I tried not to look shifty wolfing down the most delicious cheese on toast I’d ever tasted, and I was off on the last bus back to Macc, wondering how the hell we’d managed to get away with that one. His mum never even raised an eyebrow.
I could now see why Hawkwind were probably smoking mountains of dope. It certainly made you think differently about things and music sounded ten times better than when you were straight. I even thought I finally understood what jazz was about, so I went and bought a Charlie Parker record. It sounded terrible.
So that was idea number two out of the way, and I think you could say it was an unbridled success. Now for idea number one . . .
The band scheme.
I’d mithered and cajoled my way into getting a guitar. I was hoping for a nice Strat or a Flying V but settled for an Arbiter six-string acoustic and a book by Bert Weedon called Play in a Day. That sounded promising so I got an Alan Lomax book of American folk songs so I would have something to play the following day. I had learned a valuable lesson from my experience with the Beatles’ instrument and insisted that the bloke in the shop tuned the guitar before I left. He even chucked in something he called pitch pipes. I thought these were for playing along with, like a harmonica or something.
A day came and went and my knowledge of guitarmanship had not gone up in the slightest. That book must be crap. It couldn’t be me, could it?
So I went to a guitar teacher on Saturday mornings. Perhaps he had a better book or some way of cheating. The first lesson consisted of learning the nursery rhyme/folk tune ‘Bobby Shafto’ and one chord. Still, once I’d got the hang of it I’d be on to something by the Who next. But no, it was just ‘Bobby bloody Shafto’ over and over again. This couldn’t be right. It made my fingers hurt. I persevered.
But not for long. At school, I had discovered the dulcimer, a stringed instrument that was dead easy to play. It had three strings and made a lovely sound. It was acoustic and great for folky ballads – Joni Mitchell played one a lot – but not really rock and roll. I planned to put a pickup on it and, with an amp and distortion pedal, invent the world’s first electric dulcimer. It turned out that using a hammer and nails on such a delicate instrument was not a great idea. I put its splintered remains away in a cupboard and never mentioned it to anyone at school.
The band idea, though, had got a bit of interest at school. Bert and his brother Kim (by now better known as Snot) were in and a couple of other lads, Mark Bolshaw and Mike Marshall, were very interested. Phil reckoned ‘Axiom Kinetic Truths’ would be a good name for our band, but when I pointed out it was a bit of a mouthful he was slightly miffed.
‘Fine. I was thinking of using that for my first solo album anyway.’
Thinking up band names and song titles was something I did all the time. All of them were terrible but that didn’t put me off – it made double chemistry go quicker.
Bert, I think it was, came up with the name ‘The Sunshine Valley Dance Band’ with the reasoning that such a harmless and wholesome-sounding name would enable us to get lots of bookings in totally unsuspecting straight places. It was subversive, he said.
‘That sounds cool,’ I said, but I didn’t know what subversive meant.
So ‘The Sunshine Valley Dance Band’ it was.
Taking advantage of Phil’s mum and her night work once again, we settled on his residence as the venue for our first rehearsal/audition. One Saturday night, we set to work making a racket, and a fairly tuneless racket at that. To cut a long, boozy, tortuous story short, it was obvious that not only Phil but everyone present was a better guitarist than me, so I reverted to type and started banging things. His mum’s pots and pans mostly.
‘You can be the drummer,’ was Phil’s verdict, ‘and you can apologise to my mum about the broken crockery.’
We got one song done and called it ‘The Worm Song’. To call it a song may be going a bit far. A loud noise accompanied with shouting the word ‘worms’ is probably about right.
God bless Mrs Sturgess. There’s weren’t many people in those days who’d leave their house in the care of a bunch of lads with a collection of scrounged microphones, amps, guitars and beer. We did our best to tidy up but there was a degree of collateral damage. It was pretty obvious we’d have to find an alternative venue for any future rehearsals. And I’d have to figure out how you played the drums.
It was around this time that I first heard Van Der Graaf Generator. I’d seen the name about a lot in the Manchester Evening News gig ads. They always seemed to be on at the University or UMIST. That gave me the idea that they were a local band.
Van der Graaf Generator was an intriguing name for a band, and it made me wonder what the hell they sounded like. So I borrowed their second album off Bert and became a fan for life.
It was the drama in Van der Graaf’s music that got me. That slightly insane melodrama. I loved their magnum opus, the twenty-three minute ‘A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers’. It was the tale of a solitary lighthouse keeper losing his mind. Heavy stuff, in prog terms. They made a very raw and intense sound. Nothing as whimsical as Genesis or as trickily complicated as King Crimson, but still something quint essentially English. Their singer Peter Hammill had done a few solo records and these were even rawer and more minimal. I played his Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night daily – it was a very affecting record. (Yes, I’m well aware of how naff some prog titles sound today.) ‘Music to accompany a nervous breakdown’ was how one music paper described Van der Graaf. The darkness and depth of their sound is what drew me to them.
Van der Graaf also had an interesting drummer. I listened to Guy Evans’s drumming on the records to see if I could figure out what he was playing, but just got confused. It was tricky and complicated. I’d never be able to do that.
Keith Moon was a more obvious inspiration – who wouldn’t want to be Keith Moon? He was the world’s most (in)famous rock drummer. But listening to Who records was no help either. I couldn’t make head nor tail out of what was going in the Drum Dept.
I went to see the Who at the Belle Vue in Manchester and did my best to watch what Keith Moon did in person. It seemed mostly to involve acting as a human drumstick dispenser and juggler. Apart from that, it was a classic rock gig. Townshend’s windmill guitar, Daltry lassooing the microphone, and an almost stationary Joh n Entwistle. Keith Moon was exciting and entertaining to watch, an amazing drummer, but I was never going to be Keith Moon was I? There was only ever going to be one Keith Moon.
So instead I settled on Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground as a musical inspiration. Then, if I ever got to be any good, maybe Jaki from Can or Guy from Van der Graaf. Hey, even Ringo had a couple of good riffs – just a couple.
Watching the Who did give me one idea, though: get plenty of drums and people will think you know what you’re doing.
This was a common theory in the early seventies. All the top drummers had two bass drums. Added to that, I thought that the more drums you had the more likely it was that sooner or later you’d succeed in hitting one.
I began carefully studying the drummers that appeared on TOTP every week. The camera never seemed to linger on them for long, though, and it seemed to me that all they were doing was going ‘boom-crack-boom, boom-crack’ most of the time. I could do that – who couldn’t? In fact, if you didn’t overthink it, this drummer lark looked simple. Most of them seemed to play more or less the same beat whatever the tune. I tried banging out ‘boom-crack-boom, boom-crack’ on a table top – easy. There was none of that nonsense with six strings but only five fingers to put on them. None of the blowing and finger waggling and none of that play-a-C rubbish. Why did it always start with a C? Surely it should be an A. I knew my alphabet and the way it related to music made no sense to me at all. Not to mention all that sharp and flat codswallop. It seemed to me there was none of that convolution. Plus I’d never heard of a drummer going out of tune. Why had I never realised this before? It seemed perfect.
Instant gratific
ation was what I was after and the way of the drummer seemed to promise that. However, there was the small matter of the equipment. I dug about in the old toy box looking for the Sooty kit. I knew it was tiny but it could be a good gimmick and you’ve got to have a gimmick (one of the first rules of showbiz, I’d been told). The bits of it that could be found were useless, completely wrecked. If I hadn’t know, better I would have said it had been blasted by a shotgun at very close range, perhaps by a close relative, so that was a nonstarter.
It was going to be difficult to persuade my parents that I had finally found my musical calling after binning the clarinet and pestering them incessantly for a guitar, which now lay neglected and gathering dust in the corner of the bedroom. I would have to work like a demon, and be really nice and pleasant to everyone. Both things near impossible for a teenage boy in the 1970s.
My first attempts at putting the case for a percussion-based career met with a resounding ‘No!’ but that did not deter me. This was only to be expected. It would have to be another war of attrition.
I read interviews with famous stickmen (the 1970s percussive equivalent of an axeman) and picked up a couple of things. Mainly that drumming required dexterity or coordination – specifically ambidexterity at the very least. I got the impression that this was a skill easily mastered. Can you pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time? You can? Wallop, you’re a drummer! I took to head patting/tummy rubbing at every opportunity. This then moved on to head patting/tummy rubbing while simultaneously tapping my feet. A little bit like dancing, but a more stationary kind that didn’t involve women pretending to be men. The other thing that drumming required was the ability to count reliably.
‘Don’t worry, most of the time it’s only up to four,’ a pro drummer said in one of the interviews – hey, I could do that in French and German at a pinch.
Given that all you needed was a flat surface to hit, you could both practise drumming and annoy friends and relatives anytime, anywhere. Another win-win! Being a corner-cutting lazy bastard, I had found my musical medium.
6
ISOLATION
Hobbo, who we now referred to as ‘the dealer’ or more commonly ‘the man’, had gone missing from his usual school-gate skulking spots.
‘Probably been busted,’ we reckoned and this was hampering our quest for more mind-altering substances a little, but only a little. For Phil (again) somehow got hold of something called MIMS – Monthly Index of Medical Specialities. It was a medical guide for prescription medicines with colour pictures and descriptions of effects, side effects, dosage, etc. It was like an I-spy guide to DIY drug abuse. I would surreptitiously go through the bathroom cabinets at home searching for old pill bottles and then refer to this handy guide to see if there was anything worth nicking. Usually there wasn’t, but MIMS made no mention of what could happen if they were combined with Pernod and sherry in large quantities, so there was the odd bit of blind testing. But nothing that came close to two quids’ worth of hash.
There was another hipster type, called Adam, in our class, and he was a sort of off-and-on friend. His parents, so he told us, were fab-and-groovy types – his dad was an actual artist. Adam’s problem, as far as I was concerned, was his fondness for Yes and the early works of Marc Bolan. Now, T. Rex were all right – ‘Ride a White Swan’, ‘Jeepster’, ‘Get It On’ were all great singles – but Bolan’s first album, My People Were Fair etc., was just airy-fairy nonsense. Adam wouldn’t have it: Bolan was God as far as he was concerned and he wouldn’t let me forget it. His other boast was that he had an actual real live girlfriend, who he claimed hung out with a bunch of ‘really far-out guys’.
One morning he rolled into class, copy of Prophet, Seers and Sages, T. Rex’s crap second album, under his arm, and starts up with this confession.
‘You’ll never guess what happened last night . . .’
Expecting some sort of sordid and highly improbable sexual revelations, I tried to appear disinterested. ‘Not sure if I want to know actually.’
‘I took a trip.’
‘Oh yes, where to?’
‘Outer space, man. Outer space!’
‘Oh bullshit. Fuck off.’
‘No, I went round to one of my bird’s mates and he laid a trip on me. It was like cosmic, man.’
‘No really, fuck off.’
‘No it’s true, man, I’ve still not come down.’
‘Hey Phil, have you heard this? Adam’s tripping.’
At which point Mr Newbold entered the room and we pretended to be interested in the conjugation of French verbs.
Break time came and Adam was at it again.
‘It was really cosmic, this lamp turned into a planet and we flew into it. Totally cosmic.’ Cosmic was Adam’s favourite adjective. Not at all tiresome. ‘It was full of these weird creatures that could talk just by thinking. All green-and-purple-coloured they were.’
‘You got any more of it then?’
‘No . . . but Charlie’s going up to Manchester next week to score. He’ll get some for you.’
‘Could he get us some pot as well?’ I asked hopefully.
Even if he couldn’t, just the acid on its own would be great.
I did think it a little odd that Adam’s psychedelic adventure didn’t sound much like the ones described in the books of Tim Leary. Perhaps it was some really strong stuff and, anyway, he did say he was still out of it. I found it a little suspicious and didn’t expect much to come of it.
My plans to become a drummer hadn’t exactly set the world on fire either. I’d borrowed a pair of sticks (which allegedly used to belong to Woody Woodmansey from the Spiders from Mars), bought the Gene Krupa Drum Method book – which almost made sense – and was tapping away on the settee in the hope I would get taken seriously. I trawled through the Manchester Evening News classifieds and the small ads in Melody Maker and Sounds, hoping to find some drums in my price range – free to ridiculously cheap – but they all seemed a bit on the expensive side.
I’d started paying even more attention to the drumming on records and at gigs. I’d seen Buddy Rich on TV – the greatest drummer in the world, they said. I thought he was just an arrogant showoff. He sounded like an angry man urgently rolling a barrel full of marbles down a never-ending flight of stairs. There was no way I was going to be doing any of that stuff. Besides, it looked too much like hard work. No, to me the most interesting drummers were the ones who kept it simple like Jaki Liebezeit or Moe Tucker. I didn’t like the showing-off thing. Even back then, I figured the drummer’s job was to hold the band together, not to stand out. It’s a thankless task but someone’s got to do it.
My mother was still laughing sceptically at my plans for a career in ‘music’.
‘You? In a band? You couldn’t say boo to a goose! You’d be home in no time. You never wear that nice check shirt I bought you . . .’
My father wasn’t impressed with my new choice of instrument either.
‘Drummers, Stephen, I’ve never met a sane one yet. They all end up taking morphine and drinking absinthe, rotting their brains. You don’t want to end up like that, do you?’
‘No,’ I lied, ‘but it’s all different nowadays,’ hoping he had forgotten the Hawkwind gig, which he hadn’t. I wheedled and I cajoled, I wouldn’t give it a rest. I told him I was saving up and I’d even started selling off some naffish records to raise a bit of cash. (These naff records were a result of me misunderstanding the terms of the Britannia Music Club. I had been lured into membership by the opening offer of free albums, and expected our relationship to remain on those terms for the rest of time. But they started sending me shit ones that I was expected to pay for every month. Always read the small print.)
As part of the deal to accomplish my percussion purchase, I found it best that I keep my end of the gig deal and show an interest in my father’s musical heritage. I had still not been forgiven for Hawkwind.
Keeping my end of the bargain, I was taken by my father, twic
e, to the Southport Floral Hall (quite a journey from Macclesfield; well, it was with my Dad driving). First it was to see Count Basie and His Orchestra, and then a few weeks later Marlene Dietrich. Count Basie was all right, a lot better than I expected, to be honest, but I really thought Marlene Dietrich was fantastic. She was getting on a bit but she still had that charisma. A pre-war Berlin decadent chanteuse vibe, all in gold lamé and top hat and tails. A kind of Nico for the old folks. She was undeniably a star that refused to fade, transcending the showbiz cliché shit.
I had to admit to Clifford that I had enjoyed both gigs more than I expected, but especially Marlene’s.
I love that quote of hers: ‘Do you think this is glamorous? That it’s a great life and that I do it for my health? Well it isn’t. Maybe once, but not now.’
I only wish I’d read it sooner.
* * *
Meeting girls was a large incentive in considering rock music as a possible career path. The problem was that I had noticed that most of my fellow gig-goers back in the seventies were men.
Unsurprisingly, females didn’t seem to like the music of Frank Zappa. They certainly didn’t like Captain Beefheart and, so my friends told me, they didn’t like Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Yes much either. You can’t really blame them for that though, can you?
‘Girls buy singles, boys buy triple concept albums,’ some record exec once said (probably). He was a man (definitely).
OK, maybe I am stereotyping a bit here. In fact, ‘glam rock’ had its fair share of female devotees, especially in the Roxy/Ferry genre (the roots of part of punk and new romanticism, I reckon). I once threw myself into the carriage of the last train back to Macc and found it proudly occupied by a troop of beguiling sirens heading home from the Roxy night at Pips, looking for the most part like they had just escaped from a mild 1940s air-raid drinks party (if there was such a thing) with the odd pink-satin-tie-wearing spiv in tow. Having just legged it from a Van der Graaf Generator gig, I was shunned. Even lighting up the old black and gold Sobranie (usually a guaranteed conversation starter) failed to impress.
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