lost in music by gyles smith Introduction In the spring of 1989, shortly after my twenty-seventh birth- day, as I stood in the sleet at a bus-stop in Colchester, it dawned on me that I had probably, all things considered, failed in my mission to become Sting. At least, for the time being. It was late afternoon, dark prematurely, and RCA Records in Germany had just ditched the Cleaners from Venus. You may not have read about this at the time; there were disappointingly few angry headlines in the press, not many shocked editorials in the trade magazines. None at all, actu- ally. But the Cleaners from Venus was the band I was in, and for three and a half years this band had served as the very nerve-centre of my pop-stardom operation, my Become Sting campaign. There had been other bands before, but this was the one I really lavished my chips on, the one I really rode hard - all the way from our ignominious beginnings in an Essex industrial village, to our triumphant recording deal with RCA Germany (why Germany? Because nobody else would have us), right up until about 11.30 a.m. on this dis- consolate day, when someone important in Hamburg con- tacted our manager in London and said whatever the German is for `You're fired'. To be fair to RCA, things had gone þ" ~ly awry. Sales of the Cleaners from Venus's first album, Going to England, had been negligible yet, astonishingly, they had been undercut by sales of our second, Town þ' Country. The last time we had appeared live in Hamburg, (on the Town & Country Tour 1988), the chairman of the record company had walked out after three numbers, shaking his head despondently. Furthermore, our manager was about to run away, our drum- mer was about to be deported to Japan and the singer, who wrote all the songs and whose band it was anyway, had stomped off in a huff ages ago to become a gardener Leaving me, just off the London train at North Station, waiting for a number 5 to take me up the hill to town, round the one-way system to Crouch Street and then out west down Lexden Road, left at the lights by MFI, and home to my mum's. It was a shame because I really fancied Sting's job. Great pay: the best pay. Superb hours, too (because what does Sting actually do in the long months between albums and tours? He mucks about, I reckon). Homes in Hampstead and New York and Miami and Los Angeles (Barbra Streisand's old place, in fact). Not that I wanted to make records that sounded like his, but I was certainly on for the lifestyle. Concerts, fans. Pop music. Pop stardom. Strictly speaking, of course, no vacancy for a Sting was ever advertised - though, as aspiring musicians tend to do, I read Sting's mere existence as an indication that the world needed Stings. In any case, the fact that no one had said so, let alone been looking at me as they said it, was really the least of the insuperable obstacles I wilfully ignored when I set out on Mission Big Time. This book is the story of that voyage - one man's journey into the world of rock and then back to his mum's. And at the same time it's a book about what gets into people when pop gets hold of them. And, boy, can pop get a hold. It's pushy like that. You've really got to watch it. You invite pop into your house on a fairly casual basis and the next thing you know it's telling you what to wear and picking your friends. Growing up in the 1970s, you were often told by your elders that pop's tyrannical rule over your life would not last. Pop, they said, was just a phase you were going through, a kind of teenage mood. It would clear, like spots, as you entered your twenties to be smoothly replaced by an adult taste for classical music - orchestras, operas, the real thing, music which demanded more of you than a three-minute spasm of helpless assent and (the rumour was) gave you so much more in return. But I've reached thirty-two and it still hasn't happened. Pop isn't only for young people any more and it isn't only made by them. Now it looks as though youth was just a phase pop went through. I've grown up with pop, and pop has giown up with me; and both of us are very different now from the way we were in 1970. And from time to time, a slight uneasiness creeps into our relationship which I would like to get to the bottom of. About the records and artists covered in these pages. The book spans some twenty-five years of pop music but it does not pretend to offer any kind of overview. This is a personal account and perhaps it would be fairer to call it an under- view. I'm not suggesting these are the best things that hap- pened in all that time. This is probably obvious from the fact that there's a chapter on Nik Kershaw, but it's as well to be clear. Not that there aren't pieces of music here whose value as contributions to twentieth-century culture I would be pre- pared to argue until I was a very nasty shade of blue. It's just that, in my experience, a record collection is subject to some fairly arbitrary forces. It includes the record you bought because a friend told you to, or because you thought you liked it and you were mistaken, or because you thought it was another record altogether until you got it home but then you quite liked it anyway, or because it happened to be playing when something else, entirely unrelated to it, occurred, so your pleasure in it is only tangentially a musical one. With my own record collection, there are holes where great, seminal things ought to be; and there are things where I often wish there were holes, most acutely, most buttock-clenchingly, when people come round and start browsing and saying things like: `You bought this?' or, `Bloody hell - the Wombles! ' I've had my triumphs, I might say - my small share of those ginchy moments when your own tastes and some broader consensus on what is gifted and worthwhile coincide. But much of one's relationship with pop is circum- stantial and happenstance and conducted against one's better judgement. In fact, I hold it to be one of pop's most winning gifts (and much underestimated in writing on the subject) that nothing can so smoothly persuade your better judgement to take the rest of the night off. It seems only fair to warn, then, that these pages contain graphic descriptions of some truly horrible music and, appended to these descriptions, some passages of self-justifi- cation of a deplorably see-through nature. Readers with sen- sitive dispositions may wish to skip, for example, the chapter on 10cc. Also that one on Nik Kershaw. And to tread care- fully during the chapters on Randy Crawford and Pink Floyd. And to go nowhere near any of the chapters about the bands that I was in, from Pony through the Orphans of Baby- lon to the Cleaners from Venus. I really did think one of them might make it. I'd even started thinking about places in Colchester where they might erect the plaque, commemorat- ing my early days - days when people hardly suspected, yet somehow Iznew, what would become of me. My parents' house was obviously a prime landmark candidate. Or per- haps above the door at one of the pubs or clubs, scenes of those tentative first steps on to the world's stage - the Oliver Twist, the Embassy Suite, the Colne Lodge (now an old people's home). Or what about outside that little rehearsal room off Priory Street, which became a shop selling leotards ? Actually, no. The best place would be on the wall of the garage at John Taylor's house (not the John Taylor who ended up as bassist in Duran Duran, but another one), which is where it all started and, really, if I had known about some of the grief that lay ahead, where it all would have ended. chapter 1. The band with no name It is 1971, T Rex are No. 2 in the charts with `Jeepster' and I'm on lead guitar and vocals in the garage at John Taylor's house. I don't have a guitar, actually, but I do have a two- stringed ukulele, one of a pair found in the attic at home. I also have a pair of plastic sunglasses and a waistcoat, yanked out of a bundle of dressing-up stuff. I am nine and I think I just saw John Taylor's mum put her face up to one of the small square windows at the top of the garage doors, and I'm pretty sure she was laughing, but I'm not going to let that put me off. My cousin ian, who lives in the house at the end of John Taylor's garden, is behind me on drums - or rather on drum , hitting an old bust snare he pulled out of the trash in his father's shed. Phil, who's in our class, is over to the side on bass, except there's no bass so he's using the second of that pair of ukuleles. As for John Taylor, who is much smaller than the rest of us, he's on percussion. He's shaking some kind of bottle filled with sand or stones or God knows what. I'm already a bit narked with John Taylor because in the scramble through the dressing-up clothes, he got the bullet belt - the big ex-army number. No bullets in it, but it's really wide and black and dangerous. Personally, I reckon the bullet belt is lead guitarist's gear. I mean, it's wasted on the per- cussionist. Who looks at the percussionist? But the belt business is nothing compared with what John Taylor's doing right now. In fact, I'd be prepared to grant him unquestioned rights to the belt every time, from now and for ever, if he'd just pack up what he's doing, which is walking, while we're playing, in a huge clockwise circle, round behind the drum, up the side, across directly in front of me (in front of me!), down the other side, round the drum again . . . And he's doing this in big, clowny, exaggerated steps and every time his foot slaps down on the ground, he shakes the bottle. Plod, plod. Shake, shake. I am incensed. What does he think that looks like? What does he think this is? So midway through the second verse (or where the second verse would be if this song had any verses), just after he's gone by me on his stupid circuit for about the third time, I stop playing and turn on him. `What are you doing?' Because I think I know what he's doing: I think he's taking the mickey. Or he's trying to ruin everything. Or he's taking the mickey and trying to ruin everything. Or he's trying to steal the show like he stole the belt . . . Of course, he comes on all defensive. `This is how I play it,' he says. `It's not what they do,' I say. `But I can't play it otherwise. It's how I do it.' `It's not what they do,' I say again. `It's my garage,' he says, irrefutably. Well, I quit. Just took my ukulele, got out of there and never went back. Who needs these amateurs? I was looking for a real band. The Beatles If anyone ever asks me, `What was the first record you bought?' I tell them proudly it was `Let it Be' by the Beatles, which I got on its first release in 1970 when I was eight. And like, I think, pretty well everyone who tackles this `first record' question (and I calculate that within a normally active social life, it's likely to come up three or four times annually), I am lying through my teeth. `Let It Be' wasn't the first single I bought at all. I've just been back through my singles and checked and there were other records which I had well before I owned `Let It Be', records which I have somehow come to overlook with the years. And, I must say, the truth has come as something of a shock. I'm so used to connecting myself with the Beatles at their most anthemic that when the conversatifln comes round again and someone says, `What was your first record?', I'm not even conscious of setting the other records aside; I never find myself beginning to say the name of one of them and then changing in a hurry to `Let it Be'. I am unable to pinpoint the precise moment when I began to indulge in this fiction, yet it seems clear to me that it must have been a thought-through decision. When you talk about your first record, you're saying something about how quick you were off the mark: you're indicating the place where you and pop music first really hit it off. And I must have realized at some point that I didn't want to start just anywhere. And it must have occurred to me at the same time that the affiliation between oneself and one's first record was too important to rest on something so insubstantial and arbitrary as the truth. So I went ahead and fiddled with the history and, by a peculiarly judicious telescoping of the past, I arrived at the single which marked the end of the Beatles, and not at `A Windmill In Old Amsterdam' which was, if we're going to be literal about it, the first piece of vinyl I ever called my own. Yet splendid though Ronnie Hilton's mellow yet cheerful delivery is (`I saw a mouse/Where?/There on the stair/Where on the stair?' etc) this was not quite the statement I wanted to make about me and pop, as we were in the beginning. For the same reason, I have tended not to offer up for consideration my entire album of songs from The Jungle Book, bought at Colchester Woolworth's and, again, acquired some years before John and Paul began completely ignoring each other. A quick gripe about that Jungle Book album: it wasn't the film soundtrack by the original cast, I discovered when I got it on the deck, but a shoddy mock-up by second-rate ses- sioneers - a rogue Mowgli, a bogus Balou. It was like one of those cheap Top of the Pops albums, which were doing big business at the time and which used to feature a selection of the day's hits made by soundalikes who didn't. Except there was no woman in a tasselled suede bikini on the cover of my Jungle Boolt soundtrack, but rather a genuine-looking shot of the Colonel and his pals herding cheerfully through the undergrowth, which, in my naivety, I took to signal the pukka, Disney-endorsed product. Not that it mattered in the end. By persistent playing over a five-day period, I managed to convince myself that this wanton fakery was equal to the real thing - a trick I was to attempt many years later, but with significantly less success, with records by Paul Young. Anyway, in the crucial matter of my first record, some- where along the line I have started performing a little shimmy and slipping forward a few purchases to 1970, where the Beatles were right at the end of their tether and marking the occasion of their dissolution with `Let It Be', this glazed, sway-along number, in which you can virtually hear them waving goodbye to the sixties, waving goodbye to us all. At the time, the New Musical Express called the song `a card- board tombstone', arguing that `Let It Be' - which does, it must be said, contain more than its fair share of cod religi- osity - was no fitting tribute to the Beatles, no suitable end- note for the band who, in so many ways, started it all. I take the point. There is no simpler way to measure how far the Beatles had travelled and how much they had lost along the way than to mark the distance from `She Loves You', in which every second seems to count more vitally than the last, to the cyclical defeatism of `Let It Be'. A bum note for me to come in on, but a trenchant one with slightly thrilling morbid overtones: my first single, the Beatles' last. There's a story there - and, needless to say, it's a story which flatters me, which was the entire point of this `Let It Be' illusion. It was my way of indicating that, though a child of the musically impoverished 1970s, I had at least some kind of grounding in the golden 1960s. It also allowed me to imply that, had I been a record-buyer in the 1960s, I would, clearly, have been connecting with the Beatles and not been the sort of saddy who thought Cliff Richard was more exciting. To tell the truth, though, I haven't always been strictly loyal to `Let It Be' as my first record. There was a substantial period, which ended only quite recently, when I told people that the first record I bought was `Hey Jude'. There was, I'm fairly sure, nothing deliberately misleading about this; I wasn't intending to prove anything. Quite simply, out of a combination of forgetfulness and confusion, I stopped saying `Let It Be' for a while and started saying `Hey Jude'. (Hugely unlikely that this could have been the case: I was six when that song was released and probably not quite ready for Sparky and his magic piano on Ed `Stewpot' Stewart's Junior Choice, let alone for `Hey Jude' with its squally McCartney vocal and its infinitely circling fade-out. ) The problem is, once you have started tampering with the facts like this, once you've seen how, with a nip here and a tuck there, your musical past bursts gratifyingly into signifi- cance, there's potentially no end to it. In the early 1970s, for example, when my loyalty to the group T Rex was at its blindest and fiercest, the first record I ever bought was `Ride A White Swan'. And then, at the height of the Jam's success in the late 1970s, and in a lame attempt on my part to suggest pre- cocious Mod-leanings, `Cindy Incidentally' by the Faces was the first record I ever bought, though, according to my elab- orate numbering system (we will come to my elaborate num- bering system later), it was the nineteenth. And just once, more recently than I would care to acknowledge, the first record I ever bought was Otis Redding's `(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay' (1968). This was to impress a girl. Shame- less: I never owned it at all. (Though my brother did, if that's any good.) But after each of these truancies, I would always return, shame-faced but with the contentment of the homecomer, to `Let It Be'. So why can't I find my copy of it? I've been upstairs and gone through the box where my singles are and it's not there. And it's implausible that I have lost it or got rid of it some- where in the intervening years. I should probably mention this early on: I do not sell, exchange or give away records that I have bought. These are not transactions I'm even prepared to contemplate. It seems to me that one's ownership of records and the moral responsibilities and personal signifi- cances involved are way too grave to allow for the kind of flippant horse-trading that some people go in for. I have been known to pass on to friends records of which I have, for one reason or another, a duplicate copy, but even then only grudgingly, in the spirit of someone granting a loan which he expects to see repaid within the next five minutes. In every other respect, with regard to the filing and maintenance of records, related literature and all things pop, I combine the characteristics of an archivist who fears for his job and a badly paranoid squirrel. Hence the decade's-worth of Record Mirrors and NMEs (1977-87) currently representing an unrivalled fire hazard in the attic at my mother's house; hence also my unbroken set of Q magazines (about to exceed a hundred monthly copies as I write, most of them in starchy good nick) and my having retained a poorly Xeroxed list of tour dates handed out at a Tom Robinson Bang gig I went to at Essex University in 1978. Weighing the absence of a copy of `Let It Be' against the refined efficiency of my own storage systems, I am forced to ' confront the disturbing possibility that not only is `Let It Be' not the first single I ever bought but that I never actually , bought it in the first place. Yet I can see it clearly - the dark green apple pictured on the A-side middle, the halved apple on the B-side - though I could be remembering that from any Beatles record released on the Apple label. But what about the plain white sleeve it came in, the black lettering, almost too dark to be legible, at the single's centre? A fantasy, it would appear. A self-installed myth. So what was the first single I bought - I mean the first non- nursery-based single, the first piece of pop proper? Returning to the single box, I discover that the single boldly marked `No. 1' in blue biro, is `(Dance With The) Guitar Man' by Duane Eddy and the Rebelettes, but I can discount that, firstly because it was a hit in November 1962, when I was nine months old, and secondly because I stole it at some point from one of my brothers. I know this because small boys are always in a hurry to write their names on things and on the green paper Columbia sleeve, just below where I wrote mine in earnest block capitals, I crossed out, but failed to obliter- ate, my brother's initials. A bad job by me, there - but a significantly better one than my brother did before me, as revealed in the distress marks on the B-side where he has tried to scuff out the centre label with his fingernail but where you can still read, clear as daylight, the proprietorial legend `Ada Clark'. (I don't know who Ada Clark was, but I do know that she was robbed.) When I finally came to install the numeric system, which would have been around 1972 or '73, just as soon as my collection had burgeoned to the degree where it needed strict control by cataloguing (i.e., when I had about four or five singles), I made Duane Eddy `No.1' on the grounds that it was the oldest - and, perhaps, also the most daringly acquired. (It remains to this day the only record I have ever appropriated in a heist.) As I go through the rest now, the numeric sequence is unbroken. There is no hole where `Let It Be' may once have been. Frightening though it is to concede, all the evidence points to the fact that the first record I ever bought was `Rosetta' by Georgie Fame and Alan Price from 1971. Thinking about it, I feel sorry for anyone whose first single genuinely was `She Loves You' or Elvis singing `Heartbreak Hotel' or `I Wish It Would Rain' by the Temptations or any other astonishing one-off pop moment, people who really were in the right place at the right time with their pulse beating at the right pace. Because we'll all nod slowly and heavily with approval when they tell us and say things like, `Oh, really? Fan-tastic!' But who's going to believe them? Of course, now that the single is debased currency, all but replaced by the CD and the cassette, perhaps the more poignant question is `What was the last single you bought? Do you remember? The last piece of 7-inch vinyl. Mine was `Don't Dream It's Over' by Crowded House. Which works out OK, because I would argue that that was their finest song so far, what with that little tripped-up chorus line (`Hey now'), the way the bass guitar prods the last verse along and that overall feeling in the drummer's dragged pace and the singer's slur that the whole song is being seen through early- morning eyes. And there wouldn't be much risk of social estrangement involved in nominating `Don't Dream It's Over' as positively your last 7-inch buy, the one you went out on, because most people like Crowded House anyway. But how long before I'm making that one up? How long before I'm bolting together a story to suit the times? Well, no time at all, in fact. For as I now recall, when I bought `Don't Dream It's Over' I also bought `Building A Bridge To Your Heart' by Wax. I was in Toþþver Records in London, about to take the underground to Liverpool Street for a train, and it was quite late at night and I was mildly drunk, which is not a condition in which you should ever shop for records unless you are prepared to accept the risk that you will come out of there with about seventy pounds worth of old Carly Simon albums. Or, failing that, a single by Wax. Wax were a short-lived duo formed by Andrew Gold (he of the sublime `Never Let Her Slip Away' and the abysmal `Thank You For Being A Friend') and Graham Gouldman, the one with the fuzzy hair from 10cc. I'd heard `Building A Bridge To Your Heart' a couple of times on the radio and had developed, rather guiltily, a fondness for the chorus. What with the drink and the suspension of reality that comes from being in a record shop late at night, this fondness became a raging urge to spend money. And I suppose `Building A Bridge To Your Heart' is kind of satisfying, in the way that truly soulless pop music so often can be. But as an epilogue to the story of my life as a buyer of 7-inch vinyl singles . . . well, I don't think it has quite the substance or the legs. I'll opt for Crowded House, I think. So my first single turns out to be a record I never bought, and I arrive at my last single by sweeping another equal claimant under the carpet. Appalling. But many of my deal- ings with pop music turn out to have been like this. The opportunities for self-invention which pop offers seem nearly limitless. And I've been leaping at them from the word go. chapter 2 T. Rex Every Saturday morning, shopping reluctantly in Colchester town centre with my parents, I kept an eye open for Marc Bolan of T Rex. Not that Marc Bolan lived in Colchester. He came from Hackney and he had no connection that I knew of with the town, or any reason to be shopping there on a Saturday, when the place got pretty busy what with the market. But I kept my eyes peeled, just in case. I didn't bother too much upstairs in Jacklin's where, at eleven o'clock, we had coffee and individually wrapped choc- olate digestives; Jacklin's had dark panelled walls, middle- aged waitresses in starchy black and white uniforms and a display of Rotary Club pennants from around Britain. No place for Bolan, really, with his corkscrew hair, his glitter- painted cheekbones, his shiny silver jacket and satin trousers. (That's what he wore on the telly; I assumed that's what he wore all the time.) More likely to see him near Wright's the butcher's or in the vicinity of Woolworth's on the High Street, or walking down the road which runs past the back door of Boots the Chemist, which is where I always had to stand with my father while my mother went in briefly to shop alone. Week in, week out I looked, and week in, week out he failed to show But I wasn't discouraged. Come the summer of 1971, Marc Bolan was by no means the only pop star I hadn't seen in Colchester High Street. Others included Rod Stewart, Noddy Holder of Slade and that man with the side- burns out of Mungo Jerry Then again, these others could have slipped by without me noticing because, following `Hot Love' and `Get It On', Bolan was the only one I was really looking for. I had no questions for him, nothing that I urgently needed to say. An autograph would have been nice, I suppose. I wasn't asking him to put on a concert, or any- thing. I just wanted to see him. But Colchester wasn't a good town for that. It wasn't the kind of place pop stars came to, or came from. Look it up in Pete's Frame's tremendous Rock Gazetteer of Great Britain, the ultimate pop geography book and a mine of indispensable information; like the fact that Rick Astley used to work at Parkside Garden Centre, Newton Le Willows, and Midsomer Norton is the birthplace of Anita Harris. The Gazetteer's big and cheerful message is that pop archaeology is anywhere and everywhere. Just disturb the soil slightly with your foot and there they are - traces of pop. But not really in Colches- ter, Essex. Under `Colchester', you'll learn that Twink, later the drummer with the Pretty Things, had his first band here - the Fairies. The Gazetteer carries a picture of him captioned `Twink trashes a drumkit on TV'. You will also discover that the sleeve for Fairport Convention's What We Did On Our Holidays album is a photograph of a chalk drawing on a blackboard, taken in a dressing room at Essex University, which lies on the outskirts of Colchester. My copy of the book was published in 1989, too early to record the group Blur, most of whose members are Colcestrians, though all of them moved to London and affected Cockney accents as soon as they were old enough to shave. So in the third and final entry, the town is `home of eighties hopefuls, Modern English'. I love that `hopefuls'. It doesn't get much better when you look up a few places in the district: Kevin Rowland of Dexy's Midnight Runners once had a summer job washing up at Butlin's in Clacton-on- Sea. And Clacton is where Sade grew up, although, as Mr Frame is careful to mention, she was born in Nigeria. Also, `Yes made their debut well away from the public glare at East Mersea Youth club in 1968.' The first time I read that sentence, some sort of local protectiveness bridled inside me and I thought: How patronizing. What about the public of East Mersea? Don't they have a glare worth anything? But then I thought about East Mersea and the author's got a point. I don't mean to quibble, but Mr Frame does sell Colchester a little short. He doesn't mention that Steve Harley, of Cock- ney Rebel, worked briefly on the local newspaper and lived in a small flat above the bakery on Sheregate Steps. (Was this the original `up' referred to in the song `Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile)'? I like to think so. And he doesn't indicate that local guitarist Steve Linton once auditioned for Thin Lizzy who kept him waiting a whole week before ' informing him they'd given the job to Gary Moore. Nor does Mr Frame include a story one of my brothers told me: that, on their way to a show in Ipswich in the mid- 1960s, the Beatles stopped for chewing gum at the newsagent at the end of our road. (I never believed this tale: it had the ring of other tales employed by my brothers to wind me up. I've used it a lot since, though, pointing out the newsagent to visitors.) And the Gazetteer is silent about the time I saw Ray Cooper, the percussionist who works with Elton John and Eric Clapton among others, run into Gunton's, the delicatessen in Crouch Street. But, true enough, there is no `Colchester Sound', no `Colne Beat'. A little to the south and we could have been part of the Canvey Island R&B explosion: Dr Feelgood! Wilko Johnson! A little to the left and down a bit and we could have joined in ' with Basildon's 1980s synthesizer happening: Depeche Mode! Yazoo! And just sixty miles to the west and we would have been in London: Nearly Everyone! But, no, we were in Colchester: the town voted, during the 1980s, the most boring place in Britain by listeners to The Terry Wogan Show 'on Radio 2, and they should know; the town where an awful lot happened in Roman times, but not much since, except the abolition of early-closing on Thursdays; the town where, aged nine, I walked around looking for Marc Bolan. T Rex never played in Colchester, but they did appear at the Weeley Pop Festival in August 1971, just as my Bolan interest was really catching fire after the low-slung groove of `Hot Love', which I witnessed on Top of the Pops, and after `Get It On', which was the same thing, basically, played at a different pace and which I got my mother to buy me from Harper's Music Store, thus redeeming one of those Saturday mornings. Weeley is to the east of Colchester on the way to Clacton. There's not much there except fields and a few quiet cottages, which made it the perfect place for a weekend of live rock and substance abuse. `T Rex,' said the posters in town. `Lind- isfarne, The Faces, Rory Gallagher, Caravan, Colosseum, Barclay James Harvest, Mott the Hoople, Curved Air . . .' I didn't even bother to ask my parents if I could go. I was only recently the beneficiary of a number of rights relating to unaccompanied cycling. To suggest that I might now set off for three uncertain nights under canvas in the company of 30,000 rock fans would have been pushing my luck. And these were the days when a rock festival was a rock festival: with chainsaw-toting Hell's Angels, continuous nudity and shockingly poor-quality drugs. I base this statement on vague recollections of some of the stores printed in the local paper in the run-up to Weeley and discussed at home. All of the stories featured `angry villagers' and may have contained exaggerations. Even so, you can bet there was a distinction between the flavour of Weeley '71 and today's Glastonbury Festivals which, ever more pre-packaged and accessible, have quietened down into a vaguely alternative shopping weekend with live coverage on Channel 4. At home, that Weeley weekend was agony - and the antici- pation of it, too, with the free, cut-out-and-keep festival guide in the paper, the week beforehand. So near and so far And yet I figured if I couldn't go and see Bolan, I could at least catch him on the way past. `To get to Weeley from London,' I said to my father, more than once, `you have to go through Colchester, don't you?' `Yes. Why?' `Nothing.' I had a very clear picture of the Bolan I would see, stopped at the traffic lights on London Road, bound for Weeley. He was in the passenger seat of a Ford Escort van, with a load of , instruments clustered behind him. None of the rest of the band was there, just Bolan - with the glitter under his eyes and the silver jacket and the satin trousers. So, on the first day of the festival, I cycled down to the main road which, before they built the bypass, fed the traffic from London round the edge of the town. And I leaned my bike up against the Nat West bank and waited for most of the afternoon. No sign of him, though. Typical Colchester. In those days it was either T Rex or it was Slade. The whole history of pop seemed to have boiled down to this crucial axis. Actually, history seemed to have boiled down to ' this crucial axis. The industrial unrest of the early 1970s? It was just background hum during the Slade versus T Rex chart wars of 1972/73; `Mama We're All Crazy Now' versus `Children Of The Revolution'; `Cum On Feel The Noize' versus `20th Century Boy'; `Skweeze Me, Please Me' versus `The Groover'. After the boy/girl distinction, Slade or T Rex was about the easiest way to divide the people I knew at school. Slade had Noddy Holder, as whiskery as a Victorian factory-owner, the wearer of a top hat with reflective discs set into it, his voice a sulphurous gargle. But T Rex had Marc Bolan with his angelic face, his pursed-lipped pouting, his precious Ts and Ss, sung from the front of the mouth. Noddy Holder was never Slade in the way that Marc Bolan was T Rex. The three people who stood behind Bolan on Top of the Pops, in various stages of self-conscious stiffness, were not where one's interest lay. Whereas Slade was a group, a bunch of lads, rough-edged, raucous good-timers, their sound thicker and heavier than Bolan's spangly shards of guitar. I couldn't quite get on with Slade. It wasn't Holder I objected to. It was that other one, with the long straight hair and the goofy grin - Dave Hill. He looked like a nerk to me. Ditto the drummer, the one who just sat there chewing. And there was no sitting on the fence, so I opted for Bolan. Clearly, much was encoded in this choice. Were you a team player, responding to the garrulous network that was Slade, or were you an individualist, smitten by Bolan's singularity? Did you like boys who looked like girls, or boys who looked like Victorian factory-owners? Girls on the whole preferred Bolan, so to be a boy who liked T Rex was to be one of the girls. I was lucky enough to know Karen Jones who liked neither and was prepared to trade me the colour Bolan pin-up from her copy of Jackie for nothing more than four Black Jacks, which seemed to me a laughably good deal. It went on the back of my bedroom door along with the selection of images from my brothers' magazines and papers which formed my Bolan mural. In the end, the door was completely papered: some thirty Marc Bolans looking out at me in vari- ous states of pout and sulk and grin. Was this about sex? I think, in part, it may have been less sexy than that - and more male. I wasn't nearly as interested in sleeping with Marc Bolan as I was interested in pasting neatly clipped articles about him into my specially designated T Rex scrapbook and making drawings of him in which I tried to get the shape of his guitar exactly right. I had no desire for him which throbbed as loudly as my desire to 1 collect his records, keep them together in unblemished con- dition and label them thoroughly in biro - name of artist and , song in top left-hand corner of sleeve, number of record in top right, large capital G at top centre, pair of mirroring, Baroque-style brackets on either side of the sleeve's central ; hole and, written round the rim of the hole in authoritative capitals, THIS RECORD BELONGS TO GILES SMITH. And what began with Bolan characterizes, I fear, a substantial ' portion of my affair with pop. There aren't many things so obviously in touch with passion and so frank in their emotionality as pop music; yet there's nothing like it for bringing out the librarian in me. But, beyond this reflex, I was never aware of an urge to be together with Bolan in a pre-pubescent love tryst. The excitement that immediately followed his appearances on Top of the Pops - felt as a kind of nervous agitation, low in the stomach, right on the edge of unpleasant - and which could fuel half an hour or an hour of frenetic activity at I the drawing pad or of repeated playings of the records, was excitement in which I disappeared completely, or hoped to. These were the spells in which I thought of myself not with Bolan but as Bolan, which, let s face it, would have compli- cated our union. My commitment to Bolan had to weather extensive ridi- ' cule from my brothers - three of them, all well beyond the Bolan target audience, listening to Free, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and thinking themselves pretty clever with it. If anything, their mockery only confirmed me in my belief. The eldest, Nick, who was twenty at this time, went to the trouble of sending me letters from college taunting me about Bolan, frequently in the idiom of Geoffrey Willans's Moles- worth books. `Marc Bolan is a weed and a wet,' he wrote. `I diskard him uterly.' `Van Morrison,' I wrote back, `is a hippie.' Jeremy and Simon, meanwhile, who were in their mid- teens, developed an exaggerated and high-pitched version of Bolan's trademark yowl (`Ow!'), which they performed jeer- ingly whenever I entered the room. Their campaign of disdain intensified around the time of the release of `Telegram Sam', which sounded almost exactly like `Get It On'. `All his songs are the same,' they crowed. `He's useless.' They missed the point badly there. Innovation wasn't something I wanted nearly as much as I wanted consistency. I liked `Get It On', so the more Bolan's other records sounded like it, the happier I was. Given the amount of comic mileage my brothers got out of my Bolan obsession, it was, of course, in their interests to encourage me in it. And without my brothers I would never have found out about the `Power Play' slot in the evenings on Radio Luxembourg, in which they played a new record every hour for a week. In the evenings, Radio Luxembourg was nine parts interference to two parts reception. Most of the countries of Europe seemed to be represented in its perma- nent background of crossed-line chatter. Occasionally the signal blew loud and ugly with distortion and then settled again. But I tilted my head towards my brother's transistor radio and listened, ahead of its release in Britain, to T Rex's `Jeepster' fading in and out of the Norwegian shipping fore- cast. And then I waited an hour and heard it again, this time obstructed by the Finnish time signal. It had one of Bolan's neat, chippy riffs. It had drums and clapping and stamping. Like all of the T Rex singles, it was produced to sound close, immediate. Even through the chaotic white-noise of Radio Luxembourg, it spoke to me. It's perhaps a little odd to say of a Marc Bolan song that it `spoke' to me, given how little of what he said I actually understood. The words to `Metal Guru' and `Telegram Sam' made no paraphrasable sense whatsoever but that didn't stop me thinking they were powerfully communicative at the time. It didn't help, clarity-wise, that I was such an innocent. I i misheard a line in `Get It On' as: `Well, your duty is sweet.' As Nick manfully explained, what Bolan was actually singing was: `Well, you're dirty and sweet.' I now realize that Bolan I was either utterly baffling or explicitly sexual and there was no middle ground. The chorus of `Get It On' urged the girl who was `dirty and sweet' to `get it on, bang a gong, get it ' on'. `Hot Love' sounded more like the title of an adult film than a pop song and incorporated some saucy exhalations of breath. `Jeepster', which included the puzzling line `Girl, I'm ' just a jeepster for your love', ended with the more explicit `I'm gonna suck ya', followed by some coital panting, leading to a loud orgasmic gasp. For the pubescent girls who screamed at Bolan and grew hysterical in his presence, these words and primal calls must have seemed thrillingly promis- ing. I didn't scream. I was oblivious and, in any case, too busy filing the records and clipping out the pictures. By the time `Jeepster' came out, I had my own record player. My parents, fed up that whenever they wanted to play their own records, they were always having to remove from the turntable either `A Windmill in Old Amsterdam', my Tubby the Tuba EP, or that appalling pirate version of the Jungle Book soundtrack, had passed over to me a Murphy F4 which had originally belonged to my Aunt Eileen. Barely bigger than an LP, it featured a rudimentary plastic turntable set inside a small pink cardboard suitcase, complete with moulded handle and metal snap-fasteners. You set the needle I down on the record manually. And quite frequently, you set the needle down on the mat beside the record by mistake, where it howled in protest. This was a prototype portable machine, though clearly there was no intention that you should walk around with it while it was in operation. In any case, if you were a self- conscious nine-year-old, you wouldn't have been seen dead out and about with something that looked like Barbie's over- night bag. The simpler notion here (and what must have sold my aunt on the idea) was that once you were tired of playing your Ray Conniff and Perry Como records in the sitting room, you could simply whip the machine away into the bedroom and start all over again in there. One crucial thing about the Murphy F4: it was - and I would be prepared to argue this vehemently before any jury of hi-fi specialists - supremely unjoggable. I'm not sure what the technical term is for `joggability' though I feel sure there is one, and that it is probably something like `platter destabiliz- ation ratio' or `needle-to-groove interface parameter'. What's more, there are doubtless a hundred different factory tests for it, involving wind tunnels, vibrating steel surfaces and copies of Dire Straits' Love Over Gold. I had one test, and one test only and when I praise the Murphy F4 for its resilience, I simply mean that whenever I leapt from a standing position on the bed, bounced once on the floor and dropped to my knees in the manner perfected by Marc Bolan as seen on television (though he was using his drummer's podium at the time, rather than a bed, and was on a stage in some unspeci- fied auditorium, rather than at home, and the floor was shiny rather than carpeted, enabling him to glide open-mouthed towards the camera on the knees of his flares) the vibrations on landing didn't automatically hump the needle into the paper label in the record's middle - a problem I would later have with the Ferguson, hurriedly passed on to me by Jeremy (who didn't explain this design fault at the time). What I didn't realize about the Murphy F4 was that it wasn't giving me the whole picture. I discovered this when I took my copy of `Jeepster' (plain sleeve, but with a full colour picture label on the B-side, featuring Bolan in a turquoise top) round to see my cousin Nigel. Nigel had recently shown me the first picture I had ever seen of a naked woman (this would have been a week or so after he gave me my first ever cigarette) and in the spirit of reciprocation, I thought it was only fair that I should share with him the new T Rex single. Generally I found Nigel intimidatingly advanced, but music is a great leveller. Nigel might have had precocious access to porn mags and Embassy No. 6 but he was lining himself up to buy an album by Lynsey de Paul, so to some extent he needed all the help he could get. Nigel thought we should play the single on the family radiogram, which was, in essence, a coffin on legs, situated against the wall in their sitting room. There was a deep thunk as Nigel turned the machine on and then we waited while valves the size of milk bottles slowly warmed. With me anxi- ously looking on in case he fingered the playing surface, Nigel rested the record on the flanges at the top of the miniature silver pole in the middle of the turntable, and clipped it there with the L-shaped bracket. Then he flicked the deck-level tog from OFF to REJECT The record flapped down on to the turntable and we watched the big, bulbous arm, like a model helicopter on a stick, travel above the platter and put down on the single's rim. At which point we repaired to the leather- look sofa on the other side of the room and readied ourselves. The record started - drums first, the stamping and clap- ping on the beat, then Bolan's riff. I was checking Nigel's face for a reaction when I noticed it: this second guitar coming out of the right-hand speaker, playing little runs and fills, quite independent of the guitar playing the riff, a detail that I had never heard when I played the record on my suitcase at home. Almost immediately I was off the sofa and over to the record player in a state of anxious confusion. Because I lþnew about T Rex: there were four in the band - Bolan on lead vocals and guitar, Mickey Finn on bongos and high voice, Steve Curry on bass and Bill Legend on drums. There was no other guitarist in the band, only Bolan. So what the hell was going on? Who was this other person fiddling about? I couldn't understand it. I had counted them all out ; now I was counting them all back in again, and there was more of them. Almost ill with incomprehension, I dipped my head against the radiogram and inspected the needle for fluff. Nigel was unimpressed by `Jeepster' but, then, I had rather spoilt it for him, yanking the needle off after ten seconds like that, then putting it back on and yanking it back off and so on, before I finally gave up and let the thing run through while I slumped back in the sofa, wearied by by my own perplexity. It took Jeremy to explain, back at home. `It's multi-track recording. It's not just the band, playing the song in a studio. They can add other bits afterwards. ' What he was saying, it seemed to me, was: the whole thing was a fake, a confection. I had thought `Jeepster' repre- sented, if not a mirror held up to nature, at least a micro- phone held up to T Rex. But it was all much more complicated than that. I felt royally cheated. Next he'd be telling me the groups weren't actually playing when they appeared on Top ofthe Pops. It wasn't this that stopped me looking for Marc Bolan in Colchester - though stop I did, eventually. The cumulative effect of the weekly disappointments, and of the Weeley inc:- dent in particular, must have worn me down. But, of course, it's when you're not actively looking that you're most likely to see . . . On a misty autumn Saturday afternoon in 1975, when I was thirteen, I was playing football on the pitches at Wood's Leisure Centre where there's a sports hall which doubles as a small-time pop arena. And suddenly a long, sleek, black car pulled into the car park and a small crowd seemed to materialize instantly, out of nowhere, round its back window. And all the people in our football game streaked that way too - just abandoned the match and ran over. By jostling a bit, you could see the wound-down window, some lacquered hair, a hand with an enormous ring on it. It was Alvin Stardust. Chris Sutton (not the Chris Sutton who became for a while Britain's most expensive footballer, but another one), who was bolder than the rest of us, spoke to him. He said something like, `Hey, Alvin - like your records.' And Alvin Stardust said something like, `Thanks. Thanks a lot.' Eventually, his car pulled away again - maybe he was just checking the place out - and everyone stood around laughing and congratulating Chris Sutton and saying, `Amazing! Alvin Stardust in Colchester! Who'd have thought?' I didn't say anything, though. I hated Alvin Stardust. T. Rex again Marc Bolan was killed in a car crash on Barnes Common in south-west London in September 1977. He was in the pas- senger seat of a purple Mini driven by his partner, Gloria Jones. The Mini left the road on a bend and hit a tree. Jones survived, Bolan died. He was twenty-nine. My mother told me about his death at breakfast, just as three years later she would wake me with a cup of tea and the news that John Lennon had been murdered. I wish I could say that I flung myself to the kitchen lino, hauled myself back up the stairs to my bedroom, moaning noisily, and spent a week there, inconsolable in a ring of candles. But that's now how it was. I felt that chilly standstill which happens in your chest when you hear about a death. But I felt nothing more personal. The point is, I was long over Bolan by 1977. I had bought `The Groover' in 1973, but mostly for old times' sake. I didn't really like it. Worse, by the time he died, I was fifteen and, to some extent, in denial about my Bolan phase. For a year and half there I had behaved as if nothing else was important. And then in direct contradiction, I had moved on to Sweet and Mud and a host of others - taste an early casualty as a paper round caused my disposable income to burgeon. In 1976, brazenly faithless, I'd even take a mild interest in Peter Frampton, who was a kind of Bolan flash- back, baby-faced, angel-haired. In other words, where Bolan was concerned, I had made the short journey from passion to indifference and had begun to indulge the heartless polygamy of the pop fan. I thought about him more warmly much later. In the 1990s, some pop stars are granted a reincarnation. They come back advertising jeans. In 1991, whether he liked it or not, it was Marc Bolan's turn. `20th Century Boy' was heard in a Levi's commercial, one of the series using old pop records to lodge in your mind some striking, trouser-related visual scenario. How you feel about this depends largely on whether you are disquieted at all to hear the soundtrack for your past converted into the soundtrack for somebody else's sales pitch. But that year, for the first time, I visited the Bolan tree, the scene of the car crash, which T. Rex fans have appropriated as a kind of shrine. This was no pilgrimage: I was living ten minutes up the road at the time and I went there to write a newspaper article. Throughout the year, the tree is festooned with tributes, but as the anniversary of Bolan's death approaches, these swell in number until the thing is a ribboned maypole, its branches wrapped with poems, flowers in bright paper, rosettes, draw- ings, photocopied pictures and record sleeves. The tree is situated where houses and street lights peter out into a net- work of roads crossing the common. The ground slopes steeply down a track on one side of the tree and the area is now pinned in by a crash carrier on the other, Bolan being by no means the only person to have made an unscheduled stop at this point. It was drizzling that night and miserably autumnal but about twenty people were there, sitting in vigil, carrying on a muted conversation as the rain spattered in the trees and cars sluiced round the corner. Most of the gathering had been over to Golders Green crematorium during the day to pay their respects at Bolan's memorial plaque and then had come on to the tree. `Solid Gold, East Action' was playing on a car stereo parked in the road below. I was an imposter here, a lapsed Bolanite among these keepers of the flame, these people whose fixation had held for twenty years after mine had fizzled out. But we had some things in common: `Hot Love', `Get It On', `Jeepster', and an unease about the Levi's commercial. I squeezed on to the crash barrier next to the guy in prime position by the trunk. He was my age, had Bolan-length air and a strip of purple glitter under each eye and he stared mournfully at the neck of the electric guitar he was holding as he said: `Marc didn't even wear jeans.' Sitting in the rain at night by a tree under which someone was crushed to death in a Mini . . . well, this opens itself rather easily to the charge of morbidity. Thinking obsessively about anything is a kind of self-entombment, but the more glaringly so when the object of the obsession is itself entombed. Yet it struck me by the Bolan tree that the solem- nity was mostly the weather's fault and that something straightforwardly cheerful was going on under those dripping branches: some people were remembering Bolan and a hand- ful of records which had stirred, and continued to stir them. And if the Levi's commercial wasn't in the true spirit of Bolan as they saw it, then this gathering was. There was some conversation about getting back to the true spirit of Bolan by going direct to Bolan's spirit. One of the company mentioned someone he knew who, following a near-fatal car accident of his own during which a T Rex tape had been playing on the stereo, claimed to have communi- cated with Bolan in a Ouija board session. Somebody else raised an objection. `The thing is, they bullshit you.' `Who?' I said. `Mediums?' `No, spirits. They'll pretend to be the person you want to get in touch with - Bolan, Hendrix, whatever. They lie, just like we do. So who can you trust?' chapter 3 Relic The disadvantages of growing up with older brothers are many and varied. They share your bedroom and put pictures of scantily clad women on the wall right where you wanted to put a picture of Chelsea's Ron Harris. They offer you money to eat a spoonful of mustard and then don't pay up. One of them gets the front seat of the car every time. They're much bigger than you and don't really feel it when you hit them. From a pop music point of view, though, it's a different story. Pop-wise, older brothers are a boon. They flood the house with records and you become the indirect beneficiary of their advanced spending power and more mature tastes. True, much of the music they listen to you hate precisely because they like it: I was twenty before I got over my eldest brother's infatuation with Van Morrison. And I can't say I've ever been grateful to any of them for putting me in touch with Jethro Tull's Aqualung. But I got to hear Ogdens Nict Gone Plalze by the Small Faces and Surf's Up by the Beach Boys and Can't Buy A Thrill by Steely Dan when I was, by rights, too young to be involved with music as good as that. And, thanks to older brothers, me and a handful of rock essentials genuinely go back: (`Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay' by Otis Redding in 1968 when I was six; `Honky Tonk Woman' by the Rolling Stones in 1969 when I was seven; `Whole Lotta Love' by Led Zeppelin in the same year. Other advantages of older brothers include: hi-fi hand-me- downs (not just the Ferguson, but a whole range of discarded amps, dodgy decks and battered speakers); access to the New Musical Express and Melody Maker at a time when many of my friends were forced to glean their pop knowledge from Look In; and prototypes for filing systems (I picked up every- thing I know about record collection curatorship by watching my second brother with his sticky labels and fastidious handwriting). And, if you're really lucky, two of them will form a rock group and take you to see it. That's how I came to be at Lexden Church Hall on a Saturday night in 1972 for the first public appearance of Relic. On lead guitar and backing vocals was Jeremy, soon to depart for teacher training college, with his hair down to his shoulders. On drums was Simon, with still more hair, whose greater interest was stripping the engines out of cars. You only needed to watch him drumming to know this. He was of the Keith Moon school, though `school' may not be quite the word for what is clearly a form of musical truancy, founded on the principle that if it doesn't move, hit it with a stick until it does. On the front of his bass drum, in black stick-on letters, was his nickname: Sniff. People would say, `Is the band called Sniff, then?' And he would have to say, `No, it's called Relic.' The other members were drawn from their friends, a large, hairy and, to me, bottomlessly charismatic gang of people named things like Nuts, Fitch and Spiney. Relic had taken shape in the course of several rowdy rehearsals in the front room at a house up the road from us. This was where Fred lived; Fred had volunteered early on to become Relic's roadie. It's a myth that roadies are people who want to be in bands but can't play anything. Some people just want to be roadies. When Relic rehearsed at Fred's, you could hear them three hundred yards away in our garden. In the run-up to that inaugural performance, I was privi- leged to sit in on a Relic rehearsal, which took place at the house of their newly appointed singer. His family lived in a sumptuous manor with a fully floored and brightly illumi- nated attic - a facility which, just possibly, eased his passage into the band. The top three qualifications to get you into a band, irrespective of musical ability, are, in descending order of importance: 1. Ownership of a van. 2. Ownership of a PA speaker system. 3. Access to practice facilities. In the singer's attic, Relic were trying to learn `All Right Now' by Free. There were evident tensions. The rhythm guitarist was devoting a lot of time to perfecting a forward skip in his plimsolls, a move he reckoned looked great. Else- where in the band, the feeling was that this wasn't important right now. Then again, only that morning the whole lot of them had posed for publicity stills in the seats of a Cadillac convertible belonging to the singer's father. And it's fair to say, even with a week to go before the show, fewer man-hours had been spent rehearsing than designing the band logo - Relic, written in a flourishing Gothic Script. Still, when they ran through the song, I was impressed. Impressed by the noise, which was gargantuan; impressed that the song was even vaguely recognizable as `All Right Now'; impressed by the way Simon slammed into the kit, apparently determined to tunnel his way downstairs; impressed by the way the singer flung himself around the attic as if there were four thousand people looking on, rather than just me and Fred the roadie, who was asleep. After extracting certain guarantees about the hour of my return, my parents decreed that I could attend Lexden Church Hall for Relic's big night. They were supporting Plod. Only in the early seventies could you have seen fit to call a band something as grimly pedestrian as Plod. But Plod had a local following so my brothers were confident of a big crowd. People would turn up to see Plod. Odd, this business of going out to `see' a band. My parents, when they were younger, would probably have talked about going to hear a band or going to dance to one, and would not have recognized or understood the ritual that evolved with rock: clumps of people solemnly gathering to face the stage. Years later, I saw this taken to an extreme at a John Peel Roadshow at Essex University where almost the entire audience huddled at the foot of the dancehall podium. What they were watching so raptly was a disc jockey (albeit a famous and much-loved disc jockey) playing records. `I don't know what you're looking at me for,' Peel remarked, half- way through. `I don't actually do anything.' The audience laughed but, reared as gig-goers, they could only carry on staring. I could hardly wait to stare at Relic. I was excited about it for a week in advance. I put on jeans and an amber football shirt specially. Simon had been busy at the hall for most of Saturday, what with the soundcheck and hanging up the bedsheet backdrop with `Relic' painted on it. I fiddled at home neurotically until he collected me near showtime. He seemed nervous - slightly stiff-faced. I had pre-gig nerves, too. We travelled in silence, right up to the hall's side door. Lexden Church Hall was a typical modern municipal amenity: orange and green curtains, a squeaky floor and a faint smell of hospitals. To encourage an atmosphere, most of the lights were off. I was put on some steps beside the stage, out of the way. My brother disappeared into the dressing room. People in their late teens and early twenties were beginning to drift in, offering up their wrists at the door to be tattooed with an inky date-stamp. A makeshift bar in one corner was serving beer and Pepsi in plastic cups. The DJ had his decks and boxes of records set up on a trestle table. Occasionally he would turn on a faint white strobe light, let it putter for a few seconds and then turn it off again. Finally the houselights went out altogether and I heard the DJ say, `Please put your hands together and welcome . . . Relic!' From the darkness of the stage came four bars of cod Charleston music - Relic's cheeky opening motto. Then the cumbersome curtains were withdrawn and a light came on, revealing Jeremy, stamping on a distortion pedal and churn- ing out a monstrous riff, dimly discernible as the opening to `Paranoid' by Black Sabbath. BLAN, BLAN, BLAN, DIDDLE-DIDDLE-DIDDLE-DIDDLE BLAN, BLAN, BLAN, DIDDLE-DIDDLE-DIDDLE-DIDDLE. Then some more lights came on and the whole band piled in. I had stood up when the curtains parted but was nearly forced to sit down again by a sickening combination of excitement and fear, which I was to re-experience not long after this at Ipswich stock car stadium, watching a friend of the family compete in a hot-rod race. Except the gig was more intense than that because even then it occurred to me that you risked public humiliation and personal injury far less driving a souped-up Ford at speed round a dirt-track than you did playing with Relic. They crashed through `Long Train Running' by the Doobie Brothers. They thundered into `Locomotive Breath' by Jethro Tull. The evening offered more than a bit part for Fred the roadie. He scuttled on, two minutes in and every three minutes thereafter, bent over at the waist in approved roadie style, to carry out running repairs on the fatigued metal of Simon's drum kit, nobly ducking the bits of splintered drum- stick and the hot cymbal shards as he worked. No one had the confidence to move around during the songs, except the singer, who had confidence to spare. He wore a body-hugging scoop-necked Tshirt and a pair of white trousers as tight in the groin as they were loose at the ankles. He seemed to have learned by heart the Bumper Book of Mike-stand Manoeuvres. He lifted its circular weighted base off the floor and toted the stand like a barge pole, in the manner of Rod Stewart; he hopped across the boards, towing it behind him; he forced it down towards the stage in an aggressive tango; he howled into the microphone and then thrust it away to arm's length. Only the low ceiling prevented him from slinging the thing skywards. During instrumental passages - guitar solos mostly - he maintained his place at centre stage, mouth open, nostrils flared, shaking his long blond hair, clapping in time, postur- ing madly. It was an utterly commanding performance - the performance of a man who knew exactly whose show it was. Accordingly, shortly after this gig, the band voted to replace him with someone much calmer, who came on in a nine-foot scarf and mostly stood at the mike smoking. They lost their rehearsal space but they must have figured it was worth it. The on-stage lighting was coming from a set of black- painted, chipboard boxes, hammered together by Jeremy in our garage. A lackey was operating a primitive switchboard to match the lights to the music - all of them on and flashing like an ambulance during the fast ones and, during the slow one (there was only one slow one - `Nights in White Satin') all of them off except for a pair of dull green bulbs behind the drum kit. At five-second intervals, I glanced down the hall to see what effect all this was having on the audience. It was having very little. The place was about a quarter full and most of the men, in various combinations of leather, denim and sheepskin, were leaning against the back wall with their thumbs in their belt loops. The handful of people dancing animatedly at the front were all, I noted, girlfriends of the band. But there were three or four other girls watching intently whom I didn't recognize. They looked on gooey-eyed at this frank display of white loon pants and cheap electric guitars. Near the end of Relic's allotted twenty minutes, Simon closed `Honky Tonk Women' with a magnificent final flour- ish. Sadly there was still a verse to go. Everybody else, catch- ing the imperative force of that last, juddering drum figure, had come to a halt with him. There was a pause, probably only a couple of seconds long, but suddenly time felt heavy as lead. Relic exchanged bewildered looks. I felt as if I was about to throw up. But then, like the cavalry regrouping, they set off once more, ground their way back up to speed, beat a path through the final verse and ended again, Simon's flourish sounding a little more sheepish this time. After that, they were gone. And no encores. In the brief interval between Relic's set and the arrival of Plod, the hall magically filled. Plod had more equipment, more lights, more make-up, more hair. But I only saw half their set, at which point one of my brothers came and shouted in my ear, `I've got to take you home.' I lay in bed that night with singed ears. With hindsight, it has occurred to me that Relic were really, by default, Colchester's first punk band, breathtakingly meritless. But I didn't think about that then. I thought about the noise, the lights, the leaping around. I thought about the gooey-eyed girls. I thought I could see a way forward. chapter 4 Faces My father, who hated pop music, would ask, `Why does it have to be so loud?' Sometimes this was a rhetorical repri- mand, but sometimes it was said with the straightforward curiosity of someone amazed. Because quiet was a project of his. He was after a quiet life. He would go around the house turning things down - the radio, the television, the record player - a pained expression on his face and then a look of exaggerated relief as he stood and exhaled and said, `Now, thats better.' (The scheme extended to a time-absorbing determination to remove all extraneous interior noise from the family car - rattles, hums, lumpings - a fated struggle given its age. My requests for an in-car stereo were, needless to say, blanked.) My father would also say other things about pop: that he didn't know what I heard in it; that it all sounded the same to him; that it was just noise. Well, maybe, but what a noise! Especially if you turned it right up. And some records just commanded you to be generous with the volume knob, like `Pool Hall Richard' by the Faces in 1973, which doesn't so much start as trip up and then turn its stumble into a run. And when it was loud enough and the bedroom door was shut, I could run with it, over to the mirror, hands shaped around an imaginary guitar, thumb and forefinger of my right hand pressed together and twitching against my thigh while I mouthed lyrics at my reflection. In which I became a histori- cally inaccurate figure. Because Rod Stewart, who was sing- ing, didn't play guitar on these tracks. But that's how good the record was: I wanted to be doing both and if I could have mimed the drum part at the same time, I would have. (There's a crude piece of psychology which relates guitar-playing and simulated guitar-playing to masturbation, but I think we can crush this directly. Playing a guitar is nothing like masturbation. Playing a guitar is much more difficult.) But sometimes you needed the noise for other reasons. You were busy qualifying as a teenager, putting in the hours, in your bedroom, on your back, on the bed, with a record on, stuffed rigid with unfathomable woe. These were your Samuel Beckett years. And sometimes pop would talk you out of it, but often pop would talk you down into it, which was where you wanted to be. At which point. you would flip `Pool Hall Richard' over and play the other side, which was `I Wish It Would Rain'. There is nothing like pop for getting you out of yourself; but the opposite and equal truth is, there is nothing like pop for centring you in yourself. Here's pop, this monumentally outgoing, life-affirming force, proof of the raging heart and the racing pulse. Odd, then, the solipsistic nature of so many of the pleasures you took in it: the bedroom hours (not lonely, to adapt Roddy Frame, but just alone), the solo danc- ing, the mirror miming, the listening through headphones in the dark, which is even now my favourite way to hear things, to sink into them, sealed off, so that there's no distraction. At which point, pop was not the soundtrack to your life, it was your life. Why does it have to be so loud? Because when it's loud, the bass pumps through and the drums kick up and the guitars come skidding across the room and the whole thing hits you in the chest. Because when it's loud, you can't hear anything else, particularly the people who would ask you why it has to be so loud. Scott Joplin Fate did not smile kindly on my plans for global rock domi- nation the day it made me a piano player And my mother did not smile kindly on those plans the day she gave away my piano to a local psychiatric hospital, but more of that later. The agony of being a pianist is, it seems to me, easily sourced: you aren't a guitarist. As it became clear, in my early teenage years, that I was the former and not the latter, I entered a period of desperate refutation, flinging myself at anything that vaguely resembled a guitar - those near-string- less ukuleles, an orange plastic Beatles toy guitar found lying around and, when my brothers were out, their thrilling full- size acoustics and electrics. And I pulled and plucked until my fingers were sweaty and cramped but I could never wring anything from these instruments above the most halting and rudimentary level. The riff from `Jeepster' played on one ukelele string was an early triumph whose promise I never fulfilled. Shortly after that, Jeremy showed me the three chords which comprise Creedence Clearwater Revival's `Bad Moon Rising', of which, after months of gruelling appli- cation, I could turn out a pretty nifty version - if you didn't mind waiting two minutes between each chord change while I cajoled my fingers into position, sometimes using my right hand to fold my left hand into shape. The piano felt more possible and I should have been grate- ful that I at least had that. The piano is, in many ways, the more satisfying instrument on which to be competent; it is self-sufficient and adaptable and sociable. But none of these advantages compensates for the instrument's one crucial drawback from a pop perspective: your restricted ability to strike poses of a rock'n'roll nature while playing it. In all my life, I have never stood before a mirror in a bedroom pretending to play a piano. Whereas I have made some sort of act mimetic of guitar-playing, however casually, in all of the rooms, in all of the houses in which I have ever lived. By the age of ten, I had saturated myself with images of Bolan and his Flying V, bunching himself up and twisting his hips behind its body, trotting and sliding and grooving. Gilbert O'Sullivan, slope-shouldered at a grand piano in his pullover, didn't offer quite the same buzz. A friend confides in me that he spent a lot of the private moments of his youth furtively pretending to be Ray Manza- rek of the Doors. He would play Doors records and waggle his fingers along an imaginary horizontal plane. Sometimes he would use the edge of the bed. I would maintain this was a fairly isolated outbreak of keyboard wishfulness. At concerts, you will rarely see keyboard players celebrated with the abandon that greets guitarists: during keyboard solos, there is, in the audience, no unison holding aloft of hands and waggling of fingers. We have no settled idea about what it would be to be an air keyboard-player. As I reached twelve and thirteen and it became clear that the piano was the only instrument on which I would ever hold my own, I looked in vain for role models. But keyboard players seemed to be people like Tony Banks from Genesis, perhaps the least expressive man in rock, whose idea of a crowd-pleasing freak-out is to nod gently to himself. Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder look great, swaying and weaving round the microphone the way they do, but partly their responses are `blindisms', reflexes of the visually impaired, and to impersonate these is to risk the charge of bad taste. I watched Elton John get himself up in daft specs and elaborate frocks and prance about on the lid - but it didn't seem to make him very happy. I just thought, If he'd been a guitarist, he wouldn't have had to try nearly so hard. Acknowledging this tragic hole at the centre of the pianist's life, during the 1970s one of the instrument manufacturers developed a keyboard that you could wear, guitar-style, around your neck on a strap, forcing you to pat at the keys as you might pat at your pockets, but enabling you to cut loose from your static position and shake your thing with the rest of the band. It was particularly popular with members of Earth, Wind & Fire, less so with me, who couldnt have afforded one anyway. This triumph of technical engineering didn't make you look like a guitarist; it made you look like a keyboard player with a bad case of career-envy. Not for the keyboard player any of that leaning back-to- back with the bassist in a display of leering chumminess. None of that dropping a shoulder and stepping away from the microphone stand to peel off a quick lick or a rippling run. You're just stuck there, like someone serving at a check- out. I noted that Rick Wakeman chose to compensate by mounting a defiant display of synthesizer armoury, setting himself at the centre of several tottering stacks of keyboards, many of them redundant to his purposes as a performer but just there as a threat - the musical version of a military march-past. Today's slimline technology, in which one key- board can do the work of ten, deprives you of even that satisfaction - unless you're Wakeman, who continues to pack a stage to the rafters with old keyboards, for old times' sake. As a pianist, I saw how you could at least work the sensi- tive balladeer angle, the Billy Joel option. You, the slightly brutal loner, inexpressive except for those moments late at night when you settle at the keyboard and pour it all out of yourself. And she drifts towards the piano, wine glass in hand, thrilled and impressed. `Hey, what's that you're playing?' `Oh, this little thing? Oh, you know, just something I'm kind of . . . fooling around with.' I would settle for that now, at thirty-two, making the best of a bad deal. As a teenager, this held no appeal whatsoever. Clearly, the best thing to do behind keyboards is behave like Vince Clark of Depeche Mode and then Yazoo and then Erasure, or like Chris Lowe of Pet Shop Boys. These days, keyboards are so advanced that you can generate the noise of an entire orchestra at the drop of a finger, and one of the splendid things about Clark's and Lowe's solution to the problem of being a keyboard player - they remain for the most part facially expressionless and physically static - is its honesty about the extent to which the machinery is doing the work. Lowe knows that a sizeable amount of what he does is the job of a computer operative. He is quite prepared to acknowledge that from time to time he is genuinely bored. If only he had been there to lead the way in the 1970s. On the piano we had at home, you struggled to generate the noise of a piano. It would probably have been turned down for the bar-room scenes in a cheap Western. The instru- ment had belonged to my grandfather, who, old and stooped, still went to it frequently when he visited, although only ever to play one tune, `In An English Country Garden', whistling the melody to supplement the notes his fingers slipped past. Strangely, he always played it standing up, like Little Richard. Only not. Unpleasantly florid, and perhaps designed for an Edward- ian Liberace who hadn't quite got the nerve to go all the way, the piano had a pair of brass candle-holders bolted to the front, although the cups that had held the candles were long gone. When you depressed the loud pedal, there was a deep clunk inside, like someone changing gear on a traction engine. The biggest disadvantage was that the frame was one of the old-fashioned wooden ones which were not made to hold up well under the pressures of the modern 1970s home environment. Basically, a piano tuner would call every six months or so, put the instrument into startlingly melodious condition and leave. Then the central heating would come on and four minutes later the thing sounded like a Hawaiian guitar. When I was seven, my parents decreed that I would be taught piano by an elderly lady called Mrs Galley, who did home visits rather in the manner of a district nurse. I have often wondered how sensational I might have turned out to be had the time of my weekly Thursday afternoon lesson not coincided exactly with the start of Scooby-Doo on TV This made me a ratty, pent-up pupil and not just because of the thorough excellence of Scooby-Doo, but also because the cost of missing it was social ostracism; in the playground the next day, people would be saying, `Wasn't it great when Shaggy bit Velma?' and how would I know? I was busy bad-temperedly screwing up a simplified version of Bach's `Ode to Joy' at the time. I don't suppose these lessons were much of a treat for Mrs Galley either, although I don't necessarily link their taxing nature to her death, midway through Grade 2. She was, I insist, elderly. Still, her dying didn't help matters with regard to my accomplishment at the keyboard. But it did mean that I had a period of some years subsequently in which I was free to roam unfettered at the keyboard, instruct myself according to my instincts, generate my own playing style. I could hear myself giving interviews in the future in which I would casu- ally allude to something Paul McCartney once said (or `Paul' - or even `Macca' - as I hoped to be calling him by then) about how he had always shied away from classical learning, even later on when it was offered to him, for fear that sud- denly knowing some of the rules would somehow stop up what he had been doing all these years in almost complete ignorance of them. `Yeah,' I would say. `I can relate to Macca there.' Left to my own devices, I developed two tentative forms of boogie-woogie. One was mid-tempo and went jud d'jud d'jud d'jud. Then there was a faster one which went judda-judda- judda-judda. Also I contrived a two-fingered version of the theme from the television series Robinson Crusoe, one of the great melancholic TV themes: the series was dubbed from, I think, the original French, but a strangeness seemed to have overcome the entire soundtrack, including the title music, making it muted, slightly woozy and saddened. I also worked out, by ear, a version of Scott Joplin's `The Enter- tainer', in which I could be fairly accused of selling out to popular pressure. In the mid-I970s, everyone who played the piano played Scott Joplin's `The Entertainer'. Most people, though, had access to the sheet music, whereas I had to feel my way in the dark. Still, it was a storming little version I produced, even if it was a bit shy of the black notes and didn't involve me once changing key in the left hand where, having found that big sprung leap which powers the tune along - boom ching, boom ching - I held it in the same place for fear of losing it. Mostly, though, I played the one which went jud d'jud d'jud d'jud, followed by the one which went judda-judda- judda-judda. My mother said, controversially, `Why don't you learn something you can play all the way through?' I suspect she had once had a vision of me with perfectly parted hair and impeccable manners, perhaps in a velvet tuxedo, descending from my room in the late afternoon to entertain her friends with dextrous little pieces of Mozart. But this vision had faded. Now she saw the piano as an ugly encumbrance, taking up space in a room she quite wanted to `do something with'. She was also thoroughly fed up with the theme from Robinson Crusoe. `Why can't you play some- thing nice?' was another refrain. I was to have one more shot at becoming a `proper' musician. It happened when I was seventeen, at the point where I had all but exhausted the appeal of my repertoire and could see no way forward: marooned for ever with the theme from Robinson Crusoe. I booked in with Mrs Forbes, a tutor recommended to me by my sister-in-law, and started attend- ing lessons, in the overheated front room of her semi- detached house off Drury Road. Mrs Forbes was younger than Mrs Galley, but only just. She had dyed black hair, strictly controlled by pins and clips, and she wore white cotton blouses with ruffs at the neck and wrists. On her doorstep I would pass a pupil coming out, a five-year-old girl with a pony-tail. Perhaps because she had found her rhythm in the previous hour and now couldn't shake it off, Mrs Forbes spoke to me as if I, too, was a five-year-old girl with a pony-tail, rather than a seventeen-year-old with a raging appetite for an albums deal. She tried me on Satie's `Trois Gymnopedies' - which was to the late 1970s what Scott Joplin's `The Entertainer' was to the mid-1970s and which has now been debased by its use in television advertisements for deodorant and facial scrubs. I trapped my fingers in it, horribly. In about our fourth session, in order to lighten the atmosphere, I played her a piece that I had recently made up (`. . . just something I'm kind of fooling around with . . .'). I thought she might enjoy it, being rather close in mood to the music we had been working on. In truth, the piece was probably more Eric Sykes than Erik Satie. When I finished, she said, brightly: `Well, we're quite the little composer, aren't we?' I lasted one term and still couldn't read music and still consoled myself with the thought that neither could Paul McCartney. It would have been around then that the piano tuner, a cheery man with a moustache who bounced in as if fresh from a successful cabaret season, called on what I thought was going to be another of his routine visits. But after five minutes alone with the piano, he emerged from the room wearing a grave expression unusual for him. He said he had some bad news. There was no point in beating about the bush: he was going to give it to us straight. It was about the frame: things looked bad down there. Getting the piano to concert pitch would have involved tautening the strings so radically that the frame would have been bent into a straining C-shape, cocked like an animal-trap, ready to explode in lethal shards across the sitting room. You wouldn't want to be sitting in front of it, playing jud d'jud d'jud d'jud when that happened. He could tune it roughly, within limits - make it comfortable. But basically it was inoperable and there was nothing we could do now except settle down and wait for the end. Except there was one thing we could do, if we were my mother: we could get straight on the phone to a local residen- tial centre for the mentally handicapped and ask them if a clapped-out upright would be any good to them. A few days later they sent a van. Bad enough to be a pianist. But for something like three years I was a pianist without a piano. I lost ground. It's broadly understood that pop groups are not meant to be like relatives or football teams. You don't stand by them through thick and thin. Mostly you stand by them through thick on the understanding that during thin it's perfectly OK for you to go off and buy records by someone else. This is the fabulous democracy of pop: it stands or falls on the popular vote. I would have to say in my own case, though, that my career as a record buyer has been distinguished by strange lingering attachments to bands long past their sell-by date and bouts of what I can only describe as loyalty purchasing. Take 10cc, for example. In his third year at teacher- training college in London, my brother Jeremy became Social Secretary and his absolute triumph was to book 10cc for the end-of-term party. This was in June 1974 when `Wall Street Shuffle' was in the charts and just before the band became huge. It was the last college gig 10cc ever played. I was twelve and disqualified from attending by my parents. But one of my brother's girlfriends made sure to get me autographs - Lol Creme, Graham Gouldman, Kevin Godley and Paul Burgess (the spare drummer) but not Eric Stewart, which was the one I really wanted. By way of compensation, in 1975 when 10cc came to Ipswich Gaumont, my brothers took me. It was the first rock show I ever saw. (The first one I went to unsupervised was the Tom Robinson Band gig at Essex University,1978, supported by Stiff Little Fingers.) I remember how Eric Stewart walked out of the wings with his guitar very slowly, when the rest of the band were already in position, which I thought was really cool. And they opened with `Silly Love' and finished with `I'm Not in Love' and my ears rang for an entire day afterwards. This must have been when I started, in a sense, `support- ing' 10cc. At school shortly after this, there was some tedious swimming gala and all those not involved were meant to be watching. But I was with some friends round behind the changing cubicles, listening to the Tuesday lunchtime chart announcement on Radio 1. And when it became apparent that 10cc's `I'm Not in Love' had gone to No.1, I fisted the air in triumph. ` Yesssss! ' The point is, there was no real reason to go any further than this with 1 Occ. The first two albums were fun - irritating in places, and more than a little smart-arse, but what the hell - the second two were patchy, and when Godley and Creme left, the band lost everything they had ever had in the way of wit. But, in some terrible way, I was trapped. I kept buying the albums: Deceptive Bends, Bloody Tourists, Live and Let Live (the double live album) . . . I remember reading Julie Burchill in the NME, very late on in 10cc's career, as late as 1979 maybe, saying, out of the blue, that she quite liked Eric Stewart's voice and feeling a huge surge of relief and gratitude towards her that she should come out and admit this. (She may have been taking the piss, of course.) But I stored her praise away, ready to bring it out and vamp it up slightly in case of attack: `Well, Burchill's with me on this one, actually . . .' I never did use it because in the end I gave up even pretend- ing that my relationship with l Occ was defensible on grounds of merit. Why bother? Returning to school after a lunch hour with a copy of the Look Hear album (1980!), I was forced to produce it, sadly, from the bag by someone who wanted to have a look at the sleeve. It was terrible, and so was the album - not one decent song on there - but I was in too deep. And a year later I bought I 0 (their tenth album and mine too) as well and I'm pretty sure I never even got round to playing side two. I'm at a loss to explain this, except to say that lOcc were the first band I saw live and I guess you never forget your first time. And maybe they are only the most vivid among many instances in my collection of record buys that have nothing to do with music, or at least music is a distant, barely remem- bered part of the motivation. Pony By the time Jeremy returned from teacher-training college, it was all over for Relic. But out of the ashes of Relic came Pony. Pony was Jeremy on guitar and lead vocals, Simon on drums and Jeremy `Fitch' Meade on bass. And, later, me on keyboards. They had cooked up the name in a pub. Star- ing desperately across the bar, one of them had caught sight of a bottle of Pony, `the little drink with the big kick', to use the old advertising slogan. It could have been worse, I suppose: we could have been called Babycham. Or Gents. Then again, at least Babycham or Gents would have had no unfortunate Cockney rhyming-slang resonance. No one much uses Cockney rhyming-slang in Colchester and I remained ignorant of the alternative meaning of the word `pony' until some six years later during a stay in hospital. I was two beds down the ward from a cheery middle-aged Londoner, who bounced to his feet one evening, clapped his hands together in a business-like way and announced, as he headed for the bathroom, `Just time for a pony before The Professionals.' Took me a couple of minutes, but I got there: pony and trap - crap. This little semantic detail may explain why, at the peak of our career, though we could secure book- ings as far east as Chelmsford, Pony were unable to break into the Metropolitan region. When I joined - aged fifteen, for a gig on Silver Jubilee Day,1977 - the band came interestingly close to being an all- family affair, like the Osmonds, say, or the Jacksons. Jeremy was often on at Nick to join and complete the family set. sz He was, after all, a guitarist and as able a musician as any of us. But Nick was never interested in performing and in any case, was about to get married. He kept his distance. `You could call yourselves the Smiths,' said my mother one meal- time, and we jeered derisively. As if anyone was ever going to be successful with a dumb name like the Smiths. The Silver Jubilee Day gig took place in Boxford High Street. We performed from the trailer of a lorry, covered over with tarpaulin, parked opposite the pub. The band paid to hire me a bottom-of-the-range electric piano from a shop in Colchester. It didn't sound much like a piano; it sounded more like a musical box or some ghastly Austrian clock. I hadn't learned many of the numbers at this time, so I was presented with the quandary of what to do during songs in which you're not playing. It occurred to me that you could clap in time and hop enthusiastically from foot to foot, exhorting, with hand gestures and winks, the audience to dance. I didn't have the nerve for that. Or you could lose yourself in some dance of your own to the band's music, eyes closed, head shaking. I didn't have the nerve for that either. I opted for sitting down on the stage, directly behind the key- board and out of sight of the audience. Then I would stand up when it was time to play. From the street it must have looked as if I was on a piece of hydraulic flooring. We gave them `Caroline' and `I Knew The Bride (When She Used To Rock'n'Roll)' and `Let's Stick Together'. The Silver Jubilee was where punk found a centre for its anti-institutional seeth- ing. I spent it on the back of a lorry in a village playing `Hi Ho Silver Lining'. Jeremy decided we should go commercial. There was money to be made from providing music for dinner dances and club socials, and there was no money in playing anarchic cover versions of `Paranoid' in deserted youth clubs. We rehearsed a set of foot-tappers for all ages. `Jailhouse Rock'. `One Of These Nights'. `Annie's Song'. A friend took a photo of us, lined up along the side of Jeremy's Transit van, and sent it off to Walkerprint, the pub- licity-photograph people, who printed up copies with a white border round them and the word PONY in neat Letraset along the bottom. We took out a small ad in the `Entertainers' section of the Classifieds in the Essex County Standard. It read: þOK "PONY" Colchester's most reasonably priced, versatile pop group. We were listed along with Mr Magic Man from Frinton (`Children's Parties, delightfully different, jolly hour's entertainment'), Dick's Disco (`revived 45s and country and western, plus chart sounds') and `NELLY QUACK ventrilo duck also puppet shows, home/hall, brochures - Twinstead 449'. Jeremy bought four matching nylon shirts - light blue with navy blue collars and cuffs - from some discount boudoir in the town centre. We stencilled the name of the band on the sides of the van and on the rear door. We were one of the only bands in Colchester who had our name on our van. Simon still hadn't removed the black stickers on his bass drum read- ing `Sniff'. He refused to. Now people would say, `Is the band called Sniff, then?' And he would have to say, `No, it's callPd Pony.' So we introduced a giant cut-out hardboard pony, suspended above the stage, or propped up at the back, or however space would allow. It cost Jeremy about a fortnight of intensive labour with a hacksaw in the garage. And the gigs flooded in. Clacton Town Football Club, Sainsbury's in Colchester, the Grenadier Guards Association, the Colchester Police Community Unit, the Halstead Motor Cycle Club and other brightly lit halls with stackable chairs and stackable tables where some local wag would want to take the microphone for `True Love Ways' straight after the raffle. We were out most Saturdays, and some weekends we were out on Friday too. And soon there was enough money in the kitty to buy me my own electric piano, a Crumar Compac. And we were charging œ50 and pocketing œ10 each after expenses. We played `Una Paloma Blanca'. Also, with me heavily featured at the keyboard, `The Birdie Song', at which point the floor would be thick with dancers in lines or circles, doing prearranged routines that differed from club to club - flap- ping their arms, slapping their thighs, tweaking each other's noses, etc. - as if every town in Essex had evolved its own peculiar way to birdie on down. We were a human juke-box. `Under The Moon Of Love', `Write Myself A Letter', `There Goes My Everything'. Also, `Happy Birthday To You', `The Hokey-Cokey', `Knees Up Mother Brown' and the National Anthem. During `Nights In White Satin , Simon, who was bored a lot of the time, would thrash hell out of the single snare beat just before the solo. Shaping up, he would take the stick back way behind his shoulder until it was poised like a loofah, somewhere near the small of his back. And then he would bring the thing down in his furious fist, so you would hear the bass guitar's gentle trip down the scale and then . . . CRACK! Sometimes you would see couples' shoulders leap up around their ears in surprise. `Goo'night,' Jeremy would say at the end. `And if you're driving . . . don't forget your car ' On New Year's Eve Jeremy would lead everyone in the countdown to midnight. Then there would be a balloon drop or a streamer shower and people would be jumping into each other's arms, whisking each other around, kissing and shouting. Up on the stage there would be this redundant minute or so before we launched into `Auld Lang Syne' or some spivved-up version of the Can-Can, a minute in which there was nothing to do but look out at this mayhem and wonder whether in the band was really the best place to be after all. Fallout Rick (guitar/vocals) and David (bass) came up and said they'd finally got permission for the end-of-term gig - their band Fallout, during lunch-hour, in the school hall, anyone who wanted could get in to watch, admission free - and Doug from Codpiece was probably going to get up and do something and maybe, what with me being in Pony and all that, I might want to come on for a couple of numbers. It would have to be on guitar, mind, they added hurriedly, because keyboards wouldn't, sort of, fit in. (Go on, say it, I thought, because keyboards are for ponces.) I nodded calmly, looked down at the playground, sucked thoughtfully on a cheek. I was thinking: Supergroups, eh? Well, doubtless there's going to be a lot of this kind of thing out there in the future, when the career finally takes off, so why be churlish and diffident now? `Sure,' I said, slowly. `Sure.' Inside my stomach, meanwhile, a line of cheerleaders was raising its pom-poms high, high in the air and shaking them madly for joy. A gig! In front of the entire school! On guitar! Changed for ever in the eyes of my beholders - for this was what seemed to me to be at stake here; this was the chance pop was now smilingly extending to me; with one bound, a rethink of the story so far It is not given to all of us to be rebels, much as we would like, and at school I was always too cautious to be properly disruptive. I wasn't the one who left the gas on all through chemistry. It wasn't me who popped out during morning break to phone for a taxi in the name of our history master, so that the school secretary had to come trotting along the corridor to fetch him, midway through a double period. I wish I could say it had been me, I really do. But I didn't have it in me. I lacked the initiative. But what about this for an opportunity? If I could only stand, even briefly, on the school stage (in other words, right at the centre of the school's institutional life, on its very hearth), legs apart, knees bent, tongue rudely protruding, and launch just one screaming howl of feedback and distortion the length of the oak-panelled, we-think-of-ourselves-as- rather-refined hall, well, I would have to come out of that partly remade, wouldn't I? I could already picture the bunch- ing around me afterwards, the backslaps as I tried to wrestle down my smiles of pleasure: `We had you down for a bit of a stiff, Smith. But you were ready to rock all along. Good work.' Some years after this, Elmore Leonard wrote a novel in which a character wears a T shirt with the slogan: `You've probably mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.' It was my avid hope that up there, on stage with Fallout, cannoning power chords off the board inscribed `Oxbridge Successes 1947-55', I would metaphorically speaking, be wearing that shirt. Fallout (influences: Hendrix, Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy, any- thing that managed to combine distorted guitars with calm- ing, hippie perspectives) was pretty much Rick's band. Rick was in the year above. He had long hair, hunched shoulders and a big loping walk. He wore a formless black corduroy jacket beneath which he rotated a small wardrobe of brown- ish polo-neck jumpers - shagged, primordial, some of them almost certainly unfinished. He also had a perpetually stoned grin, chiefly because he was perpetually stoned, and he drove to school in a shabby grey Cortina Estate, with tapes of Hendrix, Zeppelin, etc. howling from its crippled speakers. Sometimes, if I timed my exit right, I got a lift home. To accept a lift from Rick was to subject your ears to a rigorous sonic challenge. Nowadays, the noise you associate with other people's car stereos, heard at traffic lights or as they pass down the street, is a chassis-shuddering boom. Advances in acoustic technology mean it's possible to gener- ate a big, rich noise using a small, cheap speaker (Hence those dinky mini-systems for home use, with their virtually invisible wall-mounted speakers. Once upon a time you would have needed a pair of wooden cabinets the size of dustbins to make that kind of a racket.) But during the 1970s it was apparently impossible to get an in-car stereo that could manage bass frequencies unless you were prepared to spend as much again as the car cost having it armour-plated and lined with fur. Inside Rick's Cortina, the music had to force itself over the noise of the engine by sheer treble power, elimi- nating conversation, causing loose bolts to fizz in their mountings, the dashboard to judder dizzingly, the carpeting to rise up slightly and the air within to become dangerously static, until you stepped from the car at your destination and stood in shock on the pavement, deafened, spike-haired and waving stupidly. At the wheel, though, Rick always looked entirely undis- turbed by the noise. Indeed, he would normally be swaying to some slight, unheard rhythm at the heart of it. Rick's closest ally was his band partner David, and they were stylis- tically of a kind. Both were great users of patchouli, the perfumed oil that makes you smell like a joint. And both were firm believers in the astonishing affective powers of Tiger Balm, that greasy ointment which comes in tiny tins and glows warmly on application to the skin, a kind of hippie Vick. Thus perfumed and greased, their idea of the best time possible was to take a Tupperware tub of hand-picked magic mushrooms to a screening of Woodstock at Essex Univer- sity's film club (where it showed most weeks, in repertory with Easy Rider). Their idea of the second best time possible was to drive out to the shoreline at East Mersea - `away from the public glare', as the author of the Rock Gazetteer puts it - smoke themselves into a stupor, lurch unsteadily on to the beach and fly kites. In some respects, the original 1960s hippie was nowhere near as true to type as the mid-1970s derivative model. The combined effect of these various balms, oils, resins and fungi tended to lend David and Rick a distance, as it were, a slightly partial purchase on the world, which cer- tainly worried those charged with their education. But from where I was, in the year below and inside a school uniform, they seemed thrillingly remote. If I could just be seen playing with them - and, what's more, playing electric guitar with them - even if only briefly, if only as a guest, a temporary import, an obvious outsider, something would rub off. Rehearsals for my appearance amounted to a less than exhaustive two. The iþrst was a preliminary session in the music room, after sehool, Rick's bold, flame-orange guitar providing a cocky contrast with the tambourines, the xylo- phones and beaters and other junior orchestral debris. I had borrowed my brother's deep red Gibson Les Paul (or at least, it was a copy of a Gibson Les Paul, made by a company called Avon, who were not, I think, related to the cosmetics giant, though I could be wrong). Tears of gratitude flood my eyes, even now, at the thought that I had the kind of older brother who would loan me his electric guitar. Guitarists don't lightly pass their guitars into other hands. They think of them as pets, only more human. Of course, the loan had been pains- takingly negotiated and narrowly agreed on a number of stringent conditions which amounted to it being fine for me to borrow the thing, as long as I didn't actually touch it. But, even so, I was moved then and I still am. David had forgotten to bring his bass to school that day and the drummer hadn't been able to bring his kit along and, anyway, he had to get his bus at five fifteen. But they both sat in anyway, looking on enthusiastically while Rick and I used the time to sort out my two guest numbers - Thin Lizzy's `Rosalie' (chosen for maximum power chord potential) and Dylan's `All Along The Watchtower' (chosen for its virtually idiot-proof chord sequence). `Yeah! Rocking!' said Rick. The second rehearsal, this one full scale, took place in the loft of a barn situated on a farm in the countryside just out- side town. It belonged to some friends of the drummer's family who, with considerable magnanimity and no respect whatsoever for the country code, handed it over to us for a Saturday afternoon. But, even here, what had seemed in anticipation a luxurious abundance of time rapidly dwindled to nothing. First, all the bulky paraphernalia - amplifiers, drums, guitar cases - had to be hoisted into the loft up a set of steps which, though almost certainly the width of a late Victorian farmer carrying a hoe, was not designed with the Marshall 4x 12 speaker cabinet in mind. There was about half an hour of muffled grunting, in a scene I was going to see replayed so often in the next years, before and in the after- math of gigs - thin, stoned figures grappling unmanageable objects. Ah, the aimless confusion of rock'n'roll in rehearsal. I've never forgiven Prince for a scene in his movie Purple Rain where the character he is playing arrives late for a rehearsal with his band, scoots up on to the stage, apologizes crisply, slips his guitar strap over his neck and off they all go, into perfectly mixed, effortlessly disciplined pop heaven. And this is Prince, of all people: a man who has spent nearly all his life in rehearsal studios, who must know more than any human alive about the ear-aching tedium of raising a band. Shame on him for this falsification. The truth is, most band practices are so painful that it's a miracle any band bothers to take it further than the rehearsal room. At the start of a practice, there's no useful boardroom etiquette, briskly applied: nobody raps confidently on the table and says: `Right, let's get down to business.' Instead , there is an obligatory opening period, lasting anything from ten minutes to two and a half hours, known in the trade as `noodling around'. Some of this, to be fair, is taken up with the necessary business of taming recalcitrant electronics. There's a lot of coughing into microphones (`One two, chk! One two, chk!'), a lot of gales of feedback and spasms of static. From the guitarist's amplifier: Waaaaarrrmm. From the singer's PA: Nyeeeeeeee. Seeeynlz . . But all the rest is basic, straight down the line, 100 per cent, 24-carat pissing about. A guitarist finds it constitution- ally impossible to have a guitar round his neck and not be playing it. A drummer is the same when there are sticks in his hands. The bass player has to perform, not less than fifteen times, that ponderous figure from Fleetwood Mac's `The Chain' (the music which opens the BBC's Grand Prix coverage). And so it goes on, everyone somehow transfixed in their own little world, doing their own purgatorial thing. It's no surprise that most of the bands that make it have a sizeable authority figure right at the heart of them, a power freak or an egomaniac, someone big enough to wrestle with this chaos of self-indulgence, to rise above the racket shout- ing, `Orright, orright, orright. Let's do "Funny Farm" ', or some such. Fallnut, alas, were seriously short of a figurehead. Several potheads, yes, but no figurehead. Still, after all the conventional arsing around, we finally fell into one of the allotted numbers. It was Thin Lizzy's `Rosalie', that great, hulking, metal monster . . in Thin Lizzy's hands, at any rate. Me, David and Mike the drummer went: BLANNNG. RlCk Went: KLANNG, WIDDLE, WIDDLE, WIDDLE. The rest of us went: BLANNNG again. And then we all set off together, or thereabouts: BLANNNG, KLANNG, WIDDLE, WIDDLE, WIDDLE, BLANNG, etc. I think the question surfaced in my mind even then: how could such dedicatedly peaceful people create such a horren- dous racket? Imagine a tractor dragging a plough over con- crete while being repeatedly buzzed by a helicopter I stood at the side, up to my ankles in straw, endeavouring to force my fingers into the shapes that Rick had shown me and falling entire half-verses behind - though in truth, this barely mattered for, as a unit, we had bludgeoned our way into a space beyond time, in which the concepts of `early' and `late' no longer applied. In the brief seconds in which I dared take my eyes off my terrorized hands, I caught sight of Rick through the dust now being shaken by vibration out of the rafters above us and falling like snow. He appeared bafflingly calm at the centre of this apocalyptic storm, leaning into the microphone to sing, his eyes closed, an expression of amazing serenity on his face, what you could see of it between the strands of hair. You'd got to hand it to him: he looked the part. For all I know, he sounded it too, but I couldn't hear him because of the noise. After two and a half minutes, there was a muffled pop as the barn's ancient electrics gave out and the loft plunged into darkness and silence, but for the dry rattle of the drums which continued for at least another minute (the time it took the drummer to realize that something was afoot). `Whoa!' said Rick. There followed a brief conference during which Rick decided, with glazed glee, that we would just have to busk it on the day. Then we humped all the equipment down the steps again and went home. Acquiring the right to mount a pop concert in the school hall had proved harder than getting planning permission for a cocaine dispensary on the playground. Many of the senior staff members only had to hear the words `pop music' to fear for the souls of their pupils. Rightly so, in the case of Fallout plus Very Special Guests. Not that I imagine anything we could have done would have inspired moral depravity or an outbreak of bestial behaviour in the third form: you've got to practise a lot harder than we did before you can guarantee that effect. But almost certainly, two or three hundred children, exposed to Fallout (irradiated, if you like), would have decided there and then that they never wanted to listen to music of any kind ever again. I think this would have weighed on our consciences. In the end, it didn't come to that. Two days before show- time, Mr Balch, who was an English master, died of cancer, suddenly, shockingly. During the morning assembly, the headmaster formally announced the death to the whole school, and right at the end of a few words in tribute, added: `Tomorrow's concert in the hall is, of course, cancelled.' My mother charitably took our side when I told her about it at home that night. `How ridiculous to cancel it,' she said, genuinely irritated. `As if Mr Balch would have wanted that.' But my mother hadn't heard Fallout. And Mr Balch cer- tainly wouldn't have wanted it. Even dead. chapter 5 Andrew Ridgeley It needs underlining: in 1977 no rock band had ever played live in Colchester Grammar School's hall - or in the head- master's study, or in the staffroom, or anywhere else on the premises for that matter, since live rock was not considered educational. It needs underlining because that's not the way things are now. In March 1990, Minsthorpe High School in Pontefract booked the House of Love for a Monday night concert. Not the school bottletop orchestra, not even some neighbourhood folkie with an acoustic guitar and a local history slideshow, but the House of Love, a noisy, Velvet Underground-based, bona fide, albums-out-and-everything rock act on the Fon- tana label. What is going on at that school? Are the teachers utterly without responsibility? Don't the parents have any- thing to say about this? (Answer to the last question: no. Most of them were probably there, in fact, moshing down the front, crowd-surfing, stage-diving on to the heads of their offspring with lemonade spraying from their plastic beakers.) In the 1970s this would have been inconceivable. Pop music didn't even bother turning up on the first day of term; it knew it was automatically expelled, absolutely out of bounds. It resigned itself to hanging around outside the school with its hands in its pockets, waiting for the end of the day when we would run out and join it. Perhaps the occasional trendy English master would devote a lesson to unpacking the lyric of the Beatles' `Eleanor Rigby' or Pink Floyd's `Arnold Laine', but you knew it was chiefly a public- relations job, a crude, vote-winning strategy and that, at all other times, the windows would be crowded with garlic and crucifixes against any possible pop-related intrusion. Finally, though, education has said to pop, `Come on in, have a cup of tea.' Right now, there are GCSE music students programming synthesizers and building up sophisticated 4-track demo tapes - in school time! As work! The two have gone from resistance to collaboration, and their battle is now all but forgotten. Consider a teaching pack prepared in 1989 by the edu- cation department of the British Film Institute, for use in classrooms, tying in with the GCSE course in Media Studies. Its topic is the career of Wham!,1982-86. I am sure it is not unique in its scope or its intent, though it is almost certainly the only publication of an educational nature that contains a foreword by Andrew Ridgeley. `What you learn from this pack', the tanned former Wham! sidekick calmly promises, `may stand you in good stead should you choose to go into the music industry.' The teaching material includes a wedge of worksheets and project cards headed `Product', `Promotion', `Consumption', intended to explain the way the music business works and to encourage some sort of critical capacity by close analysis of records, chart performances, videos and so forth. Essay suggestions include: Watch the beginning of `Club Tropicana'. Look at the chart above and continue the list of denotation/connotative shots up until the first shot of George Michael. Also: From your graph and research, describe in your own words the progress of`Wake Me Up Before You Go Go' through the charts. I was taught by people who genuinely believed that pop music wouldn't survive as far as the millennium, let alone make it through to the curriculum. But look at it now: in business courses and career studies and instrumental work- shops. Rock has gone to college. Maybe it's only jealousy that makes me feel there's something rather chilly about this. Maybe it's because I wish I was there now, charging around the corridors with my synth and my lyric sheets. `What you got this afternoon?' `Double Hip Hop.' `Boring!' But it does seem to me that a group like Fallout was specifically about forces that school could not contain (and not all of them to do with smell). And I can't help feeling that when George Michael crops up in an exam question something has come full circle and stopped with a shudder. Rose Royce `If you're going to kiss this girl,' I tell myself, `you've got less than two choruses in which to do it.' I'm on the floor at the Embassy Suite on Schools Disco night (Wednesdays), in a rugby shirt, probably, and jeans, one of a room full of highly glandular teenagers, many of the male ones wearing Brut. And, behind the decks, DJ Gary Soul (possibly not his real name) has put on `Wishing On A Star' by Rose Royce. And because her friend has egged us on, I and my putative partner are among those moving slowly but going nowhere under the dim lights and I have my hand in the small of her rather thrillingly hot back. The thing you have to watch about `Wishing On A Star', though, is it starts out spare and dreamy but gets a bit tem- pest-tossed at the end. If you're already kissing at that point, you're OK: you can up the pressure a little and sway on through. If you aren't, you're lost. And why else would you be dancing to `Wishing On A Star', if not in order to end up with your lips glued to some- one else's? That was what the slow ones were for. Otherwise , if you danced to pop, you danced alone, without contact, cutting extraordinary shapes of your own devising, or mod- elled on those of John Travolta. And I only had to watch my parents at weddings, gamely hoofing it with the young ones for their one token number, to see the generational divide. My mother obviously found `disco dancing' fun in a parodic way but my father, who could happily whizz through a fox- trot or a waltz, was lost, just completely lost without another body to work with, couldn't see what this solo wriggling had to do with dance or music or anything. Nowadays, I'm inclined to see my father's point. I won't dance. Don't ask me. I used to. I used to think I was pretty nifty on my toes. I knew Paul who did a lot of the discos at the parties we all went to and he would play Steely Dan's `Kid Charlemagne' just for me and, because of the way that song is a mesh of details and flips about even as it lopes forward, there were all these fabulous twitchy bits that you could respond to with your elbows and your knees. In the end, though, sense prevailed, which is why I evolved a strict no- dancing policy. Not that I don't find it heartening that pop can pass an electrical charge through people, jerk them into life. It's just that I have a deep-seated conviction that white English middle-class males should be banned from dance- floors, this stipulation enforced by the rigorous use of fines and, if necessary, cattle prods. Have you ever watched white English middle-class males dancing? All that bobbing and flapping, all that chewing of bottom lips, all that tragically stiff pelvic work ? I rest my case. Dancing with people, of course, would be exempt. And down there on the Embassy Suite floor, with time running out, I managed to lever my chin off her right shoulder, bring my head in a cautious arc round the outside of her hair, simultaneously tilting my face through about 60 degrees, left to right, and briefly checking her expression for receptivity, before locking on for the final engage phase. And thus docked and mouthing mechanically, made it to the close. And I just had to thank God it was `Wishing On A Star' and not `Free- bird' by Lynyrd Skynyrd, which changes pace at the end, goes from being a smoocher to a fast one, leaving you one of two choices: either to jump apart and look foolish by attempting to see out the rest of the song solo, or to remain in the clinch but increase the pace of your body movements to something like the speed of the song, thereby enduring the very real possibility of getting your tongue bitten off. How people ever got to kiss each other before the inven- tion of the record player I have no idea. Stevie Wonder In Rhythm and the Blues, the autobiography he wrote with David Ritz, the great Atlantic record producer Jerry Wexler talks of his teenage years, the 1930s in New York, when he would cruise the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn and dig for musical jewels in the boxes of secondhand records in old furniture stores tucked under the elevated sections of the subway line. At night he would hang out at music clubs and jazz joints in Harlem, a white man in a black world, but getting by OK by playing it cool. `I moved to the tempo of the streets,' Wexler says, `the rhythms of jazz.' That's all very well in New York. In Colchester, moving to the tempo of the streets was more problematic. What exactly was the tempo of Straight Road, of Sanders Drive, of Words- worth Avenue? Would you hear rhythms there, or lawn- mowers? Would you know what to listen for in any case? Shrub End, anyone ? You couldn't feel the rhythms of jazz as you walked the streets, but that didn't mean you couldn't sit in your friends' bedrooms and hear the rhythms of soul. Sometime in the summer of 1976, my friend Simon played me Innervisions, a Stevie Wonder album so gorgeously tuneful it's virtually unfair: `Golden Lady', `Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing', `Misstra Know-it-All', `Higher Ground' . . . The album was already about three years old but that didn't stop a handful of us from taking it up and running with it for a while as a kind of cause. When groups of friends form allegiances to records, the decisions made between you about what constitutes a good one, a record you are going to stand by and play to death, aren't necessarily to do with prevailing fashion or a general mood. All it needs is someone with the confidence to get behind something. That autumn, Wonder released Songs In The Key Of Life and I convinced my mother to buy it on vinyl for me for Christmas - a double album in a gatefold sleeve with a thick, glossy lyric booklet and four additional tracks on a giveaway 7-inch EP Thirteen years later, I convinced her to buy me the whole lot again on CD. I had heard nothing in between that I liked nearly as much or anything which seemed quite so immune to the effects of repetition. It is tempting sometimes to believe that pop records are at their most exciting the first few times you hear them and then gradually lose their flavour ever after: that they wrestle you to the floor on your first date and from then on the two of you are forever attempting, rather self-consciously, to rekindle that initial spark. Relationships with singles are frequently torrid in this way. But Songs In The Key Of Life seemed to want to know me on a different footing altogether. There are many things I have had the time to go off since 1976 - Supertramp, the Rolling Stones, Top of the Pops, Radio 1, Robert de Niro films, cricket, various girls - but Songs In The Key Of Life remains a constant. I worked backwards and bought the crucial earlier albums - Innervisions, obviously, and Tal/zing Boofz and Fulfilling- ness' First Finale and Music Of My Mind. At this time a store in Colchester stocked an array of imported and massively discounted Portuguese versions, whose sleeves left a lot to be desired. Apparently printed on an old donkey-drawn hand press, they were like looking at the original through frosted glass or an especially bad migraine. As for the vinyl itself, it hadn't been pressed so much as rubbed lightly against a decent full-price copy. It was all the needle could do to find a groove to sit in. But at œ2.99, and given the sounds that eventually emerged, who was arguing? As Noel Coward would have said, if he'd only shopped at Parrot Records, `Extraordinary how cheap potent music is.' I liked the way Stevie Wonder could set up and lock down a rhythm. It seemed to me that if you didn't respond to the clipped keyboard over the striding drums in the introduction to `Superstition', the chances were you had died. But mostly it was his voice that drew me along, the new angles it finds just when you thought the melody was fixed, the tangents he can spring away on. At the end of `You And I' on Talking Book, in a passage I referred back to again and again, he sings the chorus an octave higher than where you first heard it, then shifts through another key change upwards and then, just when you think he can have no breath left, he holds a long note in the highest part of his range while the piano chords storm down beneath him to the final resolve. I didn't see how pop could get much more intense than that. I still don't. (Neither do I know a better piece of track-sequencing than the placement, directly after `You and I', of `Tuesday Heart- break', which starts with a wheezy sax and a woozy clavinet leaning together briefly and then skips off as the drums slip in - a cool flannel after the steambath of the previous track.) And not since Marc Bolan had I feit so strongly that a voice on a record had come into the room specifically to address me. Whatever he sang seemed instantly applicable. Any crush he happened to talk about was the one I happened to have. Any yearning he was doing said it all about my own yearning - or inspired me to yearn if I hadn't already thought of it. Because although occasionally one might talk about the songs that `bring it all back', referring to some emotional period in one's past for which records formed a conveniently apt parallel, sometimes the records were the reason you had those moods in the first place or the reason they took the shape they did. For most people, the drama of adolescence cuts one of two ways: either you are made frazzled and explo- sive by the sheer quantity of feelings you have that you don't understand, or you worry trenchantly about your zombiefied incapacity to feel anything at all. I fell squarely into the second of these categories and I don't think it would be much of an exaggeration to say that, during this awkward and uncommunicative phase, most of my feelings were Stevie Wonder's idea. I did the fan-like things for a while. I thought hard about what Stevie Wonder's days might be like when he wasn't performing. I envied him a life concentrated so purely in music. I sat at the piano and put my hands on the keys the way that he does (with his right hand he uses only the four fingers and trails his thumb along the edge of the keyboard below the keys). Occasionally I tried playing with my eyes shut to see if it made any difference. I thought about writing to the Stevie Wonder Universal Family, at the address in America printed on some of the album sleeves, though I never did. And I went to the Wembley Arena in 1980 and saw him on the Hotter Than July tour and wept silently when he was led on at the start. Since Hotter Than July, there has been a string of long gaps broken by only intermittently satisfying albums. I suspect I would have been one of the few people in 1985 who bothered to hang around in a record shop, waiting for the morning postal delivery on the day of release of the mostly disappoint- ing In Square Circle album. Still, if you're in it for the dur- ation, you learn to handle the anticipation and the let-downs, while at the same time developing a fairly strong stomach for fanciful philosophy. Stevie Wonder is politically radical, a powerful black activist, and yet some of his ideas about uni- versal brotherhood read like a charter for Disneyland and many of the rest are plain baffling. And yet there must be something in his claims about music breaking all known bar- riers between the peoples of the world if, musically speaking, he can bring together my mother and me. In 1984, in one of her rare 7-inch vinyl purchases (I'm fairly sure it was the first single she had invested in since `Knock Three Times' by Dawn in 19?1 ), my mother bought `I Just Called To Say I Love You'. It was a hopeful but frustrat- ing moment because, although I can't bring myself to dismiss completely anything that Stevie's hand is on, I like nothing he has done less than this ballad, with its pat key-changes and its karaoke backing track. So here we were, my mother and I, astonishingly, on the same ground - and yet miles apart, with me tempted to wonder if I could somehow talk her back from there to `Uptight (Everything's All Right)' - a record up around the top limits of happy - and set the two of us on a neþw plain of understanding. Impossible, as it turned out. `You can feel it all over,' Stevie Wonder sings on `Sir Duke' , his brassy Ellington tribute. But my mother says that, for the most part, she can't. Still, I know I can. Pink Floyd It could all have gone wrong at this early stage. I could have ended up a Pink Floyd enthusiast. It happened to a lot of people I knew and they weren't necessarily to blame. I under- stand because I came damn close. But I got away with it. I was dimly aware that Pink Floyd had been another kind of group altogether back in the 1960s; that there had been a figure in the band called Syd Barrett who was clearly some kind of off-the-cuff genius and who wrote trippy, psychedelic and yet strangely insightful little pop songs. Unfortunately, drugs or success or the uncontrollable loopings of his own imagination, or some volatile combination of the three, had driven him mad and he'd gone to live with his mum in Cam- bridge. But I'd missed all that, and since then Pink Floyd had turned into sulky, earnest, self-conscious, pompous rock stars, prone to large-scale, surreal public events, like floating a giant inflatable pig above Battersea Power Station. You could see why they went down well with sixth-formers. Leav- ing aside the publicity stunts with air-filled animals, you're looking at a fairly accurate personality profile for me and most of my closest friends, circa 1978. Pink Floyd played progressive rock. (And continue to play it, despite a serious rending of the group's social fabric which has led Roger Waters to stomp off on his own. Waters was, some would argue, the band's lynchpin - though don't get into this with serious Floyd fans unless you've got at least a week to spare.) This is to say, they are not renowned for snappy, chart-busting singles, but are instead spoken of, in , reverent tones, as an albums band , a distinction which, during the seventies, one rather generously bestowed on any group that couldn't come up with a decent chorus. Most progressive rock bands contain a classically trained key