‘Amanda, you won’t believe who I’ve just seen! Jimmy Savile, he’s over there.’
‘Will you get me his autograph?’ she pleaded.
‘Oh no, Amanda, I don’t think he’d like to be bothered,’ I haughtily replied.
At which my sister spontaneously broke down in floods of tears. Making my sister cry was a hobby of mine. One which, to my shame, I have so far neglected to mention.
Amanda sobbed and, like a shark scenting blood, the peroxide pervert homed in on her wailing.
‘Now then, now then, now then, what is going on over here then?’
He began to placate my sobbing sister with his popular banter.
Savile was very polite, and he seemed to have decided that my family were his new best friends and began asking all sorts of questions about who we were, why we were there, what did we think of the island, while signing his name on a paper napkin and puffing on a large cigar. This impressed my dad, himself a devotee of the stogie. My mother was charmed, and Savile kissed her hand. Me? I’d like to say that I knew at once I was in the presence of evil incarnate and that I felt my flesh crawl with revulsion, but the truth was he just made me feel uncomfortable, not a difficult thing to do if I’m honest, but there was something blatantly phoney about him, like he was secretly taking the piss out of us all. At the time I thought that must be how all famous people were. I thought he was never going to leave us alone, he went on and on and on. Eventually one of his acolytes dragged him off and a bright, beaming, autograph-clutching Amanda said as she waved him goodbye, ‘What a lovely man.’
Not as lovely as that go-kart, I thought to myself.
Little did we know that Haute La Garenne, a children’s home just ten minutes down the road from our hotel, would later become the centre of a child abuse investigation. We drove past it frequently and never knew what evil lay inside.
I really couldn’t wait to grow up. Being a kid was a waste of time and nobody took me seriously. If I could have had three magical wishes they would have been to be older, to have grey hair and to wear glasses. All three would come true eventually. But by the time they did I would want none of them.
Be careful what you wish for. I should maybe have gone for wisdom instead of the specs.
3
THE SWINGING SIXTIES
The entertainment at home was by today’s standards somewhat limited. There was a black-and-white TV around which we spent our evenings glued to the grey fuzzy glow. But most of the time the pleasure in our house came from the radio – a small red-and-yellow transistor, permanently tuned to the Light Programme. It was Housewives’ Choice through the week and Children’s Favourites with Uncle Mac (that was his DJ name) at the weekend. They were the main staples with the odd Goon Show or Clitheroe Kid for a bit of variety. I used to look forward to Uncle Mac’s weekly airings of ‘The Runaway Train’ by Michael Holliday and ‘Three Wheels on My Wagon’ by the New Christy Minstrels – songs of cowboy misadventure, how they cheered me. ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ was another one of good old Uncle Mac’s top requests – the spooky vocoderish voice of the piano made a deep and lasting impression on me, as did the song’s story with the moral ‘never cheat, you will be found out’. I ignored that advice, of course. Along with the ‘practise, practise, practise’ message, I had no time for that. I expected to be proficient straight away. I was an extremely impatient child.
I had a request played on Children’s Favourites once. It was for ‘Carbon the Copycat’ by Tex Ritter. It was the echoey delay effect on Tex’s voice that got me. I didn’t know what it was at the time but I liked the sound of it. However, I missed my moment of radio fame as I was in the kitchen, elbow deep in a packet of Sugar Puffs, trying to extract that week’s free gift, which I think was a tiny plastic Roman gladiator figure. Oh well.
Other than the wireless there was the record player – the oddly named Pye Black Box. Odd, because it was brown. It was definitely a box, though, standing on four spindly wooden legs. These raised the machine’s inner workings so they were just out of reach of my infant fingers. I would climb on top of the settee to peer down and marvel at the black spinning platters. One day, I thought. One day.
Considering my dad was such a music lover, our record collection was a bit on the thin side. We had around six or seven discs in all. Noël Coward in New York, Duke Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy, a Huckleberry Hound/Yogi Bear LP (think that was mine), a Jack Buchanan EP, the soundtrack to a film called The Restless Ones (a Christian propaganda flick featuring Billy Graham; where this came from and what it was doing in the Morrises’ record cabinet was a complete mystery) and a 78 of Gene Kelly doing ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ (a perennial favourite). Oh and Mandy Miller doing ‘Nelly the Elephant’. That one was definitely mine.
Auntie Elsie Stacey, mum’s elder sister and a smaller, smilier version of my mother, was a keen churchgoer and patron saint of bring-and-buy sales. Elsie’s family had a musical collection that was much more engaging than ours.
The Staceys’ music came from a majestic radiogram with a glowing tuner strip on which were emblazoned exotic words such as Hilversum, Luxemburg, Lille, Warsaw, Moscow. Moscow! You could actually hear what people were saying in Moscow! You couldn’t understand them though, even if you did speak Russian, as it was all hiss, bleep and clatter. Despite that, this record player and radio combination was amazing. More than twice the size of our little Black Box, it was awe-inspiring. There was a door at the front that dropped down to reveal the turntable at just the right height for my prying hands to explore. Inside was a rack for storing your 45s, old 78s and 33s. There were quite a few in there too.
Auntie Elsie and Uncle John had two daughters, my older cousins Kathleen and Susan. They were ‘with it’ teenagers, devotees of pop music. Despite our age difference, Kath and Sue kindly shared their knowledge of what was what in pop with me. Though this did seem to involve listening to Cliff Richard and Adam Faith singles mostly, there was other stuff as well. They had singles by the Beatles, the Stones, the Zombies – Kath had the Zombies’ autographs (she’d met pop stars, wow!) – the Kinks, Gene Pitney (I wasn’t too impressed with him, apart from ‘Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa’, obviously) and, of course, Elvis. Everyone liked Elvis.
Even though I loved the sound of the records, I was indifferent to the pop malarkey generally. It seemed to me it was all a bit girlish – all screaming and chasing. Gluing and painting plastic armies were still my main passion. I spent all my free time in the company of Airfix model kits, glue and paints.
But I thought, There’s nothing wrong with listening to a few records now and then is there? So I persuaded my mum to buy one. My first single was ‘The Locomotion’ by Little Eva. That was great. It appealed to me because the words were, I guessed, about a train, not some loveydovey romantic slush. Then Elvis’s ‘Return to Sender’ was another. This, I assumed, was about the perils of the postal system – a much more interesting subject than rejection, of which I understood nothing, so it didn’t exist. I would listen to ‘Return to Sender’ endlessly. I loved the sound of it. The shuffly drums of D. J. Fontana. The ‘da ta da tadada dada’ baritone sax bit. The song made me feel happy, made me smile. Another hit 45 was Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ – Kath and Sue were keen twisters. A sixties dance craze, the original and greatest. Me, I liked the Widow Twanky panto-style lyrics, ‘Is it a bird? No. Is it a plane? No. Is it the Twister? Yeah’, and the train-beat drums (I always liked a good beat). Without realising it at the time, it was the rhythm of music that interested me most. Much more than melody or lyrics.
My favourite 45 was ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados – the great Joe Meek’s finest work. It had everything an infant space enthusiast could want in a single; that whooshing noise in the intro and the catchy organ riff. The best thing about it, I thought, was its lack of words. Groups used to go on and on about love all the time. ‘Telstar’ didn’t have that flaw. I thought it was perfect.
That bloke Heinz, the fr
ontman, looked cool on Thank Your Lucky Stars; I wondered if that was his real name? Was he related to the sauce people?
The Fireball XL5 theme by Don Spencer was another great tune. Along with the Wild West, rockets and space were a major passion of my infancy.
The only trouble was, if I wanted to listen to any of these 45s, I had to ask an adult or a taller person to put them on for me. Growing up seemed to take forever.
It’s fair to say that, by 1963, I had taken an interest in pop music.
Me and Amanda went along with Auntie Elsie to St Andrew’s Church every week and, once the singing and praying was over, we would go back to her house for a cup of tea, some cake and some Elvis, frequently alternated with songs from the soundtrack of South Pacific or The Sound of Music. I began watching Thank Your Lucky Stars and Juke Box Jury on a regular basis – just to stay informed, you understand. Oh and from 1964 Top of the Pops as well.
Pop music seemed to be everywhere, and tales of teenagers’ scandalous behaviour were always in the newspapers. Dancing and having fights mostly. I couldn’t wait to be older.
It was with Kath and Sue that I queued up round the block to watch the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night and Help at the Majestic Cinema in Macclesfield.
It was around then that I became a Beatles fan and fell victim to the Beatles marketing campaign – first, it was a Beatles Easter egg and mug, then a plastic Woolworth’s Beatles wig. This was a bit itchy and the dog kept running off with it. Then, one Christmas, I got a Beatles guitar from Santa.
Finally, I was ‘cool and with it’. I would now be able play all the Beatles’ tunes for myself. Guitars were cool-looking things and no mistake. This one was white and orange, made of plastic, and emblazoned with rather poor likenesses of the Fab Four. Ringo, in particular, looked very odd. But he was the drummer and shouldn’t really have been on the guitar in the first place. He looked more like my friend Geoff from up the road than a scouse mop-top. John Lennon looked as if he was enjoying a bit of chewy treacle toffee. If they hadn’t bothered to write their names underneath, I really wouldn’t have guessed who they were supposed to be.
My new guitar had four plastic strings knotted to four clothespeggy things at the sharp end. I didn’t think this odd. I’d seen guitars before but I’d never bothered to count how many strings were on a guitar. It looked about right. To me this was a proper guitar.
I balanced the instrument on my knee, put my fingers where I reckoned George – or was it John? I was never certain – would have put them and began to strum.
Something was dreadfully wrong. It sounded nothing like the opening sound of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. It sounded more like a bunch of rubber bands that had been badly nailed to a cigar box by a blind carpenter. Perhaps it was faulty? I adjusted the position of my digits and strummed again. Any improvement? No, worse if anything. It was definitely a dud.
What I needed was advice, so I asked Susan.
‘Sue, I’ve got this guitar but it sounds all wrong.’
‘Well, have you tried tuning it?’
Ah, tuning it, that was the problem.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t. How do I do that?’
‘Well, you twiddle the things at the end until it’s in tune.’
‘Ooh, hadn’t thought of that. Is that what they’re for? Right, I’ll give that a go. Thanks!’
So away I twiddled and, yes, the thing was sounding a bit more melodious. Then a bit more twiddling was accompanied by the sound of a tiny oil tanker running aground and the ping of one of the wires snapping in two. Never mind, I thought, one string here or there isn’t going to make much difference. I continued with my tuning until, with a creak, a groan and a much louder crack, the instrument rent itself asunder. Its back bit had come away from the front bit. Never mind, I thought again, nothing that a bit of Bostick glue won’t fix.
But in reality, I knew I was beaten. The guitar had won. I could always watch telly instead. So I did. What a con, I thought as I watched a western. I’ll write to that Brian Epstein and complain. But as his address didn’t feature on the guitar, I never did. My distrust of pop band merchandise began at a very early age
Another Christmas, Santa brought me a Sooty drum kit. This was more like it, no painful tuning and finger bending involved for this. Just bang, bang, bash, bash, and off you went. You could always trust a small orange bear who never spoke in public. (Sooty also played a magical xylophone and so I had one of those too. It wasn’t really magical. Still, I kept the faith in my musical mentor.)
The drumming was all going well until Boxing Day. I thought my banging and crashing was sounding great, better than the guitar anyway, but it seemed I was alone in that belief.
‘That Harry Corbett wants shooting!’ my father announced, his attempts at a post-dinner snooze thwarted by my percussive experiments.
I was shocked.
I had never heard my father berate anyone before, certainly not a TV celebrity. What act could Sooty’s chum have committed to warrant such cruel and unusual punishment? I guessed this would have been some heinous crime my enraged father had just read about in his newspaper.
That bear was a marvel (seen here with his omnipresent minder). Sooty, like many would-be drummers, frequently needed protection from angry parents.
‘Why, Dad, what’s he done?’ I plaintively asked.
‘Ask your mother, it was her idea.’
I was baffled.
My drumsticks disappeared shortly after that and were never seen again. I tried playing the drums with my hands but it just hurt.
Sometime later that Boxing Day, we went to visit Auntie Renee in Hazel Grove, as usual. After a couple of sherries – not me and Amanda, obviously, because everyone knows children are only allowed to drink in Jersey – a New Musical Express Poll Winners TV special came on the telly.
‘Who are this lot?’ my mother asked.
‘The Pretty Things,’ I replied knowingly, having just heard Brian Matthew do the intro.
‘Well, they don’t look very pretty to me. Look at the hair on that one, looks like a bloody girl,’ chipped in Renee with something close to venom. Perhaps it was the sherry but my elders seemed a bit antagonised by this particular beat combo. The Stones were on later and they received an even angrier reception from the senior Morrises.
‘Ooh, turn it off, I can’t stand this rubbish. Let’s play Cluedo instead.’
Impressed by the reaction this music produced in my elders. I made up my mind that I would no longer like the Beatles, it would be the Stones for me from now on. They didn’t make rubbish guitars and they didn’t smile.
It was that simple really. You got asked ‘Who do you like then, the Beatles or the Stones?’ Like black and white, chalk and cheese, jam and marmalade, there were only the two choices. You had to be one or the other or you were no one.
You’re absolutely sure about all this are you?
Only I don’t think Brian Mathews ever introduced the NME Poll Winners show and I’m fairly sure that the Pretty Things weren’t ever on it with the Rolling Stones.
Oh and while we’re at it, the NME awards were shown in April, not December.
Are you sure you’re not just making all this stuff up?
See the tricks that memory plays.
All right, maybe it was Easter Monday, not Boxing Day. But I’m sure the Pretty Things were on. I remember that very clearly.
I also remember the Cluedo game vividly. We argued about whether it should be Monopoly or Cluedo, and Cluedo won. It was Professor Plum in the Library with the candlestick.
I definitely remember it that way. I’m certain.
Maybe your memory is playing tricks on you. It wouldn’t be the first time. When was this then exactly?
Well, 1965 or maybe it was 1964.
You can’t really be certain about anything, can you?
You know what they say: if you can remember the sixties you weren’t really there.
* * *
The main TV s
how that I and probably any boy my age was preoccupied with at that time was Doctor Who. It was like nothing I’d seen before. Unlike Fireball XL5, this had real people in it, not puppets. And it had that really eerie hypnotic yet scary theme tune. I never missed it. I remember sitting at Auntie Elsie’s on Saturday evening waiting for the football results to finish. Doctor Who was usually preceded by Juke Box Jury for Kath and Sue. I was at my auntie’s when I saw the episode with the first Dalek and was scared out of my wits. Yes, I literally did hide behind Elsie’s settee until it had gone. ‘What was that?’ It was the talk of the playground come Monday.
Being a time traveller’s assistant looked like a good job to have. I would add that one to my list of replies to the ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ question.
‘Well, either a fighter pilot, a time traveller’s assistant or a spy.’
That none of these career choices seemed widely available in the Macclesfield area was a little disappointing. But the place seemed behind the times, old-fashioned. The future was elsewhere.
Growing up, America was where we were headed. Sitting watching the Pye TV was to be indoctrinated into everything American. Gerry Anderson’s fantastic puppet shows – essential viewing for any sixties schoolboy – had at their heart locations that were clearly a long way west of Macclesfield. OK, I know the later ones such as The Secret Service – Prof. Stanley Unwin as a puppet, anyone? – and Joe 90 had a bit of a quirky English bent but they were a bit naff. The stuff that made those first and biggest impressions – Four Feather Falls, Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray and the unsurpassable Thunderbirds – were all set in some kind of mythical America. And OK, I know Lady Penelope lived in London and there was general globetrotting (in a marionette sense) in Thunderbirds but the Tracys were certainly of American descent. Then there were the Westerns – Wagon Train, The Lone Ranger, Bonanza – ‘in color’ the TV lied. You always knew where you were with Westerns: black hat bad, white hat good and Injuns with flaming arrows, dang varmints. The USA was where it was happening and the TV allowed you to visit and share what might one day be yours.
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