Educating Peter

by Tom Cox

  ‘Mmmm. Yeah. My dad brought us here. Me, Raf, Zed and this girl – Caroline? My dad watched Slipknot, too. I think he quite liked them. But I think he liked Incubus best. He said so anyway. I’m not sure if he’d, like, put them on in his spare time or anything.’

  ‘Oh. Right . . . I see.’

  ‘It was really funny, yeah? Caroline had just got back from Thailand and she was still really jetlagged. People kept seeing her and thinking she was stoned. And then we were in the moshpit, and there was this real mosher there, and him and Raf were, like, lifting one another up and then crowdsurfing. It was really violent. I’ve got such a cool bruise on my shin.’

  ‘What, so you camped and everything?’

  ‘No. We stayed at Caroline’s auntie’s house in Oxford. Caroline’s, like, sooo bayse.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Bayse. You know.’

  ‘No. I don’t know. What does it mean?’

  ‘It’s kind of like what you say about people who are well off, but kind of dozey.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?’

  ‘What? About being bayse?’

  ‘No. The festival.’

  ‘Dunno. Didn’t think it was important.’

  ‘I’m sort of surprised you want to be back here today, after seeing the real thing yesterday.’

  ‘No. It’s cool. I wanted to see if I could find the patch where Raf was sick.’

  ‘Oh. Where was that?’

  ‘Just over there, by the burger stall. I guess someone’s cleared it up by now.’

  As we walked back towards the car, the crowd had thinned out slightly. A few stragglers sat on street corners, perched on empty beer crates and rolled-up sleeping bags, with the look of people who were waiting for something but couldn’t quite remember what. I chose not to act on Petter’s suggestion that we ‘give them all a lift’. I’d only just valeted the car, for a start, and besides, I was feeling slightly sore at my Nordically named companion. Whether or not he’d made a premeditated decision to withhold the fact that he was a seasoned festival-goer from me was still very much up for discussion, but that didn’t make the truth sting any less. It was ridiculous: I would rather spend a week living the authentic life of an Aberdeen Angus than attend another rock festival, yet there was no getting away from it: I wanted to be the one who showed Petter his first festival experience. I wanted to have seen him headbang for the first time. I wanted to meet Raf. Jealousy overwhelmed me and, in the car on the way back to Crouch End, I did something that no self-respecting adult should do in the presence of a fourteen-and-three-quarter-year-old boy: I sulked.

  Sulking, of course, was a wholly pointless activity in the vicinity of Petter. Over the few months that I’d got to know him, I’d found that he was proficiently out of tune with my emotions. He’d never once asked me if I was alright, what I’d been up to the day before, how the sale of my house was progressing, or whether I’d recovered from my bout of laryngitis. I hadn’t actually had a bout of laryngitis since I’d known him, but that wasn’t the point: I still felt upset that he hadn’t asked me about it. And now, as I silently negotiated Greater Reading’s industrial sprawl, muttering only the most cursory ‘oh’s and ‘mnngh’s in response to his eulogies about Rammstein’s new video and Raf’s new footwear, I found that my brooding was having the exact opposite effect to its intended one. He was becoming more, not less, garrulous. He was talking to me as if I was one of his mates.

  He was talking to me as if I was one of his mates.

  He was talking to me as if I was one of his mates.

  I was one of his mates.

  Clinically and beautifully, the truth stood up and made itself known. Metaphorically, I shook myself down and threw my funk out of the car window (my internal one, that is; my Sly And The Family Stone tape wasn’t going anywhere). What did I think I was achieving by getting in a huff with someone half my age? What, precisely, was I mad about? Six months ago, I would have walked recklessly out in front of a double-decker bus just to avoid someone who looked like Petter. Now we laughed and joked together, shared bags of pickled onion Monster Munch, and knew the names of one another’s best friends. I should have been rejoicing, not fuming. Here I was, lucky enough to witness a teenager – a slightly melancholy and spoilt teenager, but when all was said and done a good-hearted, mild, funny teenager – in the prime of adolescence, halfway between wanting to be like everyone else and wanting to be unlike everyone else. Sometimes I felt like I wasn’t really close to him; sometimes I felt like my musical lessons went in one ear and out the other. But what right had I to be close to him? Who, in the end, got properly close to any teenager? Who, in the end, got any teenager to give them an honest acknowledgement that they were interested in Boring Adult Things? You only had to flick through the writings of Elizabeth Fenwick and Dr Tony Smith to realise that it was hard work. My initial Thunderbolt And Lightfoot fantasy might have transformed itself into a Thundergoth And Gordon Lightfoot reality, but I was doing okay. I’d kept him occupied, and that was a big part of Jenny’s point in the first place, wasn’t it? And now here was Petter, in his element (‘element’ in this case meaning cleanest AC/DC t-shirt and black nail varnish), and here was me wanting to see him more in his element, and that had to be a good sign, didn’t it? I’d forced him into lifts with ageing rockers. I’d cajoled him up trees with folk-loving space cadets. I’d introduced him to a man in tights. Perhaps most fearsomely of all, I’d driven him around the outskirts of Hull. But he was still here, talking to me like I was more than some prematurely middle-of-the-road friend of his family who didn’t figure in his day-to-day existence, and that fact alone was enough to make me want to reach out and pat him on the shoulder . . . or certainly enough to reach across charitably and turn Slipknot’s ‘Eyeless’ up a notch on the car stereo. So that’s exactly what I did. And for just a few small moments, before I realised that, even mid-revelation, a hideous racket is still a hideous racket, and, seeing him looking the other way, sneakily turned it back down again, guess what?

  It very nearly felt tolerable.

  MY GENERATION

  ‘HOW DOES THAT song go? That one you had on in the car before. “People try to put us down, just because we stay around”? I like that.’

  ‘Mmm. It’s not one of the best Who songs, but it’s okay, until you’ve heard it for the three hundredth time. It’s actually “get around”, but I can see why you might have thought it was “stay”. The guy who wrote it’s pretty old now. I interviewed him a few years ago. He can’t hear very well, and I had an ear infection at the time. The interview was basically just us going “WHAT?”, “SPEAK UP!” at each other across the table in this studio that he owns.’

  ‘Is his name Roger Daltrey?’

  ‘No. Daltrey’s the singer. Pete Townshend writes the songs.’

  ‘And that other one died this year, didn’t he? And he’d been doing cocaine.’

  ‘Yeah. John Entwistle.’

  ‘Weird.’

  ‘Do you think your generation’s got a defining song like that?’

  ‘I guess something by Eminem.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like hip-hop.’

  ‘No, er, I kind of do now.’

  ‘Ah, that explains it. I wondered why you kept saying “word” all the time the other day.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘What else, though? You know, songs . . .’

  ‘I guess there’s “How You Remind Me” by Nickelback. That’s pretty cool, and a lot of people at my school liked it – y’know, even really tragic people who like Christina Aguilera.’

  ‘It doesn’t really have much of a message, though.’

  ‘Do we have to have a message?’

  ‘No. I guess not. We had “Here we are now, entertain us”, but, when you think about it, that doesn’t mean anything, does it?

  ‘But I was wondering how you felt – you know, whether you felt you’ve been swindled when it comes to the pop culture you get expos
ed to. And, you know, whether you feel any responsibility about saving the world and stuff.’

  ‘I don’t know. Raf’s brother – Jonti – he’s, like, twenty-four, and he reckons that his generation really fucked up and it’s up to us to put it all right. But I’m like, “Why should it be up to us?” I feel like the main thing about my generation is that nobody really feels the same about it. But I suppose, in a way, it’s quite cool for us, ’cos, well, people who were a bit older than us didn’t have the Internet and stuff.’

  ‘But don’t you just use it to access porn? That’s what the teen flicks, like American Pie, seem to reckon.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I said. It’s cool.’

  ‘Ha.’

  ‘But no, those films like American Pie and Loser and stuff, I don’t really feel like the kids in those. They’re really old now, those films – like three years, some of them – and the kids in them weren’t really teenagers anyway. They have loads more fun than us. But they’re just really dumb, anyway. I dunno.’

  ‘You seem to have a lot of fun, though. I mean, you have a far more active social life than I did at your age. You do fencing and judo . . .’

  ‘Karate!’

  ‘Yeah, sorry. Fencing and karate and stuff. And you’re always at parties doing mad things. I’m surprised there’s room for feeling depressed. I mean, it seemed that when I was fourteen it was the weird, unpopular kids who wore black and listened to dark, heavy music. But now it seems like it’s the popular kids, too. Or perhaps that’s just in your social circle.’

  ‘It kind of is, and it kind of isn’t. Er . . .’

  ‘Or maybe it’s just that you have two different personalities and you keep them carefully compartmentalised. I mean, you know, you don’t wear your black nail varnish for karate, do you?’

  ‘No. Er . . . mmmph.’

  ‘That reminds me. How did that nail varnish remover that my wife gave you work out? Did you get it all off in time for the lesson?’

  ‘Er . . . I guess. Yeah.’

  ‘It’s funny: I remember you telling me earlier in the year that modern goths didn’t wear black nail varnish.’

  ‘Really? I don’t think so. No. No way.’

  ‘You did. Definitely.’

  ‘No. No way. Black nail varnish is totally cool. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Oh, okay then. But . . . getting back to what we were saying. Do you ever think about the differences between your generation and my generation?’

  ‘I suppose. Sometimes. I think it would have been kind of cool to have seen Nirvana before Kurt Cobain shot himself. And I like some of the clothes that you see them wearing – y’know, Alice In Chains, and people like that. But I guess it would have been kind of shitty, too. I mean, y’know, Tony Blair’s shit, but my mum says John Major and Maggie Thatcher were shitter.’

  ‘And the mobile phones were crap. No text messaging.’

  ‘Yeah. Bummer!’

  ‘But things haven’t changed that much, really.’

  ‘I dunno. I think I remember a lot of stuff about the Nineties that my mates don’t. Like Caroline – she can’t even remember Zig and Zag. I thought everyone remembered Zig and Zag.’

  ‘She is bayse, though, like you say.’

  ‘Yeah. Sooo bayse. Ha! I think I kind of like the past, but I wouldn’t want to be in it.’

  ‘I feel the same about hippies. I love loads of hippie music and films and clothes and like to imagine myself in 1971, but in reality it probably wouldn’t have been so great. I sometimes call my generation Generation Twat, and there are a lot of idiots in it, but I think the self-righteous attitudes of hippies are responsible for a lot of the bad stuff. So, I guess, in a way, it’s up to us to clear up the mess.’

  ‘Mmm. The one thing I hate about being around now is being told by everyone that I should be famous. There are all these things like Pop Idol and Fame Academy and Model Behaviour on telly and you get all these lameos at school saying they’re going to be on them. I mean, like, that is sooo lame. Even if you do get on them, nobody’s going to give a fuck about you in five years’ time. Shut up and get a life.’

  ‘But I thought you wanted to be a famous rock star. You still do, right?’

  ‘Er, yeah; a rock star. Not a pop star. And anyway, I don’t want to be famous; I just want to be cool.’

  ‘And do you feel any cooler after hanging around with me?’

  ‘Er . . . Um . . . Can I get back to you on that?’

  AXE DEMONS

  WITH PETTER’S NEW school term starting in earnest, our summer together was coming to an end and our final few adventures took on a frenetic quality that I hadn’t quite planned for. This was partly my own fault for taking on a temporary job as manager of Circulus, and partly the fault of Marc Bolan from T-Rex for getting killed too close to the date of Axe Demons, Petter’s beginning-of-term concert.

  On 16 September 2002, it was exactly twenty-five years since Bolan’s girlfriend, Gloria Jones, had driven her Mini into a tree on Barnes Common in West London, killing Bolan and badly injuring herself. I wanted to take Petter to the tree for the anniversary celebrations to witness an unsurpassable, authentic example of rock and roll hero worship. Personally, I found T-Rex repetitive and tediously kitsch, but, taking a democratic standpoint, I hoped that some of Bolan’s much-discussed ‘stardust aura’ might rub off on Petter in the build-up to Goat Punishment’s performance at Axe Demons the following Monday.

  A couple of weeks before we visited Barnes, I’d realised one of my own musical dreams: to become a rock and roll manager. Over the last half decade, I’d become increasingly frustrated and mystified by Circulus’s inability to get a record deal, and even more frustrated and mystified by their inability to get off Circulus Meantime and act concerned about it. Finally, while listening to their latest brilliant demo, something inside me had snapped, and I’d decided that if they couldn’t do anything about their scandalous lack of corporate backing, then maybe I could. And even if I couldn’t, maybe I could teach Petter something constructive in the process.

  ‘We’re not going to be able to pay you, you know,’ explained Michael. But this was about love, not money. Besides, I’d read about the great rock svengalis – Peter Grant, Don Arden, Sharon Osbourne – and the job seemed easy enough. Get a mahogany desk roughly the size of Birmingham, dangle a few promoters out of the windows by their legs, pay several hundred teenagers to go and buy your band’s debut album, and before you knew it you’d be ordering your jumbo cigars from Harrods. Loveable hippie daydreamers that they were, the root of Circulus’s unfulfilled promise seemed obvious to me: they’d never forced themselves on anyone. But now they would have me to do that for them. Petter, meanwhile, would act as The Sundance Kid to my managerial Butch Cassidy.

  Our first job was to drum up interest in the band’s next gig: a mid-morning, open-air performance at the European Car-Free Day demonstration in London’s Russell Square, with comedian-turned-traveller Michael Palin as compère. Immediately, Petter and I sent out a massive email circular to everyone I knew in the music industry, headed ‘BEST UNSIGNED BAND IN THE WORLD!’, with details about the gig, a potted biography of the band, and the cunning insertion of the industry buzz phrase ‘acid folk’. Then, three minutes later, we sent out another, this time remembering to include the date of the gig.

  One of the few good things to be said about having email access to the music industry is that, over time, you pick up some pretty tasty virtual addresses from the ether, and can pretend that you’re mates with famous people. Somewhere during my seven years’ writing about music for a living, I’d acquired the email address for Peter Jenner, legendary early Pink Floyd manager and psychedelic scenester. Petter and I were thrilled to find that, within moments of my Circulus missive going out, Jenner had responded. We were slightly less thrilled, however, to read the email itself, which featured the lone sentence, ‘Please remove me from your mailing list.’ Still, an assortment of music editors, A&R men and gig promot
ers had come back to us, making vague promises to ‘swing by and watch a few tunes’. I assumed this meant that they were intrigued.

  We began to make notes about strategy – not because we needed to, but because it seemed like a manager-type thing to do. One of the toughest things about planning a strategy for your favourite band is that they are your favourite band: you don’t really want to change anything about them. Instead, I tried to find ways of playing to Circulus’s strengths. Noting that they had rarely performed outside London, Petter and I went to work on getting them an out-of-the-way gig – something that would compliment the pastoral, hippies-in-space-but-sort-of-on-a-farm-at-the-same-time ambience of their latest demo.

  ‘What about getting them to play at my school?’ asked Petter.

  ‘But that’s not really out of the way, is it? And I thought you ditched your folk night,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a good ten miles from the centre of London, though.’

  ‘Mmm. No. We need to work on the provinces.’

  ‘What about getting them to play in Snowdonia? How cool would that be? Goat Punishment could support. We could have goats there and everything.’

  ‘Now you’re just being silly.’

  After ten minutes of cold calling, during which we were turned down by my local village fête, we secured Circulus a last-minute headline slot at a cider shed in Banham, a large-ish village in the South Norfolk wilderness. In the end, Petter and I were surprised at how easy this was to arrange: apparently all we had needed to do was give our management company an intriguing name (Goat Enterprises), emphasise the fact that the band had once been reviewed by the Guardian, and pretend that we knew who Headspace – the hot folk band on the Banham scene, apparently – were. I felt sure, though, that our success was largely down to the extremely professional nature of our administrative tactics. These consisted of Petter making the call to the promoter on my behalf, asking to speak to the person in charge, then putting the head of his ‘management company’ (i.e. me) on the line to do the real, hardcore business negotiations. It was all very intimidating, we felt, and only slightly marred by Petter’s habit of loudly crunching Kettle Chips in the background while I sealed the deal.