Altri aneddoti su Pip Pyle.
Questo a proposito del nome "Pip" e del suo effetto su alcune persone in Francia, dove Pyle viveva e lavorava da tempo:
"When he first came to Paris and was looking for gigs for his then band, he would call up various agencies and give his name to be met with raucous laughter. He subsequently learned that "Pip" (pronounced "peep" in French) sounds the same as "pipe" which is slang for, well, a certain oral pleasure unconnected with tobacco. He decided it would be wiser to use another name and, more to the point, pretend to be the band's manager as he thought it would easier to get gigs if the agencies thought they had a real manager. He chose the name of his ex-Hatfield roadie Nick Levitt and was very surprised to get the same raucous laughter. In French, "Nick Levitt" would sound like "neekle veet" or "nique-les vite" which means "fuck 'em quickly!"
Ecco quel che accadde a Tokyo quando Pip, uscendo a bere per conto proprio, incrociò un bar dal nome a lui assai familiare... Lo racconta sul suo blog il chitarrista Jakko Jakszyk:
"Having fallen out with his other band members, not for the first time, Pip heads off to get drunk on his own. He finds a strange collection of really small bars in a nearby district of Tokyo. He starts in one and walks the down the small streets to the next. Eventually he sees one in the distance that has neon sign out side that says ‘Pip’s Bar’. Obviously he makes a bee line for the place. He tells the proprietor that ‘This is my bar’ the owner, no doubt no stranger to drunks, humours him, but remains wary. Pip continues to call it ‘His bar’ to the continuing annoyance of the landlord. Eventually Pip gets his passport out and says ‘That’s me, my names Pip.’ To his astonishment the bar owner looks at the picture and asks ‘You Pip Pyle? You Pip Pyle!’ His face begins to light up. Pip rather warily says ‘Err yes.’ The owner, unable to believe what’s happened says, with increasing excitement ‘this is your bar; I name it after you’ and proceeds to bring out various pieces of Hatfield and the North memorabilia. I asked Pip what happened next. He told me he had absolutely no idea. The next thing he remembers was waking up in his hotel room at about 4 the following afternoon naked but for his trousers round his ankles."
Ancora dal blog di Jakko, ecco a proposito della telefonata con cui Dave Stewart gli annuncia la morte di Pip:
"August 28th. The phone rings again. It’s Dave Stewart, who I’ve been trying to track down for the past week. I can tell immediately that something is not quite right. Just from the way he says ‘Jakko, it’s Dave’.This is followed by ‘I’ve got some really bad news’. My mind raced and then, like some car crash, every thing seemed to turn into slow motion.‘Pip died last night’. In the vast distance of the slow motion silence that followed, my head started to think that there was surely some other Pip that Dave and I knew. A former road crew member or engineer that we liked, but hadn’t seen in a while. But there was no other Pip. We only knew one. Involuntarily I let out a weird noise made from an intake of breath and disbelief. I was stunned. I couldn’t take this in.‘When, how, why?’ Dave said that the Hatfields had played a show in Holland on Saturday and that on Sunday they said their goodbyes and Pip made his way back to Paris. For some inexplicable reason Pip got a hotel room at the Gare de Nord instead of going to his nearby home. It appeared he had some kind of haemorrhage in the night and choked on the blood.
I can’t believe that the phone won’t ring and Pip will be on the line. Trying to persuade me to do something I don’t want to do or go somewhere I don’t want to go. I can’t believe I can’t e-mail him about some nonsense I’ve just read. Or that we wont get drunk and laugh like idiot’s anymore. If you never met Pip you’ll not know how full of life he was. He burst into a room, started chatting it up and then invited it out for a drink.
I start to cry, which sets Dave off. I tell Dave that I thought Pip was one of those guys that would go on for ever, like Keith Richard. Dave reminds me that Pip had lived about 100 lives to everyone else one. A little later Doug Boyle also calls in tears. My thoughts, and the rest of the day, are filled with the loss and the memories. On one of the last occasions I saw Pip, I drove up to see him at his old house near Bishops Stortford, where we used to rehearse with Dave back in the early 80’s. His new wife, some 20 odd years his junior, had left him. He was in England with his young son of about 3 years old. No doubt distressed by the absence of his mother, he was very clingy and hated it when Pip left the room without him. I just can’t get that bloody image out of my head."