Frank Skinner Autobiography by Frank Skinner Page A

voices of my family. As I walked further and further into the garden, both grew dimmer. It was dark at the end of the garden. I stood still and listened to the night. Distant mumble from our kitchen, almost inaudible traffic sounds. I waited, and even these sounds seem to fade like the stage was being cleared for me. It spooks me out a bit that I can still remember it so clearly. I stood very still. I mean, weirdly still. And then I started. Not with a big breath and an equivalent roar, but with an increasing murmur, slowly reassuring myself that it was OK to interfere with the silence. The sound developed from an ‘Urrrrrrrrrnnnn . . . ,’ to an ‘Aaaaarrrrrrrgh . . .’ This was the sound I was searching for. Once I’d found it, I let it get louder and louder. I stopped for breath. And then went again with the ‘Aaaaaarrrrrrgh . . .’, thrilled at how loud it was. I spread my arms and leaned my head backwards into the darkness. I repeated my call about five or six times, then I stopped, very still again, and listened to remind myself what the night sounded like without me. Then I went back into the house. They’d heard nothing over the sound of the television.
    The next night I repeated the ritual. It became something I looked forward to and told no one about. Then, after about three weeks, the man who lived next door turned up at our house and explained to my parents that, the previous evening, he had let his dog out ‘to do his business’ and had heard shouting. In the gloom, he could make out a small figure, with arms outstretched, standing at the top of our garden. My dad asked me about it. I said I just felt like shouting that night. He told me not to do it again. And I didn’t. So every night, the neighbour’s dog was encouraged to go out into the garden, to stand still in the dark and slowly empty himself while I sat indoors and watched the telly.
    I had a meeting with my publishers about the cover-photo for the book. Someone said that, rather than funny, we should go for sexy. I said, ‘No. It should definitely be a picture of me.’ This, to my disappointment, seemed to be taken as a serious comment. Worse still, I told this story to a colleague and they said, with no detectable irony, ‘If you have a long photo session, there’s bound to be something useable.’ Thanks. I hear that Robbie Williams is currently doing a book. I wonder if anyone said, ‘Let’s go for unsexy,’ and then sweated over the results of that photo session in case there was nothing ‘useable’. Perhaps I should have held out for ‘funny’. When I see the cover now, I can’t help feeling we fell between two stools. The picture, I think, begs the caption, ‘My life selling novelty slippers’.
    However, I very much like the photo-booth pics on the back. These were taken in September 1973, after I had been to see the Rolling Stones at the Birmingham Odeon. I queued with three mates for eighteen hours in the rain to get those concert tickets. We lay on the pavement in New Street and played pontoon with soaking wet playing cards, and laughed a lot about us deciding earlier that sleeping bags and waterproofs would be a waste of time. At 10.00 a.m. the box office opened and it was all worth it. We were going to see the Stones. They were still cool then. When those pictures were taken, minutes after the gig, I still had concert-ears (you know, that post-gig hissing sound) and, safely tucked into my wallet, the rose petals that Mick Jagger had scattered over the crowd towards the end of the show. I kept those petals for about twenty years, in the same box as the light ale bottle that Ray Davies of the Kinks gave to me at Birmingham Town Hall.
    As a symbol of how my life has changed, those photo-booth pics are very apposite. Nearly thirty years after that rainy night on the New Street pavement, I was with Caroline at a