The Importance of Music to Girls

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  ‘I bought it from a gypsy in the street.’

  ‘Take the foil down to the lab, Eric, and check it for cocaine.’

  In Essex?

  ‘You think that’s funny, girlie?’

  ‘Yes, no, I –’

  ‘We need to contact your parents. You’re not going anywhere without one of them. What’s your dad going to say about this?’

  I was sure of what he would say about this. ‘He’ll come and get me, he won’t mind. Please call him, call him now.’

  The officer smiled and said nothing and handed me on to another officer, larger and more gentle, who with something resembling sadness locked me in a cell. It must have been lit but to me it was appallingly dark: a wooden bench, and no windows other than a small slat in the heaviest door I have ever seen. It shut with the force of the Pied Piper closing the mountain. Had I ever been locked in a room before – with nothing to do and no idea when I would be let out again?

  After some hours I was taken to another room where a thin quiet woman asked me a lot of questions without looking me in the eye. Name? Spell it. Date of birth? Address? Spell it. She wanted to know about Chris and Joe. Had I been with them all night? Had they given me any drugs? I knew they were seventeen and what this meant. I had heard the phrase ‘dealing to a minor’ and knew that it was like ‘having sex with a minor’ and that it was serious. I said we’d only met them there and I had no idea they had anything on them. She asked the same questions in different ways, over and over, until the only ones I felt I could actually answer were Name, Date of Birth and Address, although I was forgetting how to spell any of that.

  Eventually, I was taken back to the cell. I asked the giant if anyone had phoned my parents because they would be worrying but he couldn’t say. More time passed and then another female officer took me to a room where Cara was waiting. Name? Spell it. Date of birth? Address? Spell it. This was a larger cell with a longer bench, and it was so brightly lit that my eyes hurt. Another female officer came in. They put on rubber gloves and explained what they were about to do.

  I handed over the Indian quilted jacket, the silk scarf, the Southern Comfort sweatshirt, the plaid shirt, the desert boots, the patched jeans. My underwear. I didn’t look at Cara or at the women, and didn’t understand when they told us to get up on the bench and jump off.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We want to see if anything falls out.’

  ‘Falls out of where?’

  ‘Of where you’ve hidden it.’

  An hour or two later, I needed to go to the lavatory and called through the slat to the giant, who sent for a female officer because I had to be accompanied. As she stood the other side of the brief gate to the stall, she asked me what my name was. I began to spell it, to give my date of birth, my address, but she said, It’s alright, I was only making conversation. I’d forgotten what conversation was.

  When my father arrived I could hear him shouting, but at them rather than me. We were taken back to the thin woman and she asked me the questions again but this time only once. As a minor, I could not be interviewed without a parent present. My father drove me and Cara home. He said little, and was more worried for us than angry. They had waited hours before calling him, until after I had jumped off that bench, but even then they told him only that I had been arrested on suspicion of possession. He had refused to be shocked or furious, as the police had evidently hoped, wanting only to get me out of there. The next day I asked him why he wasn’t angry and why they allowed me such freedom.

  ‘Because we have tried to instil in you a sense of judgement. I hope that while you will try things, you will know where to draw the line.’

  But I didn’t know how to draw my own lines yet. And it turned out that I wasn’t ready for a real boyfriend after all. To my brother’s annoyance, I made my way through a string of his acquaintances, flirting with them till they asked me out, allowing them to kiss me and then running away. The strongest impulse I had was towards freedom. I did not have words for what I felt and it was those songs that mentioned freedom which spoke to me most strongly. I had gone to see Uriah Heep because of their rock ballad, ‘Sweet Freedom’. I made Luke play Lynyrd Skynyrd’s endless ‘Freebird’. I remembered slow-dancing to Deneice Williams’ ‘Free’.

  For all my unease and loneliness it seemed that I wanted, needed, to be free. I knew this and ignored it as much as I could, as if I knew already what it might cost. Freedom. It could mean anything. Yet when I heard it sung, in whatever way, I felt restored to some deep imperative and for that moment, entirely self-sufficient – free.

  37

  Protest and survive

  Your radio will be your only link with the outside world. So take a spare one with you if you can. Keep any aerial pushed in. You will need to listen for instructions about what to do after the attack and while you remain in your fall-out room.

  Protect and Survive, 1980

  I grew up with Vietnam as a myth in the making and the IRA bombing campaigns as a local reality. Nuclear war was palpable as people whispered about civil emergency plans, and the first guidelines were issued to local government and relevant others. As my father was a doctor, he was included in the local plans. The Home Office would later issue a pamphlet on how to build a domestic bomb shelter. By 1980, every household had received Protect and Survive.

  Even the safest room in your home is not safe enough, however. You will need to block up windows in the room, and any other openings, and to make the outside walls thicker, and also to thicken the floor above you, to provide the strongest possible protection against the penetration of radiation. Thick, dense materials are the best, and bricks, concrete or building blocks, timber, boxes of earth, sand, books, and furniture might all be used.

  The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament put out a counterblast, written by E. P. Thompson, called Protest and Survive, which my mother left by the telephone as anyone else might a vase of dried flowers. She voted Communist, sent telegrams for Amnesty and campaigned for Taxes for Peace. Clearly she believed we could each change the world, but what convinced me this was possible was music.

  In August 1977, there was a rally in south London to prevent the National Front marching. After this, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism brought together punk and reggae in protest events. In April 1978, Cara and I sneaked off to the Rock Against Racism carnival in London. It began with a march from Trafalgar Square to Brixton’s Victoria Park. We were there for the music but also to change the world, two among tens of thousands who were going to stamp out racism and the National Front.

  Punk did not save any whales but it made itself a force for change. It believed in something after all. Singing along, we believed in it too. If we could come together, make this noise and take up this space then surely what we had to say would make something happen. There would be no more racism, no more police oppression, no arms escalation, no war. Music, with its pumped-up feelings, fooled us into this. We felt part of something powerful and, because we all knew the words, something fantastically simple too.

  I could not really conceive of nuclear war any more than I believed that as we marched through London we were actually spreading love and peace.

  If you are in the open and cannot get home within a couple of minutes, go immediately to the nearest building. If there is no building nearby and you cannot reach one within a couple of minutes, use any kind of cover, or lie flat (in a ditch) and cover the exposed skin of the head and hands.

  Policemen lined the route as impassively as lamp-posts and behind them, behind barriers, old men in caps waved their fists or brandished copies of British Bulldog. There were reports of conspiracies and violence, but I saw nothing. I walked and shouted for hours and then squeezed my way into Victoria Park where I could just about see, but not really hear, the bands. I watched them anyway – The Clash, Tom Robinson, Steel Pulse and X-Ray Spex. They mouthed and grimaced and gesticulated, just like the old men in caps. We were all protesting. We would all survive.r />
  38

  Lost people’s meeting point

  We have, over the years, pressed for a flagpole or something similar from the promoter to fly a ‘lost people’s’ flag, but in the face of continuing failure we may have to ourselves explore the cost of a large banner saying for instance ‘Lost People’s Meeting Point’ which we can fly over the Festival Welfare Service tent. Given sufficient warning it may be possible to approach local scout groups, etc. in the hope of borrowing flagpoles.

  JAN HITCHENS, Local Welfare Groups Report, Knebworth Festival, 29th June 1978

  Somewhere among these excursions, I finished my exams and left school. I was still fifteen, the youngest in my year. On my last day I walked home instead of catching the bus, knowing that this was a moment I wanted to concentrate on and remember. I knew I would not have done well; I had made sure of that. One morning, a distressed art teacher had called me in to show me that someone had sabotaged my exam work. They had drawn little stick figures all over it. She could think of nothing to say when I explained that it had been me, and neither could I. When the examiner arrived he said that he wanted to give me a better grade but I had produced so little. He needed to see more and was prepared to come back. Did I have any work at home? I was sent for but wasn’t in my Russian class, having played truant to get my hair cut. I took no notice of the teacher’s consternation and was indifferent to the lost grade. My exams were happening without me.

  That was the last of a number of ways in which certain teachers tried to help me or to wake me up, but I didn’t understand this till later.

  My experiments with older boys had finally led to a boyfriend, David. He was tall and graceful, a handsome man rather than a cute boy. He was far more grown-up than me, so much so that it astonishes me to think that he was actually only eighteen.

  Before David, there was a run of boys who lasted a couple of weeks each, partly because when they asked me out I found myself unable to say no and so endured an awkward night in a pub. I did this with Mike, whom I saw the next night at a party, staggering about drunk.

  ‘Idon’twanttogooutwithyou,’ I said by way of greeting.

  ‘Wha – ?’ The music was loud.

  ‘I DON’T WANT TO GO OUT WITH YOU!’ I shouted.

  Mike staggered and grinned, ‘Sfine, sno hard feelins, sfine …’

  That was easy, I thought. I was direct, he was fine. It was fine. The next day, Mike appeared at the front door.

  ‘Hello?’ I said.

  ‘Are we off then? It begins at eight.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Don’t you remember what I said last night?’

  ‘Last night?’

  Somehow with David I didn’t feel trapped. He let me set the pace and he did grown-up things such as sending flowers and taking me out to dinner and planning excursions. I received his kindness and courtship not so much as gifts but as facts, in the way I received the facts of my own lost state. It did not occur to me that I could actively change myself or that I could, let alone should, get actively involved.

  So I’d left school and acquired a boyfriend, but it was still only June. Life would not begin again until sixth-form college in September. I relied on David, who organised two trips – to Knebworth Festival and to see Bob Dylan, who was playing at Blackbushe, an aerodrome in Surrey, that July.

  Knebworth was two days with sixty thousand other people in a field in the rain. We slept four to a two-man tent, and spent our time trying to get dry or queuing for lavatories which were so overwhelmed that most people took one look at them and headed off into the fields. The atmosphere was hippyish, with people being strenuously trusting and mellow. The only ones who got hurt were a pair who’d gone to sleep on a track wrapped up in dustbin bags and who’d been run over as they were impossible to spot in the dark, and even they were just badly bruised. The real threat was the food:

  After the birth of a baby at the 1976 Festival, first aiders were given a crash course in midwifery, but most of the medical problems came from the Hare Krishna free soup kitchen.

  Outlets listed their prices in the programme: ‘(Examples) Soft Ice Cream 15p; Yoglace (Iced Yoghurt) 15p; Fish and Chips 70p; Chicken and Chips 75p; Beef Burgers 65p; Hamburgers 35p; Tea 13p; Coffee 15p’. Despite the cheapness of what was on offer, the welfare officer’s report noted people running out of money and requiring free food.

  At about 11.00 pm the Welfare/Information point in the arena started dealing with cases of people who were distressed because they had lost friends. This was especially the case with people who had not made arrangements for where to meet up with friends if they became separated in the crowd. This increased until well after the concert finished, when enquiries then related to where stranded or exhausted people could find somewhere warm and dry to sleep.

  The real problem was people getting lost. Information signs were few and small, as if no one wanted to do any shouting. That would be uncool. No one had a plan. We didn’t know why we were there or how we were going to get home. The music had got lost too, not only because it wandered off on the wind so most people could barely hear it, but because of the bands on the bill. The headlining act was Genesis, who had lost their lead singer Peter Gabriel. There was Jefferson Starship, whose singer Grace Slick failed to turn up. There was the jazz-fusion outfit Brand X and after them the Atlanta Rhythm Section and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, famous for not quite making it here.

  Up to this point, I had been more interested in being at a festival than listening to the music. I was cold, damp and exhausted and as I couldn’t really hear anything, I lay down next to David and slept. Then a band came on who had nothing to do with rock festivals or rain.

  Devo wore surgical outfits, as if setting up a sterile field in order to protect themselves from these filthy English hippies. They had short hair and sang in clipped syllables, and their music and dancing were restless, aggressive and smart: ‘Are we not men? We are Devo!’ They were a wonderful irritant, especially when they did a cover version of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’, which stole the song entirely, turning its machismo into neurosis. The audience were enraged and for a moment actually reacted, pelting the band with beer cans.

  This was the group I’d wanted most to see and watching them now I wondered where they came from. They were absolutely new. I don’t remember seeing any punks at Knebworth but there must have been hundreds of people like me, who didn’t think of themselves as hippies and didn’t like rock but were trapped by the fact that those were the only languages available.

  The new language was evident in the difference between set-lists.

  Genesis: ‘Eleventh Earl of Mar’, ‘The Fountain of Salmacis’, ‘Burning Rope’, ‘Deep in the Motherlode’

  Jefferson Starship: ‘Ride the Tiger’, ‘Wooden Ships’, ‘Dance with the Dragon’, ‘Pride of Man’, ‘Sweeter than Honey’

  Devo: ‘Wiggly World’, ‘Pink Pussycat’, ‘Too Much Paranoia’, ‘Uncontrollable Urge’, ‘Mongoloid’, ‘Jocko Homo’, ‘Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA’, ‘Gut Feeling/Slap Your Mammy’

  In front of these bands was a mass of lost English youth, confused by music which was on its way out and music they had yet to grasp and the complete lack of connection between the two.

  There was an enormous amount of litter left behind, especially polythene sheeting and bags which people had slept under as shelter from the rain. It seems a pity that more of this plastic couldn’t have been reused and recycled.*

  Two months later, David took me to see Bob Dylan at Blackbushe. We caught a train to London and then travelled by Tube to Victoria. As the Tube pulled into the station, I began to panic. The place was full of people who were evidently also going to Blackbushe. I was back in the mass of lost youth. We inched towards the platform and were herded onto an already crammed train. I apologised to David but could offer no explanation as I jumped off just before the train departed, and fled.

  * Festival Welfare Services,
Field Worker’s Report, Knebworth Festival, June 1978

  39

  A home for good music

  I require clothes and money, that is all. These are easy goals which do not disturb one’s sleep.

  HERMANN HESSE, Siddhartha

  So it was possible to organise – to ring up and speak to someone in a box office, to send a postal order, an s.a.e., and to arrive with tickets, to have planned an evening out. Like using a bank account or returning something to a shop, this is one of those adult procedures about which you gather clues until you feel confident enough to have a go on your own. In the first few transactions you will be conscious of enacting adulthood, and will speak as if in a foreign language, getting the tone wrong and not understanding the shorthand.

  I read the listings in the New Musical Express and persuaded Cara to come down to London with me to see the Vibrators play at the Marquee Club in Wardour Street. I had only just heard of the band, but the club and the street were famous.* I also invited Beth, a girl from Ohio with whom I’d been friends as a child. Against all the odds, we had kept up a correspondence from the age of ten and now she was passing through London again. Like a grown-up she rang and asked if we might meet, and like a grown-up I thought about how to entertain a visitor and invited her along.

  We arranged to meet at Tottenham Court Road Tube and walked along Oxford Street chatting politely before turning into the darkness of Wardour Street. To my relief, we looked more or less the same: fresh-faced and wearing jeans. Where was the club? I was expecting a hall, lights and a long queue, but there was nothing except a small sign sticking out into the street like that of a mini-cab office.