My Old Man

by Ted Kessler

  John Deevoy by Adrian Deevoy

  My father is not a great man. He has never, to my knowledge, liberated hollow-cheeked, khaki-shorted men from Japanese death camps or flown in a fighter jet or anything other than a comfy Airbus. He’s not had a sniff of the Nobel Peace Prize and hasn’t ever made a speech, other than the one he gave me about poofs who wear patchouli.

  But my dad is a great bloke. He’s funny, profound and charismatic, and pathologically unable to take life seriously. Like a rogue Terry Wogan, he enjoys the craic and everyone loves him for it. He’s got friends in high places and plenty more downstairs by the pool tables.

  Reared in rural Ireland, conveniently close to Portlaoise prison, the third youngest of, I think, seventy-one siblings, he sometimes rode to school on a donkey and didn’t see a black man until he was fourteen. The Afro’d stranger trundled through the village on a bicycle and all the local children followed him, ‘like he was an African Pied Piper . . . on a bike’.

  Dad was educated by Christian Brothers who, while doing God’s work, regularly beat their pupils unconscious. If that doesn’t prepare you for life’s sadists, rapists and sickos, nothing will.

  He put the experience to good use and worked in a massive mental hospital for half his adult life.

  At a time when psychiatric illness was frowned upon, even feared, Dad didn’t discriminate, knowing full well that he ‘probably wasn’t the full shilling either’. He got on famously with the patients, some of them murderers and worse.

  One man had invented his own language and often admitted himself to the local maternity wing in the belief that he was about to give birth to the son of God. A bearded character named Joe told me he was controlled by the radio waves emitted by Jimi Hendrix’s guitar and Tony Blackburn’s Sunday lunchtime show. Another woman, Vivienne, frequently set herself on fire and had flecks of fabric scorched into her skin. They all became family friends.

  So, I grew up surrounded by the mentally disturbed and went on to work in the music business – I swear I’ll write a book about it one day.

  It would be a safe bet to say my dad enjoys gambling. In fact, he deals exclusively in percentages. Everything from the Ryder Cup to a comment about your haircut is a calculation. He once kept a record of his bets over a ten-year period, big wins, bad losses, and came out around thirty pounds down. No wonder my mum couldn’t stand it any more. I spent the tail end of my teenage years refereeing my parents’ imminent divorce.

  It had always been a mismatch. Mum with her head in a book by R. D. Laing, Dad with his in a barmaid’s blouse. That they stayed together for twenty years was a minor miracle.

  They’d met at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse. Mum could never quite remember what she saw in him but it certainly wasn’t his dansing. When they married in Shepherd’s Bush in the early sixties, Dad was younger than Sid Vicious ever got to be. Like Sid, he fought Teddy Boys in Ladbroke Grove and befriended disenfranchised Jamaicans, albeit back in the days when the notorious ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ sign would hang on boarding-house doors. He drank in pubs, some of which still stand today, the last bastions of non-gastrification: the Crown and Sceptre, the Coningham, the White Horse. Boozers I have known since I could barely see over a bag of crisps.

  As a child I believed that my father had been an Icelandic fisherman. He told terrifying tales of his time trawling the savage North Sea, where strong sailors, good men, died in cold so severe that he didn’t notice losing three fingers from his left hand.

  I stopped my sympathetic sobbing to ask how come he still had the discontinued digits. ‘They grew back,’ he bullshitted bullishly, then ploughed on with his heartbreaking story.

  In terms of learning, my dad once spent a valuable afternoon patiently teaching me to spit properly. It has served me well and I can still hit a wad of gum into a urinal from twenty paces. He also told me that I am not a drop in the ocean but the whole of the ocean in one drop. That bogus piece of cod philosophy has seen me through a few grim times, I can tell you.

  In 1974, he dabbled with disciplinarianism but would often be undermined by his own behaviour. I once brought a gaggle of stoned friends home only to find a trail of my father’s clothes leading up the stairs to the master bedroom, where he was making uninhibited love to my mother. At least, I think it was my mother. One of my drug buddies, Excitable Stan, literally pissed himself laughing.

  Years later, I was with a girlfriend in my own room engaged in a similar act of physical affection when I felt a sharp slap on my bare behind. ‘Hurry up,’ chirped my well-refreshed father. ‘There’s a queue of us waiting out here.’

  He was and remains the kind of dangerous dad that your contemporaries adored. He’d often answer the door to them in his horrible underpants, if they were lucky, clutching a claw hammer and dribbling for dramatic effect.

  He had a neat way with a self-deprecating Irish one-liner. His burgeoning beer gut was always ‘relaxed muscle’. Less-than-pretty people had ‘trodden on a few rakes’. He will routinely tell you that he doesn’t drink any more ‘but I don’t drink any less’.

  Dad met his second wife at her first husband’s funeral with the immortal chat-up line ‘Well, you’re single now . . .’ Cherie fell for him on the spot. ‘Cheeky swine,’ she swooned.

  When she died young I thought he’d fall apart, but he pulled through, by delighting in the life they’d shared together. He’d lost his soul-mate, his lioness, but his rationale was that at least he had found her in the first place.

  He has always rolled with the punches, fallen on his feet and relied on his dubious Irish charm. Even when some unenlightened soul daubed ‘IRA Pigs’ on our house, at the height of the Troubles, Dad – in an attempt to distance himself from terrorism – claimed not to be able even to spell IRA.

  Did you ever have a dream that you couldn’t explain? I once took Dad to see Dylan at Wembley Stadium. He headed straight for the free drinks and started skulling Guinness like a drought had been announced. Knowing what would happen, I left him to it and went to watch the altogether more predictable Jewish singer.

  I returned after the encores to find Dad deep in conversation with the actor Dennis Waterman, offering sloshed advice on his faltering marriage with Rula Lenska. They split up shortly afterwards.

  At another party in the mid-eighties, I introduced Dad to the flamboyant but troubled singer Adam Ant. By the time I’d got back from the bar, Adam was cheerily calling my dad ‘Paddy Ant’, as they animatedly discussed the combustible nature of lunatic asylums. They got on like a nuthouse on fire.

  Dad recently had a double stroke: bleed at the front, big burst at the back. The hospital called to say he was unsteady on his feet and his speech was slurred. ‘Nothing new there, then,’ I quipped, then vomited with anxiety.

  Upon reaching the Intensive Stroke Unit, I expected to see a haunted shadow of a man, but he was in reliably robust form, propped on his pillows, perusing the lunch menu, winding up a sweet old Gujarati gent in the opposite bed whom Dad had decided to call Gandhi.

  The strokes had left Dad unable to remember the word for ‘stroke’. He called them ‘scones’.

  ‘I was okay till I had those feckin’ scones,’ he’d say. It led to a pleasurable afternoon of bakery-based, rupture-related punning. But that’s me and my dad – where the pun never sets. It can’t be good for the old ‘jam tart’.

  A Nigerian nurse came around to take some blood for further tests.

  ‘When do you think I should tell him about the Aids?’ Dad asked innocently.

  But the ‘scones’ were serious, so – as ever in times of emotional stress – we talked not of life’s fragility or the final whisper being wrung from the yew, but about Queen’s Park Rangers. It was good to hear Dad’s familiar ‘’Arry’s having a laugh’ refrain again.

  Having been born in Shepherd’s Bush, I had little choice but to support QPR. Dad took me to Loftus Road when I was too impressionable to understand a world beyond Stan Bowles’s insouci
ant sorcery and Dave Thomas’s defiantly rolled-down socks.

  I still call Dad before every home game, from outside the ground, just prior to kick-off and we have a comfort-moan about the Rs. He likes to hear the disgruntled hubbub in the background and reckons he can smell the onions from the hot-dog vans. Dad doesn’t go any more: he knows Rangers are rubbish.

  When he had his strokes, we joked about lumping on at the bookie’s for a dead Dad/Rangers relegation double. A healthy dose of humour always helps, I find.

  And as the clock on the wall laughs at us all, I can see QPR going down but, God willing, the world’s greatest bloke will survive another season.

  Adrian Deevoy has been writing about music since 1978.

  He lives in London and elsewhere.

  ‘WHY ARE YOU LISTENING TO GREEN DAY? YOU WANNA BE LISTENING TO THE RAMONES’

  Nick Welch by Florence Welch

  My dad’s incredibly emotional and sensitive. He’s a very louche, swearing, fairy-like creature. I always felt like he was waiting for my sister and me to grow up so he could hang out with us. ‘You’re babies, you’re babies, you’re babies . . . Ah! You’re teenagers! Excellent! Would you like a glass of wine?’ He just wanted some accomplices he could trust.

  A thin, elegant, smoking man: he was always very charming and my idol growing up. I’ve spent my whole life trying to impress him. After school musicals he’d shower me with faint praise. ‘Wonderful, darling, not your best performance, but fantastic.’ But then he became my biggest supporter and he even tour-managed us. He drove us around Europe in his camper-van when we supported MGMT. I think me becoming a performer was enjoyable for him because he’s definitely a rock ’n’ roll dad.

  The scariest thing that happened was that he got hit on his bike when I was in New York, on tour. His bike was mangled, and when he woke up he couldn’t remember what had happened. He got checked out by my stepdad, who is a doctor, and everyone thought he was fine. The next morning, however, he woke up and believed he was still married to my mother. They’d been divorced for about ten years. He had bleeding in his brain. That was terrifying. I’m so attached to him, I love my dad so much and the thought . . . But he’s fine now. Part of that fear is to do with his physique, I think. He’s almost bird-like, and that always made me and my sister feel unreasonably ravenous, as if he’d given birth to these enormous hungry cuckoos, constantly flapping about dramatically and demanding pizza.

  I’m not alone in loving my dad this much. Everyone does. He’s a legend. He’s the manager of an organic campsite, which sounds modest, but he always makes me regretful of my own education. I remember a lot of my childhood would be me asking questions, and he could speak so eloquently on any subject, in fluent French if necessary. He introduced me to the Smiths and the Rolling Stones. The Velvet Underground. He’d come into my room and say, ‘Why are you listening to Green Day? You wanna be listening to the Ramones.’ He used to run squat parties where Joe Strummer’s 101ers would play. All of that stuff.

  He’s sensitive and deliciously rude. He’s still the most well-dressed man. The most fantastic cook as well. Fuck, my dad’s great.

  Florence Welch is the singer with

  Florence + the Machine.

  HALF-TRUTHS, RUMOURS AND SECOND-HAND MEMORIES

  Harry Doherty by Niall Doherty

  The first time I ever saw my dad was when my mum laid down a copy of the Derry Journal in front of me. I was nine years old and sitting at the dinner table in our flat in Walthamstow. She opened up the paper and there he was, his words, his face, looking back at me. It was a special anniversary edition of the Journal and, as one of their ex-writers who’d gone on to Great Things, he’d written an article about his time there. I went into a sort of panicked shock. I read it five times in a row and then bawled my eyes out.

  My dad had left when I was six months old. In my life, we’ve had two main phases of contact with each other. If I hold up all my fingers in front of me, that’s about the amount of times I’ve met him, so you’ll have to excuse this piece being mostly made up of half-truths, rumours and second-hand memories. There are some of my own recollections scattered here and there.

  Harry Doherty was born in Derry in the 1950s. The son of a milkman, he was a teenager as Northern Ireland’s civil-rights movement was kicking off. He and my mum were on the Bloody Sunday march; it’s him at the front of the stock footage the BBC show every time they mention it – he’d gone to the front as he was covering it for the Journal. Later, he started writing about music and they moved to London. By the mid-seventies, he was one of the main writers at Melody Maker. He was one of the first people to write about Kate Bush and he wrote extensively on Thin Lizzy, although I think he balanced this out by also writing an awful lot about Jethro Tull. I write about music for a living too (you can have that one for free) and can only imagine the big-collared, flares-wearing fun of living the Almost Famous dream. It was an era that invented rock ’n’ roll clichés, and he probably did most of them; he told me that he’d done heroin ‘by accident’, thinking it was coke. My cousin once let slip that my dad was sleeping with one of Abba and that was one of the reasons why they split. I have no idea if that’s true, although I found it hard to join in the celebrations of his legendary swordsmanship.

  When I was eleven, he got in touch for the first time. My mum took me to meet him at Earl’s Court Tube and we went to a computer-games exhibition. He looked like me, except his hair was completely white and he was quite fat. He gave me a copy of U2’s Achtung Baby and Pearl Jam’s Ten. The next time we met, he took me to Southend-on-Sea. We had fish and chips and then we drove in his Mercedes Benz to a printing house so he could check up on how production was going on Metal Hammer, the newly launched hard-rock magazine he was the editor of. He gave me some more CDs: Nevermind by Nirvana, Yerself Is Steam by Mercury Rev and something by the Hothouse Flowers. He also gave me a copy of Metal Hammer, which came with a giant Nevermind poster that I stuck on my wall as soon as I got home. These are mostly the bands that shaped the music I listened to then and have ever since, apart from Hothouse Flowers. Another time, he took me to Metal Hammer’s offices. I was at an impressionable age, and with all the CDs lying around and posters on the wall, it’s not hard to remember what made me excited about the idea of working at a music magazine.

  My mum was pleased that I was happy about seeing him, but it was a short-lived phase of communication. I had his home phone number and one night I called to speak to him. A girl answered, then my dad spoke to me quickly and asked to be handed over to my mum. He bollocked her for letting me call the house. The girl who answered was my younger sister, who, like her younger brother, had no idea I existed. Things petered out after that. I remember my mum looking so sad one night when he didn’t show for a school assembly I was singing at. I think she felt it was her fault for exposing me, which really wasn’t fair on my lovely mum. There were a few exchanges by letter after that. In one, I told him he’d let me down. In the response, he opened with this: ‘There are three sides to every story: his, hers and the truth.’ It was a play on an album title, III Sides to Every Story. His way of explaining the situation to me was by citing the work of Boston funk-metal group Extreme.

  Ten years later, I was just about to finish university in Leicester. I hadn’t had any contact with him in a very long time. But I’d really started to feel a weight on my shoulders about it. I was worried that if something were to happen to him, I’d feel guilty for not getting in touch. I knew that was absurd but, like a lot of absurd thoughts, it just wouldn’t shift. I googled him, found his email and wrote to him before rationale had a chance to stop me. We exchanged emails for a while, then met up in December 2002 and went for a pizza in Kensington. I was now old enough to drink my way through any awkwardness, and as I was working at a music magazine myself, he told me stories about how it used to be. We would do this maybe once or twice a year. It felt fine, adult even. I’d scratched my itch.

  My mum died in 2007 aft
er a decade-long battle with cancer. I was absolutely heartbroken. She was an amazingly cool and profoundly kind person. After that, I just lost interest in the whole Dad thing. I don’t know if that was a reaction to the fact I couldn’t see my mum any more, or if I’d realised I didn’t need a dad. Maybe a bit of both. It seemed like the less interested I became in maintaining any sort of relationship with him, the harder he tried. He would email me asking for photos of his granddaughter, trying to arrange a meet-up, and probably banging his head against a brick wall due to the lack of replies.

  In 2013, I wrote a piece about him for My Old Man, the blog that birthed this book. He saw it and emailed me about it. I focused on the obvious fact he’d been googling himself. We were on a plane together shortly after to go to Ireland for his mother, my grandmother’s funeral and we talked about it. He told me he was angry when he’d first read it but a friend of his had said something along the lines of ‘Isn’t that what happened, though?’ So he read it again, and recognised a past he’d never really faced up to. He’d gone through life not paying much attention to consequences but here were his actions laid bare on a blog he’d stumbled upon.

  A few months later, I visited him in hospital as a long-standing stomach problem had got much worse. As soon as I saw him, I knew he wouldn’t be leaving. He could hardly talk and I sat next to him for ten minutes or so, barely saying anything myself. As I left, I patted him gently on the shoulder and said something stupid like ‘Be good.’ There was nothing left to say, no bedside grieving, no emotional outpourings. Everything I ever wanted to say was in the piece I’d written, in the piece he’d read, and we both knew it. He died a few days later. It was over, a father and son forever out of time. The moment had passed.

  Niall Doherty is a music writer from London.

  He lives in Southend with his wife and two children.

  I COULD SEE MY OWN FACE IN THE GLASS’S REFLECTION