The Living Years

by Mike Rutherford

  * * *

  Music was a lifesaver at school but so too was the highly illegal Honda 50 motorbike that I’d managed to acquire. I kept it at a local garage where I paid a monthly rent, which doubled as hush money because the garage owner knew exactly where I was from.

  It wasn’t a cool motorbike, the Honda 50, and I never managed to convince myself that it looked good, which made it more painful. But it gave me the freedom I needed and the fact that it was so completely against the rules made riding it feel even better. It often didn’t matter where I went. It was just the fact that I could start it up and escape the clutches of the whole suppressive regime.

  One afternoon I was heading for Guildford and as I looked in my wing mirror I recognized one of the masters’ cars on my tail. Not that it had ‘Master’ written all over it, but there was a certain type of car parked in the staff car park and this one definitely fell into that category. However much I tried to lose him by turning down various lanes, he was right behind me. Eventually I realized there was nothing for it but to bail out.

  Having made a sharp and dangerous turn into a driveway I leapt off the bike and ran across the garden with my helmet firmly in place. I then managed to jump the fence into the next garden – nearly taking the clothesline with me. Having clambered back over another fence and on to the road, I was relieved to find that the car had disappeared from sight. I can’t say it was one of my coolest moments.

  It never really occurred to me not to go back, to ride off for good on my motorbike. Occasionally word would come down the wire about runaways – two boys from Harrow or someone from Eton – but even while I was busy rebelling it seemed paramount not to embarrass my father. What I did do was skip classes to go to the pub in Godalming and drink gin and lime – even though I still didn’t like the taste of gin – and I would regularly get beaten for sneaking off to smoke cigarettes with Ant. The worst thing about this was that it wasn’t the master who spotted you coming out of the bushes who did the beating: they’d report you to your housemaster who’d then drag you in for interrogation. And that meant Chare.

  ‘Have you been smoking, Rutherford?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Bend over.’

  It was the lack of transparency that really rankled.

  Amazingly I never got caught skiving off school to go to gigs at the Marquee Club in London. I took great care not to be seen: I would wait until it was dark and then climb out of the window in my mauve platforms.

  I would either ride my Honda 50 to Guildford Station or walk down the hill to Godalming Station, a school mac disguising my velvet flares, and wait anxiously for my friends Chris Piggott and Andy Dunkley to turn up. (Dunkley was the brave one: he wanted to get expelled. As for Chris Piggott, I was surprised he was still talking to me because early on in my musical career I’d blown up his amplifier. ‘DC’ socket on the amp stood for ‘Direct Current’ and anything direct – so I thought – was obviously going be louder than anything that wasn’t. I had plugged in my guitar and smoke had come billowing out.)

  The Marquee Club in Wardour Street was the home of everything that meant anything to me back then. It’s funny but I never found Soho threatening although it was seedy enough in those days. It was full of strip shows and dirty bookshops. (You’d wander in and wander out of those quite quickly: the fact you’d been in was the main thing. Strip clubs were a bit more intimidating. There’d always be a guy on the door trying to entice you in – ‘Come on in, young man’.) The funky buildings, the red and yellow and green neon lights at night, the cool London people with their scarves and hats: it all felt slightly forbidden but never scary. Maybe it was because there was so much music happening there that I didn’t feel intimidated. There were folk clubs, the 100 Club up the road at Oxford Street and, best of all, the Marquee, which felt like a real musos’ place and not just some nightclub with a disco.

  The Marquee Club was where I saw the Nice with Keith Emerson, the Herd with Peter Frampton, the Cream, the Action and the Sands (Chris Squire had a fantastic Rickenbacker bass sound: he wasn’t just playing low notes, he was playing lead lines. I remember being very impressed by that). And I loved the harmonies – in those days every band seemed to have about three people doing backing vocals.

  The volume was mind-blowing and the heat was amazing. The Marquee Club was on ground level but you felt underground as everything was dark and dripping with sweat. No one ever took their Afghan coats off, although if you were sensible you’d got an Afghan waistcoat and were wearing that over your tie-dye T-shirt. Everyone was in boots and flares, which made trying to tell the girls and boys apart difficult. At least I was in a room with the opposite sex which, after Charterhouse, was wonderful. The only girls most Charterhouse boys ever met would be at friends’ parties in the holidays: you’d find yourself trying to be the cool guy, which in reality meant shuffling from foot to foot and mumbling incoherently.

  Chris, Andy and I would travel down to London, go to a gig, and then get the milk train back at 5.30 in the morning, something that – thinking about it now – still gets me hot round the collar. There was such great pleasure in escaping to London, feeling part of the scene, but I was also terrified of getting caught and letting my father down. I never, ever told anyone what I was up to – whispers had a habit of getting round at Charterhouse. By the time I left school, the pinnacle of my ambition was to play The Marquee Club. I thought that if you could play there, you really were somebody.

  Ant and I were quite close by now and we’d often stay with each other in the holidays. At my parents’ house we’d play guitar late into the night and my mother would usually come down in the morning for breakfast and say things like, ‘Darling! Loved that tune!’ It was more difficult at Ant’s house. Ant’s father was a top banker who ran the finances for the Marylebone Cricket Club and I could tell he did not approve of our music: I always felt slightly uncomfortable. Ant’s mother was much more supportive, laughing and joking, and she also transported the Anon’s equipment to the Tony Pike Sound Studio in Putney when we went to a session there. She drove our gear in the back of her Mercedes while Ant, Rich and I had to take the bus.

  Tony Pike’s studio was in the back of a small house and Tony was an old-school kind of guy. We could tell he had no understanding of our music and noise. He had a slight West-Country accent too, which didn’t quite work when he started complaining about the damage he thought we were causing to his equipment: ‘You just mind my comprezzorz . . . ’

  ‘Silly old fucker,’ I would mutter, not realizing that the whole point of control rooms was that you could hear everything when you were standing in them. As he was.

  ‘Oi! You mind your language down there.’

  The song we’d recorded, ‘Pennsylvania Flickhouse’, was very much Ant’s – a sort of Godalming ‘Route 66’. Rich had worked out that, because our songs were three minutes long, we could easily record six in an hour. When we found we’d only managed one we immediately started making plans for a return visit but soon after that Rich’s father took him out of Charterhouse and sent him to Millfield in Somerset: he thought Rich was mixing with a bad lot in the Anon. He might have been right – at least, as far as I was concerned – but that left us without a singer, at which point Ant decided it should be me.

  I didn’t like the idea of being a front man. It might have been different if I’d had a voice. I’ve always thought that 60 per cent of the world have an okay-enough voice to be a singer of some sort, and some great singers don’t have a great voice but still find a way to make it work. I wasn’t in that category (although neither was Ant). It was when Ant got me to sing the Rolling Stones’s ‘Mercy Mercy’ and I felt something happening in my Adam’s apple area (it was quite worrying: my vocal chords seem to slip out of place) that I really knew I wasn’t meant to sing. However, in those days if you could sing a bit, that meant you were a singer, so we dropped any songs with high notes in them from the repertoire instead.

  Meanwhile, the
tension was building between my father and me. He wrote me letters (of course, I didn’t keep them) and during the holidays I would argue with him constantly about the length of my hair and my clothes, most of which came from Kensington Market. I would go there at weekends and look round the stalls, see a band in the evening and get the train home afterwards, always making sure just to miss the one that I was expected on. On other occasions I would stay with Nicky, who now had a flat in Hamilton Gardens that she shared with a couple of other girls. I would go there and be slightly overpowered by these wonderful, long-legged and rather awe-inspiring women walking around the place.

  Nicky had been to boarding school too, the Royal Naval School for Girls in Haslemere, and was now working as a secretary at the Guardian. She’d always been less scatty than Mum and me. Even at twelve she’d been grown-up, which must have made it easier for my parents, especially as they were older than usual themselves. As far as my dad was concerned she could do no wrong. She was bright, she wrote my parents letters, she visited them and now she was a young lady working in London while I was sloping off with Chris Piggott to anti-Establishment events like the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival. (Not a great experience: it was July, cold, wet and the sound was crap. Plus the Small Faces only played for fifteen minutes, which really pissed me off. But I was there!) I’m sure Dad thought that I was a waste of space in comparison with Nicky. The only good thing was that he didn’t know half of what I was doing. But it was only a matter of time before things came to a head.

  Dad and I had often argued about Chare in the past but my father thought it was me who was the problem. However, when Chare threw me out of the school just before my O levels I think it finally dawned on my dad that something odd was going on: the timing was so bloody stupid as I had only got one term left. Perhaps I’d been right and the old bugger really did have it in for me.

  It was still term time when my father was called down to meet with Chare to discuss my future. I only found out what happened later: apparently Chare lost it completely with Dad, ranting and raving and scolding him like a pupil. That wouldn’t have impressed Dad. He had a word for people like Chare: ‘uncharming’. More than that, when Dad asked for a list of all the terrible things I’d done, Chare couldn’t come up with anything: I hadn’t killed anyone, I hadn’t maimed anyone, I hadn’t burned down the school.

  My father had been paying my school fees for the past three years and, as far as Dad was concerned, Chare was not behaving correctly. Dad wrote to the headmaster to say as much, no doubt quoting precisely the figure he’d paid for me to be at his school. At that point the headmaster must have decided to overrule Chare, who was not a popular figure. A deal was cut: I could go back for my O levels but would have to leave to do my A levels somewhere else.

  This was a great outcome for me – vindication at last – and it also led to the start of a slow improvement in my relationship with my father. But there were other important events also now occurring. The Anon had petered out but a new band was taking shape . . .

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I hadn’t really come across Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel that much at Charterhouse: we were in different houses and boys didn’t tend to mix. Sometimes I would see them in Record Corner, the record shop in Godalming, listening to music through headphones in one of the little booths, but because Record Corner was strictly off limits – you needed a chit even to walk into town – it wasn’t really the place to bond. (Charterhouse boys always got jeered a bit in Godalming but it didn’t bother me: I would see the town boys with their long hair and feel we were all in the same game. Music seemed to me to do an important job in bridging divides.)

  Everything about Peter Gabriel in those days was soft and round. You could tell he wasn’t a sportsman. He had a circular, slightly chubby face and his school jacket always seemed too small for him, but although he was quiet, he had an air of confidence about him. At Charterhouse there were guys who were trying to be cool, those who were cool without trying, and those who were never going to get there. Pete was none of those. He was comfortable in his skin. He made his own hats and dyed T-shirts in sinks; he was quite free-spirited, but very worldly too.

  Tony was also quiet but he was edgy and skinny and had a quick, worried step – he’d never stride anywhere. He came from a classical background whereas Pete loved R & B, Nina Simone and Otis Redding. As well as the piano Pete played the drums at Charterhouse. He was never destined to be a great drummer but he had a very strong feel for rhythm. His drum kit was his pride and joy and he’d lend it to anyone who managed to twist his arm but he’d always stand alongside with his eyebrows furrowed while it was being played.

  It was during the 1967 Easter holidays that Ant and I together with Pete and Tony recorded a demo tape in the attic of another Charterhouse boy, Brian Roberts. He was the kind of guy who you knew from a young age would be a BBC technician in later life. A boffin. He always had a white shirt with a stain on it and greasy hair.

  Brian had transformed the attic of this house into a recording studio. It just had egg boxes on the walls and a two-track tape recorder in the corner, but was still pretty cutting edge in those days. It was more than enough for our purposes.

  Ant, who had been planning to sing on the tape, had invited Tony to come to Brian’s and play keyboards. Tony had then invited Pete to come because he knew Pete had a better voice than Ant. (Funnily enough, I don’t remember Ant having a hump about being replaced as singer: he knew it was for the common good.)

  Given that Ant and I were into the blues – John Mayall and Eric Clapton – as well as the Stones and the Beatles, we were quite a diverse lot. I’ve always thought that half the point of being in a band is that the guys you’re playing with are different to you: they bring something to the music that you can’t.

  We recorded five songs that afternoon, four by me and Ant, and one, ‘She Is Beautiful’, by Peter and Tony. Theirs was definitely the best. It had a moody sadness to it, a hint of darkness – probably because it had been written for Peter’s voice which always had that feeling.

  Sometimes you just need a lucky break. That first tape we made in Brian Roberts’s attic had our best songs on it, but if you took away Pete and Tony’s song it wasn’t as good. Yet Jonathan King must have heard there was something there.

  Jonathan had been at Charterhouse a few years before us and had come back to the school for an old boys’ day. At the time he’d just had a huge hit with ‘Everyone’s Gone to the Moon’ and had written and produced another hit, ‘It’s Good News Week’, for Hedgehoppers Anonymous, which was released on Decca. He was also a bombastic self-promoter who talked the talk and wore noisy, very flamboyant clothes. I’m also sure he fancied Pete – we all thought that. But he did have an ear for a song.

  I don’t know why it got left to our friend John Alexander, another school friend, to put the tape in Jonathan’s car while he was down at Charterhouse – I think in the end John Al was the only one who had the nerve. He was one of those lucky boys who’d got away with long hair because nobody realized it was long. It was thick, black and curly and he had a chunk of it that he could tuck behind his ear and pull out when the masters weren’t around. He undertook the clandestine operation on Jonathan’s car and managed to leave the tape along with a note: ‘These are Charterhouse boys, have a listen.’ And Jonathan must have done because soon after that he invited us up to London to meet his business partner, Joe Roncoroni.

  Joe was an old-school music publisher: a well-built Jewish guy who’d been publishing cabaret and vaudeville songs when suddenly pop appeared. We were naturally extremely impressed that he and Jonathan liked our songs but we were less sure about Jonathan’s idea that our next step should be to form a band. Until then our plan was to be songwriters and let someone else do the performing, something that wasn’t unusual back then.

  Songwriting was (and is still) the area in which I measure success: I’ve seen many guitarists who can play fantastically well but who can’t wri
te an original song. We wanted to be original from the word go but, unfortunately for us, Jonathan King didn’t like our kind of originality. We recorded another couple of demos for him but he was losing interest fast, so then we forgot about trying to be original and did something we knew he’d like.

  ‘The Silent Sun’, our first single, was written by Pete and Tony and was basically a Bee Gees pastiche. Ant wasn’t convinced by it but I thought it was a great song and Jonathan liked it as well – so much that he tried to sign us up for the rest of our lives.

  I’m not sure that the contract he got us to sign with Decca was more binding than most contracts were back then, but as we were minors we shouldn’t have been signing it in the first place. That alone was enough to raise our parents’ suspicions. Between them they called in Goodman, Derek and Co. – top lawyers who had represented the Beatles – to redraft the contract.

  This certainly cost our parents’ quite a bit of money but perhaps they were happy to help us out because they felt that this was their world – contracts and lawyers as opposed to gigs and guitars. A contract was something my father knew how to handle and could form an opinion on, whereas I’m not sure that would have been true for ‘The Silent Sun’. In any case, I didn’t feel worried about him going off to London in his bowler hat to meet Jonathan King. It was the school holidays and, when Dad came home and hung his coat up in the hall afterwards, I knew it’d gone well. Of course, I still had to wait for the official debriefing, for which he called me into the dining room the next day. Not that I really cared at the time: contracts, man, whatever.

  Now that we were a band, we needed a name. Jonathan came up with Genesis and although I wasn’t mad about the name, it stuck. We had wasted so many hours on lists of names (Pete had come up with Band of Angels and Ant had something flowery like Champagne Meadow) that Genesis was a bit of a relief.