Sievey Chris - Frank: the true story that inspired the movie

One day in 2005 I was in the park with my little boy when my phone rang.

Hello? I said.

HELLO! yelled Frank Sidebottom.

... Frank? I said.

OH YES, said Frank Sidebottom.

We hadnt spoken in fifteen years.

Its been so long, I said.

Between 1987 and 1990 I was the sometime keyboard player in the Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey Big Band. Frank wore a big fake head with a cartoon face painted on ittwo wide bug eyes staring, red lips frozen into a permanent half smile, very smooth hair. Nobody outside his inner circle knew his true identity. This became the subject of feverish speculation during his zenith years. His voice, slightly muffled under the head, was disguised toowith an ostentatious cartoon nasal northern twang, as if he were a man-child pretending to be a nightclub comic. Our act involved us doing amateurish plinkety-plonk cover versions of pop classics like I Should Be So Lucky and We Are the Champions. Frank was all a little wrong, like a comedian youd invent in a dreamfunny but not funny, meticulous and detailed but repetitive, innocent but nightmarish in a certain light. We rode relatively high. Then it all went wrong.

And now Frank was on the phone. He was ready to stage a comeback. Maybe I could help by writing an article about my time in the band? I said of course I would. When I got home from the park, I tried to remember our lives back then.

Photograph courtesy of Linda Nylind

In 1987 I was twenty and a student at the Polytechnic of Central London. I was living in a squat in a huge decrepit townhouse in Highbury, North London. The students who rented proper rooms ended up miles away in places like Turnham Green, while the squatters lived for free in salubrious places like Islington and Bloomsbury. It was an otherworldly life. You could find yourself squatting in some abandoned mansion with ballrooms and chandeliers. One group lived for a while in the Libyan Embassy in St. Jamess Square. A staff member had shot out of the window at an anti-Gaddafi protest and a policewoman had been killed. The embassy staff fled and the squatters moved in.

Most of the squatters were sweet natured, but sometimes youd find yourself living with chaotic people who were too frenzied for the mainstream world. In Highbury Id stand in the kitchen doorway and watch a man called Shep smash all the crockery every time Arsenal lost. Hed grab cereal dishes from the sink and hurl them in a rage across the room, his dreadlocked hair tumbling into his face like he was some kind of disturbed Highland games competitor or a Dothraki from Game of Thrones.

He is SO mentally ill! Id think with excitement as I stood in the doorway. On Saturday afternoons back then the BBC had a show called Grandstand that used to broadcast the days football scores. Shep was like Grandstand, only terrifying. Arsenal was destined to lose 25 percent of its games in the 1987/1988 season, finishing sixth. We were in for a tumultuous time in the communal kitchen.

One time Shep noticed me staring at him. What? he yelled at me. I didnt say anything. I felt like a cinema audience watching an adventure movie, emotionally engaged only in the shallowest way. I was just delighted to not be living in Cardiff anymore.

In Cardiff, where I had grown up, Id been bullied every day: blindfolded and stripped and thrown into the playground, etc. It was the sort of childhood a journalist ought to haveforced to the margins, identifying with the put-upon, mistrustful of the powerful and unwelcome by them anyway.

I dreamed about becoming a songwriter. My handicap was that I didnt have any imagination. I could only write songs about things that were happening right in front of me. Like Drunk Tramps, a song I wrote about some drunk tramps I saw being ignored by businessmen:

Drunk tramps

Ignored by businessmen

They walk right past you

Dont even see you

But youre the special ones!

With pain but hope in your eyes

Drunk tramps

I did make some money busking on my portable Casio keyboard. There was one song I played fantastically well. It was twelve-bar blues in C. It was literally the only song I knew how to play. For busking this was finenobody stayed around long enough to become aware of my limitations. But one day a man approached me and said he ran a wine bar in Guildford, southwest of London, and did I want to play a set at his club?

That sounds great, I said.

I caught the train to Guildford and found the wine bar. I set up my keyboard and played my song. The owner turned to his bar staff and gave them a look as if to say, See?

After ten minutes I stopped. There was a lot of applause. Then I played my song again but slower. Then I played it again, but back at the original speed. Someone shouted, Play a different song.

I looked at the crowd. They were evidently puzzled. And irritated. A fake pianist had entered their world and was banging away at the keys, a young man being odd and dysfunctional on the makeshift stage, presumably unaware not just of what was required of a wine bar pianist but of how to be an adult human in general. Panicked, I hurriedly invented somethingan unsatisfactory improvisation around my song. The owner asked me to stop and go home.