years old and despite it coming with an assurance from my mum that hard work and discipline were the only ingredients required to become a virtuoso player and that if I wanted to sound like all my heroes on dad’s American rock & roll records, I must remember these three little words; ‘practice makes perfect’. Yeah right; like ‘arbeit macht frei’, as they used to say in the old country. Strumming away on the old ukulele was not the way I’d ever be able to produce the guitar sounds that I heard on dad’s records, created by people like the great James Burton, who had recently played the ground breaking solo on Rick Nelson’s number ‘Hello Mary-Lou’.

I knew nothing about instruments at all and didn’t really know what a guitar sounded like. I was, however, able to tell that there was more than one purpose for which they were used and that the sound that they produced could vary depending on what was being played and who was doing the playing.

At that time, I used to have a buddy called Stanley Taylor, who had had a guitar since he was 10 years old. It wasn’t just any old guitar; it was an electric guitar. A blond Hofner Senator non-cutaway acoustic to which a separate Hofner pick-up had been added by virtue of a screw-clamp fitted to the end of the fret board. It was a bit limited sound-wise; it did not even have a volume and tone control and was just the pickup with two yards of cable stuck into the side of it. At the other end of the cable it had a plug; forget a 3.5 mm proper jack connection, which would have been nice; it just had a bodged-up hi-fi type plug so it could be plugged into his tape recorder.

Most bolt-on pickups I’ve ever seen have separate volume and tone knobs mounted on a little chrome box, which came supplied with the pick-up, so at least you have basic control of the sound. The first time I heard him play it was in the front room of his parent’s nice thirty’s-built semi in a nice leafy road in Ilford. I remember he had it plugged into his tape recorder and he played for me his complete repertoire; the endlessly repetitive, but celebrated 4-note ‘Peter Gunn’ theme. The ‘Peter Gunn’ theme was a simple little ditty, to the extent that if one had mastered the four notes it contained, they didn’t necessarily have to be played in the right order to make any kind of musical sense, which suited Stan. If ‘Satisfaction’ or ‘Whole lot of love’ had been around then, he probably would have learnt to play those riffs too.

Thinking of old Stan helps me to remember the nights some years afterwards, when we were earnest, enthusiastic young men. Stan and I would wash up at the Dell Gray Sunday Club at the Red House pub, on the Redbridge roundabout. I would turn up in my brand new yellow Lotus Élan S4 SE and Stan, who by then was a very successful motor dealer, would bring one of a series of seriously credible super-cars of the time; an Aston Martin DB4 (without the James Bond paraphernalia) which he wrote off at the roundabout that used to be at the Raleigh Weir pub, on the A127, Southend Rd.

He was coming back from Southend with his girlfriend in the car and just crashed straight into the roundabout, hitting the foot-high parapet wall which surrounded the roundabout and more or less destroying the front underside of the car. Stan was a very good driver and I think he must have been distracted in some way, if you take my drift.

When I sold the Élan in 1974, it was bought by a young couple called Merle and Melina Mercuri from Sepulveda, a very nice suburb of Los Angeles, who had come to England specifically for the purpose of buying themselves a British sports car and were both over the moon about acquiring a genuine British motor racing legend, which my Élan was, and if they had any sense they would have cherished and maintained it because today, it would be worth a fortune.

Next up on Stan’s catwalk of motors was a dark metallic red—same colour as the DB4—Aston Martin DB5, followed by a silver-grey Maserati, which he got from his uncle, who used to own a posh golf course in Essex, on one of the main exit roads out of London. His uncle was a tax exile living overseas, so he probably had a few bob. The Maserati was almost impossible to sit in because of the horrendous driving position; the impossibly heavy clutch pedal required a driver to be double-jointed as well as being possessed of a bionic leg. As Stan was (and still is, so I hear) 6’ 5" tall and is a big man, it must have been like sitting in a dodgem car at the fairground for him and so the Maserati, as flash and sought after as it was, didn’t last long. There then followed a Jensen Interceptor, which was a bit comfier and several Jags. I’ve not seen him for some years and I suspect he’s now a full member of the Mercedes mafia.

Every week, we’d walk in the door of the Dell Gray and proceed to the dark places at the sides of the club, the place reserved for us and all the other losers. We had usually done ourselves up to the nines and stunk of about a gallon of Tabac aftershave lotion or one of its equally evil smelling competitors and set about doing our usual convincing impersonation of a couple of smelly superannuated wallflowers. We’d just stand there all night, eyes darting from right to left repeatedly, as if we were watching a game of tennis as all the birds walked past, this way and that, the silence broken only by the regulation comments…

There y’are, what do reckon on them two?

Nah, no good; too fat,

How about them two, then?

Naah, too thin.

Those two?

Don’t like yours…

Right—neither do I!

Want another drink?

Might as well; V and T, cheers…

Wanna snout…? Flashing a new packet of Benson’s.

No, go on, have one of mine…

No, go on, don’t be a hero, I’ve got them out now…

Cheers.

And so, it went on, week after week. We’d stand at the side of the dance floor like a couple of lemons, gradually getting drunk on V and Ts, just watching all the birds dancing around their handbags, set in a neat little pile in the middle of the floor, whilst the girls gyrated like a group of Red Indians dancing around a totem pole. The trouble was, we were both James Bond lookalikes, or so we thought, and sooner or later a couple of absolute little cuties would appear on the radar screen and we would sweep them off of their feet, whereupon we’d all repair stylishly in a private helicopter to the Jules Verne restaurant on the second floor of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, where we’d order champagne cocktails all around and a plate full of prawn nibbles and maybe some chips-in-a-basket with loads of Heinz ketchup.

Then we’d go on to a stockbroker friend’s luxurious penthouse apartment, a stone’s throw from the Champs Elysée, and at the end of a heart-stopping private elevator ride up the side of the building, step out onto the marble floors of the penthouse, which occupied the entire 40th floor and had a wrap-around glass visage, looking out on an amazing panoramic view of Paris at night. We’d then sachet inside, turn the lights down low, put on some smooth jazz, maybe dance a little… Whoa! This was more like it! …but alas, the reality suddenly evaporated; it was all a dream and we’d wake up to being in the old Del Gray club on yet another Sunday night, five minutes into injury time and with nothing left to play for, except our pride.

Then the final kick in the trousers would arrive—they began switching on the house lights! Right, we’ve had your money, lads, now bugger off! There it was then. Nothing! Nada. Zilch! Another bloody week down the pan, but for a few admiring glances and willowy smiles from the couple of 10-pinters determined not to leave the club empty handed. Our two beautiful and mysterious princesses had not arrived. There were no more V and T’s waiting for us either; the bar was well and truly closed.

That’s it! I’ve bloody had it with this place.

Yeah… right. Bloody waste of time.

Yeah… see you next week?

Yeah.

We’d then commence the ‘long walk of shame’ back to the carpark, or the ‘krap rac’ as we miscalled it, back to our beloved cars, a single young man’s only true friend and companion. The night’s comedy of errors and total failure to pull anything remotely female would just serve to put us both in the right mood for another of our trademark burn-ups down the Southend Arterial Rd., once again putting our lives and more importantly our licences in immediate peril. It was no wonder I hardly ever pulled anything. I had a particular problem with shyness—I absolutely would NOT ask a girl to dance, no matter what the inducement and I used to dream up all the excuses under the sun for not doing so—I wrote the song ‘I won’t dance’ to commemorate this fact. Thank goodness the shyness problem is all behind me now. At last I’ve got some confidence and self-assurance. I ask all the girls to dance these days and most of them say…

In your dreams, fatty!

My next book will be called ‘A Young Man Growing Up in East London—How I Learnt to Cope with Rejection’.

Let’s get back to Stan’s impromptu rendition of the ‘Peter Gunn’ theme on his Hofner. It was no surprise that he should have cottoned on to this tune. Stan had always had a liking for American private-eye type shows on the TV. I’d known him since my time at Parkhill primary school when he, like me, had been one of eleven pupils in the ‘B’ stream in the last year who passed the 11-plus exam and would go on to West Hatch high school. We went on holidays together and did some outrageous things, obviously unbeknown to our parents and had some very illuminating and hilarious times together. We were thus both saved from a life of grinding tedium in the half-lit world of the British factory system, for this was the reality of the government’s education policy in the 1960s.

Stan had always seemed to me to be about six months in front of me in the growing-up stakes. Style wise, he was the first one of the crowd to have a shiny, grey, mohair suit, which came with a card that you were supposed to display in the top pocket of the jacket, which had three white folded cotton points stuck to it to resemble a cleverly folded handkerchief. You could get these items at John Walton or Tony Man, both fashionable men’s clothes shop in Ilford High Street. He was also the first to wear button-down collars and knitted silk narrow-width ties and the first to have a lightweight, beige Mac with the collar turned up, ideal for standing under street lamps alone in the dead of night, smoking a Strand cigarette and looking for the entire world like Philip Marlow, the American private-eye.

At 4 o’clock in the afternoon every Sunday afternoon, we’d go to the Wimpy Bar in Gants Hill. I would always have ten bob, which my mum sent me away with. I’d take the 167 bus from Chigwell station or jump on a Central Line train; they both cost 1s 2d—about 10 cents, and we’d meet up at the bus stop at Gants Hill or in Gants Hill Underground station, then spend a couple of bob on a Wimpy or a cheeseburger and a cup or two of the Wimpy’s atrocious frothy coffee, before walking over to the Odeon cinema and getting our seats in the ‘one and nines’.

When the week’s film—and of course, there was only one and a ‘B’ movie—had finished, we’d go to the dark, smoky and slightly intimidating Circus coffee bar opposite, on the other side of Gants Hill roundabout. As soon as we got in the Circus, we felt like we had moved up a notch or two; we had moved into the big league; we were walking on the wild side! It was populated by many of the shady characters that we’d just seen in the movie! We’d sometimes meet up with our friend, a lad called Barry Tyson, who also wore a lightweight, beige Mac with the collar turned up, and we’d sit there for a couple of hours talking about motors, guns, birds, or whatever the riveting topic de jour was, drinking coffee and smoking our Strands, like we were three tough-guy private dicks taking a break from the grisly murder case we were working that night…

Most controversially, Stan was the first one to get a pair of Denson Pointers, which were pointed-toe, Italian style winkle-picker shoes. They were generally frowned upon by our parents’ generation, not because they looked ridiculous and were completely impractical, which they clearly were, but because of the type of boys who wore them, who were perceived to be wayward and disruptive and were generally called Johnny. For this reason, together with the fact that he was always a foot taller than me and therefore looked older, my mum thought he was a precocious young man and although she liked Stan, I think that she suspected that he was a bad influence on me… not true of course.

I remember the row that I had with her when Stan appeared in his Denson Pointers one evening. I mentioned in conversation that I thought Stan’s new shoes looked really great and didn’t she think that I’d look good in a pair too? Mum said something along the lines of…

Don’t even think about it. They look bloody ridiculous. Do you want to look like you’ve got clowns’ feet? You’ll be wanting to wear a black shirt next! What would your father say? Do you not realise that we are in business in the area?

Can I take that as a yes?

No, you bloody well can’t take that as a yes! Now, get on with your homework and turn that bloody music down; we’re trying to watch a programme in here!

When I eventually got her cornered in Baskin’s, the shoe shop and home of Denson pointed shoes in Barkingside high street, a month later, we had protracted negotiations which covered degrees and extremes of teddy boy behaviour, what constituted a point and what constituted a slight point and actually agreed that the Turks, who were clearly not all teddy boys, sometimes wore pointy toe shoes. Thankfully, the conversation stopped short of us both having to seek professional opinion and that day I was obliged to settle for a slightly less pointy pair of shoes that weren’t Denson’s.

This constituted a fair and balanced political solution to what was essentially an issue of whether I should be allowed to wear stylish footwear or not that had managed to get itself blown-up into the proportions of an issue with the import of whether Turkish women should or should not be made to wear the veil at some point in the future and whether the Turks can now be trusted not to try and capture Vienna again and can now take their place alongside the people of Austria as good Europeans—regardless of their dodgy footwear.

It also demonstrated just how much my parent’s generation had been brainwashed into concepts of ‘Old World’ normality and respectability. Her aversion to young men wearing black shirts puzzled me for a time. I thought that it was because when I saw teddy boys being arrested in some seaside resort or other for having yet another punch-up on the beach, they always seemed to be wearing black shirts and I suppose this may have been a factor in her disapproval. The main reason was that my parent’s generation had only twenty years previously survived a world war. They had seen Mosley’s fascists marching through the east end of London wearing black shirts and heard him give impassioned speeches in which he espoused views very similar to Britain’s enemies; Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany.

The shopping experience was totally different in those days. If you want to buy a guitar, amplifier, keyboard, recording gear, or whatever nowadays, you first of all look on the internet and find out all there is to know about it, so you have your own version of the truth in your head before a salesman gives you the ‘10 crucial facts that you should know about your purchase’. You then look for who does it the cheapest. There is no need to restrict your inquiries to the UK either. UK prices generally tend to be higher than the rest of Europe anyway; it is not for nothing that the Britain is known as the rip-off capital of the world, especially for luxury goods. If it’s not obvious where the best price is actually to be found, you can always get on the phone and do a number on the retailer and threaten him with your credit card.

These days, prohibitively expensive phone calls to Europe, America and most other places in the World are a thing of the past, no thanks to British Telecom of course! There are now a number of access-number companies like Tele-Savers and Tele-Discount which can provide overseas calls often much cheaper than BT provides calls to other UK destinations. How can it cost ten times less to phone somebody on a mobile in the Grand Canyon than it costs to phone them in the next street in the UK? Closer scrutiny may reveal Tele-Savers and Tele-Discount to be the same entity. Scarier is that they both might turn out to be rooms with a phone within the British Telecom labyrinth……….!

Buying things you need from retailers has really become a quite a sophisticated game of cat and mouse these days. Big retailers can afford to employ sales-staff straight out of university, who have particular skill sets designed to maximise the sales of goods—and this is important—that the retailer wants to sell you, rather than goods that you want to buy. Customers have become merely cogs in the machine of manufacturing, supply and demand whose needs, wants and desires can be predicted and measured with a high degree of accuracy and manipulated.

Why? What’s in for them? What are the advantages of manipulating customers for business? Simple. The greater the control they can exert over their customers the easier their lives become. If a retailer knows precisely what the demand will be for a particular item, then he won’t end up ordering twice as many as he will sell and if a product comes in, say a choice of different colours, a retailer needs to know that customers are going to buy the colour that the retailer has chosen. He doesn’t want half his customers saying,

But mummy, I don’t want a pink one; I want a blue one!

The retailer thereby ties up half of his buying budget in non-productive stock. And it’s not only the retailers involved. This lack of control reverberates all the way back to the factories. While the customer has a choice; while the customer has free-will; while the customer is capable of randomness, the whole process of designing, manufacturing and selling goods is a hazardous business. From a company’s point of view, what is needed is some global legislation to oblige consumers to use a certain quantity of specified products within a certain time frame. That is, to make it a punishable offence to not consume what is precisely prescribed by the corporate authorities. The application of use-by dates on most products—food and drugs at least—is a good start as use-by dates are largely adhered to and at least give manufacturers control at one end of the cycle, but they could do more. The exact quantities and types of products and the exact time frame could be decided by governments and depend on how afraid of their governments the people are as to how much pressure could be applied to obey and comply with these dictates.

Of secondary importance to the governments would be the profitability of the factories and distributors. The interests of the consumers and the retailers would of course be completely ignored. In this way randomness would be extracted from the economic cycle of the planet and the process of supply and demand would be totally regulated at both ends, leaving politicians across the planet free to do what politicians do best—establishing total control over their populations whilst feathering their own nests. I’m joking of course. They couldn’t possibly get away with anything so blatant…….or could they?

The geographical location of the retailer doesn’t matter a jot because if you pay with a card, they can send it to you, simple as that. The very last thing you want to do is let the salesman talk you into going to the shop, even if that were practical or indeed even possible, given the draconian parking restrictions that apply these days, at least in Britain. If you actually turn up at the shop, when the staff have all picked themselves up off the floor at the shock of seeing a live customer, you will then have to endure the psychological battering as the salesmen attempt to back you into a corner and brainwash you into buying exactly what they want you to buy and that which they want to most rid themselves of.

Some items carry a much higher profit margin than others and it is in a retailer’s interest to sell you the thing that he will make the most money on. Very popular items that the manufacturer or wholesaler has spent a lot of money promoting are generally high turnover, low profit items which they try to hang on to (unless they have done a deal with a manufacturer and have shed-load of them!) and try to sell everybody a high-ticket item, whether they want it or need it or not. This process is known as ‘switch selling’. And remember, this is your last chance to buy before the price goes down!

The customer is however not completely without resources. In shops up and down the country, any day of the week, you will hear the same duel being played out between customer and salesman. Retailers have, of course, worked out many ripostes to combat the various lies, gambits, schemes and scams attempted by customers in order to obtain a lower price. Playing one retailer off against another is one of the favourite ways of getting a lower price. A customer will say…

How much can you do an Okai Kokai 2000 for?

The first rule for shops hoping to make a sale is never, under any circumstances answer this question, except with any other question, like…

Why is that important to you, sir? The conversation will continue.

Well, because I might want to buy one, of course, you idiot…

(The actual subject of the question does not matter a jot. He could just as easily ask the customer if he has any children named Damien or who won the 1953 FA Cup; it doesn’t matter what he asks and it doesn’t matter what the customer answers either, because all he wants to do is to throw the customer out of his stride and take the initiative himself on the first exchange—in tennis-speak, to take service. (I’m pretty sure it was Bolton Wanderers…no, it was Blackpool; Stan Mortenson got a hattrick…)

Then the retailer says, When do you want to buy it?

If the customer says anything else but ‘right now’, there is a long choice of responses, which I’ll not go into here, but if the first answer is ‘right now’, the immediate next question is…

Ok, then sir… rustling a piece of paper to sound like an invoice book.

Let’s write it up now then; Visa ok?

If the customer replies ‘not now’ and will not answer the ‘when?’ question, the retailer knows from experience that any further comment, apart from giving a quick, glowing advert for his shop, is a complete waste of his time, so he will say…

Ok then, when you do want buy it, we will definitely be the cheapest… goodbye Ken!

The retailer quickly hangs up the phone as any further comments that the he makes will do nothing but damage to the prospect of a sale and must be avoided at all costs. The worst thing he can do is leave his mouth running and say something like…

Yep… I used to have one of those myself, I found it a bit limited to tell you the truth. or Hey, why don’t you come in the shop for a demo; I’ll show you all its weak points.

The word tr…tr…trtrtru… I’m really sorry, I just can’t get the word out! (brain to mouth, brain to mouth, come in please…engage now!) Truth! Of course, has no place at all in the retail or any other business.

By the way, he will know the customer’s name and address, what he had for breakfast, the colour of his bathroom curtains and his inside leg measurement or with whom he had slept or failed to sleep with the previous weekend, because that would have been established, together with his or her phone number and if the salesman is really good at his job, the poor unsuspecting punter’s card number as well, during the innocent exchange of questions. This routine is known in the trade as ‘good qualification’. If the retailer is busy and somehow a new, inexperienced ‘wally’ salesman escapes from his cage and manages to get to the phone first, before an experienced salesman can snatch it out of the poor kid’s hand, the ‘wally’, being completely unaware of how good some customers are at this game and the breath-taking scope of some of their tactics he might innocently reply to the first question.

How much can you do it for? like this…

We’ll do it for £999.

The customer will come back, quick as a flash with Oh God man! I thought you said you were cheap! Oh well, forget it then… I know I can get it for £899 somewhere else…

At this point the customer is clearly winning the debate, but the retailer, if he’s awake, will see that the ‘new boy’ has just dropped the ball and is about get himself creamed; a recovery is called for and just as the customer is about to say ‘goodbye…’ he will grab the phone out of the poor kid’s hand and say, with a hand half over the phone…

Eric, you know perfectly well that maintenance staff shouldn’t speak to customers! Now go out to the back of the shop with your bucket and clean my bloody car…yes, it’s the brown Skoda! I’m sorry sir. Now, you were about to say where you’d been quoted that price…?

(The retailer’s car is not and has never been, of course, a Skoda; there are no Skodas in retail. In fact, it is a brand-new Ferrari, but it’s never a good thing to give customers any sort of clue as to how much money you’re making off them.)

Now, the customer can choose not to answer this question and simply say ‘I’m not going to tell you!’ and immediately push home his advantage, in which case he will certainly end up getting the thing for less than £899, because further retreat is the only course of action the retailer now has in order to save a sale, but most customers do not do this. Instead, they will say triumphantly…

Widgets ‘R’ Us say they’ll do it for £899. Unable to conceal their delight at thinking they’ve just gotten one over on the retailer.

The retailer will then say, Uh huh…have Widgets ‘R’ Us got it in stock?

The customer replies, No, they haven’t got it in stock… (check…)

The retailer replies, Well, if you phone back when we haven’t got it in stock, we’ll do it for less than £799! (checkmate!)

The panic is over and the conversation goes back to the top of the page, but the initiative has now returned to the retailer, who stands there shaking his head for a second and says under his breath ‘sheesh…bloody punters!’ Before turning to one of his bods, or ‘senior sales personnel’, as the Dept of Employment insists that they must now be called, and says in his normal voice…

Oi, Bill or Jill or whatever your name is; get us another black coffee! Now pleeeease! Well? Don’t just stand there looking at the sodding machine…fill it up again! There’s the bloody kettle! What do you mean ‘it’s not there boss…’ well, bloody find it; that’s right! No, you’re quite right; there is no steam coming out of it currently… well? Fill it up, plug it in… come on! Chop chop! Buddha! Please tell me it’s nearly six o’clock…

The retailer knows also that even as the customer puts the phone down, rings back Widgets ‘R’ Us and tries to re-negotiate the price on the basis of someone doing it for less than £799; which is, incidentally, impossible, he will immediately be told to ‘go forth and multiply’ amid roars of laughter and will come back on the phone within the next 10 or 15 minutes, when he will be told that the £799 batch have all been sold and he should have bought one of them at that low, unrepeatable price when he had the chance!

So, what is the point of all this? Is it to sell product? No, not really. From the retailer’s point of view, the real point is to gain a small victory in the perpetual war that has been raging between the retail trade and the ‘dark forces from the world below’ since time began. A war between extremes of good and evil; between the ancient realm of men, with hearts good and true, and the creatures from that ‘other world’, where lives the dark stuff of nightmares, the vampires, werewolves, the other atrocious, evil blood-sucking fiends, that would steal all our stock; put us all out of business; would see our children die of hunger and enslave our souls. These atrocious creatures—or ‘customers’, as they have taken to calling themselves in recent times, seem to winning this eternal battle. This war has raged on through generation after generation and knows no end, no quarter and no mercy. It could only end one day if we just capitulate and give all our stock away for nothing and give everyone a free lunch as well! Until that day terrible day, the battle for our children’s future goes on.

The way it worked in the old days was if you wanted to buy something