The Importance of Music to Girls

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  England was no longer England, at least not the England it persisted in believing itself to be. Twenty-five years earlier when the news came of the death of George VI, people stopped their cars and stood to attention at the side of the road as a mark of respect. Twenty-five years later, the 2002 celebrations for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee would be like a show on which the curtain had gone up after the audience had left the building. As the Queen made her way through a lunch in each county, her progress had the definite air of a farewell tour. It was as if she were asking, Is anyone out there? And we were saying, We don’t know, Missus, I mean Ma’am, we’re not sure.

  In 1977, England was halfway between these two points. People everywhere were eager to celebrate, and they were still in the habit of civic duty and collective responsibility. They formed committees and working parties, and strove to find original ways to mark this anniversary. There are trees, schools, bridges, swimming pools and community centres which carry this date as their inauguration, and hundreds of plaques throughout the country commemorating a royal visit.

  The England of the Jubilee committees was already changing. Faraway events were affecting the price of petrol, tripling the cost of coffee and prompting the disappearance of sugar from the shops. There were terrorists, foreign ones, who might be here (this was the time of the Red Army Faction and Ulrike Meinhof). While council members and social clubs planned their Jubilee parties, unemployment was climbing sharply. There would be dancing in the streets, the great act of togetherness, while 100,000 Londoners had recently voted for the National Front.

  The 1977 charts were moody and indecisive, full of songs about not wanting to talk by bands who couldn’t be bothered: ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ – Racing Cars; ‘Torn Between Two Lovers’ – Mary MacGregor; ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’ – Barbara Dickson; ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ – Abba. Even the Muppets were ‘Halfway Down the Stairs’. Otherwise, there was a lot of shrugging and sulking: Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Go Your Own Way’, Rod Stewart’s ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’, Hot Chocolate’s ‘So You Win Again’. They were fed up and so were we.

  By May, a month before the Jubilee, punk bands were making forays into the charts: The Stranglers’ ‘Peaches’ and the Ramones’ ‘Sheena is a Punk Rocker’, songs which were built on familiar rock models. Later in the summer, things would speed up with Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ ‘Roadrunner’ and The Jam’s ‘All Around the World’.

  Elizabeth toured her domain and, like a Tudor monarch, processed along the Thames while the Sex Pistols hired a boat called The Queen Elizabeth and did the same, playing their version of ‘God Save the Queen’. Banned by the BBC, it still reached Number One, although many record shops refused to admit it, leaving a blank space in its place in chart listings. The pressing plant had at first refused to manufacture the record and the printers to print the cover. ‘God Save the Queen’ got to Number One not just because it was shocking but because it was a real tune. It was catchy. Jamie Reid’s cover was more disturbing than the song itself. It featured an official portrait of the Queen in necklace and tiara, with her eyes and mouth covered by ransom-note style newspaper text. Blindfolded, gagged and pierced by a safety pin through her nose, she looked far more frail than she might had Reid just added a moustache and glasses.

  In the new England, little old ladies got hurt, even royal little old ladies. Those who organised the street parties might have remembered the celebrations for the Coronation, or even the end of the War. This celebration was taking place in the shadow of unemployment, terrorism, fascism and punk rock. I believed then that only the young understood this, because we listened to the music, went on the marches, and had bad dreams. I didn’t understand how the world absorbed and adapted to change, and that punk rock would soon be, was already being, soaked up.

  I avoided the village and ended up in a nearby town with friends. We couldn’t think of anything to do and so we went to look at a street party. We danced on the edge, in the rain, for a brief moment part of the national celebration of an island where people laid paper cloths on tables and strung paper flags, where bands played in the open air, beacons were lit and everyone wore paper hats and drank from paper cups and ate ice-cream and jelly, as if rain were an impossibility.

  34

  Elvis est mort

  On Monday August 15 [1977, the day before Elvis died] I went into a shop to get a T-shirt printed with Elvis’ photo on it. The shop also printed wording on T-shirts, so I asked for ELVIS to be printed above the photo. The man in the shop teased me by asking how to spell the name, and asked who this Elvis was. I did not realise at the time that he was joking, and I replied in all seriousness.

  TONY CLAPTON

  Walking the length of the beach to buy Gauloises and a glass of diabolo menthe – crème de menthe and lemonade, fizzy and green and halfway grown-up – still child-invincible so walking the length of the beach alone in the dark, walking alone from the campsite to the straggle of restaurants and outdoor discotheques where they played medleys: Et les Cailloux chantaient … I can’t get no … It’s been a hard … Everybody’s doin’ a brand new dance now, and the slow numbers, Il est trop tard, those two boys, hippyish but cute, Il est trop tard pour faire l’amour, who wanted to dance with my friend and her sister, whom we thought we’d see tomorrow but saw only once more days later by when we’d become part of a gang who hung around a different disco, we’d met them walking the beach, noticing, deciding, daring each other to walk up with a cigarette, Vous avez du feu? Among them the golden couple who used me to argue with one another, and the night she wasn’t there he got me to walk into the dark and pretended not to understand when I wouldn’t lie down, and yes he had a girlfriend but what was the problem, she wasn’t there and nothing was serious, not even the letter that came later, Ma petite Anglaise adorée, from him or him? Because this was a medley, all of us fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, making it up out of bits of what we knew, and we were free because there were only tents and the beach and the track between the two, and we spent all day soaking up heat and salt and planning the night, these French boys wanting me to translate the words to David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ – He pulls in just behind the fridge? All night, barely noticing the adults we were with, my friend’s parents and her uncle and aunt, who had brought us here and who took us for meals and corrected our French but let us roam. The last night, how we lay in a medley, no one being themselves, everyone sleeping on someone else and the night darker and colder than I thought and we woke in a confusion of temperatures to find grown-ups and children wandering past in their swimsuits and us left behind, as if we’d slipped down a crack between them. Too clear, and we woke and walked to the end of the beach to buy Gauloises and diabolo menthes for breakfast, the news-stands: Elvis est mort. Late Elvis, ‘In the Ghetto’, ‘Suspicious Minds’, his mansion of a voice, but lumbering, sclerotic now, that was who had died not the inky nimble ‘King Creole’, the shivery boy of ‘Jailhouse Rock’. It didn’t hurt, he was a story by then, a double album of greatest hits someone gave me for Christmas. We left him behind with the boys and the heat and the medleys, not knowing what it meant to see someone like that for the first time, to hear a voice shaped like that, a body move like that for the first time, we knew nothing yet of such disturbance and drove north, three girls in a crush on the back seat trying to sleep and when we couldn’t sleep we would be dreaming, for now, of Michel or Joël, Yannick or Olivier, Je t’aime et tu danses bien … mais ce soir … il est trop tard … and it would take days to get home, the long drive and the ferry, the sea we’d cross as the sun pulled away and we wrapped up and sank back into village life and school life and family life, and the first of the last years of it all.

  35

  Separation and contrast

  … colour … exhibits itself by separation and contrast, by commixture and union by augmentation and neutralisation, by communication and dissolution …

  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
, A Theory of Colours

  That year, Marc Bolan had a television show called Marc and in the first episode, he promised ‘a lot of new sounds, a lot of new experiences’, before introducing … Who was it again? He picked up a badge as if to check the name and then waved an arm dismissively in their direction – ‘Oh yeah, The Jam.’ A man who sported ringlets and a leopardskin catsuit talking in a floppy voice about three boys who buttoned down their collars and measured the turn-ups on their trousers. While Bolan lounged on a fluffy pink throne, The Jam posed rigidly – black suits, white shirts, black ties, black-and-white shoes – in front of a plain black backdrop. Clean-shaven, short-haired and with emphatic estuary accents, The Jam played ‘All Around the World’ and here was a speeded-up, pared-down sound that I knew could take me further and faster than any boy in his car. Bolan cooed and drawled but The Jam shouted: ‘All around the world I’ve been looking for new …’ I was looking for ‘new’ and it lay in such collisions and detonations and two-minute songs, and in a new kind of colour.

  Essex in the 1970s was a world of painted pub signs rather than of neon, of black-and-white television, early closing time and the corner shop. Children wore school uniform, men wore suits or at least jackets, women wore co-ordinated outfits by day and blocks of colour or floral expanses on special occasions. Many in the village did not leave the house without hat and gloves, whatever the weather. Teenagers were subdued. The shape of their clothes had started changing along with the shape of their music but for most, it happened slowly. We were also so colour deprived that we were impressed by a set of six winking red, yellow and green lights lined up in front of a DJ’s deck.

  In November, our English teacher took us to see Othello at a theatre marooned in a shopping precinct in Basildon New Town, a place of concrete that looked as if it had never quite dried out. It was just another long afternoon to be got through and then, as we were ushered off the bus, I caught sight in a shop window of the cover of the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks. The offending word had been covered with tape but that didn’t thrill me nearly as much as the bubblegum pink and acid yellow of the cover. It was strident, lurid, and magnificently out of place in that damp mall. It buzzed.

  The colours of punk, like its rumour, set off a vibration and cracks began to appear – orange socks, blue hair, lime-green nails, pink trousers. Hippies wore orange, pink and lime too, but in shades of flowers and fruit, whereas the punk equivalents were synthetic. Punk colours were primary but not in terms of light theory: that meant a rainbow, which was hippy shit. A rainbow was beautiful, softly graduated and glistening. With punk, it was more as if an old image of the world had been broken down to the four components of colour printing: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. These are dead colours. Alone, they suck in light, but reduced to tiny dots they can be used to build up a full-colour image that looks realistic. They conspire to play an optical trick, the illusion of glorious Technicolor out of three nasty shades. In punk, colour combinations were dishwater and vomit. It was a form of aesthetic resistance, a spectrum chosen to remind the world of all that was unnatural or decayed: pink like rubber rather than roses, green like snot rather than leaves.

  Punk didn’t just change what I listened to and how I dressed. It altered my aesthetic sense completely. This is what music could do: change the shape of the world and my shape within it, how I saw, what I liked and what I wanted to look like. How does this work? You listen to Yes and fall in love with boys with long hair. You listen to T. Rex and find only men in lurex scarves beautiful. Or is it the other way round? That you find you like the look of boys in suits, The Jam say, and so fall in love with their songs? Does it depend who you come across or is there something building up inside you, as I believe there was in me – a half-formed vision needing an external phenomenon, such as music, in order to complete itself?

  36

  Freedom

  Hawks over the sea …

  As we

  In our village dance

  In smaller circles

  TAIGI

  In that coming of colour and noise, I took a step back and found myself walking along a Suffolk dual carriageway at midnight in December. I had gone to Ipswich with three friends to see Uriah Heep. We had not thought about how we might get home and found ourselves stranded, the last train long gone. We walked back out of town to the motorway, planning to hitch the fifty miles home.

  The first live bands I saw were rock bands – Alex Harvey, Dr Feelgood, Santana and now Uriah Heep. They were old-fashioned performers, men getting on a bit who acted the part so well that watching them was like watching a play about rock. Their music sounded more or less as it did on record, but the vision of them, the actuality, was scintillating. I had seen bands in black-and-white on TV, or in simplified colour in magazines, but here was animation and brightness. I didn’t care who they were or what they were playing, I was thrilled by the experience of something live.

  I was starting to want another kind of live experience – a real boyfriend. I had been falling in love for years, carving initials, crying and dreaming, waiting all day for a particular moment when I knew I would pass someone on the stairs between classes but that was all I wanted – the possibility. If a boy came towards me, I panicked and ran. Once or twice, I managed to say Yes, I will go out with you, and then the boy wasn’t over there but here, and not remote but eager. After a few awkward evenings he lost his charm, and I felt trapped.

  Now I felt ready but the slow dancers were gone and there were only the serious boys who were my friends and they did not thrill me. I needed boys I didn’t know and the only source was my elder brother. While I was going through a series of rapid and violent transformations, my brother was consistent. At ten he moved into the garage, at university he would live in a bus and from there he would head for a Scottish island and eventually, New Zealand. He exempted himself by being himself, and this made him free.

  But I didn’t want a boy like my brother. He wore a coat he’d fashioned out of a goatskin rug and went barefoot in winter until my father bought him a kit for making his own shoes. His friends were hippies but, for a brief while, they were nonetheless a solution. They looked like grown-ups, and the girls – with their muted gestures and annoying calm – like women. I dug out my mother’s afghan coat, started growing my hair once more, and acquired a quilted Indian jacket and an embroidered skirt. Joe asked me out. We did not amount to anything but went on flirting and stayed friends, and here I was with him and his friend Chris and my friend Cara walking along the Suffolk road.

  I wanted the interest of boys like Joe and to demonstrate a kind of growing up, even to try out being a woman, and so I wore the Indian jacket, burned incense and listened to their rock. I went to hear Dr Feelgood or Barclay James Harvest at the Southend Kursaal because Joe would put his arms round me and his mouth on the back of my neck. That was what the evening was for.

  I listened to Santana’s Abraxas and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours in the same manner that I read my horoscope: eager for illumination, which I instantly forgot. This music was serious, or at least it was performed by people who were very serious indeed.

  Being a woman seemed to mean listening to the music boys liked and neither dancing nor singing along. That would be annoying. And while the boys were serious about music, they didn’t expect me to be so too. A boy could impress a girl with his musical knowledge and taste, but it was something he was showing her, like a fleet of cars or a gun collection. She was not meant to join in. Girls and music were separate pursuits. Or do I mean women? Was I a woman yet? Perhaps the fact that I was noticing such things, how boys (men?) wanted me to behave, meant that I was.

  We walked on along the motorway. Joe found a dead pigeon and carried it for a time, singing ‘O for the Wings of a Dove’, and we laughed more than we should have and found other things to sing. We tried to hitch and finally a car slowed down and we ran towards it, somehow not noticing that it was the police. Two officers got out. They asked us to turn
out our pockets. Joe produced a bunch of a dozen or so keys.

  ‘What is this key for?’

  ‘The goat shed.’ He lived on a smallholding.

  ‘And this?’

  ‘The chicken coop.’

  ‘You taking the piss, son?’

  ‘And that one’s for the barn.’

  They searched the two boys, found some grass in Chris’s pocket and arrested him. One of the officers radioed for a van to come and pick us all up. The other one turned to Cara and me: ‘I can’t search you two girls, so I’m arresting you on suspicion of possession and taking you in.’ The Black Maria arrived in a matter of minutes and the four of us got into the back, Chris murmuring ‘Sorry, sorry,’ and the rest of us smiling and shrugging and saying it didn’t matter. This was an adventure and anyway, we were glad to be out of the cold.

  At the station, we were separated.

  ‘Name? Spell it. Date of birth? Address? Spell it. One leather wallet containing two pounds and fifty-three pence, one eye make-up pencil, one silver bracelet, four bead bracelets, one silver necklace, three sanitary items, four cigarettes, one Bic lighter, one bar of chocolate, one sprig of heather in foil. Where did you get this?’