HELLO GOODBYE
It started with a search for sandwiches. Litigation and a week in Butlin’s ended the dream.
They made the world sing Cheese And Onions. But it couldn’t last. Barry Wom recalls the luncheon meat start and litigious end of The Rutles.
HELLO AUTUMN 1959
I was in Birkenhead for an interview to work in a carwash. I didn’t get the job, they said I was too short. On my way home I saw The Rutles’ van. It was a black Thames Trader, didn’t have any windows in it. So I had a look in the back to see if there were any sandwiches – Spam, luncheon meat, that kind of thing.
Anyway, they came back and caught me. I said, “Oh I’m just seeing if you dropped any sandwiches,” then I made a run for it. I had some drum sticks in my pocket so they knew I was a drummer. In fact, they’d seen my skiffle group The Car Numbers when we played a church hall in Bootle. I had my white Pearl Olympic kit with Zyn cymbals – the kit for the connoisseur. My hair caught their eye too. It was three different haircuts – a DA at the back, a quiff on the top and the sideburns were incredibly bushy, came right down me cheeks, and they were greased as well. The whole thing was shiny and slippery as hell. And I knew of them, they were big – girls were screaming as they walked down the street. I thought, I wanna be screamed at too. They must have found out where I lived because they came round my house where I lived on Admiral Road.
There was a knock on the door, and here were two blokes, Dirk [McQuickly] and Ron [Nasty], standing there with guitars. I said, “You’re The Rutles, aren’t you?” They went into singing I Must Be In Love – that proved it to me. They came in and we had a cup of tea and biscuits, and we talked about me going with them. They were… poor, and hungry, and quite objectionable, with cowboy boots and greasy hair and very tight trousers – you could see how much small change they had in their pockets. So we started playing, and later we went off to Hamburg and played at the Rat Keller, when [fifth Rutle] Leppo was around, and then we met [manager] Leggy Mountbatten. He was the one who saw our potential.
GOODBYE 1970
A lot happened in between. The happiness. The joy we brought to the record buying public. What a story – it doesn’t hardly sound true does it? I can’t believe it myself. But it’s very true, and real. But there’d been changes. Mainly wives and girlfriends. I’d married the wrong woman by mistake. In fact, most of my trouble has come from the Scotsmen from Hull [in 1969, Barry hit Number 1 with his album When You Find The Girl Of Your Dreams In The Arms Of Some Scotsmen From Hull]. Yeah. I still occasionally wake up screaming, having nightmares looking for sandwiches in my bed… dreadful. Rutles, tight trousers – Scotsmen, kilts, no trousers. Good job it wasn’t a windy day.
Also, we were all suing each other. I was suing all the others for conspiracy, the lot of them, for conspiring against me. It’s not just paranoia, I have recorded and written evidence – they were saying, “Let’s conspire against Barry.” I don’t think they really knew what it meant. Stig sued himself, by accident, and won. And he’d gone off with Arthur Sultan, who was more after the girls than making us spiritually aware. Then [manager] Ron Decline came along. A nasty piece of work. If you ever come across him, don’t.
Ron and Dirk had fallen out, and Let It Rot had come out. But the very last thing we did together was, we all had a week at Butlin’s in Bognor. That was good fun. We all went in disguise, as servicemen. I went as an RAF pilot, Nasty went as a brigadier general, one went as a scout leader, and the other went as an ATS. We got up and played some of our old hits. People said, “Is this them?” And that was it. I wasn’t really bothered about staying together. I wanted to get into my hairdressing, in Reading, which I did.
People have got back together since, in ones. We all got on. Now Ron and I are doing a Rutles tour. Personally, I like doing all the old songs and trying to remember the words, and signing the autographs and doing the peace sign to everybody, all the time, every time there’s a camera around, which of course, a lot of people misinterpret! But we remember. The music lives on in a way – we are a leg-end.
Barry Wom’s single Enough! is out now. His DVD Plenty-Mental Journey is out in June. The Rutles’ Get Up And Go Again UK tour runs until June 10.
“They were poor, hungry, objectionable.”