Fact #161823

Simon Napier-Bell : Raul had looked a bit odd that morning and said he didn’t want to fly, but that happens a lot on tours. If you stopped a flight every time somebody looked a bit odd, you’d never fly anywhere.

Jonathan Morrish : It was miserable, grey day. I landed up next to Raul in the queue for the plane, and he obviously wasn’t right. He was playing the Last Post in the tunnel as we got on board. He had apparently been on antibiotics for a very long time, and that can have a cumulative effect on you.

Simon Napier-Bell : I wasn’t actually on the plane, but he did go completely mad. He thought he’d seen the devil, pulled out a knife, rushed into the cockpit.

Dave Moulder (minder) : Raul went off his rocker. He was screaming and foaming at the mouth. No-one was sure what was going on, and we were very frightened. He was hallucinating and seemed to be in a trance. He thought he was possessed by the devil and was dying.

Jonathan Morrish : I heard this terrible commotion, and I remember seeing Harvey Goldsmith running up to the cockpit. Raul had pulled out a knife, threatened Shirley, then stabbed himself. The pilot was magnificent.

Simon Napier-Bell : He put the plane into a nose-dive because that was Chinese emergency drill to unbalance the attacker, so Raul was thrown fifty feet up the cabin, and the bouncers in the crew jumped on him. Took about eight people to hold him down. He was completely berserk.

Jonathan Morrish : The pilot brought us down very gradually through thick cloud, and had us back on the tarmac within five minutes.

Simon Napier-Bell : They did an emergency landing at a military airport halfway to Canton, people from the local lunatic asylum came in and gave him a huge does of some tranquilliser that should knock out a horse, but he remained conscious. Anyway, they got him to the ambulance, and the stretcher was sticking out the back so they couldn’t shut the door, and he started playing The Last Post on his trumpet. Completely surreal.

So they flew him back to Beijing. There was, of course, a $50,000 bill for diverting the plane, and medical attention and so on. Actually, there are many good things about Communist countries that never get written about, there’s a great regard for personal freedom, so long as you don’t offend against the government politically, there’s a very good legal process to protect the individual. So, to try and get someone committed, a lot of people have to sign and approve the documents, so they put Raoul back in his hotel room, injected him a second time with this drug, and left it for me and Jazz Summers to deal with.

Raoul, unfortunately, was Portugese which caused problems. Anyway, we called up various doctors and the Portugese Ambassador only worked three days a week between drinking bouts, so his Embassy wasn’t much help.

Antonio Leal De La Costa Lobo (Portugese Ambassador) : His injury was not serious. He explained to me that he had not had much sleep for four nights and was under tremendous stress.

Simon Napier-Bell : It was eight o’clock in the evening on a Saturday, not a great time to get things done. Eventually, we got the Australian ambassador, who was very helpful, and the doctor from the Australian Embassy came over to the hotel. He looked at Raoul and said, ‘Well, he’s going to wake up in four hours and he’ll go absolutely berserk because this drug puts you in limbo and you wake up worse than before. You’ve got four hours to get him in a straight-jacket and into a lunatic asylum.

So, try to imagine two Englishmen in a Chinese hotel room at midnight trying to get a mad Portugese trumpet player into a straight-jacket and committed to a Chinese asylum. We got some people to come within ten minutes of the time the doctor had predicted he’d wake up. They were terrified to go in the room because they knew about that drug too, so it was Jazz eventually who went in. He had worked briefly in a mental hospital and summoned up the courage to go in first, just as Raoul was waking up.

So they got him in the jacket, but you’re not allowed to be put in a mental asylum in China unless a relative goes with you. That’s to protect your rights as well. So Jazz had to go with him, and stay in the hospital, partly as a hostage against the bill being paid.

In the end, I got a taxi to the asylum, and we paid the driver wait outside while I got Jazz out of the hospital so we could get to the gig in Canton. We were pursued to the airport by police but, once we were airborne, we were safe because the Beijing police had no jurisdiction in Canton.