Ian and I hatched a plan to make our Wednesday afternoons more interesting and productive. Incredibly, as 16-year-olds, we had the authority to sign for and withdraw rifles and automatic weapons, high explosives and blank ammunition. So every Wednesday, that’s what happened. We would come up with scenarios then wander off armed to the teeth into a local wood and shoot the crap out of each other.
I should set the scene at Oundle School. Before 1914, the British Empire was demanding technocrats. The traditional public schools churned out the Greek-and-Latin educated civil servants to be, but the dark days of the future demanded leaders who understood metalwork, mechanical engineering and electronics.
Oundle established what was essentially an industrial estate. It had an aluminium foundry, composite and fibreglass workshops, lathes, milling machines, and woodworking, blacksmithing and metalworking shops. Every term, I spent one week dressed in overalls learning to chop and assemble bits of wood, metal and plastic.
The aim of all this activity was to build a vice. The halves were cast from wooden moulds in the foundry. The sand moulds you made yourself, and there were various ways of sabotaging them to make life less dreary.
Excessive moisture and too much tamping of the sand in the mould would cause it to explode. Even better was to leave a hole in the bottom of the mould so that molten aluminium dripped onto the shoes of the pourer – the taciturn master in charge, Mr Moynihan. I suspect he quite enjoyed having his shoes set on fire. To this end he came equipped with multi-layered steel-capped boots, asbestos helmet and gloves, plus a rich choice of language, which meant that no one would skip the foundry lesson.
‘Faacking ’ell . . . ’Oo faacking set fire to my faacking feet?’
Mr Moynihan was a good sport and he taught me never to panic, even when you are on fire.
In woodwork I was an abject failure, although I designed and built the world’s most useless and uncomfortable chair and the most incompetent set of bookshelves yet devised. Even M.C. Escher would have been confused as to where to position his books.
In the machine shop I broke windows with the chuck key, using the rotary action of the lathe as a catapult. Finally, by an act of sheer mechanical stupidity, I destroyed a vertical milling machine. Had I been parachuted in to a Nazi factory, I could not have done a better job at sabotage. I wish I could say it was deliberate. As the machine ripped itself in half, the drive shaft stripping its thread, I stood and watched as it vibrated itself to pieces. It was the master in charge I felt sorry for. He was actually crying as he switched it off.
‘Oh, no,’ he sighed. ‘You have broken the machine.’
The only bit about the electronics shop I liked was the smell of the circuit board. I carried it around in a plastic case with various resistors rattling around. I don’t recall what the point of it was, possibly an oscillator.
Disinterested, disgraced and dangerous, I entered the last iteration of my workshop sojourn at Oundle, and unexpectedly hit the jackpot when I discovered an inspirational teacher who knew a bit about metal.
John Worsley was calm and tidy, and wore such a large pair of glasses that it seemed impossible to imagine that he wasn’t interested in you. The moment he picked up a piece of metal, I noticed his fingers. They were thin and nimble, and they floated across the surface of the billet of steel as if he was imbuing it with some otherworldly quality. John would always turn up to classes on his bicycle – racing handlebars, cycle clips on the bottom of his trousers. He had a curious gait, as if one side of him was a sailor and the other had been employed in a previous incarnation as one leg of a tarantula. One of his favourite words was ‘plangent’, and it was an odd, almost archaic-sounding expression. John Worsley was like a hybrid between a bicycle repairman and Gandalf.
Metalworking covered wrought iron, forging, silversmithing and jewellery, plus welding and associated skills. Our project was to make a nickel-silver bracelet, which I quite enjoyed and was rather proud of. When I brought it home, Dad regarded it with deep suspicion.
John Worsley had a plan to get our attention. He thrust a shaft of steel into a glowing brazier and sparks showered forth. He pulled it out, still red hot, placed it on an anvil and started to beat out the shape of what I immediately realised was a sword. He quenched the metal with a satisfying hiss in a bucket of water, and thrust it back in the fire. Without saying a word, he produced a leather blanket and dramatically unfurled it to reveal a replica of Excalibur. The crossbar of the hilt was leather-covered, but the blade, broad and gleaming, was what entranced me.
‘I could teach you all to make this, if you want,’ he stated, rolling the weapon over and over in his palm. He paused for effect. ‘And I could teach you how to use it, of course.’
‘Sir? What, you mean . . . sword fighting?’
The reason John Worsley walked funny was because he had been a fencing teacher for most of his life. On arrival at a posh public school, as a working-class northerner, he seized his chance. My hand was up right away. I signed up. I would learn how to fence. It would change my life.
My drama teacher also had a profound effect on me. John Campbell was one of those rare but essential teachers who give you permission to dream.
Drama, as opposed to music, was another line of escape, and I was in several productions: Macbeth, Hadrian VII, The Royal Hunt of the Sun and some local inhouse plays that were usually awful West End farces.
In Macbeth I was a witch, murderer and various messengers, spending much of my time under a gigantic polystyrene skull encased in toilet paper. Downgraded to acolyte in Hadrian VII, I stepped up a gear as the mercenary in The Royal Hunt of the Sun and oily manservant in According to the Evidence, a play so silly I was amazed that Samuel French kept it in stock.
Nevertheless, the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd were taking their toll on my subconscious. The germ of a philosophy started to take root. The idea that it didn’t matter what it was that you engaged in, as long as you respected its nature and attempted some measure of harmony with the universe.
An Unexpected Journey
It wasn’t just the senior boys who kicked you around. You could be legally beaten up by teachers. Corporal punishment was common. It ranged from slippers across the backside by individual teachers to more formal floggings with a cane or birch. Opinions varied about the efficacy of a beating. The event was usually administered during the evening, with the unfortunate recipient in his pyjamas, after lights out. This was to ensure maximum psychological anxiety and maximum physical discomfort, as six strokes through cotton pyjamas was almost certain to draw blood. The now thankfully meaningless expression ‘books down the trousers’ was intended to convey a situation where, in anticipation of physical sanction, a geography notebook might shield the buttocks from damage.
There was general agreement that fives or squash players were the most devastating floggers on account of their fearsome backhand. Golfers came a close second. A great deal of discussion in dorm rooms revolved around angles, velocity and acceleration. After a beating, the victim usually stood on top of a chest of drawers and dropped his pants to invite comments by flashlight.
‘Not bad grouping.’
‘Ooh, stroke number four a bit low.’
‘He doesn’t like you much, does he?’
My housemaster had a variety of implements, ranging in length, flexibility and thickness according to the severity of the transgression. Four to six strokes were delivered, and his favourite armchair became the flogging stool, with the cushion removed and the boy exhorted to bend over and touch the bottom of the chair. There was a fetishistic streak to all this. Many of his beatings were administered while he was dressed in his rowing kit.
There are possibly people who still regard this sort of thing as character building. I am not one of them.
I began to think of school as a prison camp, and my duty was to disrupt, subvert and/or escape. But, of course, there was no escape. I felt I should make some kind of statement. I deci
ded to deliver two tons of horseshit to my housemaster. Just one of those spur-of-the-moment ideas that comes with no logic in tow, but a great deal of emotional momentum.
I was wandering through town, considering the colour scheme for my squadron of Hannibal war elephants, which required painting before being blooded during the wargames society Roman stand-off. Pottering past the post office, I saw a postcard in the window, which read fatefully: ‘Manure delivered to your door.’
I went to the phone box and dialled.
‘Hello, do you deliver? Excellent. I’d like two tons, please . . . Yes, drop it in front of my house . . . The address? Sidney House, Oundle School. Thank you so much.’
That evening, the house gathered for supper. The housemaster stood up, sucking air through his teeth in lieu of the pipe he perennially puffed away at.
‘This afternoon,’ he said, ‘some wag thought it amusing to deliver two tons of shit onto my front doorstep. Unless the person owns up there will be no electricity for kettles or stereos in the house.’
Standard tactics for a low-grade despot. The stereo was an essential part of student existence. There were no CDs, and cassette recorders were in their infancy. Chronic audiophiles with rich daddies had reel-to-reel studio recorders and busily spliced tapes together to make compilations from their vinyl collections. It was only in your third year at Oundle that you were allocated to a study, a room not quite of your own but which you shared with one or two others. Decoration was possible and, inevitably, a music system was essential. By strolling past open study doors on a Sunday afternoon it was possible to sample most of the premier rock bands of the sixties and seventies. To cut off this lifeline to sanity and escape from the Oundlian Alcatraz, if only in spirit, was a dark and cruel punishment.
After supper, I knocked on the housemaster’s door.
‘Come!’
Seldom was the word ‘in’ ever used. I entered. He looked around from where he was seated at his desk, yellow pipe clenched in his teeth.
‘Ah, Dickinson. I thought it might be you.’
Actually, I was quite pleased. ‘Very amusing,’ he said. An unexpected compliment. He looked down. ‘Of course, I’ll thrash you for it.’ I heard the clack of his teeth on the pipe stem. Was he salivating? He looked up, startled. I just continued to stare. He dismissed me with an imperious wave.
On the dot at 9 p.m. I heard the squeak, squeak, squeak of rubber soles, and then the knock at the door.
‘I’ll see you now,’ the housemaster said.
He had changed into his rowing kit: shorts, chunky V-neck sweater and tennis shoes. His legs were ridiculously skinny and covered with a childlike coating of thin red hair. With every step I respected him less. He was using an extra-long cane, so he needed space for a good swing, and he was an amateur golfer, which did not bode well for the next 30 seconds or so. Really, these people should have been locked up.
Thankfully, among these sadistic floggers and the failed Oxbridge dons existed a small core of decent eccentrics. In this perverse society of dystopian hypocrisy, with its own internal politics and rigid hierarchy, the brown, smoky common room inhabited by the staff had a secret cabal of visionaries who made our lives worth living, and gave us hope. As well as Mr Campbell and Mr Worsley, we had an art teacher who somehow managed to promote rock concerts in Oundle’s Great Hall.
It’s probably time to come clean about music and how I ended up singing. Music, not singing, came first, and it is one of the peculiar schizophrenic traits of my academic boot camp that it introduced me to rock ’n’ roll more close-up than you could possibly imagine.
The first band I ever saw was called Wild Turkey. Then Van der Graaf Generator and, in similar prog-rock vein, we had String Driven Thing and a prog-folk band, Comus. Queen almost played, but they cancelled when they became massive overnight in America. The big story was that Genesis had played, the year before I arrived, complete with Peter Gabriel wearing a box on his head.
Wild Turkey had ex-Jethro Tull bass player Glenn Cornick in their lineup, and their first album, Battle Hymn, stands the test of time to this very day. Out of my mind on Fanta and Mars bars, raging with hormones, I was on a high for days. Every square inch of me was drenched in sweat as I staggered back to my dormitory across the forbidding lawns topped with dark shadows from academic spires. My heart was thumping, my ears were ringing and it seemed like my head was full of bells, with a madman tugging at ropes to ring the changes and pulling at the back of my eyeballs as if to say, ‘Listen to this feeling and never forget.’ Wild Turkey actually name-checked the gig in an interview as ‘one of the craziest reactions we’ve ever had’. That was me, with my head stuffed in the bass bin.
Afterwards, a long succession of prog bands took over; all very cerebral, but with the exception of Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf, not nearly so visceral. Nevertheless, when wandering the corridors with music drifting out from the individual studies in Sidney House, I was stopped in my tracks. What the fuck was that? I knocked tentatively. The senior boy looked at me scathingly: ‘What do you want?’
‘Er, what is that track?’
‘Oh, that. Deep Purple, “Speed King”, Deep Purple in Rock.’ He rolled his eyes and shut the door. My insides continued to churn. I wanted music.
My first record was a sampler called Fill Your Head with Rock, comprising mainly West Coast American CBS Records acts, and although I played it to death, it was barely satisfactory. I wanted a straight shot of adrenalin. A second-hand Deep Purple in Rock, scratched to bits, cost 50 pence in an auction of albums because someone needed to pay their tuck-shop bill. Now, my friends, we were cooking on gas.
A family trip to Jersey – that’s the Channel Islands, not New Jersey, folks – netted brand-new gatefold editions of Van der Graaf Generator classics H to He and Pawn Hearts. (The latter was such a manically depressive record that you could actually empty a room with it after a couple of minutes. On the other hand, I could listen to it for hours on end in solitary confinement, probably because I am not a manic depressive.) I took the two albums out of their brown paper bag. The gatefolds had some rather splendid surrealistic artwork by Paul Whitehead. I showed it to my father, who was an amateur oil painter.
‘What do you think?’ I offered.
‘Degenerate,’ he replied scathingly. We spent the rest of the day in silence. I decided that given a choice between being beaten at waterboarding school or being looked at as if I had two heads, I would take my chances back at school. I was determined to spend as much time as possible away from home, and set about signing up for school trips, army placements and whatever I could lay my hands on.
During summer holidays I moped around town, hanging around record shops and pressing my nose up against the glass of guitar and amplifier stores, lusting after speaker cabinets and hardware. My exposure to bands, albums and the stage had grown into a fantastic dream world. I had a transistor radio with a small earplug, and I would listen to pirate station Radio Caroline, the scratchy sound fading in and out, under the bed sheets at night.
I had memorised Deep Purple’s Made in Japan note for note. Every drumbeat, every thud of Ian Paice’s bass-drum beater, I had tried to replicate. Ditto the first Black Sabbath album, Aqualung by Jethro Tull, plus my eccentric collection of Van der Graaf Generator albums and treasured copy of Wild Turkey’s first offering.
Back home in Sheffield, I still had some friends from prep school. Seeing as we’d all been packed off to boarding schools, holidays were the only time we ever met up. Paul Bray was one of them. Paul had a drum kit in his garage, a real one: actual cymbals, the whole shebang. He was in a band and his guitarist came to visit. I sat in awe as he rattled off ‘Layla’ and half-a-dozen Cream standards. He may well have ended up as a chartered accountant. Paul is actually quite a successful solicitor these days. Life’s like that.
Back then I was spotty, wore an anorak, had flared blue jeans with ‘Purple’ and ‘Sabbath’ biro-engraved on the thighs, and rode an ear-splitt
ingly uncool moped. Oh yes, and I wanted to be a drummer. My parents would have been horrified. It was my guilty secret. I had a pair of drumsticks, which I kept hidden, and a practice pad. Their intention was that I should be a doctor, vet, accountant, solicitor or some other ‘professional’ occupation.
I returned to school and set about forming a band. When deprived of something essential, the human mind is capable of surprising and often perverse adaptability. The Marquis de Sade, denied paper and sexual contact, solved both problems by writing down his increasingly feverish fantasies on toilet paper, recently retranslated by an academic at the university where I would shortly end up, but now we really are overreaching ourselves. So let’s presently deal with the past.
The bands I listened to were not the bands I would ever see in their heyday, stuck as I was in boarding school at the time, so my imagination filled the gaps. I overlaid their on-stage antics in my mind’s eye with some operatic stage setting, plus the energy from the improv drama I had engaged in. It was all very fevered, very intense, and I wanted to recreate it as a drummer. It was simply a question of activity, and drumming was frenzied. It was the thrashing around at the front of the stage; it was the sweat and the focus, but also the possibility of being a Keith Moon, an eccentric, a showman. The drummer, it seemed to me, was in the driving seat.
However, I possessed neither a driving seat nor a drum kit. Amusingly, a drummer’s chair or stool is technically termed a ‘throne’, and while I admired the sentiment, the delusion of grandeur was of no practical help. I conscripted several volumes of The Cambridge Medieval History. My drumsticks were strips of plywood, and I arranged the leather-bound volumes like tom-toms around my small rickety desk in my study. With the speaker close to my ear, I battered them in hopeful symphony. Eventually, I snuck into the music room and purloined a pair of bongos.
There were kids at boarding school in possession of real drum kits, amplifiers and electric guitars. They rehearsed in commandeered classrooms on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. I gatecrashed one of their rehearsals. It was disorganised and it was all about how cool they looked. It was about fashion, about posing – about nothing. I was disgusted, though slightly jealous about their equipment. I was searching for the holy grail of innocence and experience. My vision was cloudy, but my purpose was crystal clear. Entertainment, yes, but truth above all things.
What Does This Button Do? Page 4
