After the Cheynes, I answered an ad in the weekly music newspaper Melody Maker and landed a gig in a band called the Bo Street Runners, who had been put together via a contest on the pioneering music TV show Ready, Steady Go!. That was fun and more importantly it paid the bills. The lovely thing about being in the Bo Street Runners was that I formed a friendship with our singer John Dominic that has lasted a lifetime. He is one of my closest friends in the world and he always will be.
At this time I also began a relationship with Jenny Boyd, who became my first wife years later. I’d been obsessed with and was utterly in love with Jenny from the first moment I laid eyes on her. I’d see her coming home from school each afternoon as I sat having my breakfast in the window of one of my two favourite cafes in Notting Hill. She was an absolutely gorgeous young girl, the same age as me, but I couldn’t muster the courage to speak to her, let alone ask her out. I was besotted. All I knew was that I wanted one of those.
Jenny and I have been through so much together, including raising our two beautiful daughters, Amelia and Lucy, and I’m blessed to say that we are still the very best of friends. She’s a part of me, and so much a part of my early life that it feels right to include some of her own memories of those early days here in this book. Jenny has a PhD in psychology and has written two books of her own, so her recollections of those days and her analysis of our relationship are as valuable as mine.
Jenny recalls the first time she saw me: I was a sculpture. Literally, I was a piece of thin copper wire bent into the shape of a boy sitting on the edge of her friend Dale’s desk in the stifling summer heat of their classroom in 1964. Her teacher was reading to them from Macbeth, which was far less interesting to her than the sculpture with the long legs that Dale had fashioned.
‘What is that?’ she whispered.
‘It’s a boy called Mick Fleetwood, who is fab,’ Dale replied, her eyes opening wide. ‘He plays drums in a group called the Cheynes. He’s got long, straight hair and these long, long legs.’
Jenny stared at the copper version of me as Dale sat it in her inkwell. Jenny was intrigued.
‘Come with me to meet him,’ Dale said. ‘He’s always at the Coffee Mill cafe. He’s so cool.’
The Coffee Mill was one of my two aforementioned hangouts, where I ate before heading off to gigs, and it was situated on a bend in the road, not far from Portobello Market. That is where I was when Dale and Jenny came and met me one Saturday afternoon.
As Jenny recalls, I was wearing black mohair trousers held up by a dark belt with a large metal buckle. Above that I had on a pink shirt with a white collar. I was tall and skinny, with thick, brown shoulder-length hair covering most of my face. When I did sweep my mane aside she’s told me that the most enormous cow-eyes she’d ever seen would look directly at her, then flicker like a butterfly about the room before landing on her face again. She found me very gentle and softly spoken.
When it was time for me to get ready for my gig later that afternoon, I invited the two of them.
‘We’re playing in Brentwood at the Town Hall. Why don’t you catch the train? It’s not that far.’
They agreed to come and off I went, as my ride was waiting outside, a transit van full of my bandmates.
The girls came up to Brentwood early enough to be there while we set up. Jenny sat on the edge of the stage watching as I loaded in and assembled my drum kit and once I was done I went and sat with them. Jenny recalls that when I did, my foot came to rest on hers and when she tried to move it away, the pressure increased until I’d pinned her foot to the floor. I have no recollection of doing this consciously but the body wants what it wants, so I’m quite sure my subconscious was at play. Whatever the motivation, Jenny’s sixteen-year-old self took this as a sign that I liked her. And did I!
She liked me too, but she wanted to be a loyal friend to Dale, so she tried to hide it. She has said that if it weren’t for Dale, she and I would have got together a full year before we did and that she’d never have dated our singer Roger Peacock. Good Lord. How cruel retrospect can be. Dale and I never even went out, for God’s sake! Receiving knowledge like this at my stage of life is a double-edged sword, because you can’t change the past, so it makes you wonder just how much wasted time you might have spent otherwise.
The Cheynes were the first live band Jenny had ever seen and she says the experience transformed her. She’d never seen a crowd go mad for rhythm and blues and she’d never heard the power of songs by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf played live. She spent the night in the front row, where our guitar player Phil winked and smiled at her and, as she told me later, she decided she was in love with rock and roll. Oh to be sixteen again. At the end of the night we gave her and Dale a lift back to London in the group van and she drifted off to sleep at home with the sound of a cheering crowd in her head.
After that I began to see Jenny more frequently at the Coffee Mill or the other cafe I frequented, the Mercury. Typically I’d be sitting around eating an omelette and chips with my flatmate Roger Peacock and Peter Bardens, waiting for the other guys to show up with the van, when she’d pop in after school. I adored her, but did nothing about it. It didn’t help that Jenny was just as shy as I was, and when we spoke about this period for the book, it brought tears to my eyes. We were just so innocent; reliving it warmed my heart. We were two kids, completely in love, in awe of how love felt and utterly incapable of expressing it to each other.
The first of many downsides to this was that I stood by paralysed as my friend and bandmate Roger made a beeline for the girl who’d stolen my heart and to make matters worse, he managed to make her his girlfriend. That was Jenny’s first relationship, and as his flatmate, I bore witness to the entire thing, which was torture to say the very least. I began to avoid them at the flat and everywhere else, because I couldn’t bear it. I felt like a coward for not making a move first, but I’d lacked the confidence, and that left me feeling utterly inadequate as a young man. All of this while my friend enjoyed the girl I couldn’t stop thinking about–it was a hopeless situation for me. What I didn’t know was that while I tried not to be at home when she was there, Jenny used to hang around the flat hoping to see me. She’s told me that whenever we crossed paths, all she kept thinking was that she’d rather be with me than with Roger.
When she turned seventeen, after she and Roger had been together for a year, Jenny left school and began working as a house model for fashion designers Foale and Tuffin on Carnaby Street. She began to travel to New York as well and had a promising career ahead of her. The candle I held for Jenny never went out and I stayed in touch, always making sure I knew where she was and what she was doing. For me it was simple: I loved her and I wanted to be with her. I believed it would happen because my feelings were unwavering.
One day I decided to pop by the shop in Carnaby Street to surprise her. Roger and I no longer lived together so I hadn’t seen her in some time and I missed her. She was sitting there between fittings, looking gorgeous, when she noticed me standing in the window. As she’s reminded me, I was wearing a long white cardigan, which was more or less my uniform by then, and black flared trousers. I’d cut my hair short into the Vidal Sassoon bowl cut that was all the rage at the time. I was hanging about with a couple of friends, obviously there to see her, but trying to look casual about it. She’s told me that the new hairdo did wonders when it came to exposing my ‘smooth baby face’ and that she was very pleased to see me. I came in and sat down and then my buddies, great wingmen that they were, drifted off and left us alone.
I pulled out a cigarette, a habit I picked up for a very brief time, and for appearances mostly. I felt like smoking made it easier to strike up conversations with strangers.
‘Would you like one?’ I asked her. I was incredibly nervous.
‘No thanks,’ she said.
Jenny says that cigarettes didn’t suit my baby face and she suppressed a smile when she noticed how I didn’t even inhale.
‘I’ve joined a new band,’ I said.
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. It’s called the Bo Street Runners. Those guys that were just here are in the band, too.’
‘That’s great!’ she said.
‘They won a talent competition on Ready Steady Go! that was held to find the band that would replace the Beatles.’ She smiled at me. ‘Are you playing around here any time soon?’
‘Yes we are, we’re playing at the Marquee Club in Soho next week. You ought to come.’ An uneasy pause. ‘Would you like to?’
Jenny tells me that after I said that, I stared at her long and hard and didn’t look away. She felt herself blush.
‘Jenny,’ I said. ‘I heard from my sister that you aren’t going with Roger anymore.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Going off to New York to model made me grow up. It was good for me. When I came back I realised how arrogant he was.’
‘Well, I could see that, right from the start,’ I said. ‘He never treated you properly.’
This opened something up between us; we’d both had our fill of Roger, and he gave us something to commiserate about. It wasn’t an act, I really had hated the way Roger treated Jenny. She was a plaything to him.
‘Living there while you were together wasn’t easy, Jenny,’ I said. ‘I could barely stand seeing him at gigs, because he’d be there laughing, bragging, talking about how many times he’d stood you up at the Coffee Mill. How he’d leave you waiting there for three hours just for fun.’
‘Sometimes he wouldn’t arrive at all,’ she said, lowering her head.
I stayed as long as I could, until it was time for me to meet my bandmates and hop in the van. We had a gig out of town to get to, but before I bid her farewell, I bent down and kissed Jenny on the cheek. I wasn’t going to let her slip through my fingers again.
‘I will see you soon. Let’s go to the cinema one evening.’
‘I’d like that,’ she said.
A few days later I paid her another visit at the shop. I arrived in the afternoon with newspaper in hand and stayed until they closed, dutifully researching films that Jenny and I could see in the West End that evening, when I wasn’t staring at her. The cinema was the perfect setting for us; we could be together, consumed by our feelings, and free of the onus to say what neither of us was capable of saying to each other.
By then I’d moved into a large flat in Finchley with Peter Bardens, who was playing with a band called Them from Belfast, in Northern Ireland, led by a fiery, soulful vocalist named Van Morrison. The place was one enormous room, a proper loft as large as a banquet hall, with a small bedroom at one end and a kitchen and bathroom at the other. We had so much space that our friends were always coming and going, sleeping on the floor or just laying about smoking dope. It was the perfect crash pad and practice space in one, where music was always happening.
This was also a good setting for Jenny and me, at least in terms of our awkwardness with each other. We could just be in that flat; we could sit there holding hands, listening to Mose Allison or Bobby Bland while sharing a joint. Although, according to Jenny, and I do agree, the more stoned we got, the more deafening the silences between us grew.
Fortunately when that happened there were always distractions to snap us out of it. No one ever went to sleep before 3 or 4 a.m. in that flat, so it was typically littered with bodies until late the next afternoon. Poor Jenny would have to pick her way through the human minefield on her way to work in the morning, trying her best to look put together after a mere two or three hours rest. She was the only one who saw the morning light on the other side of 6 a.m.
I wasn’t much help to her either. That was my home and that was my world and I was in it. I’d do things such as call her at work to play her a drum fill I’d come up with while practising, after I’d arisen at 1 p.m. One day I called and asked her very seriously to listen, and then embarked on a solo that never ended. Later she told me that she listened as long as she could, so as not to hurt my feelings. Eventually she put the phone down, helped several customers, and then returned to discover that I was still playing. I was off in the ether.
I can understand why, because Jenny and I were now officially together. I was over the moon and wanted nothing more than to be with her every moment of every day. By the way, Roger Peacock never got over this. He held a grudge, to the point that one day we were in a pub together and someone told me that Roger had a knife on him. When Roger asked me to come outside and have a chat with him, I was convinced I was going to get my face cut up.
Jenny and I also started hanging out with her sister Pattie and her boyfriend George Harrison. He was friendly, kind, thoughtful, natural in his own skin, and loved to laugh. He was a whole load of fun and we formed a friendship, but he formed a bond with Jenny that lasted their whole lives. George taught me the value of spirituality, because even as a young man he was very in touch with his soul. I learned a lot just being around him and, in retrospect, even more. George was talented musically but in my opinion his real contribution was the lifestyle and cultural change he brought to the Beatles and therefore the world. They went to India because of him and look at the effect that had. George was responsible for all of that and it was because of his spirit.
Jenny and I would go out to nightclubs such as the Scotch of St James, the Establishment, and the Crazy Elephant, which were the places to go at the time. We’d sit with the rest of the Beatles and their wives and girlfriends, and it couldn’t have been better.
Jenny’s favourite club was the Scotch of St James, which was dimly lit and packed with tables surrounding a small wooden dance floor. That was where we met Keith Moon of the Who one night and he introduced us to a little pill called methadrin. It was a stimulant and after we took it, we had no problem talking. We literally didn’t shut up for hours. Those clubs were places where guys as famous as Keith or the Beatles could just enjoy themselves. They were special because there was a camaraderie and a mutual respect between the musicians and those like-minded people who just wanted to hang out. It was all about how you looked and dressed, and the music you liked spoke volumes. I say this because I’m not sure anyone can appreciate how back then, in places like that, being famous or a celebrity didn’t mean anything. There was no elevation, no idol worship, no one ever asked anyone else for autographs. Everyone was a part of the same family idealistically, famous or not. It was unspoken but obvious to everyone. We were all one and we were in it together, because we all understood.
We drifted along into the summer of 1966 and before we knew it Jenny and I had been together a year, which was when I felt the pang of heartbreak for the first time. I’d never known a deeper loss and it was devastating. In the twelve months since we’d been an item, Jenny’s modelling career had taken off and she’d begun to spend more and more time abroad. I was happy for her, though I missed her when she left. I wanted no one else and I thought she knew this, but apparently that wasn’t the case. I don’t blame her; I think it’s clear that I had a hard time being demonstrative, but none of that made it hurt any less.
One day after we had spent the night at my sister Sally’s house in Notting Hill, Jenny got up early to catch a plane to Rome for a week-long modelling gig. From what she’s told me, I bid her farewell, but didn’t kiss her goodbye and was far too casual about it, which she took as an indication that my feelings for her had cooled. That couldn’t have been further from the truth and what she didn’t know was that I watched her from the upstairs window as she walked out of the mews, watched her until she was out of sight, and longed for her return the moment she was gone.
Jenny left thinking I didn’t care and did her best to avoid thinking of me while she was away. Unintentionally, she felt insecure and rejected by me, which isn’t how a guy wants his girlfriend to feel on a journey alone, to a place as romantic as Rome. She stayed in a beautiful palazzo, took part in a fashion show held in a railway station with a live band playing. From the sound of it, her trip
was magnificent and somewhere in there she took a shine to an American guy who was playing in the band. They had a brief flirtation, but when she came back to England she told me that she’d met someone, and that it was over between us. Since then she’s told me that her time in Rome had given her a taste of independence, which she didn’t necessarily want but pursued because she thought my feelings for her were only fleeting. I was too shocked by the news to react.
Jenny was dead wrong about my feelings, but it’s my fault for masking my love for her with nonchalance and detachment. This pattern plagued us for years, and we were never capable of overcoming it, though we tried to make things work over and over again. Whenever I’d seem uninterested and too far away, it triggered her insecurity, which then caused her to act out and hurt me. The tragedy was that I cared a lot, always, I was just paralysed by shyness and an inability to put my feelings into words. I assumed she knew how I felt and she didn’t.
After Rome we split up and stayed apart for two years. During that time I spent countless nights in my car, parked outside the house Jenny moved into with the incredibly gifted R&B singer Beryl Marsden. I’d sit there, watching her bedroom, waiting for her light to go out. I was back where I’d been at sixteen, once again unable to approach her.
I dealt with the heartache by immersing myself in music. I’d already left the Bo Street Runners and joined Peter Bardens’ new band, Peter B’s Looners, later shortened to just the Peter B’s. That was a good outfit. We were entirely instrumental, playing R&B and soul in the style of Stax bands like Booker T & the MG’s. After a month the original guitarist left and as his replacement Peter Bardens found an eighteen-year-old who’d never held down a regular professional gig as a musician before. The guy’s name was Peter Greenbaum but he went by Peter Green.
Peter Green was unlike anyone I’d ever met before and unlike anyone else on the scene–which really was saying something. He hailed from a working-class Jewish family, born in the East End of London and raised in Putney. His childhood hadn’t been easy and he’d worked as a butcher and furniture polisher, while playing bass on the side for a number of local bands. As a child his musical pursuits were shunned by his family as indulgent and impractical. But he had a gift and after he first saw Eric Clapton, he picked up the guitar. He chose to play a Gibson Les Paul because Eric did and when Eric joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers after leaving the Yardbirds (where he was replaced by Jeff Beck), Peter began to follow them just to watch Eric play. Peter was determined to join that band and when Eric ran off to Greece on a whim, leaving Mayall without a guitar player, Peter filled in until Eric returned. That was the extent of his experience.
Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac: The Autobiography Page 5
