The Importance of Music to Girls

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  The trains and the gin were long gone and by 1970, the Roundhouse had become a rock venue. I saw the posters: David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Doors and The Who, names which were for me part of the musical ether through which teenagers moved. This featureless, squat building was now a fairytale castle.

  Now I was to enter the castle. Of course it was not as large as I had known it to be and the bare brick walls said nothing of trains or gin or Jimi Hendrix. I listened to someone explain that here in the centre there had been a vast turning circle on which to move the engines, and my train uncoupled and diminished to a squat front end. In order to change into our black-and-white pilgrim attire we were taken down into the undercroft, the rings of tunnels and corridors beneath the turning-circle floor. I was so transfixed by the undercroft that I remember nothing of the performance. I was not touched by the music, or by the story of the pilgrim, and I had found no trace of the building’s other musical life, no clue, no key. I recently asked my brother. ‘All I remember,’ he said, ‘is running around in those tunnels.’

  Would I really one day be released on to the broad, beaten and pleasant road of Camden High Street? Would I learn to move slowly or would it just occur, this arrival of gravity? I could neither ask these questions nor answer them. All I could do was keep running round and round in my eight-year-old orbit until the turning circle moved like some cosmic pivot and I was tipped into another orbit and a heavier atmosphere.

  12

  Cover versions

  Oberon: And this Ditty, after me,

  Sing, and dance it trippinglie.

  Titania: First, rehearse this song by roate:

  To each word a warbling note …

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V. ii

  London was still dark. There were blanks and bomb sites and cratered backstreets where the lights that went out with the war had not yet gone back on. The Houses of Parliament were shabby with centuries of soot. Most people dressed quietly and sensibly. At school we watched chalk on blackboard and at home, black-and-white television.

  My mother’s cooking was half Mrs Beeton, half New Age – roast beef, kedgeree, steak-and-kidney pudding, liver and bacon, but also boiled wheat and ratatouille with a salad of dandelion leaves yanked out of the lawn. There was something called Gurdjieff Salad – a purple foment of beetroot, tomatoes, apples and red peppers. Our bread was dense brown bricks made by my mother, who was indulgent enough to supply sliced white bread as well. When we came home from school, tea was on the table. It consisted of anything from chopped raw cabbage and sliced oranges to pork pie and chocolate cake. The cake would be homemade on an industrial scale and served up in slabs from a roasting dish. My mother then prepared our main meal for when my father got back from evening surgery at eight. She made three or four meals a day for at least six and often ten or more people, and always provided pudding (rhubarb crumble, Eve’s pudding, zabaglione, apple snow) yet she did not like gadgets. She had a Kenwood mixer, which could take on anything, but we had neither toaster nor electric kettle. She saved time by grilling bread on one side only and conditioning us not to want to drink anything with our meals.

  School lunches combined black and white with Technicolor. Grey slices of beef, darker grey cabbage and lighter grey roast potatoes sat next to jade-bright peas, bullion-yellow fish fingers and pillar-box-red baked beans. Pudding was a glassful of strawberry-pink foam with a cherry-coloured glacé cherry on top, or leathery jelly which looked so green it convinced me that it tasted of lime. There was also sponge pudding or tart served with custard. The tart tasted dry and the custard wet but they were properly pink and yellow. Even the milk in the custard seemed artificial, its texture that of something whose molecules had been rearranged. No one worried about additives. My eyes itched, my stomach bloated, my lips swelled and I felt some afternoons as if I’d been clubbed, yet I craved this stuff. Often, the pink foam or lime jelly would be all I ate.

  Occasionally shop-bought confections appeared on the table at home: Swiss Rolls and Wagon Wheels. When we turned our noses up at a cake she’d bought because it was cut-price and past its sell-by date, my mother noted the sugar content, made a calculation, melted it down and greeted us the next afternoon with a plate of fudge which we devoured. (‘It was the doily that did it,’ she later observed.) Now and then she would offer us Angel Delight, which we could make ourselves by whisking a sachet of powder into a pint of milk and leaving it to set for one minute. We stood in a row by the fridge door and counted down.

  Artificial colours and flavours suggested the heightened and simplified world of the cartoon, in which everything has become simulacra – not so much an image of itself as an image of that image. I didn’t buy my first real record until 1972 but, for a year or so, rehearsed the act by buying Top of the Pops albums, cover versions of recent hits. Like artificial colours and flavours, these versions were more themselves than themselves. With their colouring-book definition and lack of depth, they were easy for a child to make sense of: strawberry mousse.

  Like someone looking at Dürer’s rhinoceros 400 years ago, I knew this was not the real thing but I didn’t yet understand why that mattered. I was not ready for real taste or texture.

  There was another kind of cover version, as Top of the Pops also featured the dance troupe Pan’s People. Each week they gave a recent hit single a heavily themed interpretation. They might be wartime sweethearts, teachers or astronauts and simply rearranged or embellished the same old moves accordingly. This was the world of the fairy king and queen where everything could be rearranged as everything else, the mechanical fantastic where everything was plastic and everything was play.

  And what of my mother? It was only many years later when I heard someone ask her why she had never practised as a doctor that this question occurred to me. Her reasons are her own but they include the fact that having been brought up by nannies, she wanted to look after her children herself. She protected us from expectation and we grew up vague in our ambitions while gradually discovering what we were for. The complicated model I was given was no cover version. It made a complicated life seem possible.

  13

  Crush

  Vronsky was a dark, squarely built man of medium height, with an exceptionally tranquil and firm expression on his good-natured, handsome face. Everything about his head and figure, from the closely cropped black hair and freshly shaven chin to the loosely fitting, brand-new uniform, was simple and at the same time elegant.

  LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina

  As I came to understand music as social currency, I realised that I needed to declare an allegiance. One day, I was watching television and saw the one for me. Donny Osmond was intriguingly poised between good boy and bad. His face was still chubby and his hair had been brushed firmly into place. On the other hand, it had been allowed to grow long enough to suggest trouble – the length at which my brother’s headmaster demanded hair be cut. He wore jeans. They looked pressed. He wore a cap, which was fashionable. It reminded me of the one my father wore to go sailing.

  He was wholesome, but in that pumped-up American way which dazzled us then. His teeth and eyes were shiny, and as he loafed around a playground singing in his high brash voice, he sat down on a swing and sighed and suddenly looked capable of complication. He was singing about ‘puppy love’ but he was being ironic and I was pleased to have understood that. The lyrics were basic, really just a net for the force of the arrangement behind him – instead of the chirpy economies of bubble-gum pop, here was what sounded like several orchestras’ worth of violinists, grand pianos, choruses and harps adding up to a surge of generalised emotion.

  I was impressed by such grandeur, and felt it matched the scale of the unformed feelings for which I badly needed an object. I had a crush on a boy at school and I looked at Donny Osmond and decided, quite consciously, that he would be my favourite pop star. Somehow I knew I needed one and as I’d never heard of him, I assumed
no one else had either. I was looking for my first musical discovery and wanted it to be as private and singular as my feelings about the boy at school. One thing I grasped from the start was the cachet of obscurity. I told no one about the boy and no one about Donny. The next day someone mentioned Donny’s name and I dropped him. I turned ten and ‘Puppy Love’ was Number One.

  There was another American boy – David Cassidy. He was older, more complicated, more fashionable and the star of a television series called The Partridge Family. These American boys were feminine and masculine in ways which did not ironise each other. Like the Spartans Herodotus describes combing their long hair before the battle of Thermopylae, these boys clearly knew how to handle a blow-dryer as well as a fight. But while I thought of those soldiers as being carved out of marble and bronze, the Americans looked as if they’d been made out of generic Boy Stuff, something bland and malleable, set in a regular mould. Their super-beauty was a triumph of proportion and symmetry. It impressed but it did not disturb and for a few months this was what I needed, the idea of Boy in its most benign and consistent form.

  I assumed that the boys I knew would become like the men I knew – silent and bearded or silent and lipsticked. These cheery sensitive Americans, who would in actuality remain thousands of miles and an ocean away, were a safer place to start.

  14

  Taxonomy

  Tune thy Music to thy heart …

  THOMAS CAMPION

  In 1972, I bought my first single and began to study the charts. I lost sight of Donny Osmond and David Cassidy immediately. The single was Chicory Tip’s ‘Son of My Father’, stomping and repetitive but made strange by the swirls and wails of a Moog synthesiser, a ghost caught in a machine.

  I was starting to see pop in terms of style and structure, and Top of the Pops was my map. I knew all those teenagers crowding around the presenter and the bands were real. They looked it – awkward, smirking, dancing as if they’d never heard music before. I began to understand pop as a construction. This was not a spontaneous party scene. These people had applied, had queued and were now being herded and prompted through the evening (which was probably not evening at all). Marooned among them were bands I was beginning to classify. Like a child filling a stamp album or collecting eggs, I needed to create order and name names.

  Nursery

  Melanie – ‘Brand New Key’

  The New Seekers – ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’

  Wings – ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’

  The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Band

  – ‘Little Drummer Boy’

  Playground

  Benny Hill – ‘Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West’

  Chuck Berry – ‘My Ding-a-Ling’

  Vitamins

  Michael Jackson – ‘Rockin’ Robin’

  Little Eva – ‘The Loco-Motion’

  Sulk

  Alice Cooper – ‘School’s Out’

  T. Rex – ‘Children of the Revolution’

  Slade – ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’

  Mott the Hoople – ‘All the Young Dudes’

  Smirk

  Hot Butter – ‘Popcorn’

  Lieutenant Pigeon – ‘Mouldy Old Dough’

  Sweets

  Lynsey de Paul – ‘Sugar Me’

  The Supremes – ‘Automatically Sunshine’

  Oompah

  Jimmy Osmond – ‘Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool’

  Jeff Beck – ‘Hi-Ho Silver Lining’

  Motorbike

  Gary Glitter – ‘Rock ’n’ Roll (Parts I & II)’

  The Shangri-Las – ‘Leader of the Pack’

  Squirm

  Love Unlimited – ‘Walkin’ in the Rain with the One I Love’

  Roberta Flack – ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’

  Who?

  Don McLean – ‘Vincent’

  Roxy Music – ‘Virginia Plain’

  David Bowie – ‘The Jean Genie’

  Bread – ‘The Guitar Man’

  Elton John – ‘Rocket Man’

  T. Rex – ‘Metal Guru’

  10CC – ‘Donna’

  ?

  Procol Harum – ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’

  Diana Ross – ‘Doobeedoo’Ndoobe Doobeedoo’Ndoobe

  Doobeedoo’Ndoo’

  Gilbert O’Sullivan – ‘Ooh-Wakka-Doo-Wakka-Day’

  Moody Blues – ‘Nights in White Satin’

  What was a light fandango? Who was Vincent? Who was the Guitar Man, the Star Man, the Rocket Man, Jean Genie, Virginia Plain, Donna, the Metal Guru?

  All these were in the charts in 1972. Some I associate with being six and some with being sixteen. I suppose at ten I was something of both.

  15

  Laughing gas

  As I was on the road, observing the littleness of the houses, the trees, the cattle and the people, I began to think myself in Lilliput. I was afraid of trampling on every traveller I met, and often called aloud to have them stand out of the way, so I had like to have gotten one or two broken heads for my impertinence.

  JONATHAN SWIFT, Gulliver’s Travels

  [Art: Lavinia shows interest and works in a very personal style – this tends to be rather messy]

  We left London in January 1973, no one now seems to remember why, and moved thirty-five miles north-east to an Essex village. The world both opened up and contracted as the city gave way to bare flat fields and a view that was mostly sky, while the lights went out. I had not known true countryside darkness and that winter, power cuts meant that our evenings were lived by oil lamp. Low cottages huddled together and people doubled over in the face of the eastern wind which was said to blow in straight from Siberia. The waiting of childhood, the waiting to be told what was happening, was replaced by waiting for something to happen – the arrival of a bus, the appearance of a friend.

  [Form tutor: Carelessness and indiscipline bedevil this report …]

  [Lavinia tends to be very extreme emotionally … I think she needs to give herself more time for everything.]

  That September I started secondary school. It was a new school injected into the grounds of a failing secondary modern, an ‘Anglo-European’ school in a brief era of European fervour. Until then, there had only been the Continent – a place of palaces but not many kings and queens, where everyone spoke several languages, trains ran on time, teenagers shook hands and people left bicycles unlocked. Cars started and houses were warm. (A woman I knew, who came to London from Berlin in the Thirties, was appalled by the damp and chill and declared that ‘Even the Romans had central heating!’) The Continent was also dangerous. It harboured rabies and revolution, and you couldn’t drink the water.

  [Geography: She does not exert herself to present ideas and facts in an ordered manner.]

  Europe, on the other hand, was the land of butter mountains, wine lakes and a forest of red tape. It was Europe’s fault that we had to eat French apples and that farmers were planting rape, whose acid-yellow flowers clashed with the poppies and made everyone sneeze. Europe was regulated, corporate and bland. You could drink the water, but you wouldn’t have much fun.

  It now seems odd that a school established in order to celebrate European unity asserted the distinction between island and mainland in its name, as if our relationship was at best hyphenated. I knew more about Walter Gropius than I did about Turner, and more about Valéry Giscard d’Estaing than Cromwell but although I learnt French, German and Russian, I had about as much opportunity to speak them as I would have Ancient Greek, so they faded.

  Only we, the first year, had to wear the new uniform, which took its colours from the European Community flag. All summer I looked forward to this azure and gold future only to be issued with a puff-sleeved banana-yellow shirt and a royal-blue crimplene jacket and skirt. We were also supposed to wear a lapel badge with the flag’s ring of gold stars, as if we were delegates to some interminable conference.

  [Art: Lavinia has not fo
llowed instructions precisely this term. She must make some effort to conform at this early stage or else the basic building methods will escape her.]

  The scale and speed of life changed as the world grew smaller and slower, and the horizon emptier. Nothing that had worked before worked now. I had to learn a new geography and also a new way of measuring it. Some years earlier, decimalisation had meant relearning money and around the time I started this new school, we had to switch from imperial to metric measurement. I could do the sums but I developed no sense of metres or kilograms.