It was the night when Billy Connolly brought his banjo to Dundee – and ended up banjoing a heckler who wouldn’t shut up.
But the Big Yin has spoken of how his decision to dole out instant justice cost him dear – because the punter he hit was the venue’s treasurer who retaliated by pulling the plug on Connolly’s fee for the gig.
Connolly has always been a fervent music fan and performed alongside Gerry Rafferty in The Humblebums more than 50 years ago, before recording a No 1 hit – D.I.V.O.R.C.E – and appearing on Top of the Pops in his own right.
Connolly, who is now battling Parkinson’s syndrome and lives in the United States, has opened up about his incident-packed life in his new autobiography, Windswept & Interesting.
This relates how he advanced from playing for £10 here, £12 there at folk and trad clubs in the likes of Broughty Ferry, Kirkcaldy, Arbroath and Rosyth throughout the 1960s to opening for Elton John on his Bicentennial Tour of America in 1976.
I gave him the Order of the Fat Lip. It was the biggest mistake I ever made.”
Billy Connolly
The latter was hardly the most pleasant experience. As Connolly related, the audience had turned up to hear Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Benny and the Jets, Daniel and Your Song, not some Scottish geezer with a shaggy beard and a banjo for company.
He admitted: “I had some good nights, like at Madison Square Garden – but they were very few.
“There would usually be a pocket of about 20 people at the front going ‘F*** off, F*** off’.
“In Washington, DC, somebody threw a brass smoking pipe and it hit me between the eyes. I fell to the ground and had to come offstage.”
However, even before he became famous and started making a series of memorable appearances on the TV chat show Parkinson, Connolly had decided he wouldn’t take any nonsense from hecklers – and this led to him getting involved in a notorious spat in Dundee.
He recalled: “I was trying to entertain the people and doing a hillbilly banjo song about a rabbit stuck in a log.
“And then, this p***k in the audience shouts out ‘Needle of Death’. He had this very flat, nasal voice.
“I said: ‘I’m sorry.’
“Sing Needle of Death”.
“I said: ‘Needle of Death. That’s a song about heroin addiction. Have you noticed this is a banjo? Banjos don’t do heroin addiction.”
However, there was no silencing the man in the crowd and Connolly eventually went searching for him in a quest that ended in a very different variety of banjoing!
He explained: “I stepped down from the stage and went up the aisle asking people: ‘Was it you?’
“(Eventually, he found him), so I hit him. Boof! I gave him the Order of the Fat Lip. It was the biggest mistake I ever made.
“He was the treasurer (of the venue). I didn’t get a penny.”
Connolly has spoken poignantly about his friendship with Rafferty and explained how the latter replaced original Humblebums member Tam Harvey during an acrimonious gig in Fife.
We became big fish in the wee pond of the Scottish folk scene and the feeling was colossal.”
Billy Connolly on the success of The Humblebums
The trio stayed together for around a year, but Rafferty insisted that three into two wouldn’t go and it led to a rancorous parting of the ways.
He said: “One of the hardest things I ever had to do was tell Tam it was over. It was in the Kinema Ballroom in Dunfermline.
“We’d just ripped the place to bits and Gerry said: ‘You better tell him’. I replied: ‘Do you not fancy it?’
“He said: ‘No, it’s your band’. So I just told Tam the truth. He took it very badly. It was horrible.”
Thereafter, Connolly and Rafferty’s paths soon diverged, with one becoming an international comedy star and the other the multi-selling singer-songwriter of such records as Baker Street, Night Owl and Get It Right The Next Time.
But although they parted, Connolly never forgot one momentous occasion – again taking place in Tayside.
He said: “We became big fish in the wee pond of the Scottish folk scene and the feeling was colossal.
“When we played in Broughty Ferry, there were so many people in the room that we had to enter via the fire escape. It was obvious that we were ‘hot’.
“But Gerry was definitely an all-round better musician than me. He was single-minded and ruthless about his career.
“I admired that, but we would make records and, afterwards, he’d go in and re-record my guitar part.
“Maybe he genuinely thought that he could do a better job, but I was really wounded. Ouch!
“(However) before Gerry passed away in 2011, I spoke to him a lot and we had a good laugh. And we talked about things that we had done together.
“I learned a lot from him. He demonstrated how to fix your aim on something and set out to get it, knowing where you would like to be by a certain point – and never losing sight of that.
“That has stood me in great stead and we were very productive together.”
And in walked Chuck…
Connolly revealed how he was first drawn into the wonder and “wildness” of rock ‘n’ roll while he was part of a kids’ camp in Aberdeen in the 1950s.
The youngster from Glasgow had grown up in harsh circumstances, and rarely escaped the grinding poverty in which he lived.
Yet he was in his element when he travelled to the Granite City and discovered a world he had never known about before.
He said: “I’ve always been drawn to the wildness of rock ‘n’ roll. I learned about it when I was at a school camp in Aberdeen.
“We were in dormitories at a school in Torry and they took us to see Rock, Rock, Rock! – a black and white movie starring Chuck Berry.
“It was brilliant. Berry blew everybody away with his “duck walk” and I could hardly believe what I was seeing.
“We had a record player at the camp in Aberdeen and the teachers brought Chuck Berry’s single, School Days. We played it non-stop.
“Berry was a staggering musician – the best in the world in his time. You couldn’t keep your feet still.
“I also loved Gene Vincent, who looked like a Teddy Boy and sang Bee-Bop-a-Lula. When Bill Haley’s film, Rock Around the Clock, came out, there was mayhem in theatres.
“We were dancing in the aisles, yelling ‘See You Later, Alligator’. Meanwhile, our parents were still singing along to ‘I’m a pink toothbrush, you’re a blue toothbrush…’”
Connolly has journeyed a long way from the man who started out in the Glasgow shipyards, and whose expletive-laden but hilarious diatribes sparked outrage in some religious circles.
But he realises he has been fortunate, not least in earning enough money to be able to purchase the palatial Candacraig House in Aberdeenshire (though it was later sold, in 2014).
He recalled the joy he derived from the Highlands, but also the pain of losing so many old comrades.
As he said: “Robin Williams came to Candacraig every summer with his family. He was a fellow savant, another aficionado of the blurting-out of whatever comes to mind.
“We used to cycle from Strathdon to Ballater together, across an enormous, high-lying treeless range of long hills like a bare moonscape.
“There were no jokes till we got there – just two guys freezing their bollocks off, battling through the heather hills.
“But when our guests and I showed up at the Lonach Gathering – the Highland Games in Strathdon – there would always be a wall of photographers facing us across the grounds.
“We would be very torn about that. I suppose if you’re sitting there with a gaggle of luminaries, it would obviously attract interest.
“But I was also afraid that it might kind of spoil the event.
“It was such a precious celebration of Highland culture – all the wee Scottish dancers tramping through the mud to get to the stage for their competitions, the children running the races, the big beefy caber-tossers, the tug o’ war and the marching pipe bands.
“It was a wonderfully low-tech affair.
“Robin took part in the hill race every year. He was such a strong athlete it’s still hard to believe he’s gone. I miss him terribly.
“And big Sean Connery… what a shame he has gone. I presented his Bafta Lifetime Achievement to him and said: ‘You’ve done awfully well for a man with a speech defect.’
“After the way I’ve lived, I consider myself lucky to still be alive. I survived a lot of s**t, much of it brought on by myself.
“At least I’m still here. I’m fishing happily in Florida and I’m not yet dead or broken.”
The effervescent Connolly once ran into the (Likely Lads and Porridge) writer Ian La Frenais in Tramp nightclub in London.
He was wearing a leather jacket and jodhpurs, pink socks and mules. Not exactly inconspicuous.
As he moved towards La Frenais, the latter asked him: “Do you know what you look like?”
Connolly said: “What?”
And the response was: “A welder who got away with it!”
- Windswept & Interesting is published by Two Roads.
