Noted

16. Tribe

With a Number Six clamped between his teeth, Maggot beats his fists on the café table in time to Chicago’s ‘I’m a Man’. Coffee cups rattle in their Pyrex saucers. The tribe lets out a cheer with a high content of jeer. ‘You’re a man, are you Maggot?’

He pounds his fists all the harder, jerking his head back and forward as he bellows along with the chorus: I’m a man, yes I am …

Maggot wears a grubby denim jacket with a metal BSA badge on the collar, BSA being the make of his motorcycle parked outside. He works in a garage, and engine oil had seeped so thoroughly into his every pore that he has a slightly dirty look about him even when fresh out of the bath. This, together with the grim line of his mouth and judging eyes, gives an impression of ferocity that compensates for his lack of height (at fourteen I am taller than Maggot, although he is five years older). Maggot has none of the fey, hippyish characteristics affected by other male members of this tribe I seem to have joined. Maggot is not a hairy, as such; more of a biker. And, of course, according to his echoed words of affirmation, a man. Not a boy, like me.

We’re in the Royal Café in Queens Road, just off Southend High Street, because that’s where everybody in the tribe goes on a Saturday. It’s rammed. Outside in the street, a head named Mick Keller—black-bearded, rangy-looking, handsome—is tying some girl to a lamppost with her scarf. It’s a very long scarf, and she has a very short skirt. She doesn’t seem to mind being tied to the lamppost by Mick, in fact she’s smiling at him. Mick smiles too, though more wolfishly. Having secured the girl he does this weird, cat-like half-dance around her, hands extended like a stage mesmerist. It’s sort of hysterical, but there is a Jaggeresque grace to his movements that is, actually, quite mesmerising. The girl’s laughter, I think, has a slightly nervous edge.

This scene draws further cheers from the tribe, who have torn themselves away from watching Maggot to press themselves against the steamed-up window of the Royal. There’s no jeer in these cheers. That’s a man, they seem to say.

As the record on the Royal’s jukebox changes to The Witch’s Promise by Jethro Tull, I look around for Maggot. Alone at his table now, he scowls and stubs out his cigarette.

It was in a more down-at-heel café close to Chalkwell Park that I first heard about the Royal on Saturdays, the source of the information being a park-football friend named Tony Galvin. Tony is several years older than me, as are all the tribe members; though it doesn’t seem to be a problem if you have long hair, are into the right sort of music and like aimless discussions about what is wrong with the world. Tony said I should go there, that I’d enjoy it—and it was while we were having this conversation, drinking milky coffee out of glass cups in this other, slightly crappier café, that Maggot came and slumped down in the seat opposite us. As he did so, there came the high-pitched whine of a moped from the road outside. ‘I’ll catch him up in a minute,’ said Maggot, nonchalantly thumbing a cigarette from its packet.

Tony made an introduction and Maggot gave me a wary look.

Unnerved by his air of hostility, but feeling that some attempt at conversation was required, I blurted out the stock question among my age group: ‘what school do you go to?’.

With a bitter laugh, Maggot looked off towards the direction in which the moped had vanished.

It was September by the time I finally plucked up the courage to visit the Royal. Tony had gone back to university. I was kicking myself: now I would have to go alone. There would probably be no-one there I recognised: worse, they might not be as friendly as Tony without him there. They might ignore me—or rip the piss. As I rounded the corner into Queens Road I’d more or less decided just to put my head around the door and have a look then go away again. Just to see what all the fuss was about. But when I walked in I realised at once with huge relief that Maggot was in there. With a surly nod of recognition, he licensed me to join him and his friends at their table.

That day I met Mick Keller and a head called Richard and a whole load of other heads. Later there was an all-night party where I met two female heads, Beverley and Gail, who were kind and spent a lot of time talking to me as I was ‘safer’ than the older male heads who kept trying to grope them.

It still seems strange that these older, cooler people would accept me, and I work hard at looking the part, wearing the tribal garb of loon pants and bumpers. From the Army Surplus Store I acquire a greatcoat and a bush hat that I wear everywhere (one Saturday I go into town without the bush hat and nobody recognises me).

An important aspect of looking the part is to have the right albums to carry around under your arm. Usually, given my lack of cash, these are borrowed: King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King was a favourite for a long time because its cover—a garishly painted face screaming in horror—made an impact even from across the street. Today, however, is a chance to change that: I’ve saved up enough pocket money to actually buy an album of my own to carry around (and maybe occasionally listen to). The only trouble is, I’m not sure which one.

Once Maggot has stomped off in a huff and Mick has concluded his mesmerisation activities by getting a phone number from the girl he tied up, I broach the matter with him and Richard. I’ve sort of had my eye on the new Led Zeppelin album, Led Zeppelin III, but having read a rather sniffy review in Melody Maker I’m not sure if their new, more folky direction, is not a false path—and if indeed they haven’t maybe peaked all together. A version of the opening track from their previous album, Whole Lotta Love, is now the theme tune of Top of the Pops, and you can’t get much more peaked than that. Going mainstream is a false path. Have Led Zeppelin sold out? Would it do me more harm than good to be carrying their latest album around?

We discuss other people’s albums for a while before I bring up Led Zeppelin III—casually, neutrally; watching carefully to see what their reaction will be. They’re the cool guys, after all; they should know if it’s still all right to like Led Zeppelin.

To my surprise, neither of them seems to have any fixed opinion. ‘Why don’t we go and listen to a few tracks, Man?’ says Mick. ‘Yeah,’ says Richard, mentioning the name of a record shop in the High Street that has booths in its basement. Though I know of this shop, it has never occurred to me before that I would be allowed to use one of these booths. ‘And you’d … come with me?’

‘Of course.’

Draining our coffees we saunter out into the High Street. Pretty soon the two older guys run into people they know and we stop to chat. The band Yes are booked to play at the Tech college tonight, but there are rumours circulating that they might not turn up. ‘They’re blowing it out, Man,’ says one of them, a bearded head in a rather smelly Afghan coat; ‘I heard it from the roadies.’

‘What would the roadies know?’ I chime in; ‘They just hang around and give them blowjobs backstage.’

‘You’re thinking of groupies,’ says Mick.

‘—Which is a shame,’ continued the Afghan coat, ‘because they’ve got this hot new guitarist, Steve … Watt, or something.’

‘Howe,’ says Richard.

‘Does the bass player still dress in a Superman costume?’ someone else says.

We carry on down the High Street, which is gradually being pedestrianised. At the point where the pedestrianisation runs out and traffic reasserts itself, I remember running into a friend of my own age on this spot a few weeks earlier, his face grave, but flushed with excitement over some news he had to share. ‘Hendrix is dead,’ he said.

‘Who’s Hendrix?’ I replied.

The basement of the record shop smells of patchouli oil and damp Afghan coats. It’s too warm, and thick with a fug of fag smoke. The booths themselves are, if anything, fuggier. And all full. We have to wait a while for our turn before Richard, Mick and I can cram together into one of them, sit down, and wait for the guy behind the counter upstairs to drop the needle on Led Zeppelin III. Oh, the anticipation.

Side one, track one. The Immigrant Song starts and it is reassuringly riffy, and not folky at all, in fact. Immediately our heads start nodding in time. Richard’s hands beat a rhythm against his denimed knees. Track two starts with an acoustic 12-string guitar and some sort of tabla drums, but when Plant starts wailing away and the cinematic stereo strings power in you can’t argue this isn’t classic Led Zeppelin. There’s even some Moog-ish wah synthesizer on the ending, segueing us into the next track, Celebration Day, which is to my mind, great. But what do I know? In peripheral vision I watch anxiously for signs of approbation or disapproval; the imperial thumbs-up or thumbs-down from these two Caesars of cool.

We’re about 16 bars into the next track, the slow blues Since I’ve Been Loving You, when Richard says, ‘I’d buy it.’

On the bus home, I sit on the top deck and examine the album’s gatefold sleeve. It’s a fancy and intricate thing with images that show up through holes punched in the sleeve, on an inner wheel that you rotate with your thumb. Such value.

I listen to the album on the record player in my bedroom, more or less secure in my choice now, and decide that Jimmy Page is a far better guitarist than Eric Clapton. Clapton was a false path. I remove the poster of Eric Clapton from the wall then, slowing the record player down from 33⅓ to 18 (almost half speed) put the needle down on the slow blues track, Since I’ve Been Loving You, and pick up my guitar. Painfully, note by note, I try to replicate what I hear. My respect for Jimmy Page’s dexterity increases bar by bar. My attempts at emulation, however, are not even close.

Later that evening I get a bus to the Tech and hand in at the door the ticket I have purchased with the change left over from buying Led Zeppelin III. Yes have not cancelled the gig, and it goes ahead with me watching, slightly distracted by the psychedelic light show, which includes a projected graphic of a couple having sex in various positions. The bass player does not wear a Superman suit, and none of the tribe turns up, despite all of them having said they were going to. The new guitarist Steve Howe plays blindingly fast—although not mindlessly, repetitively fast like Alvin Lee of Ten Years After or numbingly fast like Eric Clapton in his Cream years; there’s a lot of clever stuff in there like country picking and harmonics and classical stuff and God knows what else. A bit tooclever, perhaps. He is not my new guitar hero.

My new guitar hero is not Steve Howe or Clapton or even Jimmy Page, or Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, but someone who was already dead when I first heard his name in the High Street a few weeks earlier. Burned into my memory is the jaw-slackening moment when I first played the single Voodoo Child (Slight Return), with its funereally black sleeve, purchased on the day that Tony Coppin told me he was dead.

I don’t listen to Hendrix at 16 RPM and pick out the notes he is playing. What would be the point? He isn’t playing any notes, so far as I can hear. What he’s doing is making sounds: sounds like weather, sounds like traffic, like gunfire; the sound of your own blood throbbing in your head, of a baby crying in the night, a maltreated dog whining in pain, machinery churning, thunder rumbling, a wind that whispers then howls, blowing sheets of stinging rain in your face; screams, farts, burps; the groaning and sighing of all humanity wishing for a better world and not getting it. No other guitarist comes close, no other guitarist is even trying to do the thing that Hendrix does (or did, now that he is dead). What a musician: what a human being. What a man.

15. Love

‘Got a shirt you could lend me, Doggo?’

’Try this one.’ He passes me a white shirt, only lightly creased—astonishing given that it’s spent four days in the sports hold-all he has for luggage (you can tell his family doesn’t travel much).

’Thanks! Don’t suppose you’ve got any trousers, have you?’

‘Didn’t you pack anything?’

I thought that Mum and I had been thorough in our preparations for this skiing trip. In one of her periodic fits of extravagance she bought every one of the items on the duplicated sheets handed out by the school, including thermal undershirts, long johns, two pairs of ski-pants, a weather-proof anorak and some snow boots I knew I would never use because they looked like something a 90 year-old woman from Lapland might wear. Meanwhile I worked my way through the exercises diagrammed on the sheets, desperately trying to get my ectomorphic frame—winnowed out by childhood TB and too many nights under the covers reading books by torchlight—into some sort of shape for the slopes.

Somehow it hasn’t occurred to either my mother or me that at some point the skiing must stop and there will be evenings. And socialising. But no-one in our immediate family has every been on a ski trip before. There is also no way it could have been predicted, I suppose, that the hotel would throw an actual party for us towards the end of the holiday—a party with actual girls moreover, from a school in Scotland; and in particular a blue-eyed, brown-haired pharmacist’s daughter who has seriously got amongst me since the moment our eyes locked over a table-football machine in the bar two nights ago.

Returning to my room with the borrowed shirt and trousers I dress a tad more carefully than usual. I’ve never previously given much thought to fashion beyond a concern to avoid the sort of errors that cause trouble at school—such as turning up for a geography field trip where you are allowed to wear your own clothes in a pair of Levis you have ill-advisedly allowed your mother to buy without supervision, and which your classmates immediately recognise as bearing the wrong coloured back-pocket tag—prompting the taunt: ‘Helmer’s wearing Junior Levis’; and placing a stain on my record that will take years to erase.

But now I do give a thought to clothes, since Fiona (that’s the pharmacist’s daughter) will be at the party. And to hair. Appearance suddenly seems really important. I feel an unaccustomed urge to in some small way approximate the suavity of childhood role models such as Adam Adamant, James Bond and Napoleon Solo. Though the sight that stares back at me from the mirror—sticky-out ears, shock of disobedient blonde hair, nose burned to a violent red—looks anything but suave.

Having made the best of a bad job I join the throng going down to dinner, through corridors with their wintergreen smell that are flooded in daytime with Alpine light of an austere brilliance. Descending to the ground-floor we find glasses of some sparkling white wine set out on the tables, and unaccountably, they’re for us. This is the French part of Switzerland, which also means that the food is good, if unfamiliar.

After dinner we make for the hotel bar where I quickly find Fiona and we lock eyes again and then, for the first time, hands. We’ve spent a couple of evenings in this bar together since that game of table football; drinking cokes, putting coins in the jukebox and generally getting to know one another. But tonight is special. It’s the last we’ll have together before we both go home. After an hour or two of enraptured chatting Doggo, who is also paired off, with another girl from Fiona’s school, suggests a walk.

We follow the road out of Champéry for a bit, the four of us, and after a while I take Fiona’s hand. It feels awkward at first because we can’t get in step: I haven’t yet learned the trick of adjusting my pace to that of someone who is shorter than me and who walks less quickly. So I put my arm around her shoulder instead and this seems to work. She leans into me. Stars blaze ferociously in the clear air, while the moon picks out snow-covered roofs in the valley below, and colours purple outcrops of rock in the alp that looms above our heads. After a while the other couple fall behind, and soon we notice they’ve come to a stop. Fiona and I look at each other, giggle, and walk on, pressing closer. When we are around the next bend it is our turn to move against the mountain, synchronising perfectly at last.

Snow is falling. Chill air prickles the skin of our faces, making the warmth of her mouth all the more startling as it meets mine. An unexpected voltage runs through me, reminiscent of a time on the top bunk in the room I share with my brother at home when, out of a mixture of curiosity and boredom, I stuck my thumb in the bulbless light socket overhead.

How long does it last, our huddle against the alp? Time not measurable by clocks, atoms or stars. It’s time out of time. And who decides when it should end? Probably the sensible pharmacist’s daughter, whose favourite record is Creedence Clearwater Revival’s bouncy Bad Moon Rising, where mine is the slushy Something from The Beatles’ Abbey Road. Both of these records are on the hotel jukebox in the bar, and as we head back there I am amazed at how smoothly and easily this has all gone; the cheesy pickup lines and tricks of coercion passed around at school proving to be completely unnecessary. It’s so simple, I think to myself; you talk to each other about your likes and dislikes, your hopes and dreams for the future, you look into each other’s eyes a couple of times and then without thought or calculation come together. (Come Together, flipside of Something, is also on heavy rotation back at the bar, popular for the innuendo in its title and reference to ejaculation in the line, ‘he shoots Coca-Cola’).

I feel as if Fiona and I have been moved on a mountain ski-lift to a new stratum of air, where we can pause and look up towards the exosphere of adulthood, which doesn’t seem so bad from this vantage. Parents and siblings aren’t the only bodies in the universe that have a gravitational pull on our affections now. Far beyond the orbit of family and home, life seems suddenly full of new, stellar possibilities.

Back at the bar we sit and hold hands covertly in the fold of a banquette, listening to the jukebox. It’s songs have grown extra meaning. ‘I’m leaving on a jet plane,’ sing Peter, Paul and Mary. ‘I don’t want to leave her now,’ coos George Harrison. The reality of our situation begins to dawn.

We swap addresses. Back home we write a couple of letters each, letters full of longing and sadness, then stop. The practical difficulties of continuing a relationship when we live at opposite ends of the British Isles are too starkly clear to ignore. Gravity reasserts itself.

I spend most of that Christmas maundering around listening to Abbey Road and annoying my family with my listless sighing at mealtimes. Come New Year we have a family party and, feeling almost a grown-up, now that I have loved and lost, drink alcohol as if I were a grown-up. Next morning reveals a puddle of puke on the carpet next to my bed, and a sadness unlike anything I have known before. Limping to the window, I look out at the sky. It is leaden and dull. I feel an anxious sense of something big and horrible on its way.

Meanwhile, Mum works grimly at the carpet behind me, applying some noxious-smelling cleaning product that will bleach the puke stain into permanence and taint the air of the room for months to come.

‘Welcome to 1970,’ she says bitterly.

14 Really You and Really Me (1969)

‘Can I be in your band, Helmer?’

‘How do you know I’ve got a band?’

‘Doggo told me. He’s telling everybody. Raw Guts. Great name. What sort of music do you play?’

‘Blues-based rock. You know, like Zep.’

‘What’s “Zep”?

I roll my eyes. ‘Fucking hell, Regan; haven’t you heard of Led Zeppelin?’

It’s breaktime and we’re in the bushes behind the school, where all the cool kids go to smoke. Only Michael Regan isn’t a cool kid and doesn’t smoke; he just comes to the bushes to hang around and annoy people like me who actually are smoking.

‘If I listen to Led Zeppelin,’ says Regan; ‘can I be in your band?’

‘What do you play?’

‘Guitar.’

‘Do you even have a guitar?’

‘I’ve got a Fender Stratocaster.’

‘You haven’t got a Fender Stratocaster.’ I know this because he’s Michael Regan, who is not at all cool and whose only claim to notability is that he can do freaky things with his body like breathing through his eyes.

‘Would you like me if I did have a Fender Stratocaster?’

‘Not even then. Anyway, you can’t be in our band because we’ve already got a lead guitarist and that’s me.’

‘I could play the other guitar: what’s it called—?’

‘—Rhythm guitar. Led Zeppelin haven’t got a rhythm guitarist.’

‘Have you got a guitar—I mean, an electric guitar?’

‘Just fuck off, Regan.’

Despite my lack of an electric guitar, Raw Guts is a concept at an advanced stage of visualisation. Apart from the name and the style of music we’ll play we have already decided the clothes and how we’ll stand on stage. Doggo has drawn a picture of this in his rough book; Doggo in the middle—he’s the lead singer, being the tallest and the most popular—wearing a suede jacket with fringes along the arms like Roger Daltrey’s, me on his right-hand side in loon pants blazing out guitar riffs and looking mean. We’re growing our hair. We don’t have a drummer or a bassist as yet, however that’s only a matter of time: as my encounter with Michael Regan in the bushes shows, word is getting round.

We’re also working on our attitude. ‘It’s important how you look at people on stage,’ says Doggo.

‘Yeah,’ I agree.

‘I want to look at everyone really mean, like that prefect in the dinner hall who used to stare at you like he wanted to pull your arms and legs off.’

‘Which prefect?’ I scour my memory for an older boy fitting this description, and bring to mind an image of two prefects who together used to police the lunchtime queue. They would stand together at the end of the hall like the figures on the Trumpton clock. One had a pretty, painted-doll face, while the other had the lantern-jawed, scowling demeanour of a psychopathic grave-digger in a Hammer Horror movie. I decide that it is the latter of these two Doggo is talking about.

‘I don’t know his name,’ says Doggo; He left last year. ‘—But really scary looking: that’s how I’m going to look at people when I’m on stage.’

We need to cultivate this attitude because we are into ‘heavy’ music. Doggo lent me his Led Zeppelin album (we call them ‘albums’ now, not ‘LPs’), which came out this year and which is very heavy. I carried it around at school a bit to impress people, then took it home and listened to it on the record player in my bedroom, slowing it down from 33 RPM to 16 RPM so I could work out the guitar parts on my starter guitar. Even at that slower speed this is not easy, since Jimmy Page is a genius and plays blindingly fast.

In the course of this research I discover that my grandfather, who has come to live with us, does not like Led Zeppelin either at 33 RPM or at 16 RPM. He objects to them very strongly, in fact. He says that Led Zeppelin is not music at all. But then the only music he seems to like is military band music—and even then, not when it is over the credits to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which Dad and I both like a lot, but which he does not care for as it features just the kind of long haired lefty piss-takers he feels the BBC employs too many of anyway.

If I am to be ruthlessly honest, I have to say there are parts of the Led Zeppelin album I myself find difficult to listen to, not that I would admit this to Doggo, my grandfather or anyone else. I’m fine with the straight-ahead rockers like Communication Breakdown or Good Times Bad Times which, let’s face it, are hard not to love (unless you are my grandfather and grew up in the First World War), but just occasionally, in the slower bits …

You see, I come from a family where wallowing in emotion is strictly forbidden, along with expressing, talking about or even alluding to emotions unless they provide the occasion for some curly-lipped sarcasm that will demonstrate how not-in-their-thrall you are. But on tracks like Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, I meet wallowing of the first order. Give Robert Plant a microphone and he will go straight for wallow. His extraordinary voice swoops and moans like some banished weather-god stirring currents in a dark pool where lustful and hateful impulses mix and coalesce. Creatures of id rear, driving me relentlessly to a place of strong but unnameable emotion that I find just overwhelming. They make me anxious, these dirge-like sections; fearful, even. I worry about what would happen were I to get stuck in this dark place: who would ever pull me out again?

This is the heaviness, I decide, of heavy music. A thing to be stuck with and endured. And at this age, 12 about to turn 13, I’m secretly not sure whether I have the psychic equipment for it.

* * * * * * *

The truth about Raw Guts is that it was a rough book band, nothing more, and never likely to progress beyond the page. Doggo and I were fantasists, as we and probably all the people we gassed on to about the project, knew. But we were OK with that, because the object of our desires, the material reality from which these fantasies emanated, seemed so remote. We had neither of us ever played or sung in public, or even been to a proper rock gig (we weren’t allowed by law onto most of the premises where they took place). People like Plant and Page were hardly even people: they were gods—or at least demiurges. The world in which you could stand on a stage and exert a similar emotional power over fellow human beings was, for us, completely out of reach. Or so we thought.

A visit from my glamorous older sister that year brought it all just that little bit closer. Five years older than me, she was living the life, working in an office in Savile Row which was, coincidentally, next door to the building in which The Beatles had their Apple offices and studio. One Friday in January she got back to work after a day off sick to hear that the road had been closed and police called the previous day because the mop-tops had performed a rooftop concert next door. She had a French boyfriend at the time who worked for Apple in some rather nebulous role and was a friend of George Harrison’s. George had gifted him a guitar, a white Stratocaster (so far as I could make out from her description) which she had not only seen but touched. I stared, awestruck, at her fingers. The fingers that had touched the neck, that had touched the hand …

If I’d only known it at the time, rock fame was always much closer at hand than I imagined. That scary-looking prefect in the dinner hall was John Wilkinson, who became better known as Wilko Johnson of Dr. Feelgood. The cello I was learning to play sat next to another in the music room at school which was pointed out to me years later as having been loaned to Gary Brooker of Procul Harum. Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Band attended a school just up the road from ours, Southend High School for Boys, though I didn’t know it. I learned to swim in the same outdoor swimming pool in Westcliff where Ian Dury contracted polio. And yet figures like this, passing close to me in space (if not always in time) seemed hardly part of the same reality.

Chalets at Brean Sands holiday camp, where I watched the moon landing in 1969

The boundaries of reality were shifting in 1969 however. Holidaying in Somerset, we watched people from our own world set foot for the first time on another world in live TV coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. We were staying at a Pontins holiday camp called Brean Sands. I spent most of my time on that holiday in the slot machine arcade, fishing lodged pennies out of jammed machines with a lolly stick and learning to play pinball. I would gaze in silent worship at the arcade’s local pinball wizard (an approachable, domestic-scale god), at his sun-tanned wrists and convulsively twitching fingers. Falling out of the arcade after dark, my pockets bulging with pennies, I looked up at the moon and found it almost inconceivable that there were human beings up there at that very moment, tramping and bouncing around on its surface. Everywhere, people were doing things now that only gods were supposed to do.

A less successful space mission was the subject of a single I bought later that year, Space Oddity. I always loved story songs: I’d been listening to them all my short life, starting with comedy records like Charlie Drake’s ‘Mr Custer’ and Bernard Cribbins’ ‘Right Said Fred’, progressing to darker themes with Tom Jones’s Delilah and—probably the apogee of the genre—’Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town’, by Kenny Rogers. But with this new disc I’d got a twofor; Space Oddity on one side and on the obverse another story song that made an even more powerful impression on me, perhaps the strongest impression of any record issued in 1969, The Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud.

I was struck by this story of the young outsider misunderstood and abused by small-minded villagers—they probably didn’t appreciate Led Zeppelin any more than my grandfather—but it’s relatability rolled over into triple score with one particular line: ‘… As he breaks the night to cry:/ It’s really me / Really you and really me…’

Ever since I was little there has been this game I played in my head—or rather, a game that my head played on me. At first it would start with me repeating the word ‘really’ over and over to myself. With each repetition, the word seemed to get more loaded and more onerous—‘really …? really ..? REALLY?’—until the panic it gave rise to mushroomed out of control.

Each repetition peeled away a layer of comfort and artifice. This is real life, not television. Not a film, not a book. This drab wallpaper, this lino, this is it. My one life, my one-way life; this is it. Really. There is nothing else. Really …’ The sting of it, the sense of swiftly accelerating fear, made me decide never to play the Really Game again. But after the first couple of times I found that it would start up on its own. Science fiction TV programmes like Doomwatch could trigger it. The odd story in The Pan Book of Horror Stories series could set me off. The Mickey Mouse section of Fantasia. The sight of an unshaded light bulb a in bare room, glimpsed from the top of a bus after dark …. But more often the game would just begin spontaneously with no obvious cause, when I was alone in the bathroom or late at night in bed. When it happened, I would have to sing or whistle or beat myself about the head, or find any sort of distraction to make it stop.

I tried once describing it to my little brother Paul, the human I was closest to, to see if he’d ever experienced anything similar, but I could see that he didn’t really understand what I was getting at. I tried mentioning it to a couple of friends at school, but they just gave me funny looks. And I never, ever felt that I could bring it up with either of my parents. Clearly, this was not a general thing, I realised; just something uniquely wrong with me. So I shut up about it. Never said a word to anyone, not even in therapy years later. Never even tried to describe it in words (until now).

So this was my David Bowie moment, the moment every fan can describe when they imagine that their favoured artist is singing exclusively for, to and about them; a phenomenon different for everybody in its circumstances, but qualitatively similar. Listening to The Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud, I felt at first a deep sense of paranoia—had this Bowie person been surveilling me from his starry capsule?—which quickly gave way to an uneasy gratitude. One other person, at least, seemed to understand what I was experiencing. Someone else knew the deepest terror of my soul. And that alone made my periodic contacts with the abject feelings inspired by The Really Game just that tiny bit less terrifying.

13. The Pack

It’s 1968 and I’m in a coach on the M1 that smells of vomit. Not my vomit. It turns out that a school trip to Whipsnade is the ideal opportunity for kids who haven’t got around much to discover that they suffer from travel sickness. Or that when their mothers made egg sandwiches for their packed lunch the day before, they neglected to put them in the fridge overnight. It seems that everybody at the back of the coach is chucking up except me and the kid in the next seat, who is practicing a bit of mild rule-breaking by playing a transistor radio with the aerial poked out of the window for better reception. He’s managed to pick up a pirate station (further rule-breaking) and we’re singing along to ‘My Name is Jack’ by Manfred Mann, with its inexplicable lyrics.

My name is Jack /and I live in the back / of the Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls …

It’s a moment of happiness for me (despite the reek of spew); I feel part of a happy herd. A rare moment of happiness in 1968.

I’m not really enjoying my new school, even though I know I am lucky to be there. I was one of only four kids in my year at Catholic primary school to pass the Eleven Plus, the rest of them having gone on to secondary moderns to learn metalwork and fighting—or in the case of the girls, home economics and hating nuns.

Where my primary school was a mixed, ethnically diverse, fairly happy place, I’ve now landed in this mostly white, male-only protestant hegemony. In Assembly when the other boys bend their backs in prayer, I can spot the other Catholics and the Jewish boys, who are all still sitting upright. Noting how few of us there are, I realise that I am part of a minority.

It seems a brutal, irreligious place to me. People want to fight each other all the time, often for not very clear reasons, and people seem to want to fight me, for one thing, on account of my minority status. A boy in my class, bigger and stronger, pushes my arm painfully high up my back and won’t let go until I deny the Pope.

Irreligion seems part of the school ethos, and not only among the student body. Our Scripture teacher is a self-professed atheist who spends his lessons pointing out the factual variances between the four gospels and going into the history of how and when each was composed, in what seems like a concerted attempt to weaken any belief we might have in the Bible as the revealed word of God.

On Friday evenings I and the other Catholic boys traipse along to the secondary modern over the road, St Thomas More, for an hour of re-indoctrination by a priest, meant to keep us steadfast in the faith. We go for about a term and then when the lectures about masturbation get too frequent and vehement, stop going.

Religion is not the only reason people to want to fight me. I am eminently bullyable—skinny and weak-looking on account of having contracted a mild form of TB when I was two years old, and girlishly pretty. The effect of the prettiness on some boys is to make them want to either punch me or kiss me, or maybe both. Occasionally I can see these two contradictory urges playing across the face of a bully, causing him visible distress.

Since I’m not good at fighting, I decide that the way to avoid being bullied is to make some powerful friends. I befriend the boy who made me deny the Pope (actually it’s more his idea than mine). When he becomes my friend, he stops hitting me, and because he’s popular in the class, other people stop picking on me as well. Soon there is a small group of us friends, a gang. We are the Bears. We have nicknames (mine is Faustus, for reasons I’ve never understood) and an initiation ritual. The neophyte is tied to a tree in the bushes behind the school where we go to smoke, and we dance around him singing a cod-Native-American chant.

My father has a mild go at me for not playing with my old friends from Catholic school; Bruce Murphy and an Indian boy called Kevin White (who he insists on calling ‘Chalky’ White—a great joke in his eyes). It’s something of a shock, as it always is when my dad shows signs of noticing my existence, and I feel a bit wounded by it. I’m not particularly conscious of having dropped Bruce and Kevin, it’s just that we don’t bump into each other so much now that I’ve changed schools. There’s a lot of churn in my friendship group. All the time new people are showing up at the park over the road where I still spend the bulk of my free time, playing football and hanging out. One of these is a kid called Phil Cornwell, whose parents have moved down from London. As well as being annoyingly good at football, he’s also brilliant at impressions.

One day a kid turns up at the park who has often been there before, but whose appearance seems to have altered radically. I’m going to call him Brad, though that’s not his name.

I come in late to the conversation. Brad has already been laying on the grass for a while when I plonk myself down, talking to a bunch of kids who are hanging on his every word.

‘… I have a bath every day, wash myself morning and night. And I always carry this …’ Brad produces a gleaming steel comb that catches the rays of the afternoon sun.

‘What do you need a comb for: you haven’t got any hair?’ I josh. It’s true. His hair, once long and curling over the ears like the rest of us, is now cropped close to his scalp.

His lips curl in a mocking smile. He proffers the comb. ‘Feel the edge.’

‘Ow!’ Blood appears on my thumb.

‘I sharpened it up in metalwork (Brad goes to a secondary modern). Dorises all have girl combs—like this but with a handle. They sharpen them into spikes.’

There is uneasy laughter.

I look at Brad more closely. He’s wearing checked Ben Sherman, jeans jacket and industrial boots polished to a high shine. What has happened to him? It’s more than a new set of clothes; he talks about this thing he’s into now as if it’s a whole way of life. ‘… You have to be clean. Hippies are dirty. Scum … Blacks are dirty. I’d never go with a black girl. I’d never even hang around with a bloke who’d done it with a black girl …’

There’s a new word in our vocabulary after this: skinhead.

Fast forward to the end of the summer and we’re back at school and suddenly half the kids in my class are of the skinhead persuasion. The hardest of these is a deceptively short boy called Gary who wears a Crombie overcoat and Royal brogues. Gary has a theory about fights that you have to get the first punch in quick, before the other bloke has even thought about hitting you. One morning in the form room before History he demonstrates this theory by headbutting me. It’s true; I hadn’t even thought about hitting him. Immediately a plum-sized bump rises on my forehead. ‘What happened to you?’ says the history teacher, breezing in with a stack of exercise books under his arm.

Eyes go around the room. Snitches get stitches.

‘Walked into a door, sir,’ I say.

* * * * * * * * *

Years later—last week, in fact—I decided it was time I found out what the lyrics of that Manfred Man song were all about.

Back in 1968 I think I assumed that the institution in question—The Greta Garbo School for Wayward Boys and Girls—must be some sort of approved school; one of those shadowy institutions about which grownups were always making dark threats; the type of place you would end up in if you continued shooting your brother in the leg with arrows, setting fire to your father’s aftershave and jamming both ends of a wire coat-hanger into the electric socket just to see what would happen. However in the song the occupants of the school seemed happy enough to be there, and the generally upbeat tone of the record was in stark contrast to the rather bloodcurdling tales that had come to our youthful ears of life in places like Borstal.

Then again, what did Greta Garbo have to do with it all? I knew of her as a star of the old black and white films my mother liked to watch. Mum had a stock phrase she always quoted, referring to the actress’s legendary reclusiveness: ‘I vant to be alone’.

It was all too puzzling to figure out. But there was something attractive about that indeterminacy. It gave the song a dreamlike quality.

Life, I was beginning to find, was full of enigmas; questions that never got answered. Such as, what class were we? Were we rich, as seemed to be indicated by the big house we lived in and the area where it was situated—or poor, as my mother always insisted? And which was her real accent; the one she used on the telephone, or the one that came out when she swore at us kids for doing something bad? Why was my father away so much? And when he was home, why was it not possible to have a proper conversation with him? What was he thinking when he fixed his hazel eyes on the sky for minutes at a time and said nothing? Why did my sister cry so loudly in the night: surely it wasn’t alwaysfallen arches?

None of these questions seemed at all welcome when I posed them, so eventually I stopped asking. And as more and more of them stacked up (why didn’t skinheads like black people, why did that anonymous person send me a poison pen letter, who was that man who drove Mum to her art appreciation classes every week?) I surrendered myself to the illogicality of the universe. The trite, packaged fictions of mainstream cinema and pop songs no longer seemed an accurate representation of reality. I became drawn to the surreal, the outlandish, the bizarre and inexplicable. Luckily there was a lot of it about.

At the house of my new friend (and fellow Bear) Tony, I encountered the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s album The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse, and it became my favourite record. The band were on TV regularly in the show Do Not adjust Your Set, doing surreal, outlandish, bizarre and inexplicable things while miming to songs from this album and others of theirs. I was particularly taken with the track Rhinocratic Oaths, a series of monologues from the brilliant Vivian Stanshall, but I also liked Neil Innes’s songs, which were more like songs.

As the tide of unreason rose in my cultural tastes, thoughts of ‘My Name is Jack’ retreated to the deeper trenches of undersea memory. Until last week, when I asked Google what that song was all about.

Turns out The Greta Garbo School for Wayward Boys and Girls wasn’t situated in Britain at all but in the United States. It was a San Francisco flop house inhabited by hippie dropouts and heavy drug users; a sort of earlier West-Coast version of NY’s Chelsea Hotel. The building features in a fairly cruddy underground film called ‘You Are What You Eat’ produced by Pete Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary. In the film you can see the poster of Greta Garbo on someone’s wall that gave the place its name. The song My Name is Jack, written by music producer John Simon, is in the film too. When you see it in its proper context, sung in an American accent, with the little kids running around between the legs of the smacked-out freaks and acid heads, the lyric and the characters in it suddenly make sense.

We live in an age when it feels like everything can be known and the world, finally, will be made to make sense. Just a couple of clicks on Google will unpack any mystery, solve any riddle that might have puzzled you down the years. But it’s an illusion. A few months ago my sister died, taking with her a whole chunk of family memory. She had a way of hinting at dark secrets in the family I didn’t know about. What those secrets might have been, and whether there were in fact any significant secrets left to uncover at all, I won’t ever know. Unreason, irreligion still rule.

Lead image by Sludge G licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

12. Starter Guitar

‘Can I borrow that, Paul?’

It’s a cheap three-quarter-length Spanish my younger brother got for Christmas and if there were any justice in this foul world it would belong to me.

I remember the moment he unwrapped it on Christmas Eve, the surge of resentment. Why were they buying him a guitar? Guitar was my thing. And I am desperate for something like this. Desperate for a starter guitar to learn on so that when the day finally arrives when I own a beautiful gleaming electric like the one in the guitar shop, I can strap it on and instantly reel out killer riffs.

True, this desire of mine was not an especially well formulated one before the moment Paul tore back the wrapping paper. Neither had there been any discussions between Mum and me about guitars—not since the row when I demanded a Vox Phantom VI Special.

She used a lot of bad-sounding words then I didn’t understand, like ‘mortgage’, ‘bankrupt’ and ‘bailiffs’, but her excuses were facile. Surely, unless the woman is entirely incapable of managing household expenses, there must be money left over for essentials like a Vox Phantom VI Special? I mean, we live in a detached house on the good side of the park, and I go to grammar school, where I was sent with a new leather satchel and a cricket bat of such superior quality that an older boy promptly ‘borrowed’ it for his net practice.

So the subject became too hot between us, and I never got round to asking for something a bit cheaper to start on: a starter guitar—but surely she must have known I needed one? Aren’t mothers supposed to telepath things like that?

As I reach for the instrument, Paul signals acquiescence by the faintest of nods and carries on watching the Monkees on TV—oblivious to the massive irony of what he is doing. Or not doing. The Monkees play a bunch of kids who want to be pop stars: here I am taking actual steps towards being a pop star while all that he, the owner of the only guitar in the house can do is sit there on our G-plan sofa watching TV like a slug. I take it upstairs and begin shaping my hands to chords from the Burt Weedon Play-in-a-day Book, reflecting on this contrast between Paul and myself; a difference that I feel licenses me to an act of appropriation similar to the older boy’s with my cricket bat. The next time I feel like playing the guitar I don’t ask, I just take. Pretty soon it begins to look a lot more like my guitar than Paul’s. It’s a thuggish logic, I recognise: the toy belongs to he who can play with it properly, he who loves it best. But it turns out I love it quite a lot.

* * * *

Guitarist Bert Weedon with inset his guitar tutor 'Play in a Day'

The truth is, I don’t really remember how I learned to play guitar. At least, my brain doesn’t. My hands still know how to make the shapes and hit the strings. I can play. So clearly there is a residue in ‘muscle memory’ (if that really is a thing) from learning—but I have no conscious memory of the process by which I learned. What went on in that bedroom, exactly, during all the hundreds of hours I spent compulsively repeating a riff or a chord sequence over and over again, varying it with each repetition by tiny, barely imperceptible increments until it finally approached adequacy? The flow state is mysterious. But … Play in a day: did ever a book’s title hold out a falser promise? You can’t learn the guitar in a day. It takes hours and hours. Weeks and weeks. Years and years.

Luckily, I have an obsessive streak a mile wide.

I was spending less and less time in the sitting room anyway watching television with the family. The crunch point was when Mum brought tea for my father and grandfather and all three of them promptly fell asleep after just a few sips: moments later my grandfather’s jaw sagged and his upper set of dentures, expanded by the hot liquid, fell onto his lower plate with a loud click. I slipped upstairs and started strumming.

The three-quarter length guitar fitted neatly against my body. Its nylon strings weren’t hard to hold down. Soon I was developing for this thing the sort of feelings I had only previously experienced with bikes and go-karts; a sense of speed and freedom, allied now to a new sense of entry into an expansive, self-created world.

At school I was learning proper grown-up classical music with a slightly unhinged teacher called Gerwyn Parry who told stories about Handel in a lugubrious, Welsh-accented voice. For a while it seemed that I might go that way: I remember writing a couple of bars of actual music—a tune I had made up—and staring at it afterwards in wonder. I even started learning the ‘cello. But to be honest, I never got on with the thing—it was huge: it dwarfed me. And it had no frets, so how the fuck were you supposed to know where to put your fingers? Meanwhile my nightly practice on the guitar, picking out tunes heard on radio or records, was building an ability to play by ear that outpaced my struggles with learning to read ‘the dots’—with the result that I never learned to sight-read.

This didn’t stop them putting me into the school orchestra, however, where I spent most of the time miming. A skill that was to come in handy later on, when I finally got to own a beautiful gleaming electric guitar of my own, and to tote it on Top of the Pops.

11. Electric Guitar 1967

‘Let’s get sweets,’ says my friend. We’re walking home from school and we’ve reached a parade of small shops by the park near my home.

‘Hold on, I just want to look in there.’

‘In that junk shop?’

His mistake is understandable. It looks like a junk shop. It has the same down-at-heel, functional look; with its harsh strip-lighting and window display screened off by perforated hardboard. But this is no bric-a-brac emporium. What this shop sells is not spurious antiques and suburban rejectamenta, but guitars.

‘Are you going to get one?’ says my friend, after we’ve been parked in front of the window for some minutes.

I snort derision. As if I, an eleven-year old schoolboy, could walk into this shop and walk out with one of these fantastically desirable pieces of hardware. As if. Secretly I’m flattered that he thinks I might be that type of person. Secretly I’m flattered he thinks my parents might have that kind of money—or if they did that they’d let me spend it on this type of thing. True I live in a detached house on the more affluent side of the park, while my friend lives in one of the cramped, tree-less streets to the North—a difference of which I have become more aware since I accidentally passed the Eleven Plus and got into our slightly snobby grammar school. But it seems risible to me that he should therefore imagine I can have anything I want. If my parents wouldn’t buy me the Johnny Seven gun after which I lusted for most of my primary school years, they’re hardly likely to fork out now for a Vox Phantom VI Special, the thing in the window that is currently fixing my interest.

I stare at it, enthralled. To its right is another Vox electric, a teal teardrop-shaped model like the one played by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. But it’s the Phantom that obsesses me; polar white with an odd irregular polygon of a body, like something off the set of Thunderbirds. As well as a formidable array of the usual rotary knobs, it also had a baffling row of push buttons, which look more like something you’d see on a vacuum cleaner. I have no idea what all these knobs and switches actually do, but there’s no doubting that this is superior technology. With a machine like this, with all its controls, its three pickups—and even a tremolo arm—you could take on the world: you couldn’t help but become a massive pop star. Everyone would love you.

When my friend finally gets bored and shades off home, I’m only dimly aware of his saying goodbye. I stare and stare. And come the next afternoon I’m back here again to continue staring.

Of course, just as you’re never aware when you place your first bet on a horse or accept an unaccustomed bump of cocaine that you are potentially laying the foundations of a long-term habit, I had no idea of the significance of what I was doing. Even now, more than half a century later, I can’t pass a guitar shop without checking out what’s in the window; a fact to which members of my family will wearily attest: there are streets in my home town of Brighton none of them wants to walk down with me for fear that I’ll lapse into trance state.

I very rarely actually enter the shops though, much less try out the instruments. My guitar-buying days are over. It’s other reasons that draw me at this stage of life. I love the stories that second-hand electrics tell, and for that reason I prefer the smaller, shabbier shops, the odder-looking guitars and the more obscure marques. I like to speculate about the musos who might have owned these instruments, the music they played on them, and how their once-sleek Arabian steeds came to end up here, in the knacker’s yard of musical instrumentation, a backstreet guitar shop. From experience, there is usually something wrong with them: warped necks, obsolescent electrics, botched repairs, inappropriate additions and restorations … and if they were any good, my inner cynic says, they wouldn’t be in this shop, at this price. But there is a romance to them, a poignancy. Like rescue animals. Were they mistreated by a callous owner, or thrown out on the day after Christmas? Were they unwanted gifts? More likely the owner just ran out of money—but many will have been rejected simply because their looks fell out of favour. Guitar shop windows are barometers of fashionable taste, the Vox guitars I stared at on my way home from school being just a case in point.

English guitars had their heyday in the Beat Boom of the early Sixties, when the US-made Fenders and Gibsons everyone really wanted were next-to-impossible to get your hands on. As the Sixties progressed things changed and American guitars flooded the market. Homegrown was out. No matter how many knobs it had, if it wasn’t a Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, Martin or Rickenbacker, you probably weren’t going to see it on Top of the Pops. That was when the backstreet shops began to fill up with the logos of Vox, Burns and Hofner—coincidentally, just as I was getting into staring at them.

* * * * *

The year I started at my grammar school, Westcliff High School for Boys, was a bit of a pivot point for other things too. 1967 was the Summer of Love, and even if the full import of this moment in cultural history was less than clear to an 11 year-old boy in Southend-on-sea, the signs were definitely there. I remember as a special favour being allowed into my older sister’s bedroom to listen to her new Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and to pore over the lyrics on the back cover of its gatefold sleeve with her. A girl in the neighbourhood took to wearing a small bell round her neck (prompting my brothers and I to follow her down the street making moo-ing noises). By Chalkwell station someone took a pot of white paint and wrote a slogan along the sea wall that you could see in its entirety only if you swam out. Treading water one day, inhaling quantities of Estuary, I read: ‘WHEN THE MODE OF THE MUSIC CHANGES, THE WALLS OF THE CITY SHAKE’. There was pirate radio: there were drug busts and obscenity trials. Leaders in the Daily Telegraph made my grandfather vibrate with rage. Meanwhile, the portable transistor radio sets that were beginning to be omnipresent in the streets, parks and at the beach, played the hit of the Summer, A Whiter Shade of Pale, wherever you went. We skipped the light fandango.

I remember watching Gary Brooker of Procol Harum singing it on Top of the Pops, and being struck by his diffident, non-showbiz affect. This was no Tommy-Steele-all-round-entertainer. He bothered less with putting on a show than the Beatles or the Stones. He actually looked quite depressed, which I sort of liked. Together with the inexplicable but oddly evocative lyrics and the churchy Hammond organ on the track, this non-performance made a deep impression on me.

Around this time I had a memorable dream. I was on the beach and it was a sweltering day. Out at sea, near but not so near that I could swim out to it, was an island where all the cool people were; the teenagers and the twenty-somethings in bathing costumes, with transistor radios wedged under their ears. They were dancing and laughing. All wore sunglasses. I saw that the island was on the move, having somehow slipped its moorings, like the lily-pad on which Thumbelina escaped her ugly toad-suitor. As I sat alone on the mainland with my towel and my Tupperware box of sandwiches, it floated past me and away, seeming to stand for something ungovernably desirable, impossibly out of reach.

10. Gig

‘A-one-two-three-four …’

The smell of warm grass rises in the tent. Afternoon sun throws a strong but diffuse light as, smartly turned out in their tailored suits and winklepickers, The Fourmost from Liverpool bash into it.

The tent is not large. It’s not like The Big Top at the circus I went to in London that had horses, elephants and lions tamed with whips. This one holds maybe 50 people max, though it isn’t that full for the Fourmost. I was the first in here, and I’ve been sitting cross-legged in front of the stage for what seemed like hours waiting for something to happen; staring at the drum kit and amplifiers with anticipation, tempered by not a little resentment.

Living no more than two minutes’ walk from the park in which this tent is pitched, I feel a strong sense of ownership when it comes to this field where I spend most of my non-school hours, playing football or cricket or just hanging out with my park mates, drinking R Whites Cream soda and chalking swear words on the shelter. Imagine my outrage on turning up to find the field fenced off and a charge of thruppence to get in. It was like being taxed to get into your own sitting room. The pretext for this intrusion is of course charity. It’s something called a fête. None of my park friends is around, and it’s full of boring rubbish like tombola stands where grown-ups can win booze—together with a load of God stuff.

If you ask me, there is already far too much God stuff in this park. If it’s not the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’s the Mormons or the Baptists, all of whom flock to the field in holiday-time to feast on young souls. They’re always trying to separate you into groups for organized games; giving you free lemon squash and saying, ‘this will be fun!’ Then before you know it you’re sitting round in a circle bashing tambourines and talking about Jesus. And if it’s not the God-people it’s the nonces …

Watching the Fourmost from Liverpool has got to be more fun than Kumbaya with the Baptists or dodging paedophiles. This is, after all, my first ever live gig. However, right from the start something is telling me that the band’s punning name fulfills only the cardinal half of its two possible numerical interpretations: yes, there are four of them, but no they are not, let’s be honest, the foremost, F-O-R-E. Granted, if you screw up your eyes and let your vision go out of focus they look a bit like the Beatles (though less handsome, and with not such good songs) but it’s the Beatles of a few years ago. The actual Beatles have moved on from tailored suits and winklepickers. Their new film Help! has fancy abroad locations and a whole new way of having fun that you don’t always understand because it’s completely weird. And the Beatles are in Technicolour now, where the Fourmost seem to be still in Black & White.

The level of excitement in the tent is not high anyway, the audience being mostly grownups with kids, a few dogs and hardly any teenagers (a bad sign). But even with my undeveloped nine year-old critical faculties I can see there’s cause for concern. I mean, I don’t want to come across like some kind of prepubescent Kenneth Tynan, but it’s clear that what we’re watching here is not the first division. Not even the second or third. Watching the Fourmost, in fact, is a bit like watching Southend United lose four-one to Tranmere Rovers at Roots Hall; better than bashing tambourines for a beaker of lemon Treetop, but not something to set the heart of youth aflame with rebellious passions.

Nevertheless, among the mixed emotions I feel—balancing if not entirely cancelling out the umbrage taken from being done out of an afternoon’s football and low-level vandalism—there is a sort of visceral fascination.

The way everything gleams. The light glinting off cymbals and the metal pickup covers of the guitars. The bigness of the sound compared to listening on the radio—or even the stereogram at home—so you feel the bass right inside your chest and the snare whacking you round the head. The kinetic force of the performers: the thing it does to the air to have four grownups going hard at it with their lungs and their instruments. And somehow the fact that the Fourmost aren’t exactly the crème de la crème doesn’t matter so much compared to fact that they are here in real life rather than on the TV (which at this point in the sixties means small screens and tinny sound). Everything is bigger, louder, more blatant in real life, and the blemishes that come along with that only seem to bring the music closer. A gig is a gig, just as a football match where your fourth-division team loses four-one is still, for all that, a football match—with corner flags, officials, and a cheering, jeering, swearing crowd—a big-boy step up from your park kickaround.

Eventually the hit is played and the set comes to an end. Liverpool’s not-quite-finest make to leave the stage, then take a polite smattering of applause as justification for an encore. I drift away—unimpressed but hungry for more, and better.

9. Tell

‘Stand over there.’

‘Why?’

‘Just do it.’

‘Is this a game?’

‘Yes, it’s a game.’

“Who am I in the game?’

‘My son.’

‘Who are you?’

We’re in the back garden at home and my little brother is beginning to exasperate me. ‘William Tell, of course.’

Since I first watched The Adventures of William Tell on TV I have been obsessed with Tell and his weapon of choice, the crossbow (I can’t look at a picture of a crossbow, even now, without experiencing an odd pang of longing).

‘What do I do in the game?’ asks Paul.

’Put this apple on your head.’

He takes the apple from my hand and places it atop his shining little bell of hair. It falls off.

‘Pick it up. Now, hold it in place this time.’ I turn and pace away from him, counting my steps. When I get to fifteen (the number is arbitrary) I stop and crouch down.

Paul eyes me suspiciously as I begin assembling the Triang crossbow which, after years of lobbying, has recently been gifted to me as a birthday present. It is of green-painted metal, fairly crudely fashioned; the lath fastened to the barrel by a single wingnut. I spin the wingnut. ‘What are you doing?’ asks Paul.

’Evil Landburgher Gessler will execute us both if I don’t hit the apple’. I select one of the three wooden bolts that come with the crossbow and contemplate for a while the red rubber sucker on its end. I know from experience that these don’t really work very well. Somehow it doesn’t seem likely that the sucker will adhere to the apple. I remove it and, taking a penknife from my pocket, sharpen the end of the bolt.

‘John-John,’ says my brother; ‘I’m scared.’

’Don’t worry,’ I say soothingly; ‘it will be all right. I’m a crack shot.’

I notch the bolt and take careful aim.

The instant the bolt is fired, time slows and I see at once that its trajectory is too flat. The elastic is weaker than I thought: I should have aimed higher. At first I am worried that the bolt will fall short. Then anxiety of a different order kicks in as I see that the bolt will not fall short enough, but appears to be headed straight for one or other of Paul’s eyes, the whites of which are now, even at fifteen paces, clearly visible.

I glance away, too horrified to witness my brother’s blinding at my hands, then look back and see with something like relief that the sharpened bolt has hit his leg instead. It has pieced the skin and is stuck in his calf. It hangs there as we both stare at it. Relief fades. This is bad, I think to myself. Worse than the time I untwisted that wire coat-hanger and poked its ends in two holes of an electrical wall socket. Worse than the time I emptied a bottle of Dad’s Old Spice aftershave into a biscuit tin lid and lit it with a match. This time I’ve actually killed someone.

Uttering a piercing shriek, Paul runs terrified for the house. ‘Mum ..! MUM! John-John shot me!’

I flush hot and cold.

Just as when I fused all the lights in the house, or scorched my eyebrows off, there is this moment of hot-cold panic, this collision of two realities, fantasy collapsing into disaster; like waking from a dream to find yourself in a nightmare. Here once again is a hard lesson in the dangers of the imagination – something that seems to be hyperactive in me, producing an exaggerated capability to disappear inside the role of scientist, secret agent or Swiss freedom fighter to the point where any normal conception of what is possible or appropriate for an unsupervised eight year-old boy to get up to with his brother flies right out of the window – a lesson for me to learn, could I only open my ears to the voice of common sense.

* * * * *

It’s worth saying that my brother has a slightly different take on this incident. According to Paul it was not the crossbow I shot him with but a home-made bow and arrow, fashioned from a piece of bamboo and the short, thin sticks our Grandfather, a keen gardener, used in the cultivation of his roses. This would make sense. Robin Hood was also a TV hero of the time, though his weapon of choice, the longbow, never inspired quite the same level of devotion in me as the crossbow.

Paul also adds the detail that while I was, following the child-rearing tenets of the time, soundly walloped for this and all my other misdemeanours, each time he too got punished. This seems massively unfair.

Given that I have no memory at all of any of these beatings, it is quite possible that Paul has the better memory: so he’s probably right about the weaponry deployed – bow-and-arrow, not crossbow. However what this Rashamon-style double-take on the story shows clearly for me is my childhood obsessiveness about weaponry of all kinds. I loved weapons. I once swapped a go-kart my father had made me for a tiny pearl-handled penknife which was clearly of much less value – just because it was a knife. The first thing I ever made with Lego was a gun. I remember the frustration I felt that the squared-off Danish bricks wouldn’t allow me closely enough to simulate Napoleon Solo’s luger.

Where it came from, this urge, I don’t know. Perhaps it came along with my Scandinavian heritage: after all, every Christmas my family received a large box of presents from a Finnish aunt which would contain knives for me and my male siblings. On the other hand, all the other boys at school, whatever their heritage (highly mixed at my Catholic primary school), seemed to share the same fetish. In the playground, we would link arms and chant ‘all join on for War’, our little hands forming easily into gun-shapes, or cradling imaginary tommy-guns as our throats issued guttural sounds of gunfire. We were weapon freaks to a man; deeply in love with our deathly toys.

Beyond even the crossbow, my own most all-consuming weapon-crush was on a Johnny Seven OMA (the acronym standing for One Man Army), a meta-weapon that comprised seven guns in one, including a grenade launcher and armour-piercing shells. Its promise of ultimate defensive potency inspired intense pangs of longing, but despite loud and prolonged pleading, I never got one, a lack that rankles to this day.

Eventually, of course, the obsession with weapons faded — only to transmute into something else, no less passionate but less connected with violence. In a quite small space of time, months perhaps rather than years, I went from obsessing over guns, knives, crossbows, bazookas and any other type of ordnance that could kill or maim people (though preferably not little brothers) to fetishizing guitars.

6. Tape

When I get back from North London it turns out my parents aren’t dead. But there have been changes. They’ve moved the furniture around and there is a set of wooden runners over the three steps down to the garden from the French windows, freshly carpentered in new wood. Carpentry is something my father does. Dad built us a swing in the back garden, excavating a pit for its foundations in which he discovered a load of empty bottles buried by the previous owner of the house, ‘he was an alcoholic,’ my Mother muttered darkly. At the end of the garden now, near to the swing, is a pram. Howling sounds are coming from the pram.

It is around this time that I decide I am not getting enough affection from my family members. ‘Nobody loves me,’ I wail at mealtimes, hoping perhaps that someone will contradict me. Instead they laugh, and give me a new nickname: Pathetic Lobster. I go into crying jags that last until I give myself too bad a headache to continue. I get myself locked in the cupboard under the stairs just to find out, perhaps, whether anyone will bother to come and find me. They don’t – and I scream at the top of my lungs until my mother comes to let me out. ‘Nobody loves me,’ I continue to complain. ‘Pathetic lobster,’ they reply. I decide to look outside the family circle for love.

Being a Roman Catholic, I seek intercession from the Virgin Mary. In between all the other things we are constantly being enjoined to pray for at my Catholic primary school – the starving children in Africa, forgiveness for our sins, that Canon Dobson’s sciatica be relieved – there is a space for personal prayers: ‘don’t just ask for toys and sweets children,’ my teacher, Miss Henderson, says with a smile. We wouldn’t want the Holy Mother to think us superficial.

I pray for a girlfriend.

About this time I become aware that a girl in my class at school lives in our street. Her name is Karen Wells. She has a round open face, a nice smile and bright blue eyes. I tell Mum that I have special feelings for Karen and she says, ‘look at the mother, I would’ —Mrs Wells is Italian and a bit overweight— ‘that’s how she’ll turn out’.

Undeterred, I go round to Karen’s house one afternoon and ask if I can play. There’s a whole mob of kids, led by Karen’s older brother Kevin, who teases me, and I don’t get to talk to Karen.

For my birthday that year I get a tape recorder (a proper reel-to-reel tape recorder) and a toy guitar. Inspired by Cliff, who is always singing song to girls in his films, I write a song about my love for Karen and, accompanied by some exploratory strums on the guitar, sing it into the tape recorder. Perhaps I am intending to play it to her, or send her the tape. There is no fixed plan.

When I get home from school the next day I hear laughter coming from the kitchen. I walk in to see my sister and mother playing the song back on the tape recorder and pissing themselves laughing. It sounds terrible. Tuneless. And the lyrics are stupid: I love Karen, sitting on my knee/oh how happy together we will be.

I never touch the tape recorder again, or the guitar, and Karen does not become my girlfriend. It will be twelve years before I write another song.

5. Oil

In a black Zodiac Zephyr we cruise the darkened streets of North London. The radio plays Johnny, Remember Me and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.

At the wheel is my uncle Terry, who drives an oil tanker for a living and the Zephyr for fun. His face is dark and cruel-looking, like a crueler-looking Kirk Douglas. Terry was in the merchant navy during wartime, and boxed. He has belts for it in the cupboard in the house in Theobalds Road where I am staying. There is another belt in there, my cousins tell me, that he will beat me with if I get out of line.

They tell me a lot of stuff like that, my cousins; some of it I believe, other things I’m not so sure about. I’m only six – and a naïve, dreamy six at that: not London street-smart like them. Normally I live in Prittlewell, Essex, close to Southend Airport where my dad works as an Aircraft Inspector. I have been sent here to London to stay with my mother’s brother and his family for the Summer. I have no idea why. The latest thing my cousins have told me is that both my parents died in an accident but nobody has the heart to break it to me.

‘No they haven’t,’ I say.

‘Yes they have.’ Apparently, I’ve got to keep it to myself. ‘Don’t cause a fuss.’ I think of the belt lurking in the cupboard.

I look at the back of my uncle’s head; the blue-black teddy-boy hair, slick with oil. Aeroplanes run on kerosene, lorries on diesel. My Father smells different to my Uncle, and they are different in other ways too. My father doesn’t hit me with a belt: he uses his hand.

Next to Terry’s head on the front bench seat of the Zephyr is his wife Audrey’s. Audrey has button eyes and a soft smile. She washes her legs in the sink – they have no bathroom – and cooks Dambuster pudding with custard. Auntie Audrey reads to us at night from an Enid Blyton book, The Faraway Tree. At the top of the tree is a ladder the children climb up to a magical land. The land changes with each visit, but if you stay too long in the land it is possible to get stuck there, and you might never find your way back to the tree and home. The chapter where this happens – where the land moves and the children get stuck – is terrifying.

The music changes on the radio to a sad harmonica tune. Terry and Audrey talk together in low voices. I’m in a strange mood, feeling oddly disconnected from the wet streets and the lights of shops as they flash past.

Maybe they’re working out a way of breaking the sad news to me, so that I’ll take it well and not cause a fuss. But then they start laughing and I realise they’re not talking about me at all.

The shops and cafés glide past, lit-up cafés with Gaggia machines and red checked tablecloths. We stop at traffic lights outside a civic building – a modernist new build, all concrete and big glass windows. The lights are on and something is happening in there, some type of Town Hall discussion, perhaps; people in banked seating. But their top halves are screened off and all I can see are shoes and knees, trousers and skirts.

The lights change, the car moves on.

(Image credit: Charlesfrederickworth)