Educating Peter

by Tom Cox

  Peter’s selection was far more simple. Coming from a fourteen-year-old, a Living In A Box/Steppenwolf combination might have smacked of sheer naivety. However, the unusual juxtaposition of Blue Oyster Cult (uncool, but not outrageously so, and something of an enigma) and nu-metal (cool, but kind of for kids) would spread just the right level of subtle confusion.

  Like a worried father seeing his son through the gates on the first day of school, I watched as my young friend approached the counter, then, from a safe distance, did my best to pick up on snatches of the conversation. It’s difficult, eavesdropping on a teenager and a record shop employee from six yards away, since there’s no real telling if words like ‘mmfffuuh’, ‘d’njjj’ and ‘smrrright’ are real words you’ve misheard or bona fide snatches of an alien – but, in Soho, widely recognised – form of communication. Whatever the case, I took it as a good sign that Peter hadn’t burst into tears by the time he received his change.

  ‘How did that go?’ I asked him as we walked up Berwick Street towards Oxford Street a few moments later.

  ‘Fine,’ said Peter.

  ‘What? You mean nobody put a plastic skull in front of you?’

  ‘No. Seemed like alright blokes, really.’

  ‘Are you sure? They’re normally dead rude to me. What were you talking about to them? You seemed to take quite a while.’

  ‘Oh, the bloke with the big stress patches on his beard and the “Patrick Moore Is My Whore” t-shirt was talking to me about this album that I bought by Kitty. He says they’re playing tonight at the London Astoria.’

  I was baffled, and not just because I didn’t know who Kitty were. It had taken me and my friends years of training to build up psychological armour tough enough to enable us to deal with the Music And Video Exchange in-crowd, and now Peter was not only speaking their language but getting invited to gigs with them. Of course, most music-obsessed men tend to have a mental age of fourteen, so perhaps I shouldn’t have found this camaraderie so surprising, but I couldn’t help feeling hurt. Peter hadn’t talked to me about Kitty. He hadn’t talked much at all, really, unless I’d spoken to him first. I wasn’t even sure he thought I was ‘an alright bloke’.

  Later, while Peter nipped off to the lavatory in Burger King, I furtively consulted Adolescence: The Survival Guide For Parents And Teenagers. It seemed to contain plenty of advice for adults trying to communicate with sarcastic, unsociable and bullying adolescents, but little on recalcitrance, or at least Peter’s specific mode of it. Frantically, I searched for a chapter headed ‘Generally Pleasant Yet Unforthcoming Teenage Acquaintances: Getting Them To Talk To You A Bit More About Rock And Stuff’. The most relevant thing I found was a section on shyness.

  ‘Don’t force painfully shy youngsters into the limelight,’ advised Elizabeth Fenwick and Dr Tony Smith, ‘or draw too much attention to them . . . [But] don’t let them off the hook completely.’ And, slightly later: ‘Eating together straightaway normally helps.’

  I closed the book, anticipating Peter’s return. Perhaps I was expecting too much too quickly and bombarding my companion slightly. I had, after all, only met him properly for the first time four hours ago. I’d already asked him questions some of his best friends probably hadn’t asked him: what were his favourite bands?, what exactly did progressive schooling entail?, was he dating anyone at the moment?, did those metal chains he had hanging off his trousers ever get snagged up embarrassingly on road bollards and tube train barriers?, why was Limp Bizkit’s lead singer on the executive board at East West records? It was hardly surprising that most of the answers I’d received were monosyllabic. We hadn’t even had a meal together yet.

  As we tucked into our bacon double cheeseburgers, I resolved to cool my approach slightly, and almost immediately – whether as a direct result of this, by sheer coincidence, or because I was sneakily allowing him to break Jenny’s No-Fast-Food rule – Peter started to open up. For the first time he began to talk of Raf, one of his friends at school, who had ‘the coolest leather jacket’ and could play the whole of Nirvana’s Nevermind album on guitar. Peter liked Nevermind? But that was from my era. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘so?’ He liked it a lot – had done before anyone else in his school year. He and his mates were always listening to it; his band, Goat Punishment, liked to cover a couple of songs from it. Peter had a band? Of course he had a band. What did I think – that he played the guitar just for the sake of it? In fact, he had two bands, although the other one, Toast Hero, was ‘just a side project’.

  ‘Goat Punishment are called Goat Punishment because in the quadrangle at school there’s a pen with goats in it.’

  ‘And you want to punish them?’

  ‘No. We like them. It’s just a name. Adam, our drummer, wanted us to be called The Fuckers, originally.’

  ‘But that’s a bit rubbish, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. The rest of us thought so.’

  It made no odds that Peter was growing up in an environment that bore almost no resemblance to the one in which I had spent my teenage years: the protocol of communication was exactly the same. Here, you didn’t get what you gave; you got what you didn’t give. If Peter and I were going to get on, I would have to fight my urge to fill every moment of silence with inane jabber and interrogative angling. Worryingly quickly, I found myself back in a bastardised version of my 1989 mindset – desperate to impress the cool kids, but trying to hold back my natural tendency towards politeness and inquisitiveness, in the knowledge that I’d be liked a lot less for what I did say than what I didn’t. The bacon double cheeseburger didn’t help. I was fourteen again, and all that was missing were the Mr Whippy hairstyle, the Campri ski jacket and the Cathy Dennis poster.

  Was Peter a cool kid? I’d originally assumed not. Now I wasn’t so sure. True, he had disobedient hair, a little acne, a lot of black clothes and a few obvious social problems, but, while those attributes might have lost him a few friends in the adult universe, there was no telling where it put him on the ladder of adolescent popularity. I reminded myself of his age: fourteen, not seventeen. I looked at his clothes: Doc Martens, leather trenchcoat, AC/DC t-shirt, that metal chain thing that I still didn’t understand. Did anyone I’d known at fourteen dress like this out of school hours? Highly unlikely. They probably wouldn’t have wanted to in an era when Patrick Swayze was considered a fashion icon, but that was beside the point. The point was that this was a pretty advanced look for a fourteen-year-old. At least, I supposed it was. I didn’t know for sure. I’d spent most of the last seven years ignoring teenagers, remember?

  Hiking up Crouch Hill back to the car with Peter dragging a few paces behind me, kicking gravel, I told myself to snap out of it. I was a married man with a Ford Focus, life assurance and a perfectly nice group of regular friends. I wasn’t here to impress my teenage companion, or even to become his pal; I was here to give him a lesson in the ways of rock, plain and simple. If we bonded in the process, fine. If we didn’t, my life would not be significantly altered.

  That said, it was going to make for some mighty awkward car journeys.

  LET IT TRICKLE

  THE STORY, AS it’s traditionally told, begins with a Daimler pulling into a garage forecourt. Eight or nine young men and women emerge boisterously from the car. One of them asks to use the lavatory. The petrol station’s resident mechanic, who’s come out to see what the commotion is, says no, he won’t allow it. Slowly, the gang break into a chant of ‘We’ll piss anywhere, man!’, as two of the men – one of particularly memorable appearance due to the size of his lips – urinate against the petrol station wall. The group get back in the car and it pulls away with, according to the Daily Express, ‘the people inside sticking their hands through the window in a well-known gesture’ (it being 1965, you assume this gesture involves double digits as opposed to the later, somehow less swashbuckling ‘flipped bird’). The police are alerted. Three of the agitators are fined five pounds.

  It’s not, it has to be said, the most scand
alous tale of rock and roll hell-raising ever told. Next to, for example, the story about the Led Zeppelin groupie and the red snapper or Keith Moon driving his Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool, you might even say it was a little on the sissy side. These days, the Shell station on the Romford Road doesn’t have a mechanic, but if it did, you suspect that, were you to piss against his wall, he’d barely look up from his copy of the News Of The World, where there would be every chance he’d be reading about celebrities who indulged in far more licentious activities than urinating in public. In place of that original mechanic were a couple of downcast Asian men in their mid-twenties, selling petrol, fags and, just occasionally, disposable cameras from behind the safety of a Plexiglas partition. Their generation would still know of the miscreant with the prominent lips, but less because of his music and more because of the frequent stories in the tabloids about his philandering with Latin women young enough to be his daughter.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said to one of them (the men selling petrol, not the Latin women) as I handed over the money for a disposable camera, ‘but you wouldn’t happen to know if this is the garage which the Rolling Stones urinated against in 1965, would you?’

  Peter lurked behind me, flicking through a copy of Kerrang!

  The men who work at the Shell station on Romford Road get asked about pissing a lot. At first they look at you suspiciously, as if merely by being in this dodgy corner of London and wanting to make conversation you must be up to no good. But then their tight scowls break into voluptuous grins and they point you towards the legendary spot, chuckling.

  Did they think that the mythical value of their bricks gave them an edge over the Esso station across the road, which only has a normal, prosaic wall? I wondered.

  ‘Perhaps.’ They laughed.

  ‘Has anyone ever thought of erecting a plaque?’

  ‘Oh, no. I don’t think Mr Shell would like that!’

  ‘And what about The Stones? Do they come back here much?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What about other bands? Do they like to piss here, too? You know, like the way dogs like to piss where other dogs have pissed.’

  ‘Er. Mmm. No.’

  I’d always loved The Rolling Stones – thought of them, perhaps, as the ultimate band – and felt that I’d be a pretty lame teacher if I couldn’t find a valuable lesson for my pupil somewhere within their four-decade history. Romford Road seemed a good place to start, since a) Mick Jagger was too busy promoting his latest movie venture to show us around his mansion, b) it was one of the few legendary spots associated with the group that didn’t charge an entry fee, and c) it was on the way to Brighton, where we were scheduled to stay at my in-laws’ house, before dropping in on Ed The Troubadour in Hastings the following day. I also had a vague memory of a student teacher once using a poem about people pissing on the floor as a disarming device on my fourth-year English class. ‘The Waz’ might have been a hackneyed conversation loosener between adults and children, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to use it to my full advantage.

  My original intention had been for Peter and me to recreate the famous piss, but as the day had gone on, I’d become more and more worried about stage fright. Besides, now we’d befriended the petrol station’s employees, being rude to them and provoking them to call the police was going to be slightly less practical, especially as I’d asked one of them to take a photograph on our behalf. So, instead, we hunched over and mimed the crime, looking back over our shoulder and scowling like Satanic Majesties as the cash assistant shouted ‘Cheese!’ What can I say? It was tacky. It was touristy. It was precisely the sort of thing I’d hoped we’d get up to on our adventure.

  For the first time, Peter seemed to be enjoying himself. Fortified by the family-sized pack of Wheat Crunchies I’d bought him at the Crouch End branch of Budgens, he’d begun to open up and relax on the way here, even going as far as to tell a few anecdotes, almost all of which would start with the phrase ‘It was really funny . . .’ and involve one of his friends putting a pair of pants on their head. Still, I couldn’t help puzzling over what he really thought of the latest stage of his musical education. To me, The Rolling Stones were still untouchably insouciant icons, but that was because I owned twenty-one of their albums and had spent a third of my life pretending I was living in a late-Sixties utopia. To most of my generation, they were shrivelled old skinflints. To Peter’s generation – or at least the members of it that had bothered to notice the second biggest band in the history of the universe existed – they were probably something much more decrepit and embarrassing.

  ‘You’ve heard of Mick Jagger, right?’ I’d asked Peter earlier, in the car.

  ‘Yeah. Of course. He’s the one who tries to pretend to be young by shagging all those women and making that sad album with those hip-hop guys. I saw that documentary about him on TV, where he was taking the piss out of Kate Winslet.’

  ‘What about Keith Richards?’

  ‘Think so.’

  ‘You should do. He’s the really cool one. What about Charlie Watts and Ron Wood?’

  ‘Ummm . . . not sure.’

  I decided not to mention Bill Wyman. As a rule, it’s best not to. Besides, we had only just eaten.

  It was one thing playing Peter The Stones’ invincible 1973 album, Exile On Main Street (Peter: ‘This is alright, actually’), going into a bookshop and showing him a picture of Keith Richards taken during the making of its predecessor, Sticky Fingers, and convincing him that The Stones had once been the coolest men on earth. It was another thing entirely trying to convince him that they’d been the wild men of rock as well. One of Peter’s favourite bands, Slipknot, regularly defecated live on stage without being noticed, never mind arrested. Merely by opening their mouths and switching on their microphones, other groups he listened to could replicate the sensation of having someone projectile-vomit down your ear canal. Why was he going to be impressed by a group of former art students having a slash against a petrol station?

  I pictured the months ahead, and wondered what kind of battle I was facing. How hard was I going to have to try to impress him? Just how anaesthetised was he to the murkiest reaches of Rock And Roll Babylon? As we stood and focused on the scene of the crime, I attempted to give him a sense of historical perspective: a 1965 world on the brink of upheaval, with flower power just around the corner, when pop music genuinely seemed dangerous. He nodded a lot – it was difficult to know if he was taking it in or not – then went to purchase two tubes of Pringles from the kiosk.

  ‘Can you feel it in the air? The sense that you’re somewhere special?’ I asked him upon his return.

  ‘I’m not sure. I’m a bit too cold to feel anything at the moment,’ he said.

  ‘But can you picture it? It was a pretty daring thing to do in 1965, you know.’

  ‘Yeah. It sort of sounds like fun. My mate Raf’s brother sometimes drives around with eight people in his car. I think you’re supposed to only have five.’

  ‘You could probably fit eight in a Daimler, though.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I suppose it’s a good job that the car didn’t cut out when they were trying to pull away. That would have ruined the moment a bit.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  With one last wistful look – well, a wistful look from me; a slightly relieved one from Peter – we turned for the Focus. It started first time. Sticking our hands out the window in a well-known gesture that the Rolling Stones probably didn’t use, we waved to our new friends in the booth and pulled out into the unruly early evening traffic. It was, after all, just a wall, and there was only so long you could stare at it.

  REALLY FUNNY

  ‘IT WAS REALLY funny. There’s this guy in my year, Sam, who’s, like, really cool on guitar. He can play all bottleneck and stuff, but he’s a bit of a mosher . . .’

  ‘What’s a mosher?’

  ‘Well, it’s kind of like a goth, but not quite.’

  ‘What? More
energetic?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s weird. Moshing was just a kind of dancing you did when I was a kid; now it’s a whole lifestyle choice. Bizarre. Anyway – sorry. Carry on.’

  ‘Yeah, so Sam’s like showing off in Mrs Williams’ music class, playing this Feeder song, and Raf, who’s in year eleven, walks in, and he’s like, “What’s going on?” And we’re like, “Oh-oh,” ’cos Raf’s, like, the best guitar player in the world, ever – better than Sam. And they start having this duel, and Sam’s playing this Feeder song really quick, but Raf just keeps getting quicker, and Mrs Williams walks in and she’s just watching, going, “Wow.” It was so cool.’

  ‘I never really got into music lessons at school. I had a problem with those weird xylophone-type things that you had to blow into. The bit where you put your mouth always seemed to still be covered with the spit of the last person who’d used it. Do you have those?’

  ‘Er . . . no.’

  ‘So is Raf your best mate?’

  ‘Yeah, probably. He’s a couple of years older than me, but we’ve got really similar taste and stuff. He got me into Nirvana and AC/DC.’