Mon Mar 15, 2010 6:04 pm
Uncut
Monday 15th March 2010
Allan Jones
There are lights you're sure will never go out. But you're always wrong. They all go out in the end, even the brightest and best of them.
And so it's with great sadness today that I have to report the death over the weekend from cancer of Carol Clerk, who I'm sure many Uncut readers who followed us here from what used to be Melody Maker will remember as that paper's long-serving News Editor, although she was always rather more than that, a mere job title a wholly inadequate description of what Carol brought to MM.
Which was, briefly put, a heady mix of thorough journalistic professionalism and, in keeping with the anarchic mood that frequently prevailed in those days at the Maker, a taste for rock'nroll mayhem, largely unrivalled before or since.
The Maker editorial staff at the time was so generally inclined towards rowdy waywardness and what seemed like a collectively unquenchable thirst, it was not unusual to learn that someone or other had been banned from this or that pub, club or barely-legal drinking den.
Only Carol, though, to my knowledge, managed to get herself banned from an entire country.
It happened in 1983, I think, when she was in Israel with Hanoi Rocks, one of her favourite bands and probably her most celebrated drinking buddies. The trip ended as it had begun, in the kind of chaos Carol relished. A hotel room was drunkenly demolished, most of the furniture thrown out of a window, including a table that landed on the roof of a passing taxi.
Carol and the band were arrested, charged and their passports confiscated. A two year jail sentence loomed, until the taxi driver settled for what turned out to be a small amount of cash and a bottle of whisky. The band and Carol were then deported and officially banned from returning, ever, under any circumstances.
"Humourless c***s," was her typically frank assessment of the Israeli authorities' failure to see the funny side of any of this, and I can see her now, an eyebrow raised, puffing on a Bensons and downing a pint, recounting this and many more similar tales.
Carol drank like a Viking, smoked like it was her personal responsibility to keep the British tobacco industry in thriving business and swore as inventively as Malcolm Tucker, loudly and often and hilariously.
She was fiercely devoted to the music and bands she loved and an inspiration to the people she worked with, as evidenced by the many tributes posted over the weekend from friends and former colleagues, shocked by her death.
They will, many of them, remember her holding court most nights through the mid-'80s in The Oporto, the pub in Holborn, around the corner from our offices. At what became known as 'the rock'n'roll table', she regally entertained a regular crew of like-minded cronies, often from a variety of glam-punk-metal bands, all of whom, I think I can say without exaggeration, adored her, even when she was tearing them off a colourful strip for one misdemeanour or another.
You went out with her in those days, not knowing what might happen or how things would turn out - although if you tried to keep up with her drinking, as several of us felt competitively obliged to do, where you usually ended up was under the table.
Work, however, always came first. However raucous the night before, she would be among the first the next morning at her desk, on the phone, chasing news stories, chewing up tardy PRs, even as the rest of us were trying to reassemble ourselves for the day ahead.
The only people I can remember ever being in the office before her were The Stud Brothers, and that was probably after a night she'd got them so drunk they gave up all hope of ever getting home and instead found a way into the MM office, where they were found the next morning under a desk, covered in mailbags, snoring like dray horses and smelling like a fire in a chip shop that had been put out with a couple of gallons of Carling Black Label.
One of the many highlights of her time on the Maker was winning a PPA journalist of the year award for her coverage of Live Aid in 1985, the trophy she received proudly displayed for many years behind the bar at The Oporto.
She was fiercely loyal to Melody Maker, which she had joined in 1980, when I was assistant editor, and stayed until it was closed in 2000, although she by then hated what it had misguidedly become in its final hugely unpopular incarnation.
Following the Maker's closure Carol wrote for Uncut and other music monthlies. Inspired by a fascination with the Krays and the London underworld generally, she had already ghost-written the memoirs of a number of their associates, including Freddie Foreman and Mad Frankie Fraser, who on at least one memorable occasion she dragged me off to meet when they called around the Maker's new watering hole in Waterloo.
If you could get past some of the things they were reputed to have done, which you actually didn't want to spend too much time thinking about, they seemed pleasant enough company. Carol loved their stories, and told them well in her books.
She also wrote a number of terrific music books, especially her biographies of The Pogues and Hawkwind, which were published by Omnibus.
Carol had for so long seemed indestructible that when I first heard she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, it seemed too unlikely to be true. She was typically defiant through her final illness, precipitated by a stroke just before Christmas, when what turned out to be an untreatable brain tumour was discovered.
She'll be terribly missed by everyone who knew her, but most of all by her husband Nigel, who was with her when she died, and her daughter Eve.
Rest in pokkin' peace, Clerkie. And give 'em hell, wherever you are.
Allan
