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 �"  ~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 �' 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 To��ver 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 l�new 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:

                  �OK "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 �50 and pocketing �10 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 i�rst 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 �2.99, 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
ne�w 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 keyboard
player who will explain during interviews that the organ
figure in `Asylum Of The Sane' is, in fact, based on a piece by
Bach. You don't call them songs, you call them `tracks', and a
track isn't really pulling its weight if it comes in under seven
minutes. Progressive rock is pop with big ideas.
  Retrospectively it's easy to see what an ill-founded notion
this was: after all, one of the best ideas pop music ever had
was not to have too many ideas. But back there in the early
throes of adolescence, pimply with unfocused rage and
wielding ungainly concepts of our own, Pink Floyd shone like
a beacon of good sense. They wrote surly epics about how
money was screwing things up, about how Americans were
screwing things up, about how authority and television
screwed you (and things) up. And at precisely this time,
we'd get together at each other's houses and bore on about
the evil which is money/America/authority and the pernicious
effects of television (which all of us were qualified to pro-
nounce upon, given the gigantic quantities of it we happily
watched).
  The key text was, of course, The Darlz Side Of The Moon,
the one with the prism on the sleeve. One critic called it `a
moody paean to bleakness which has so outdistanced the
competition that most thinking people believe it may never
be equalled'. (He didn't say what most unthinking people
thought.) Certainly, few records have been so relentlessly
popular: 25 million copies sold; in the British albums chart
for 301 weeks; in the American albums chart for more than
twice that. My brother Simon bought it when it first came out
in March 1973 and, for what seemed like fourteen years
(though in reality it was probably more like two months), he
played it as if it was the only record he owned. He steeped

himself in it, scrutinized it exactingly, as if hell-bent on
tilting
this talismanic object through every conceivable angle. I once
wandered into his bedroom to find him hunched determin-
edly over his record player and a cassette machine containing
a tape of the album. He was running the tape recording and
then manually dropping the needle onto the record, attempt-
ing to get the two versions to play simultaneously but with
one just slightly behind the other, in order to create a strange
echo effect. He said he was trying to discover how The Dark
Side Of The Moon would sound if it was being played in a
field. I nodded encouragingly and left. It was that kind of
album.
  But my own time with the Dark Side came later, and like
many educative experiences during this period, my friend Jim
was involved. For me, and the handful of others who con-
trived to get near him, Jim had taken on the status of legend.
Awesomely advanced, he was experimenting with hallucinog-
ens when the rest of us still thought cola-flavoured Spangles
were pretty risky. Someone so far ahead of their time was
inevitably going to be a loner. One summer holiday, without
notice, Jim took himself off to Europe by train. Others would
get round to InterRailing in years to come - would set off
with overstuffed backpacks and return a month later to talk
excitedly about meeting Australians at Florence station and
eating bread and cheese in train corridors. (It never seemed to
occur to anyone InterRailing to get off the train, unless it was
to wait for another train.) But Jim went to Amsterdam and
Bruges and hung out and took drugs and got into all sorts of
character-forming adventures, which he never quite related to
us because, as he rightly assumed, we weren't cool enough.
When he returned, his hair was on his shoulders and he had
affected a pair of round glasses so that he looked like John
Lennon. This earned him mysterious relationships with wild

looking girls with extremely long hair and tattered dresses.
We were impressed.
  Of course, it was to Jim's advantage that he had parents
of a  virtually Swedish  liberality.  My own mother and
father were unhappy about me travelling on Colchester
Corporation buses much after ten thirty, let alone taking
night trains across Denmark. By contrast, Jim's parents -
Marion and Bob as they encouraged us to call them - had
enlightened views on hairstyles, pornography and smoking.
They were the kind of people who imagined they had as
much to learn from their children as their children had
to learn from them. We speculated, secretly, that they
probably wandered around naked a lot. Jim didn't have a
bedroom, he had a two-room apartment with its own sepa-
rate entrance on the ground floor of the family house. While
some of us had to fight hard for pinboard rights, Jim was
allowed to draw on the walls - which he did, fluidly in wax
crayons, lathering the surfaces with lurid variations on
Munch's The Scream, loud atomic explosions, bits of nuclear
aftermath, and sundry impressions of wild-looking girls with
extremely long hair and tattered dresses, until the place
looked like a tattoo parlour in a mineshaft. God, we were
impressed.
  It was in this disturbing den that we gathered that night, as
we would whenever Jim would allow it, maybe four or five of
us, slowly replacing the room's oxygen with our own collec-
tive scent of musty duffel coat and old trainer. And maybe as
the result of some trenchant discussion or other about the
fate of the planet, or perhaps in order to inspire one, Jim
suggested we listen to The Dark Side Of The Moon, all the
way through, in absolute silence and in the dark, the better to
soak up its portents and bathe in its mind-boggling oddity. So
we listened to `Breathe' with Dave Gilmour's hollow tones, to

`On The Run' with its spooky synthesizers, to `The Great
Gig In The Sky', where the female voice comes in, the noise
of someone screaming for the fate of us all at the end of
time.
 Each of us sat there in the black-out, overawed. Even at the
end of side one, as somebody groped their way to the hi-fi
and flipped the record, there was silence - just the fizz of a
match as Jim pensively lit another of the cigarettes his parents
had probably popped out to the newsagent to get for him.
On, then, through side two, through `Money', its rhythm
built around the clank of coins and the ratchet of a till, on
into the floating `Us And Them', which softly proclaims the
unity of all people, rich and poor, black and white, thinking
and unthinking, through  `Brain Damage', swelling now
imperiously towards the close, and on then to the final, the
anthemic `Eclipse', the music dying around us in the slow
agony of the final fade-out. At which point, as the needle
rose again from the record, Stephen Goodridge took it upon
himself to release a rounded, vibrant and fully conceived
fart.
  About three hours later, we hnished laughing and went
home. All in all, it wasn't really on to break wind during
Pink Floyd albums. That wasn't what they were for So this
moment contained the thrill of heresy. But it also brought
with it the feeling that a benign and magnificent good sense
had entered the room. If you are lucky, there are these
occasions in your life when the unsayable gets said (although
perhaps `said' is the wrong word here). And if you're not
lucky, you're left in 1994 celebrating the twenty-first anniver-
sary of Dark Side Of The Moon by buying the CD re-release,
further investigating Roger Waters's solo albums, maybe
queuing up for thirty-quid tickets to see the Floyd at Earl's
Court. We were just the fortunate ones. I would wager good

money that no one who was in that room that night has
bothered to listen to Dark Side Of The Moon again.
  Incidentally, I don't hear from Jim any more, but I under-
stand he's now an accountant.
             Bob Dylan

A friend has just made me up a Neil Young compilation on a
C60: `Powderfinger', `Cortez The Killer', `Only Love Can
Break Your Heart', `Albuquerque' and a number of others.
As he's explained it to me, it's a taster, a starter pack, a Neil
Young tape with training wheels in place. Once I've ridden
around on this for a while, he'll move me on to something
more wobbly and harder to manage. And if I do OK there, we
can move on to a Neil Young tape with gears and then I'll be
free to venture off on my own.
  I'm looking forward to it because I know absolutely
nothing about Neil Young. Actually, that's not true. I can sing
this:

                  Hey hey, my my,
                  Rock'n'roll will never die

Also this:

    I've been to Hollywood
    I've been to Redwood [? I've seen a Redwood, maybe?]
    Der der der der-der der der heart of gold
    Der der der der der
    Der der der der
    .  . der der der der der der heart of go-wold
    And I'm gettin' old

  But that's it: that's my total knowledge of the music and
lyrics of Neil Young, an artist from the late 1960s who, it is
widely reported, is continuing to prove his worth into the
                      Lo� In Mudc

nineties, issuing albums as exciting as any he's done. (He's
one of the few, if this is the case.) As for me, I own nothing
that he has released. I'm fairly confident I own no records on
which he even appears as a guest. I have heard none of his
music except in as much as it has floated into my ears from
the radio or the television, whence all but the lines quoted
above have floated out again. Somehow, it never quite
happened between me and Neil.
  I can only think the roots of our failure are somewhere in
my early years at secondary school, not long after `Heart Of
Gold' was a hit in 1972. (I looked up the date.) Someone -
and I'm pretty sure it wasn't me - decreed that Young's voice
was comically trembly. I have a dim recollection of a competi-
tion in the school showers to bounce off the tiled walls
absurdly contorted impressions of him singing `Heart Of
Gold'. And this must have established in my mind a picture of
Young as a figure of fun with more than a hint of naffness
about him, an impression I have managed to hold on to for
some twenty years.
  Neil Young is by no means the only seminal, unmissable,
late-twentieth-century musical icon about whom I remain in
a state of pure ignorance. Bob Dylan is another. I have never
listened to a Bob Dylan album. I don't own any. I have been
in rooms where other people were playing him, but none of it
seemed to stick. Here's an awkward thought: I have spent
more time listening to Whitney Houston than to Bob Dylan. I
have bought one Whitney Houston album (I'm Your Baby
Tonight) and the 12-inch of `How Will I Know?', whereas I
have never spent any money at all on the work of perhaps the
finest lyric poet of his generation. And I can see how reason
and judgement laugh in my face here, that, under all manner
of objective analyses, it is Dylan who is the heavyweight
cultural figure, not Whitney Houston. Unfortunately, where I

am concerned, buying pop records begins where objective
analysis ends - assuming objective analysis ever began.
  My skipping Dylan is not the result of anything you could
call deliberative, critical thought. It has its basis in a couple
of
childhood memories which I have turned into reference
points and never updated. I associate Dylan with my eldest
brother Nick, whose early tastes I actively resisted on account
of the extent to which he ridiculed me for mine. There was
also a formative incident in which Simon played to death a
copy of `Watching The River Flow': just played it again and
again and again in an experiment, I think, to test the limits of
his own endurance. He would have been about fifteen, I
would have been about nine, and my endurance snapped
before his. People often say Shakespeare was ruined for them
at school; Bob Dylan was ruined for me at home.
  So that's Neil Young and Bob Dylan; and then there's
David Bowie. He's sixth in the Guinness Boolz of British Hit
Singles `Most Weeks on Chart' list, but no thanks to me who
has never bought anything with his name on. He's made
something in the region of twenty-five albums and I've never
listened to any of them. He's changed his image virtually on a
monthly basis, and have I cared? Did I so much as cast him
a glance? No, I did not, which was timid, critically question-
able and downright ungrateful of me. And my reason? He
was lilted by someone at school whom I didn't like very
much. That was it. That was enough to set me off on a path
leading away from Bowie, one which has never looped back
round to him, though one C60 compilation tape is probably
all it would take.
 My acts of neglect flourished in the early 1970s and they
were allowed to do so, I think, by the speed at which things
happened then. Every time you bought a single, the world
appeared to change shape and the shape it had held before

was something you could quite happily forget. You had the
sense that, as you moved forward, the past was rolling up
tightly behind you like a carpet and the speed of that forward
momentum forced upon you the need to specialize in all sorts
of arbitrary ways. Neil Young? Daft voice. David Bowie?
Crap fans. And there never seemed to be a shortage of other
people to occupy you in their place, so prejudice was a luxury
you felt you could afford.
 I am less gung-ho these days because the pickings seem to
me leaner and I have to be cautious about casually discarding
things, unless I'm going to end up with absolutely nothing
new to listen to. But in any case, that sense of being sucked
along by pop, torching the bridges as you go, is absent from
my life. Sometimes I shuffle forwards (that Snoop Doggy
Dog album - that sounded like nothing I'd ever heard), but
far more frequently I am treading water and sometimes I am
completely  in  reverse.  I  have  to  resign  myself to  the
knowledge that my world will not change shape with the
release of the new Suede single, though I am aware that there
are those, younger than me, for whom it will. But I wonder if
even they have the impression that pop is bowling them
along, rather than gently circling like an aeroplane in a hold-
ing pattern. Today's teens listen to Hendrix. They have none
of the contempt I had then, and felt obliged to have, for `old
stuff '.
 That goes for all of us, though, and this is the up-side. In
the 1990s, as a pop fan in my thirties, I am freer than ever to
listen without prejudice. This is a heartening development
and it has partly to do with getting older myself (I don't find
myself in communal showers with my friends so often these
days and I don't feel the pressure to make sure my tastes tally
with those of the pack). But it has also to do with pop's
growing up and acquiring a past. You can look back across

pop much as you might look back across classical music or
back across the Broadway song, and take your pleasures
there without continually having to worry about who likes it
and whether it's new. So - me and Neil Young. Why not?
    XTC

When punk rock hit the provinces, the provinces weren't
quite ready. Anarchy in the UK, maybe, but not really in
Colchester.
 Sure, in the fifth form, Peter Sellers (not the comedian and
film star, but another one) promptly erected a giant, three-
inch Mohican, shaving the sides of his head entirely the better
to send this raging crest into relief. But you can gauge
the solitary nature of his display from the fact that the
local paper phoned the headmaster to ask if they could send
someone round to photograph it. The head, sensing the possi-
bility of unwelcome PR (`School Is Crazed Punks Haven', or
some such), forced him to lop it off. What hope for the
revolution when the powers that be so easily took back
the reins ?
 We got the reverberations of punk, the tremors, the sec-
ondary shocks, rather than the full-fledged, snot-tossing, real
thing. But that doesn't mean we weren't moved and changed
- phlegm-flecked in our own way. VL'e read about it first
in despatches in the NME - excitedly, slightly disbelieving
sometimes, sensing that something was coming, perhaps even
a little fearful of the inevitable disruption and the uncertaint-
ies that lay beyond that. (Pressing questions that I was keen
to table early on included: what were the implications for our
Supertramp albums and our duffel coats ? How were 1 Occ
going to come out of this? And would anybody object if I
passed on the nose-chain option?) And eventually, it wasn't
punk but New Wave, its bastard offspring, which got a
hold.
 Through 1977, the physical manifestations of the change

were subtle but crucial. Trousers were tightening by the
minute, especially at the ankle end: most of us now special-
ized, at evenings and weekends, in black cotton constructions
which required you to fold your foot in half to get it through
the leg-hole. Blazer collars were up. Badges were small: the
gaudy, wing-mirror sized proclamations of old (`All You
Need Is Love', `Smile!') had shrunk to curt buttons - Clash,
Pistols, Adverts, Gen X.
 There was a King's Road punk fashion for patching up
trashed jeans with old pub bar towels and this had filtered
down in a small way to a friend of mine who took to walking
around with SKOL printed across his buttocks. But the
intended  anarchy  of  this,  its  overt  wretchedness,  was
somewhat diminished because the jeans were always crisply
laundered and ironed in detail by his mother.
 This, though, is one of the inherent drawbacks about being
middle class: your gestures of rejection and dissent get tragi-
cally compromised along the way. My girlfriend has told me
that in 1978, aged fourteen and wearing a second-hand
dinner jacket and stilettos, she attended a Boomtown Rats
concert at the Hammersmith Odeon with a schoolfriend,
both of them wearing badges which read: `We Are The People
Our Parents Warned Us About'. What the badges didn't go
on to say was, they were also the people whose parents had
just dropped them off at the door
 So it was with the solitary safety pin I took to wearing from
time to time on the lapel of my school blazer. I think even
then I was aware that, as acts of negation and defiance go,
this was fairly low on controversy. As I self-consciously
clipped the pin under its catch, I did not imagine that I could
hear the Establishment cracking amid gasps of outrage and
horror. I realized that, to be playing the punk game by the
rules, I should really have been stabbing the thing, without

anaesthetic, through the bridge of my nose - and preferably
outside Buckingham Palace. I had to do something, though,
and this was the best I could manage - a small gesture of
solidarity with those, safety-pinned to the hilt and gobbing
on my behalf, in the front line.
 We bought some of the things the NME told us about
at Parrot Records, the intimidatingly small, faintly damp-
smelling shop up a narrow side street in the town centre. Its
only window was plastered over with record sleeves so inside
the place had an authentic, low-lit rock club gloom. The
plastic covers in the browser bins were greasy to the touch.
And so were many of the people shopping there. Parrot was
itself a sign of the times, an independent store devoted largely
to independent music and to the new alternatives. And you
couldn't get much more alternative than Nigel, the bloke who
served behind the counter.
 Tall, thin, spike-haired Nigel was usually to be found
entertaining himself by auditioning, at brutal volume on the
shop's ridiculously large sound system, the latest box of rabid
arrivals. He favoured anything punishingly tuneless, short
and with the word `fuck' in the title. The pleasure he took in
these records was uninhibited by his duties as a shop assist-
ant. He remains to this day the only person I have ever seen
pogoing while on the phone. In his more reflective moments,
though, he would lean with his arms across the counter,
hands locked, waiting for customers on whom to practise his
legendary rudeness.
 We spoke of Nigel's rudeness in tones of awe, mingled with
jealousy and sprinkled with a fat handful of fear. No one was
safe, though Nigel preyed mostly on those people - mis-
guided music lovers, hapless aunts and their nieces' birthday
lists - who had accidentally entered Parrot assuming this was
an ordinary record srop, selling nice, ordinary things. But it

wasn't. It was a horrible record shop selling terrifying things.
And it was staffed by Nigel.
 Someone would inquire, perfectly innocently, `Excuse me,
where will I find Lionel Richie?'
 And Nigel would sniff and say, `Probably at home in LA,
asleep.'
 Once a soldier entered the shop and walked confidently to
the counter `Got anything by George Benson?'
 Nigel replied, `Nah, we don't stock that soul crap.'
 For a few chilly seconds, the two of them stared at each
other  And then the soldier turned and left. There was
nothing in his training to prepare him for a confrontation
with Nigel.
 It would have been February 1978, a lunch-hour The
country had only recently struggled free of the deathly grip of
Paul McCartney's `Mull Of Kintyre' (so much for punk's
purgative fires) and we were hanging around as usual, con-
spicuous in our purple blazers, flicking idly through the
clammy plastic sleeves, hoping to catch Nigel savaging a cus-
tomer or playing something disgusting. I didn't realize it, but,
without any physical contact, Nigel was about to change me
for ever.
 We heard the needle clomp into the run-in groove, a couple
of ticks and specks, some preliminary platter rumble. And
then, after an abrupt introductory splatter on the snare drum,
in came the bass, pounding hard, slightly ragged at the edges
with distortion. So far, so Nigel. But the bass took its four-
note riff round the circuit and then dived for cover as the
guitar piled in, chopping at a chord which was cacophonous,
hard, ear-splitting and yet strangely melodic, as if the song
had started out in tunefulness but couldn't quite remember
how to get back there. The singer's words were virtually
indecipherable at first shot, sung through a contorted throat

and apparently out of a gurning mouth. Less than three
minutes later it all built to a frantic jabbering and stopped
dead.
 There's barely a pause before track two, just the slightest
break as if in compliance with some kind of vinyl shortage -
or as if the band have got this song and they just can't wait
for you to hear it. This track is weirder still: pieces of
guitar,
chipped out at random, more contorted gibbering for vocals
(though from another voice this time), mad, scrawny key-
boards, and yet, as before, somewhere at the heart of this
chaos, a hook, a lure, some memory of tunefulness half
heard.
  And then track three, and by novv I'm not even pretending
to look at the sleeves, but just standing with my back to them,
listening. Track three is slower, though still driven by an itchy
fury, cleaving to a discordant guitar, as if notes from different
songs have been crunched together in a thin, tinny slab. The
voice from track one is back, sounding more exuberant still,
heading towards the song's peak.
 And then, with a stamp and a punch, the chorus - a barely
musicalized shout, a whoop of glee, a rude wake-up call:

                       This is pop, yeah yeah!
                       This is pop, yeah yeah!
                       This is pop, yeah!
                       THIS IS!

  Before it had finished, I had approached the counter,
pointed at the speakers and - oblivious ev�n to the threat of
Nigel's abuse - had said: `I'd like to buy this, please.'
  I slipped the sleeve from the brown paper Parrot bag before
I left the shop. The album was White Music by XTC, track
one, `Radios in Motion'; track two `Cross Wires', track three

`This is Pop'. No glam gatefold: just a piece of thin, matt
cardboard. No inner sleeve: just a plain black liner bag. No
lyric sheet: just a few notes on the back in scratchy hand-
writing. Reared on more sumptuous kinds of packaging, I
couldn't help but feel a tinge of deprivation. But I would
come to study for hours the bare information on this sleeve -
staring at the pictures of the singer and songwriter Andy
Partridge, at the white trousers with black traffic arrows he's
wearing on the front and at the partly unravelled black and
red jumper he's wearing on the rear - and the regret would
pass. Fibre at last, after all those cream cakes; a bit of grit,
after all that decadence.
 In the end, XTC turned out not to be a punk band at all.
They were laughably tame by hard-core punk standards - not
snarling bondage-wearers with curled lips and metal teeth
but a mischievous small-town (Swindon) pop group, one of
the cluster who hitched a piggy-back ride on punk, capital-
ized on that moment when a stunned record business lost
control, panicked and threw the doors wide open. In went
Elvis Costello, and Paul Weller of the Jam, and Hugh
Cornwell of the Strangers, and Sting of the Police, and Andy
Partridge of XTC - British pop songwriting's last big boom.
 It wasn't much more than a blast of static, but White Music
seemed to change the air I walked around in. To love it was to
see the virtues of the short over the long, the spiky over the
lush, the quirk over the dead. By rights I should have gone
back to Parrot Records very shortly after this, knelt before
the counter and intoned: `For this epiphany, Nigel, much
thanks.' But he would have headbutted me.
 The Buzzcocks

1978, and bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, what with
Elvis Costello, all lippy dismay, singing `I Don't Want To Go
To Chelsea' with the Attractions boiling behind him, and
what with Squeeze, a high voice and a low voice and a squally
guitar, pumping their way through `Take Me I'm Yours'.
 And the Only Ones sang `Another Girl, Another Planet'   ,
which came at you weirdly, the voice dragging lazily against
the beat, like Lou Reed on Transformer in 1973. And the
Motors sang `Airport', with its swoony key change into
the first verse, its daft backing vocals (`Did-did-did-did') and
that piano solo, which I spent hours trying to master, though
it's harder than it sounds, but I did a good impression of that
desolate background scream you hear (`airport!') as the song
heads for its fade.
 And Blondie released `Hanging On The Telephone', which
had the best opening of any pop song ever - two beeps from
the phone, one line of vocal and pow. And the Buzzcocks
sang `Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)',
and I had, so when all the instruments piled in at once and the
spiralling guitar figure set off like a rocket, with the drums
trying to follow it, I was there too, mouthing Pete Shelley's
every precious, sibilant `s' (the precursor of Neil Tennant in
this) right through to the beaten up and breathless note at the
end.
 And the Undertones played `Teenage Kicks', which had the
brilliant idea that you didn't need to play a guitar solo, you
only needed to strum the chords harder; and the drummer
didn't need to play any rolls or fancy rubbish, but could just
occasionally switch over to the ride cymbal and beat the hell

out of that; and if you didn't use any reverb you'd produce a
record that just smacked people in the face, direct, with the
back of its hand, though where you were going to find
another plangent wobble like Feargal Sharkey's, nobody
knew.
 And the Jam made `Down In The Tube Station At Mid-
night', with its skittering hi-hat, the chipping and digging of
the bass and the guitar splintering all over the place. And Paul
Weller sang, `I've a little money and a takeaway curry' and no
one had sung that kind of line before. In the best shots of the
Jam on stage at this time, Weller and Bruce Foxton are both
airborne, miles off the ground. Well, of course they are.
 Before punk rock (or, to be strictly accurate, before post-
punk rock), so much of the music I had listened to had been
in denial about its origins. Chiefly, people sang in American
accents and wrote lyrics about the earth and mankind and
stars and space - anywhere, frankly, other than the street
where they lived. And suddenly wherever you turned your
ear, there was music about somewhere you came from, some-
where life was crap or boring or funny, or all of those things
and more.
Dean F'riedman

 On the other hand . . .
   1978, and bloody murder was it in that dawn to be alive,
 what with Justin Hayward whispering insipidly about how it
 was  `Forever  Autumn',  and John  Travolta  and  Olivia
 Newton-John clowning their way through `Summer Nights'
 from the movie Grease, a song which was catchy in the way
 that certain skin irritations are catchy.
  And what with `Lucky Stars' by Dean Friedman, duetting
 with some woman whose name I can never remember, on
 what must be ty  corniest record ever released, a late-night
 lovers' tiff dramatized, in which Friedman makes the bold
 reconciliatory claim that, though he may not be all that
 bright, he does at least know how to hold her tight, though
 frankly, by the end of the song, you doubt that too.
  And what with `Rasputin' by Boney M, `Mexican Girl' by
 Smokie, and `Again and Again' by Status Quo . . .
  In 1994, when people complain that the charts are full of
 crap, they forget one crucial thing: that even when they were
 brilliant, the charts were full of crap. Crap is what the charts
 are made to be full of.
          Rickie Lee Jones

I once went to a Barry White concert at Wembley Arena - the
Walrus of Love out there on the stage, mopping himself down
with a series of blanket-scale hankies and sexing it up from
the bottom of his fathom-deep voice - and I suddenly
noticed, off to the side on one of the upper levels, a young
couple stretching their arms out towards him. And in the
arms of the man was a baby. You don't often see babies
offered up to the stage at Wembley Arena and I could only
assume that this was an infant conceived to the Barry White
sound and its parents had returned to pay tribute to the man
for his inspiration.
 Personally, even despite this evidence to the contrary, I'm
not sure how well music and sex mix, and I've wondered
about this since the beginning. She was my first proper
relationship and it took us a while to get together because
when I met her she was in the process of leaving someone
else: not a school-age nerd, but someone, it weakened me
around the stomach to learn, six years older than me with a
job and a house. But of all the things she told me about him,
one detail more than any other comforted me and stiffened
my resolve: he had taken her to see Judy Tzuke. All the way
to the Ipswich Gaumont to see boring old Judy Tzuke! I was
home free.
 And all our talk had finally led to where we were now: at
my house, with my parents conveniently absent for the eve-
ning, in my bedroom, in the dark with just a light coming
through the door from the landing, and with, at her sugges-
tion, the first Rickie Lee Jones album on the turntable.
 I had been reluctant to have music on in the background at

all, the notion of `background music' being anathema as far
as I am concerned. If music is on I tend to listen to it, and the
quieter it is the more I strain after it. (The inevitable result
of this is a kind of absorption unacceptable in many social
situations and one that has regularly got me into trouble
leading to accusations of sulkiness in restaurants and charges
of silence bordering on downright rudeness during dinner
parties when I've simply been enjoying the Isley Brothers, or
whoever ) Clearly, in the sensitive circumstance I'm describ-
ing, a lapse of concentration like that could have proven
deadly.
 Another reason that I didn't particularly wish to musicalize
my sexual awakening was that one of my most irritating
habits when music is on is an involuntary propensity to beat
time on the nearest convenient surface. Now, while an
unforeseen outbreak of this might represent an acceptable
and maybe even welcome variation in an established sexual
relationship, it's not something one would want to risk first
time out.
 So these things were going through my mind in the dark
there. I was also wondering whether I really wanted, for ever
more, to associate this momentous rite of passage with the
first Rickie Lee Jones record, the one with `Chuck E's In Love'
on. I mean, it was one of my favourite albums: even if things
went well, wouldn't this be to contain its relevance to me
somehow? And, worse still, what if the whole event was a
disaster? What if I couldn't manage it at all and, say, the
beautiful, frail strands of `Company' spoke to me for ever
more of flaccidity and shame? In the end, I had to get out of
bed and take the thing off. Some people worry about doing it
with the lights on. Call it beginner's nerves, but I found I
couldn't do it with the sound up.
 It may be that where sex is concerned, pop works better as

anticipatory fuel. A girl I know got her boyfriend to drive
sixty miles to be with her in the middle of the night in the
middle of the week and in lousy weather by the simple but
brilliant expedient of playing Phyllis Nelson's `Move Closer'
to him down the phone. Even at a distance, through a tinny
handset, the track's sultry tug worked like a magnet. That, it
seems to me, is the way to play it.
chapter 6
The orphans of Babylon

  The first recording session with Geoff Lawrence (guitar/
  vocals ) took place in my bedroom in the spring of 1981.
  We were scheduled to lay down some of the songs Geoff
  had  written  and  performed  as  an  acclaimed  acoustic
  solo  artist  around  Colchester's  pubs  and  clubs.  We
  would  go  `live'  to  my  brother's  reel-to-reel,  with  me
  adding in some synthesized strings to develop the material,
  bring it along a stage. As we discussed the project before-
  hand, it became clear that we saw ourselves as, potentially
  and in the very near future, a kind of British Hall &
  Oates.
   Unfortunately, every time I depressed the record button
  Geoff kept laughing, so instead we turned into the Orphans
  of Babylon.
   What were the Orphans of Babylon? After all this time I
  am still at a loss to explain. Comedy duo? Joke band? Well,
  yes, in that we played it for laughs, though we grew to take
  the whole business terribly seriously. Satirists ? Art
terrorists ?
  Not really: the Orphans had nothing much to do with art or
  terrorism and we didn't really have the focused grudge that
  satire requires. A pile of old tosh? Yes, definitely that. But,
at
  the  same  time,  there  was  something  grand  about  the
  Orphans,  something indefinable  yet majestic,  something
  thoroughly rock'n'roll.
   When that first session finally broke down for good, we left
  the tape running and started throwing songs at it off-the-
  cuff, absurd little snatches of tune spontaneously generated,
  berserk bits of keyboard and guitar, with Geoff dreaming up,
  on the spot, screeds of nonsense verse until tears of helpless

mirth were running down our shiny faces. (You had to be
there, really. )
 Afterwards, we agreed that this was the most fun that
either of us had ever had in anybody's bedroom. We christ-
ened ourselves the Orphans of Babylon after a truly terrible
track on Bebop Deluxe's Modern Music album and agreed to
meet whenever possible to record what we now referred to as
`albums'. We named the songs on them, designed elaborate
cassette sleeves for them, gave them titles: Fran/z Sneezes, Lie
Down And Brown, Lemon Shipyard. At our most experi-
mental, we took some instruments and a ghetto-blaster out to
a field on the edge of a wood, for that al fresco feel. The
farmer who owned the field made it across to us after about
twenty minutes.
 `What the hell d'you boys think you're doin'?'
 `Er, we're just, er, recording a few songs,' said Geoff,
sheepishly.
 This was later to become the famous Interrupted By A
Farmer album.
 Geoff worked as a nurse at a psychiatric hospital (the one
my mother claimed to have sent my piano to, though Geoff
said he'd never set eyes on it there) and I think it would be
fair to say that he picked up ideas, attitudes and expressions
in the course of his work which, if you didn't know him
well, could make his own claim on a position within the
community seem tenuous. His talent for spontaneous mel-
odic and lyric invention was, it strikes me, genius and,
if called upon to back up that judgement, I would point
no further than his work: `Milk Teeth' off the Tin Full of
Toffees album; `I Love You, Colonel' on Selected Kippers;
`Burning Fires of Hell' from Bap (`Love cold as icicles/
Love slow as bicycles'); and `Wine, Women and Wine'
and `No Way To Stop Them (Once They've Started)' off

Natureveldt Shoe. (Bracketed song titles were a particular
obsession.)
 It was the end of the year before we dared fashion this
material into something resembling a live show, and even
then only for a laugh at a Christmas party. We dressed up for
the occasion in some old silver lame, ridiculous stacked shoes
and an entire packet of face-paints. We looked like Ziggy-
period David Bowie crossed with Ronald McDonald, and
even in an atmosphere of convivial tolerance befitting the
season, our twenty-minute set on tacky keyboard and fuzz
guitar was greeted with horrified amazement. Except by the
other musicians in the audience, who seemed to enjoy us
enormously, perhaps because we dramatized their darkest
fears of waking to find yourself on a stage, in absurd clothing,
with inadequate songs and inadequate equipment. Soon we
were quite regularly in business as an opening act, a warm-up
routine, other local bands quickly realizing that, after our
scratchy  incomprehensibility,  pretty  well  anything  with
drums and bass in it sounded exultantly professional and
exciting.
 On stage, Geoff was nervous but unembarrassable, a horse
stung by a wasp, charging and stamping around in the space
available to him. (It is the lot of the support act to perform
in
whatever space is left unoccupied by the equipment of the
main band; this is normally a thin strip along the front of
the stage so that, as the songwriter Boo Hewerdine once
memorably put it, `you end up looking like an Egyptian
frieze'.) As for me, I found my mind turning a lot to Ron
Mael, the moustachioed, Brylcreemed keyboard player in the
duo Sparks, who had one unaltering facial expression which
seemed at once to have nothing to do with what he was
playing and to want nothing to do with the antics of his
brother Russ, the singer, who flounced about in a more arche-

typally camp rock'n'roll manner  I seemed to have this
expression by default while playing with the Orphans of
Babylon - a kind of perturbed earnestness, informed by genu-
ine anxieties about what Geoff might do next. I was the Ernie
Wise to his Salvador Dali.
 And because there is no pop act of any kind or scale any-
where who does not believe in the possibility of a pro-
fessional future, before long we began to think in terms of
record deals - as incredible as it may seem and though to do
so was to fly in the face of the available evidence. In a vain
attempt to make ourselves easier to swallow, we began to
perform a version of the Dr Who theme and a ludicrously
sped-up rendition of the Righteous Brothers' `You've Lost
That Lovin' Feelin' '. These little `popular' touches didn't take
us any closer to radio exposure.
 I know this because John Peel, the broadcaster and all-
round hero, told me in person. Not in so many words (he
would never have taken it upon himself to be so openly
discouraging), but with one telling and suggestive gesture in a
darkened car park at Essex University. This was following
our appearance in the university dance hall - a career high-
point - as the performance interlude during a John Peel
Roadshow. (I still have the tape and have played it to within
an inch of its life: not our set, which was the usual stack of
old nonsense, but the part at the beginning where the record
fades out - `What is Life?' by Black Uhuru - and John Peel
introduces us: `Right, boys and girls, it's time for some live
music. They're lurking in the wings, wearing extraordinary
costumes, ready to delight you tonight, would you welcome
please, the Orphans Of Babylon! Thunderous applause!'
 That `thunderous applause' was generous of him. What we
got was a short burst of unreasonably hysterical screaming
from our friends at the front. But just to hear our name

spoken  in those  familiar tones  seemed  like  a  thrilling
endorsement.)
 At the end of the evening, because he was a man of fam-
ously eclectic tastes (and because it was what you did if you
were in a band), I bashfully approached Peel with a copy of
one of our tapes.
  `Can I give you this? I don't know whether . . . perhaps . .
.
Anyway! '
  `Let me show you something,' he said, and he took me out
to where his car was parked and opened the boot.
  It was filled to the brim with demo tapes - innumerable
cassettes, hours and hours of unsolicited listening, most of it,
presumably, shockingly awful. He explained that this was
about three months' worth, that they were en route to his
home where he would see what he could do about working
his way through them. He said that, obviously, where this
quantity of tapes was concerned, his methods were bound to
be a little random. And he told me the story about Terry &
Gerry, a rather wonderful skiffle duo from Birmingham who
Peel had championed early on. He said he originally pulled
their tape out of the pile because he had an aunt and uncle
called Terry and Gerry and the coincidence was too much to
let it slip. And with that, he slid the Orphans in with the rest
of them and clicked the boot shut. (I was thinking: An Aunty
Orphan, an Uncle Babylon?)
 I realize now that what he was saying, in the nicest possible
way, was: Give up, surrender now, before someone gets badly
hurt. And, like a fool, I ignored him.
 But that's how it was in the Orphans of Babylon - crazy,
reckless, devil-take-the-hindmost . . . in a word, stupid. And
it had been like that ever since the day when, as the serious-
ness of our purpose hardened, we decided it was time to go
and see Dave Woods.

 Dave Woods was the rock critic on the Essex County Stan-
dard, the local weekly. He had a sizeable picture by-line:
`Rock,' it said, `Dave Woods'. Not surprisingly, policing the
Colchester rock scene wasn't a full-time job for Dave. Rather,
it was just one of his many duties as a news reporter and
probably, in truth, not the one he was wildest about. It meant
that in any week he might have to give up his Tuesday eve-
ning to go to St Mary's Arts Centre on heavy-metal night and
see Aardvark supported by Plumber's Fist; and then, because
local papers, unlike bullying, arrogant national papers, try to
cultivate a kindly, nurturing tone, he had to find something
encouraging to say about it afterwards.
 It also meant he was ceaselessly harried in the streets and
pubs by local musicians hoping to tempt him into writing a
major promotional feature ahead of a key local gig at the
Affair Club. With scant regard for his privacy or the sacred-
ness of his spare time, people would thrust upon him, as if he
was John Peel, cassettes recorded at practices in sitting rooms
and bedrooms, saying, `It's just a rough mix, of course,
Dave', or `The sound quality isn't that special, but you'll get
the drift. '
 The way it worked out, Dave was, by default, Colchester's
biggest rock powerbroker. You wanted to get your name
about, you had to go and see Dave. Dave had the whole pop
publicity thing in his pocket.
 It must be said, there were risks attendant on the kind of
exposure offered by the Essex County Standard. The recog-
nition, the pestering in the streets, the pressure of becoming
a
local `face' overnight - none of these was at stake. But there
was, instead, the chance of embarrassment, the grim likeli-
hood of coming out of this venture ashen-faced with entirely
the wrong result.
 It was mostly a question of tone and detail, a clash between

what the paper wanted out of its pop report and what you,
the aspiring star, wanted. You could see that it made sound
journalistic sense to work people's ages into these pieces:
`Colin, 24 . . .'. Even proper professional pop stars had to
endure that in a profile. Slightly more belittling, slightly more
at odds with your touchy sense of self in this matter, was the
insistence (the first rule of local journalism being to stress
the local angle) on printing an address: `Colin, 24, who lives
at 46 Allthorpe Drive . . .' This didn't seem quite commensur-
ate with superstar status - or even imminent superstar status.
It looked uncool. They didn't go in for that at the NME.
 But these were minor detractions compared with the very
real possibility that the paper would see fit to print your
occupation - an entirely well-meaning act on the paper's part,
just another device to help the readers get a grip. But the
unfortunate consequence, from the aspiring musician's point
of view, was the implication that ;�vhen you weren't tooling
around with some daft pop group or other, you had a proper
job. `Colin, 24, who works in the bedding department at
Williams and Griffin's . . .'
 What you wanted the piece to convey was your all-involv-
ing pop identity, that you were Colin from the Tadpoles, or
whatever, and the reader had better watch out. But the piece
might just as well have read: `Sad part-time singer Colin kids
himself he has a future in the sad part-time band he sings with
part-time.' Headline: `HOPELESS CAUSE OF PARTTIME
COLIN'.
 But how else were we to make a splash locally, shift the
career up a gear? So, a handful of gigs into the Orphans'
performing history, and with one or two particularly spicy
support slots coming up, Geoff and I decided it was time to
visit Dave. We called at the paper's office in the middle of one
weekday afternoon and were surprised to be invited up to

see him in the clacking newsroom. Dave did an amazing
impression of someone who was pleased to see us, found us
seats, pulled a notebook from the busy clutter of his desk and
spun back to face us, mock-interestedly, with his back to his
typewriter.
 `So,' he said, `what are your influences?'
 `Oh, you know,' I said, `XTC, Todd Rundgren, Stevie
Wonder . . .' trying to make it sound as if these artists formed
some kind of natural continuum, when, for all the sense it
made to string them together, I could just as well have been
snatching words out of the air: `Oh, you know - tractor,
alarm bell, bracelet . . .'
 `But we don't sound like any of them,' added Geoff, accu-
rately but confusingly.
 `It's a sort of comedy thing, Dave,' I said, and then
launched into some pointless, windy paragraph about pop
pastiche, about how each of the songs was a parody in minia-
ture of a conventional pop music style, the whole show func-
tioning as a satire on rock's self-absorption. `You know,
humour but with an edge.' None of which I believed for a
second, although I would still be prepared to argue that it
sounded better than saying, `Well, basically, Dave, we just get
up there and arse around.'
 At this point, Geoff planted a quote which both of us were
keen to see used: `I'm expanding in all sorts of interesting
directions,' he said.
 Dave nodded patiently and took the odd note and tried
bravely to maintain something resembling a keen and sup-
portive facial expression. We handed him a black and white
photograph of the two of us, taken at the bus stop outside my
house (wise of us, I think, to take our own image along rather
than trust to the Standard's tastes because photographers on
local papers always want to take musicians holding their

instruments, which looks terrible; not that the Standard
would have gone to the trouble of organizing a portrait of us
anyway). We also passed over a sort of press release we had
cobbled together about the upcoming gigs and a copy of our
tape.
  `The sound quality's not that great,' I assured him, `but
you'll get the drift.'
 And then, quite abruptly, I thought, Dave whipped the
jacket from the back of his chair and said he had to be off
right now (some major marrow story breaking on the allot-
ments over at Shrub End, evidently).
  `Thanks for coming in,' he said, smiling again as he steered
us towards the stairs. `I'll see what I can do.'
 Walking back up the hill, Geoff and I were completely
confident that we'd blown it.
  And we were wrong. That Friday, I leafed through the
paper almost casually, so much had I given up hope. But there
it was on page six, half-way down, next to the Entertain-
ments guide: ORPHANS ON THE ROAD TO LAUGHTER,
200 words plus picture. Maybe some big piece on the family
folk-act Farley's Rusk had fallen out at the last minute - who
knows? But what did it matter? We were there and we were
jubilant. Better still, there was no sub-clause mentioning
Geoff's job, nothing about me going to university and no
reference to either of our addresses.
 And best of all, there, verbatim, was Geoff's quote: ` "I'm
expanding in all sorts of interesting directions," says Geoff,
20.' (Sadly, though, it had not, as we had fervently hoped,
been taken out for use in the picture caption: `Geoff Law-
rence: expanding in all sorts of interesting directions'.)
 Still, Dave Woods had done us proud. The Orphans of
Babylon were go.

         Three Times A Day

When I was in my late teens, everybody I knew in Colchester
was in a band. That's because I wasn't interested in knowing
anybody who wasn't in a band. Except girls. The majority of
the girls I knew were not in bands. Clearly, there were years
of cultural stereotyping ensuring that this was the case; pop
music was so boys-y, so laddish. Though I would also say
that the girls I knew who wanted to be in bands were in
bands. The majority of the girls I knew actually didn't want
to be in bands.
 But all the girls I knew liked listening to bands. That's
because I wasn't interested in knowing any girl who didn't
like listening to bands. Neither was I interested in knowing
any girl who didn't like talking about being in bands. Or who
didn't mind listening while the people who were in bands
talked about being in bands. Because people who are in
bands don't talk about anything else. That's what's really
boring about people who are in bands.
 Geoff and I, the Orphans of Babylon - we bored for Britain
on the subject of bands. And so did everyone else. We all
sat in pubs and the topic of conversation was bands. Never
politics, or art, or books: just bands.
 This was a good time to be in Colchester in a band. There
were the Reasonable Strollers - noisy, angular and strange.
And there was Three Times A Day, fronted by Nel, who had a
bush of spiked-up hair, wore silver trousers and what looked
like a clump of seaweed for a top. His name was Peter Nice,
but nobody called him that. Everybody called him Nel. He
had been in a band called the Toys and they had appeared,
just once, on Saturday morning television. My mother was

working in a department store at the time and she hatl seen
Nel's mother, who worked there too, hop through to the TV
department to catch it. Everyone thought the Toys were going
to make it. But their single stalled somewhere down in the
70s and that was that.
 Still, Three Times A Day were good. They released an EP:
`I Crave To Be A Hermaphrodite' and `� Ray' on side one   ,
the epical `Storm' on side two. Eventually we got to know
Nel and he started to come out with us to the pub and talk
about bands. Bands, bands, bands.
 The Orphans of Babylon soon had a tape out too. Just
locally. It was recorded by a friend called Dave, who wasn't
in a band, though his wife was, and he was a studio engineer
so he talked about bands all the time. He got us into a 24-
track studio in Chelmsford for a day when the owner was
away. We finished it off on a reel-to-reel in Dave's sitting
room. We called it Pinch Me, I Thinlz I'm in Kent (Geoff's
title). It included our best numbers so far: `Separatists',
`Tree-
mouse', `Milk Teeth (Are Good Until You Lose Them)' and
the snooker-inspired `Helluva Break By Ray Reardon', which
went:

               That was a helluva break by Ray Reardon
               That was a helluva break by old Ray
               That was a helluva break by Ray Reardon
               Green, yellow and blue.

  Lots of our friends bought it - lots of our friends who were
in bands. Of course, it was just a local band's tape, not like
a
real album. But there was no question that you judged the
one by the standards of the other. You didn't expect a tape by
Three Times A Day to rank, in terms of sound quality, along-
side your copy of Steely Dan's Aja. You know it had been

recorded round at Chris's where there were old sofa cushions
nailed to the walls for soundproofing. You didn't expect it to
be album length either - five or six tracks was ample.
 It was clear that there were, for us, two distinct musical
worlds: the professional one, where people did deais and
released albums and went on tours; and the world of local
bands. And we dreamed of getting to the place where the one
magically glided into the other.
  Quincy Jones

I have traded liberally in fantasy futures. I have imagined
myself in high-profile roles for which I was  obviously
unsuited, dreamed of far-fetched lives. These dreams pause
and amuse for a while and then pass. Except for the pop
music one. The pop one sticks. It's there and, no matter how I
shake it, it will not budge.
 Why won't the real world intervene? What is its reluctance
to go nuclear and finish this off, once and for all? With
my other lost causes, reality just got straight in there,
no messing about. My plans to become an astronaut, for
instance,  carefully  nurtured  since  Neil  Armstrong took
his first lunar step in July 1969, terminated at the end
of 1972, when NASA pulled the plug on the Apollo space
programme after Apollo 17. (Assuming a smooth career
parabola  and  a  glitch-free  training  programme,  I  had
reckoned to be in the running for the crew on Apollo
36.)
 Something less arbitrary, but equally devastating, shattered
my conviction that I would one day play for Chelsea FC. I
remember clearly the initiation of this dream. It began with
me bursting angrily on to the primary school playground
after ignominious failure in a fourth-form mental arithmetic
test, and thinking, Sod the lot of you - I'll be a footballer.
(And I proved my point just six minutes into that break-time,
picking up the ball well inside my own half of the play-
ground, skipping and jinking though the challenges of seven
or eight breathless defenders and several hundred other kids
who weren't involved in the game at all, ramming the thing
between the piled-up jumpers and celebrating, Brazil-style,

over by the railings, through which, I firmly believed, it
was only a matter of time before Chelsea's scouts would be
proffering their rolled-up registration forms. )
 But I remember exactly where that dream stopped, too. It
was the moment, only two years later, when, after a hope-
lessly ineffectual performance with the school side, away at St
Helena, I was substituted at half-time. After this crunching
tackle from the real world, I had to face facts. Either you've
got it or you haven't. I hadn't.
 In any case, with football dreams, if a lack of skill doesn't
get you, age will. This is not how it goes for ageing musicians.
We don't think it's all over at all. We think it's just hotting
up.
In fact, we think the big moment, always imminent, has never
been more imminent (degrees of imminence being the crucial
unit of measurement when you are a would-be pop star seek-
ing your break). Life has not rapped us on the shins in an
attempt to bring us to our senses. Or it may have done, but
we haven't noticed.
 How old you were must have counted for something once,
when pop was almost exclusively made by teenagers for teen-
agers (with some older people in the background, counting
the money). Presumably, if you were an aspiring musician
getting nowhere in the early 1960s, your nineteenth birthday
would have come round with a grim tolling of the bell. You
would have realized that, at some point during the next
twelve months, unless things really picked up for you in that
Tuesday-night residency down at the Greasy Quiff, you
would have to resign yourself to becoming arr estate agent.
McCartney gave himself until he was twenty to make it
because after that, he thought, he would be too old and
it would be back to the drawing board, career-wise. (He was
indeed just shy of his twentieth birthday when the Beatles
signed with EMI in June 1962.)

 But now this simple process of selection and wastage is lost
to us. Who, in the music business, bothers to lie about how
old they are any more? Fresh-eyed youthfulness is beside the
point in a context in which oldies like the Rolling Stones keep
swinging back with faces chewed up like dogs' rubber balls.
And just as the rock-star sell-by date has gone back and back,
so has the career start-by date. As I have grown older, I have
not felt myself drawing closer to the horizon: on the contrary,
I have watched the horizon recede tantalizingly before me -
with, it must be said, considerable relief but also some
distortions of perspective.
 What admiration I have for the singer-songwriter Tori
Amos, for instance, has mostly to do with her being around
the same age as me and that she was in her late twenties when
she finally made it and became, in my eyes, a brilliant torch of
hope. I would have liked to have taken her aside and said,
`Way to go, Tori! Can't say I like your debut album very
much, but it's a major strike for us late-starters.'
 Similarly, I was moved by the success of her male counter-
part, Marc Cohn, not because I was particularly drawn to
`Walking In Memphis', the song that cracked it for him
(smart lyrics, but a rather obvious-sounding thing, taken
whole), but because I knew that he had turned thirty when
this success came his way in 1991 which I found deeply con-
soling in relation to my own failure thus far. Also, he gave me
a new benchmark for late-starting - a mark that Sting,
twenty-seven before the Police got properly under way, sup-
plied me with for some years, until my own twenty-seventh
birthday came and went without any noticeable hit singles on
my part.
 What is the pop equivalent of my half-time substitution?
This is a realm, it seems, where you can't be ruled out on the
grounds of an absence of skill. People who are not fans of

pop music will tell you that artistry has very little to do
with it, at least as far as the performer is concerned. The
real work, they will claim, is done by producers and haber-
dashers and hairdressers: it's a studio confection at every
level, a matter of camera angles, a tweak of the knob, a
trick of the light, the ultimate victory of style over con-
tent. This is a bitter and pessimistic view, but you can't
say it hasn't been true in some cases - I think of Milli Vanilli
(the singing duo who had to hand back their Grammy Award
when it turned out they had mimed the whole thing) and
Bryan Ferry. And, as a pop hopeful, you don't have to buy
entirely into this argument to take succour from it. If the
music industry can fix it for Milli Vanilli, then why not for
everybody?
 There's another feeling about pop music, related to this
one, which again upholds the aspiring star in his or her self-
belief: the apparent ease of it. Pop deals - a lot of it, nearly
all
of the best of it - in simplicities: big emotions, basic
thoughts,
straight-ahead tunes. How much skill do you need? What can
it possibly take?
 Frequently, of course, the ease is deceptive. `Every Breath
You Take' by the Police is perhaps the best song Sting has
ever written. It's built on one of the oldest, simplest rotating
chord patterns in the book. It contains a one-note piano solo.
One note! Look at those lyrics: `take'/`make'/`break' . . .
rhyming dictionary doggerel, by Sting's own admission. You
think this is easy, though? Well, sit down and write one if you
can.
  Or what about `I Will Always I.ove You', that Whitney
Houston single from the movie The Bodyguard? True, this
song is mostly an excuse for Houston to have hysterics every
time the chorus comes around (it's one of those bet-you-
can't-hold-your-breath-as-long-as-I-can  specials,  like  the

blue-faced end chorus of Bill Withers' `Lovely Day'), but
somewhere beneath all that is a song written by the country
singer Dolly Parton.
 Picture her now, toiling over those lyrics. She's thinking,
How can I best convey that the performer of this song feels
that they will always love their beloved? There is a brief
pause. `Goddit!' she shouts, and writes: `I will always love
you.' No metaphor, no simile, no crafted line, no twist.
l�toney for old rope! And yet, it was Dolly Parton who
couldn't be bothered to think of a metaphor, not you. (And
it's Dolly Parton, not you, who is currently salting down
those royalties.)
 This is the pop conundrum: either you've got it or you
haven't; but what is it? In the absence of an answer, hope is
free to carry on springing. Perhaps you have been overlooked
for years: then you console yourself that you are misunder-
stood, that it's only a matter of time. (Nobody thought Pulp
were any good for eleven years and then - bam! - into the
Top Ten.) Or maybe you're so bad it's good, like Gary
Glitter.
 Of course, there are recognized sources of critical response.
Record companies, for instance, with their rejection letters -
although these are, in my experience, just a rumour. Over the
years, I have positively rained down on record companies
appalling tapes of half-baked material and have never seen
such a thing. Still from time to time you can't help but notice,
or so you would think, their silence. You would imagine that
years and years of no response would become, in its own
way, richly eloquent, peculiarly final-sounding. If you were
routinely ignored for the best part of a decade by someone
with whom you were in love, you would probably construe
this as meaning, `I'm sorry, but you're not quite what I'm
looking for right now.' Yet, somehow, where pop bands come

from, this great refreshing wind of rationality never blows.
On we go and on.
 Every week, the NME performs a valuable service free of
charge. It sends young, courageous and by no means over-
paid writers to get their feet dirty right down at the roots, in
the little clubs, the primordial swamps where rock first crawls
from the slime and tries to stand upright. These writers - or
those who survive with their limbs and their sanity - come
back and, where necessary, do the decent thing and file
reviews which, if read between the lines (and sometimes if
read in the lines), say, `Oi. You're crap. Forget it.'
 And are people in bands grateful? On the contrary: they
blame the press for its `cynicism' and they blame the record
industry for its `cowardice', its `reluctance to accept the chal-
lenge of the new' or some such. I once spoke to an aspiring
pop musician whose long-fought-for support slot at the
Fulham Greyhound in London had been casually, and justi-
fiably, savaged in an NME review. `Well, that's just the view
of one journalist, isn't it?' he said, when, no, actually, it was
the view of the entire world - excluding the members of the
band and their close family, and even the close family had
their doubts. It is nothing short of heroic the vvay a would-be
pop star will continue, undeterred, in the face of universal
indifference and - more amazing still - active opposition. The
pop dream is indestructible by mere fact. It is like an alarm
clock in a cartoon, which continues to ring long after its vital
components have been pulped with a baseball bat.
 True, the fantasies may modify themselves with time. My
own have become a touch more genteel - more adult, I guess.
I managed a long time ago to kick posing in front of the
wardrobe mirror. And it has been at least fourteen years since
I pretended that a tennis racquet was a guitar (except in
bored moments during games of tennis, which, on the

grounds of being open, public and clearly satirical displays,
don't count). The fantasies still rage, but they take less florid
forms.
 It can come from nowhere. I can be in the Gents in a pub,
at the basin, washing my hands. And the noise will drift in
from the bar - a track off the juke-box, Prefab Sprout's `Cars
And Girls', say. At which point, something inspires me to
draw slightly closer to the mirror above the taps and begin
to mouth the words at my reflection. And, in an instant, I am
Paddy McAloon and this is my song. Right then, of course,
someone else bangs through the door and I have to freeze,
with my jaw set in an extraordinary rictus, and pretend to be
examining my teeth.
 Here's another. No actions involved in this one - it's in a
straightforward daydream format. I can drift into it at almost
any point, but tend to do so particularly when driving. Vir-
tually any kind of song will do as a catalyst for it, but I'm
made especially vulnerable if the soundtrack happens to be
something from the poppy end of black American R&B,
early 1990s-style, with its pretty tunes, thick harmonies, its
rhythms derived from swingbeat - Toni Braxton or El
Debarge or Brian McKnight or Ralph Tresvant or someone
like that. And, as the writer of the song and also in my
capacity as co-producer, I am in the studio with LA & Baby-
face or Jam & Lewis, a welcome and chummy interloper on
these production partnerships, sitting at the mixing desk with
them during playback, rocking in my seat.
 (The source for this image is a television documentary on
the life of the producer Quincy Jones, called, I think, `We
Love You, Quincy' - not the astonishing biographical movie,
Listen Up, which came out in 1990, but a slightly soppy
French-Canadian tribute affair, which I stumbled on inadver-
tently on Anglia TV in the middle of the night in about 1985.

It included footage of Quincy and his engineer in a studio
mixing `Yah Mo B There' for James Ingram. Both of them,
totally absorbed, are rocking in time to the rhythm track,
which has that fabulous little catch in it - that one snagged
drum machine `clap' noise, which is 50 per cent of the song's
appeal - and occasionally either Quincy or the engineer leans
into the incomprehensible sea of buttons and sliders on the
mixing desk to make some imperceptible but doubtless
utterly crucial adjustment. And, watching this, I just thought:
What a fantastic life! Imagine doing a job where you spend
your day rocking backwards and forwards at your desk, with
music flooding through you.)
  So I'm at the desk with Babyface or LA or Jimmy or Terry,
and occasionally I suggest a little nudge on the backing vocals
to lift the chorus slightly, and maybe a touch less top on that
tambourine - what do you reckon, Jimmy? No? OK, fine -
and we're pursed-lipped but cool, exchanging nods of satis-
faction. Chiefly, though, I'm rocking to and fro at the desk,
like Quincy Jones. Producer fantasies! Now there's a sign of
age.
 It's not the daydream itself that troubles me: it's my
residual conviction, based upon no grounds whatsoever (no
production projects in the pipeline - no production projects
ever - no songs out there with the publishers, no intention to
write any such songs), that one day it will come true.
 It's during the dark, guilty moments of self-scrutiny after
these worrying indulgences that I am tempted to argue for the
reintroduction of National Service - just for me. That would
sort me out.
    Nik Kershaw

I don't want to sound like I'm crowing or anything, but we
knew him before the `c' fell off. We knew him when he was
just plain Nick. Later, as Nik, he would release a handful of
hit singles - `Wouldn't It Be Good', `I Won't Let The Sun Go
Down On Me', `The Riddle', all of them vapid, naggingly
catchy pop songs made with crunchy synthesizers. He would
become a real pop star and have thousands of pubescent
girls screaming at him in public and plastering their bedroom
walls with his pouty image. But, as I've told a lot of people
since, it wasn't like that for Nick back in the early days, when
he used to play those pubs gigs in Colchester and Ipswich. It
wasn't like that when I knew him.
 I had better come clean right here and set out precisely the
extent of my friendship with Nick Kershaw before 1984
when he became, just briefly, a national pin-up. It boiled
down to maybe three or four short conversational exchanges,
all of them in pubs at the end of evenings on which Kershaw
had provided the live musical entertainment, and each of
them taking roughly this form:
  Me: `Nice gig tonight, Nick.'
  Him: `Oh, er, thanks.'
  Me: `Well, er, see you next time.'
  Him: `Sure, yeah, see you, then.'
  In addition, I would beg the jury to take into consideration
a slightly more substantial (but still brief and embarrassing)
visit to his house along with my friend Geoff. But that's it.
 The thing is, the slightness of our acquaintance was some-
thing I rather played down following Kershaw's first hit
single. And after his second and third, to listen to me going

on about the hell Nik and I used to raise, back in those early
Colchester days, you would have assumed we were related by
marriage. Or married. I would claim in my defence that I was
by no means the only person who tampered with the evidence
in this regard. In fact, shortly after Kershaw's first appearance
on Top of the Pops, most of the people I knew were claiming
to figure prominently in his past and vouching for their own
presence at all kinds of mysterious parties and undocumented
jam sessions. Just as pretty well everyone from Liverpool,
aged between forty-five and fifty-five, will tell you about the
night in 1961 when they bought Paul McCartney a Coke
down at the Cavern, so a sizeable slice of the population of
Colchester has its Nik Kershaw tales, nearly all of them
home-grown.
 (Once, on a camping holiday in France, I met a rather
mournful Liverpudlian with an acoustic guitar and we spent
a broody evening sitting outside my tent, with him strum-
ming a few quiet, plangent chords and running through little
fragments of songs from the sixties. And he told me all about
buying McCartney a Coke in the Cavern and I told him all
about me and Nik Kershaw. It was, on reflection, the most
factually ridiculous conversation I have ever had. )
 Now, a lot of people (especially those not drawn to the
music of the man one of the less charitable music papers
immediately nicknamed `the pop elf') might suggest it would
have been wiser to deny all connections with this diminutive,
nasal-voiced, temporary teen idol, rather than painstakingly
manufacture a relationship with him. McCartney is one
thing.  But Nik  Kershaw?  The  baby-faced composer of
`Human Racing' ?
 But it is not given to all of us to be choosy in this matter.
Of
course, I regard it as typical that the one sizeable pop star
who brushed past my shoulder on his way to the firmament

ended up being bracketed, not with substantial, timeless fig-
ures like Leonard Cohen or Van Morrison, but with Howard
Jones, another serious-faced yet hugely naff mid-eighties hot-
shot. (Both of them favoured mohair for that kinetic-but-
cuddly look.) You wouldn't think there were many situations
in which one could drop the name Nik Kershaw and hope to
get a result. But that doesn't seem to have stopped me trying.
Such is the allure of fame when it passes you close by. I
should add that the Kershaw we knew, before MCA Records
got hold of him and started marketing him as a schoolgirl's
gonk, was actually - dare I say it? - quite cool. Some of us
stood by him.
 Partly his example served as an encouragement: it was
proof that stardom did come even to those grubbing around
Colchester's pubs with a cheap amplifier. But there was some-
thing else about his success that was intensely frustrating. I
wanted to dine out on my association and couldn't quite
reconcile myself to the fact that my raw material didn't even
constitute a starter. We all know from countless interviews
given by whingeing pop stars (including Nik Kershaw), that
fame brings unforeseen pressures and it is difficult to bear; I'd
like to make it clear that the fame of someone you almost but
didn't quite know is pretty hard to swallow, too.
 Nick Kershaw used to play guitar in a band called Fusion.
It must have taken them minutes to come up with that name.
Still, it was the only disappointing thing about them. Fusion
played cover versions of other people's songs in pubs and
clubs all over Essex - like a million other acts, except Fusion
could play the difficult bits. Not for them a confused, nine-
minute version of `Johnny B. Goode' and a drunken stab at
Free's `All Right Now'. Fusion breezed their way through a
repertoire selected with, what seemed at the time, impeccable
taste and nerve: `Green Earring' by Steely Dan; `Jolly Coppers

On Parade' by Randy Newman; `Cos We've Ended As
Lovers', a little-known but fabulously poignant ballad that
Stevie Wonder wrote for Syreeta Wright to sing; even Wea-
ther Report's `Birdland', that absurdly convoluted jazz-funk
instrumental which we all hated really, but which Fusion, to
our enduring awe, had note-for-note.
 They didn't play much of their own material but we
weren't about to demand originals when the fakes were so
well observed. To be fair, the band later scraped some money
together and put out an album of new compositions, Till I
Hear From You, which came in a cheap cardboard sleeve
displaying a grainy photograph of somebody pretending to
be dead in a phone box. The record was released on blue
vinyl, and the whole package would be one of the most taste-
less items in my collection, if I hadn't lent it to someone and
never received it back. Needless to say, there was nothing on
it as good as `Jolly Coppers On Parade' though it did contain
a dirge credited to N. Kershaw - the dreaded `Human
Racing' - which, in almost identical form, provided Kershaw
with a hit single in 1984.
 The members of Fusion were dispersed across a fifty-mile
radius: the keyboard player was from Braintree, the drummer
from Southend, the bassist from Colchester. Kershaw himself
lived about twenty miles north of Colchester, in a village off
the road to Cambridge. This was an odd and inconvenient
arrangement for a working band but there was a simple
explanation: if you were as talented as each of them was, you
would have to drive around a bit before you found anyone
worth playing with.
 Kershaw,  in  particular,  was  a  frighteningly  dextrous
musician, a blindingly fast and bafflingly inventive guitar
soloist - although it now seems irrelevant to say so, after
what became of him. There have been many conversations in

which I have tried to make myself heard above the laughter
and justify him - and, more particularly, my interest in him -
by referring to his diligent interest in the jazz guitarist Allen
Holdsworth. But, perhaps, inevitably, this line of argument
meets with suspicion from those who know him only as a
man who once appeared in Smash Hits on the back of a horse
wearing a kind of woolly armour. (If he'd only known the
derision he was going to bring down on me with that single
photo-shoot: why couldn't he have just stood by a wall in a
pair of jeans and a T shirt, like everybody else?)
 But in those glorious, innocent days before fame stole him
away from us, we could watch and listen to Kershaw with
impunity. And we did. Our appetite for Fusion knew no
limits. Sunday lunchtimes we would watch them in the Colne
Lodge (Colchester's premium young person's gathering spot,
populated almost exclusively by underage drinkers, adept at
making a half of lager shandy stretch across three hours).
Sunday evenings four or five of us would drive to the White
Horse in Ipswich and watch them all over again. We travelled
to Southend and Tollesbury. We went to Rayleigh. Nobody
goes to Rayleigh for a night out. Not even people in Rayleigh
go to Rayleigh for a night out.
 We loved Fusion but we never imagined that the stretch
limo of fame was going to reverse its shiny boot on to their
drive. It must be said, record-industry executives were hardly
tearing across the country in a rush to sign anyone who could
execute an inch-perfect Jeff Beck instrumental. Also, it was
the keyboard player's misfortune not only to play and sing
like Stevie Wonder, but also to be blind - and as he once
mournfully remarked, `Who needs a honky Stevie Wonder?'
 And we didn't have screaming girls and unreasonable
wealth in mind for Nick Kershaw. He had discouraging,
science-student hair and wore unbuttoned waistcoats of

doubtful origin (Mr Byrite? Kool'N'Kasual? Children in
Need ? ) . Worse, he affected unwisely coloured ties with fat
knots, casually slackened to mid-chest level. And yet Geoff
and I had evolved for this figure the kind of crush girls get for
gym mistresses. He was commandingly good, so he tapped
into that power that musicians have, which has nothing to do
with television, or wealth, or with any sense of what these
people might mean beyond the room they are in. You see
them perform and you wish you knew them. But that com-
mand is forbidding, too, so you hover shyly on the way out.
 `Nice gig tonight, Nick.'
 `Oh, er, thanks.'
 `Well, er, see you next time.'
 At that gig in Rayleigh, we bootlegged the show, perching a
ghetto-blaster on our table and sitting in silence for the entire
evening so the machine wouldn't pick up our voices. And
afterwards we walked out past the stage with the recorder
still running, so it would catch Kershaw saying `Goodnight'
to us. In fact, what he said as we approached was, `Hey, your
red light's still on.' Outside, we knelt in the car park and
screamed with embarrassment. (I still have the tapes: they
contain a prototype version of `Wideboy', later a hit off Ker-
shaw's second album, as well as the aforementioned `spoken-
word' passage. If the market for Kershaw rarities ever catches
fire, I shall be buying myself an airline. )
 Geoff  and  I  even  developed  and  honed  a  detailed
impression of Kershaw taking a solo. If you want to try it, it
involves setting your right foot neatly over your left, bending
at the knees slightly, sucking in both cheeks and woggling
your pursed lips according to the dynamics of the music.
After several months spent trying to conceive how we could
enlarge on our skimpy acquaintance, Geoff ventured up to
Kershaw and, in a brilliantly conceived variation on the

regular `Nice gig tonight, Nick', asked him if he taught guitar
Kershaw said he didn't, but he would be happy to spend an
hour some afternoon showing off a few tricks and tips. Just
like that, Geoff was in.
 It says a lot about Geoff's big-heartedness that he volun-
teered to share this adventure with me, knowing how much it
would mean. Obviously, I couldn't sit in on the session, but
the plan was that I would accompany Geoff on the twenty-
mile drive into the middle of nowhere where Kershaw lived,
and then I would make myself scarce while the two of them
jammed and bonded. Geoff would explain to Kershaw that
he had a friend with him, a keen photographer who was
using this opportunity to take some pictures of the country-
side. And at the end of the hour I would turn up at the house
where, who knows, the kettle might be on, and I too might
get to share some quality time with Nick.
 We were pleased with this explanation of my presence
which we felt had the smack of authenticity about it,
although, in truth, I probably remain the only person in this
century to have gone on photo-safari in Great Yeldham. After
an hour spent staring redundantly across flat, fallow fields, I
knocked at the door of Kershaw's small, white bungalow.
Geoff opened it (he was nearer the door, apparently) and I
stepped in and hovered just over the threshold. Kershaw was
seated in the middle of the room with a guitar.
 `Hello,' he said.
 `Hello,' I said.
 He seemed realiy nice, but the kettle wasn't on and there
wasn't a lot to say.
 `Goodbye,' said Geoff.
 Evidently, the guitar session had gone OK: Kershaw had
graciously shown Geoff some chord shapes and some finger-
ings and had played him a couple of tracks featuring Allen

Holdsworth. But at no point had he and Nick exchanged
high fives, talked about old girlfriends, vowed to form a band
together, or even swapped phone numbers, which was the
point of the whole exercise. In the car on the way back, both
of us were muted, busy pondering a spectacularly large hole
in our enchantment. (Although, of course, to listen to Geoff
crank on about it now, anyone would think that, while I was
stomping pointlessly up and down muddy lanes Iooking at
my watch every five minutes, he and Kershaw were busy
co-writing what later became Kershaw's first two albums. )
  Not long after this, Fusion split up. I suppose there's a limit
to the number of times you want to play `Birdland' in front of
broke minors. They vanished from our lives abruptly, as local
bands tend to. There was nothing about it in the press - they
just stopped turning up. Eventually, the keyboard player re-
emerged as a solo pub act with a snazzy drum machine and a
sequencer, a kind of high-class home organist. The bassist
cropped up in other people's bands. The drummer, everyone
said, was busy with session work. As for Kershaw, we knew
nothing. And then, after nearly a year, I sighted him.
 It was in Colchester's shopping precinct, outside Lasky's
electrical store and at the back of Marks & Spencer's. And
this was not the Nick Kershaw I had known (or rather, not
known). First there was the hair - all spiky and bright blond
as if a small bomb containing bleach had gone off on his
head, the de rigueur 1980s pop-star plumage. And then there
were the clothes. No more wearisome waistcoats, no more
duff ties. He was wearing a tiny black jacket with some com-
plicated fastenings, and black drainpipe jeans which bot-
tomed out in a pair of pointy boots. There were only two
possible explanations: either a major record company had
signed him up and had got its people to make him over, ready
for stardom; or Kershaw had retrained as a hairdresser and

was now working in a shiny-floored unisex salon in Chelms-
ford - Sophisticut, maybe, or Hair Today. Naturally, I
assumed the latter and shook my head ruefully all the way
home on the bus.
 And, of course, I was wrong. The haircut and the grimly
fashionable threads were courtesy of MCA, who were right
at that moment priming Kershaw, ready to detonate him and
his new hair in the teen market. There was a faltering start: `I
Won't Let the Sun Go Down' was released in late 1983 in a
cheap sleeve which seemed to have been slung together in
a lunch-hour by someone with a thick black pencil and a
photocopier. I recall seeing, with some incredulity, the sleeve
mounted in the window of a small record shop in Leyton-
stone and wondering if the whole thing was about to take off,
and finally deciding, no, of course it wasn't.
 But then `Wouldn't It Be Good' came out and suddenly he
was on Top of the Pops for the first time. I watched with a
friend who had come round specially. The room positiv�ly
thrummed with our nervousness, our proximity to this,
momentous event and our feeling of tragic non-involvement
in it all. We leant close to the screen as the camera swung
from whichever Radio I DJ was presenting that week, across
the backs of the squawking audience and picked out Ker-
shaw, alone amid the fake chrome piping and the flashy
lights.
 It shook us that he had no guitar round his neck. (Top of
the Pops was completely mimed at this time.) Instead, he was
wearing a white boiler suit and a pair of fingerless gloves
and clutching his bunched fists up to his chest like someone
working out with a set of hand-held dumb-bells. At the same
time, he would bring up a knee in the manner recommended
by aerobics videos. Who had taught him to do this? It was
certainly never a feature of his performances at the Goose

and Firkin in Tollesbury. Staggered, we realized he was also
wearing a snood - a tube of netting, of the kind you some-
times see protecting strawberries, bunched around his neck.
(It became a trademark of sorts.) He looked terrified, at least
to  us  seasoned  Kershaw-watchers,  but  he  bopped  and
clenched and wilfully concentrated his gaze on the floor,
and as the song faded and the camera drew back, there was
the usual hilarious applause. We went to thz pub afterwards
and drank in silence, alone with our thoughts.
 Later we learned how MCA had asked him to remove his ,...
wedding ring for the show, so as not to dissuade girls from
having designs on him. Kershaw had refused (though he
either didn't mind or was powerless to prevent the company
lowering his age by four years, from twenty-eight to twenty-
four in its publicity material). We had lots of earnest conver-
sations about this disgraceful and cynical manipulation of
someone's image, about how this typified the relentless men-
dacity of the music industry. Meanwhile, I was buying every-
thing Kershaw's record company released. Out of loyalty, you
understand. Because of what we had. Because we went back.
I bought all three albums, obviously, but the singles, too. I
bought `I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me' when it first
came out, and then again when it was re-released (for the
different cover). I had `Human Racing' in a 7-inch double-
pack with a gatefold sleeve (I needed the additional live
tracks, naturally).
 Most of these items were passed to me over the counter
of Cambridge Our-Price, where I had developed a special
dismissive smirk-and-shrug manoeuvre, intended to convey
that I was buying this stuff for my sister Relatively recently,
a
friend who was crouched at my shelves, casually flicking
a forefinger along the spines of my albums, suddenly froze
and then gently turned to face me, holding like some sporting

trophy the 12-inch re-mix of Nik Kershaw's `Drum Talk'. His
face grew bright with slowly evolving glee, as if he had just
discovered that I still slept with a teddy bear.
  There was a nationwide tour and, yes, I went. I caught
him at Bristol's Colston Hall and sat sheepishly in the circle,
possibly the only male there, pretty well the only person over
thirteen, and certainly the only one not screaming. The trans-
formation was bizarre and gripping - from someone who,
after a show, used to coil his own guitar leads to someone
who had to be hurried by minders from the building into a
waiting van (thus not seeing me, hovering pathetically on the
wet pavement, up to my waist in brats with autograph books �
and hoping to catch his eye).
  His fame was short-lived, as fast fame so often is. But
even as it raged, Kershaw was giving interviews about his
discontent, his uneasiness in the role of pop puppet, his desire
to be regarded as a songwriter, a man of integrity, a guitarist.
You hear this a lot from pop puppets and it always sounds
ungrateful. Still, Kershaw's was a poignant predicament. He
had wanted to be Joni Mitchell and he had ended up being
Woody out of the Bay City Rollers. Radio Musicola, his third
album, was deliberately pitched over the heads of the teenies,
who, in any case, had already moved on to A-Ha. It flopped. I
was one of the only people who bought it. Soon after, Nik
Kershaw hung up his snood.
  We still thought about him a lot. We hoped he was OK.
There were rumours of him living in a large house in the
Essex countryside, stories of him working in LA as a pro-
ducer Occasionally he pitched up on records by other people
- with Tony Banks, the keyboard player from Genesis, with
Elton John. MCA flattered him with a greatest hits compi-
lation in 1993. (I bought that, too, even though I'd already
got everything on it.) And he wrote `The One And Only', a

big hit single for the blonde heart-throb Chesney Hawkes. I
think he's probably all right.
  I saw Nik Kershaw not so long ago. On a weekend away I
found myself standing directly behind him in the queue for a
table in a restaurant in Lyme Regis. It was one of those places
furnished to look like a sitting-room (flowered carpet, horse
brasses, paper napkins folded into fans) called something like
Harriet's Pantry or The Fisherman's Nook. In other words, it
wasn't very LA. But there was Kershaw in a party of four,
handing his coat to the waitress. I froze and abruptly began
communicating with my girlfriend in a series of disguised
nods, exaggerated winks and little flicks of the elbow. Even-
tually we were directed to a table, where I explained in an
absurd whisper that that small bloke over there in the expens-
ive-looking leisurewear was Nik Kershaw, `You know, the
pop star.'
  `What?' she said. `You mean your old friend, the guy you
used to hang around with?'
  I started to look uncomfortable. She put down the menu
and swivelled right round in her seat to get a look.
 `Well, why don't you say hello?'
 `Er . . .' I was improvising wildly. `He probably doesn't
want to be disturbed . . .'
  `But, surely,' she said, `he'll remember you.'
  `Well, er, you know. It was a long time ago.'
  She looked at me very hard and then returned to the menu.
  I spent the entire meal eavesdropping. (The couple with
him seemed to be his brother and sister-in-law, and Kershaw
and his wife were talking about looking at properties in the
area.) The Kershaw party got up to leave before we did and I
toye�. with offering him a sentence on the way out. But I said
nothir�g, partly because I could already see the blank look
withwhich he would greet my manufactured smile of

greeting and partly because, well, what would I have said?
`Nik, you won't remember me, but before you were famous I
used to follow you around in a faintly sinister manner.' He
probably would have called the police.
  I still wonder, though: now that the pop-star business is
over, does his wife (Sherry, unless I'm much mistaken) call
him `Nick' or `Nik'?
chapter 7
         Randy Crawford

I was getting ready to go away to university, stuffing every-
thing I owned - books, clothes, mugs, but more importantly,
hi-fi, albums and singles - into old grocery boxes and stack-
ing these downstairs, ahead of the load-up and the car jour-
ney. My father appeared in the kitchen door occasionally,
eyeing with  mounting  disbelief the  high-rise  cardboard
shanty town I had created on the hall carpet. He was apparently
growing fearful for the suspension on his Austin 1800
and at the same time, I would hazard, he was developing a
mild, instinctual annoyance at the sight of all this pop music.
On what must have been roughly my seventeenth heart-
bursting trip down the stairs, he cleared his throat and asked,
with just a hint of irritation, `Why don't you leave some of
the records behind?'
  Slick with sweat, I was awkwardly lowering to the floor a
box the size of a cow, wedged tight with old singles. I froze
with it and looked up at him incredulously through straining,
watery eyes.
  `You're never going to have time to play them all.'
  I didn't know what to say. I mean, yes, of course, he was
right: it had never even entered my mind, as I cautiously
boxed these 150 or so albums, guarding as best I could
against scuffing, slippage, warping and the possibility of
random abuses in transit, that I would listen to all of them as
soon  as  I got  the  other  end.  Preposterous  suggestion.
Assuming an average playing time of forty-five minutes per
album, and allowing for eight hours' sleep each night, it
would have taken me very nearly a week of chain record-play
to work my way once through the pile, from ABBA to XTC.

A whole morning and a good part of one afternoon of that
would have been spent listening to l Occ. And though I didn't
know much about university, I had gathered from the
advanced literature I had received - the various college guides
and student handbooks, gesturing warmly to a world of
enlivening ritual and busy sociability - that I was going to be
way too occupied for such a mindlessly self-absorbed project.
  As it happened, most terms, I was so radically under-
employed and room-bound I could have auditioned the entire
contents of one of the larger branches of Our-Price. But, in
principle, my father was absolutely correct. Of those 150
albums, carted laboriously to university (and back again at
the end of each term because I wouldn't agree to store them
there during vacations), I calculate that I played with any
regularity, in the whole of my time as an undergraduate, six.
They were: Tallzing Boolz by Stevie Wonder, Innervisions by
Stevie Wonder, Fulfillingness' First Finale by Stevie Wonder,
Drums and Wires by XTC, Black Sea by XTC and Songs In
The Key Of Life by Stevie Wonder.
  So why didn't I have the foresight to save myself some
effort, forget the boxes and just take those six? Well, for one
thing, that kind of foresight is impossible. True, I hadn't felt
compelled to play Drastic Plastic by Bebop Deluxe for nearly
four years - or, to put it another way, since the week after I
bought it. But how could I guarantee that I would never want
to hear it again? After all, that track on side one, `Surreal
Estate', had some weird synthesized gloops and strangenesses
in it, not to mention a rather fetching rhythmical sway and, in
fact, writing about it now kind of makes me want to slip
downstairs and put it on, if only for a quick burst, just to
remember how disappointing it was.
  For another thing, it seemed to me that I needed the bulk
of the collection on hand to make sense of any individual

decisions I made within it. When I went to the shelf and took
down, say, Innervisions, I was just as importantly electing not
to play Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy or Venus And Mars by Wings
or any of those albums that had seemed like a good idea at
the time, but whose appeal had dwindled with age or the
dawning of good sense. I was able to prize the wheat in part
because of its contrast with this enormous, patiently accrued
pile of old chaff.
  `Why don't you leave some ofthe records behind?'
  What did my father mean by badgering me with this rigor-
ous good sense, this sunny logic? It wasn't as if he was a
man without dominant obsessions of his own. I wondered
whether this might not be the time to raise with him, for
instance,  his detailed interest in castles.  I only wished
briefly to burden the Austin 1800 with my fad, whereas he,
on holidays and at weekends, cheerfully burdened the entire
family with his. His plans for a day out invariably centred
on some craggy medieval outhouse, currently home to a
rook, or on some hole in a wall somewhere. (When you're
a child and your father announces brightly, `Right! We're off
to see a castle', your mind promptly fills with images of
towers, drawbridges, moats. Later you learn to adjust your
expectations. )
  Unfortunately, my father's hobby didn't end there, among
the rubble. It went, literally, deeper. He wasn't just interested
in visible ramparts; he was interested in places where castles
used to be - earthworks, mounds, dimly discernible troughs,
outlines of ex-keeps, former stone floors now merely dips.
Invariably these places were well off the regular tourist trail
and frequently inaccessible by car, or even horse. We would
park some miles from where my father, after much furrow-
browed  cross-referencing  between  obscure  maps  and
obscurer books, had scented a significant slope. And then

we would yomp off en famille, Father keenly shouldering
forward, the rest of us strung out behind, moving with the
numbed limbs of those condemned to spend inordinate
amounts of their free time slogging over a hump to look at a
ridge.
  My father (who, I think, must have been quietly planning a
book) made notes on his observations and kept them in an
impossibly complex card-index system. You would think
that, when it came to other people's interests, someone per-
suaded to document non-existent buildings would have
learned to reason not the need. But apparently not if pop
music was involved.
  So we looked at each other in silence, me hunched double
over a box and him in the doorway, abstractedly tapping his
fingertips together, until his suggestion died in the air between
us.
  `Well, hmmm. Maybe not,' he said quietly, and disap-
peared.
  The irony was that I was leaving at least some records
behind. Only the night before, I had enacted the Great
Record Collection Purge of 1981, dealing my collection a
blow the like of which it had never felt before and has never
felt since. It happened while I was packing the albums into
the boxes, fussing like a fool, trying to bunch them tightly so
they would stand upright rather than slump and sag against
the end of the box, where the combined weight of the leaning
albums might bend the sleeve of the one on the outside,
which I would have regarded as a disaster.
  Additionally, I was having to make a series of crucial
adjustments to ensure that any album visible above the card-
board at either end of the box was not one I needed to be
ashamed of if anyone caught sight of it at any point on the
journey. A scenario I could envisage too clearly featured me,

a lonely and friendless new arrival on the college stairs, lug-
ging a box of albums up the functional bareness of my new
room and having to stand back against the wall to allow the
passage of some other students descending, already in a
noisy, chummy gang. One of them would be looking directly
at the box in my arms as he came down and would flip my
shoulder with the back of his hand on the way past and say,
`Hey! Jermaine Jackson! Nice one!' and the sound of their
mocking laughter would resonate in the stairwell long after
they had disappeared.
  Guarding  against this  awful  prospect  involved  fairly
simple decisions at each point and seemed more than worth-
while. For instance, the sleeve of Talking Heads 77, if pressed
into service as an endpiece, wouldn't, it seemed to me, give
out the wrong signals, whereas I deemed it better to bury
internally my copy of The Eagles,  Their Greatest Hits
1971-1975, not because I didn't think it was a rather fine
album in places, but because I wouldn't necessarily want the
first thing you knew about me to be that I did.
  But as the packing of the collection began to take on the
form of an impromptu review of its contents, and as I looked
with a gulp and a queasy quickening in the stomach, on
yet another utterly crap or desperately juvenile or just badly
winded pile of old pop (Gallagher and Lyle's Love On The
Airwaves, for God's sake), it dawned on me that there were
one or two things here I could do without.
  Because this was university: a new horizon, a fresh start. I
would be beginning from scratch with people who didn't
need to know that I was the kind of person who owned ten
albums (ten!) by l0cc; people to whom, if one or two albums
should `accidentally' get `lost' somewhere, I would never
have to explain limply that I had bought Randy Crawford's
Secret Combination not because of the hit single `Rainy

Night In Georgia', which I always thought was a bit of a
wash-out, because I mistook the saccharine lure of her
intense and continuous vibrato for the expression of soul, but
chiefly because of the guitar solo in the middle of `You Might
Need Somebody' and particularly for the sudden ripple of
notes it finds to unfurl across the gap half-way through.
  And more urgently, with Secret Combination magically
`disappeared', Pinochet style, there would be no danger of my
ever having to explain the pathetic, melancholic, doe-eyed
relationship I had struck up with its cover: not so much the
front cover, although the camera's startlingly tight focus in
the pupil of Crawford's right eye and the one stray braid of
hair performing a scribbly halo above her head were heart-
breaking in their own way, but more especially the portrait
on the back where she has her hand laid flat across her fore-
head, and is laughing this fabulous, smiley laugh, like you've
just cracked a great joke and she can't believe how much fun
you are to be around.
  How liberating - or so I thought - to be able to check in
some of this personal baggage, tear up the ticket and never
see it again.
  So I stopped packing and instead began examining the
collection in earnest with a view to snipping a few things out,
reshaping it and, in the process, reshaping myself, whittling
out a few unwanted bits of the past, fashioning something
modern and streamlined. There, kneeling on the bedroom
floor, I drew a long breath and purged.
  And when I had finished purging, when the violence was
done and the room calm, thirteen records lay severed from
the pack. Thirteen! I smiled wryly to myself. Unlucky for
them.
  In time, I created some space at the bottom of my ward-
robe and committed these albums to the dark. Which is

where they remained until recently when I started thinking
about them again and returned home to retrieve them for the
sake of this book. I had long since removed nearly everything
else of mine from that wardrobe and it was full of my
mother's clothing and bric-a-brac overspills from other
rooms. But parting the curtain provided by a hanging dress
and shifting aside what seemed to be a completely unused
wine-cooler, I exposed them, preserved in the condition in
which they had been left, these relics of the purge.
  The thirteen were:

             Status Quo: Hello ( 1973 ) and
           Rockin' All Over the World ( 1977)
I think this is self-explanatory. Yes, I could have taken these
albums to university with me, but I could also have spent the
whole of the first year walking about in a T shirt displaying
the message `Nerd'. Following the Live Aid concert of 1985,
which Status Quo opened, there was a nanosecond in which
you could just about have passed off possession of at least
the second of these albums as somehow charity-related. In
19 81, though, the Quo were simply sad old bores, who had
entered a strangely mellow phase. Having one of their early
albums would have been bad enough; having a mid-period
one, complete with the track `Rockers Rollin", which was
imaginatively restricted, even by the Quo's own impeccable
standards  of  artistic  stasis . . .  well,  this  just  wasn't
done.
  Why did I have them? They were, of course, mementoes of
those nights at the Embassy Suite, sonic souvenirs of Coca-
Cola and Brut. These were the things that came to mind on
the night of the purge, which is why, pushing aside a pair of
split plimsolls and jacket which had slid off its hanger, I

tucked both these albums as far back into the wardrobe as
they would go.

            Heart: DreamboatAnnie (1976)
In 1985, after a long break and a personnel change, Heart
returned as an all-American FM radio, soft-rock act and had
a hit with a melodramatic anthem for the aspirational called
`These Dreams'. When they released Dreamboat Annie, how-
ever, they were a part-American, part-Canadian Fleetwood
Mac: two chicks with long hair and flouncy dresses, two
blokes with long hair and bare chests. The song `Crazy On
You', played repeatedly on the pirate station Radio Caroline  
,
had enjoyed a vogue among my peers in the middle years at
school, largely because it seemed to speak to us about the
fetid crushes we were all developing at a rate of approxi-
mately three per day. If I was going to allow people to
see me with this, though, I might just as well go the whole
hog and take along my old Charlie Brown books and the
unevenly  glazed  pottery  ashtray  I made  in  the  fourth
form.

       Supertramp: Crime Of The Century (1974),
           Crisis? What Crisis? (1975) and
            Breakfast In America ( 1979)
As I would like to make clear, post-punk, Supertramp were a
complete no-go area - no matter how fond you were of the
piano break in `School', no matter how suckered you might
have been by the vocal ad libs at the end of `The Logical
Song' (`la la la logical', etc). So in one swift move, I canned
their entire top-level career, bar one album. You may wonder
why I didn't also dump Even In The Quietest Moments   ,

which fell between Crisis? What Crisis? and Brealzfast in
America. The answer is: only because I didn't have it.

   Electric Light Orchestra: A New World Record ( 1976)
Abandoned on the grounds, again, that it would command
about as much respect among my new peers as a Garfield
pyjama case and matching slippers. `Goodbye, Jeff Lynne,' I
muttered, `and good luck.'

          Wild Cherry: Wild Cherry (1976)
It's lesson one: never buy an album on the strength of a
single. And it's amazing how I've failed to learn this, despite
wasting good money on Wild Cherry by Wild Cherry. The
single in this instance was `Play That Funky Music, White
Boy' - which one came to realize was self-serving and politi-
cally suspect, but which also featured a vocalist, Robert
Parissi, who sounded like he had been gargling staples. Some-
where during the making of this album, Parissi ran out of
staples and ended up just gargling. And I ended up wasting
�2.99.
  It is true that plenty of other irredeemably bad albums
escaped the Purge of '81, but what seems to have swung it the
other way for Wild Cherry by Wild Cherry was the album's
sleeve, an item of such abject tastelessness that perfectly
acceptable household objects began to look cheap and nasty
in its vicinity. The cover image is a giant close-up of a
woman's lips, given about sixteen coats of red lipstick and
then one final top-coat of clear polyurethane to render them
shinier than a brand new post-box. She is seen sliding a
particularly glutinous cocktail cherry between her teeth. It's
just a hunch, but possibly this was meant to be some sort of
sexual reference. Anyway, it was out on its ear.

                   John Lennon: Imagine ( 1971 )

Now, I was on good form when I shelved this one. Remem-
ber, this is the autumn of 1981: it's less than a year since
Lennon was murdered in New York. The television has
hardly stopped repeating that blowsy film of him singing
`Imagine' while wandering in a white suit through white-
painted, furniture-free rooms. The rush of otherwise intelli-
gent people determined to account for him, in death, as not
just a surly rocker with a lippy wit, but as a philosopher and
sage, was still at full flood. And the Imagine album, contain-
ing the poisonous, anti-McCartney song `How Do You
Sleep?' and with Lennon all misty-eyed and clouded out on
the cover, was widely held to be talismanic, nakedly reveal-
ing, the real thing.
  Me? I reread the statement on the rear of the sleeve -
`imagine the clouds dripping. dig a hole in your garden to put
them in. yoko '63' - and binned it.

       Rupert Holmes: Partners in Crime (1979)
This one virtually flipped off the shelf of its own accord
and walked to the wardrobe with its hands up. Perhaps you
remember Holmes's big hit, `Escape (the Pina Colada Song)',
or perhaps you have suppressed the memory. `Escape' is
about a man who is bored with his woman and so furtively
adverrises for another in the personal columns, listing his
preferences (making out in the dunes, getting caught in the
rain, Pi�na Colada - Pina Colada!) and a woman replies,
saying she loves that stuff, and they fix a date and, guess
what? It's his wife. To think I fell for this corn. Even Rupert
himself doesn't look convinced by it on the sleeve, neurotic-
ally fondling his bottle-thick glasses. (Imagine Leo Sayer

sapped of all self-belief.) And look at that tragically recent
date. I couldn't even plead innocence on this one.
  On the night of the purge, Rupert Holmes got to learn a
lesson about fame: one minute you're at the top of the Ameri-
can singles chart, the next you're at the foot of somebody's
cupboard.

     Crown Imperial: The Royal Choral Society and
    the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by
   Sir Arthur Bliss and Andrew Davis perform music from
             the Last Night of the Proms.
Believe me, please, when I say I got this record for Christmas
when I was ten. It must have been the year my parents
noticed me enjoying the television broadcast from the Albert
Hall and slipped me this in a doomed attempt to wean me off
T. Rex and encourage in me an interest in classical music. As
far as that Proms experience went, it's just possible I was
more impressed by the streamers and the laddish behaviour
than by the formidable coloratura of the woodwind. Now,
this record simply screamed ignorance. I imagined, correctly,
that at university I would meet people who genuinely under-
stood classical music and who knew better than to respect
albums on the Classics for Pleasure label.
  And that's not to mention the possible royalist, fascist,
militarist, jingoist overtones, all threatening to get very ugly
indeed. This record had nothing going for me. It was closeted
accordingly.

         Genesis: A Trick ofthe Tail (1976) and
          And Then There Were Three (1978)
In as much as I had any sense of what a stereotypical male
student might be, I had him figured for a Genesis fan. (I also

reckoned there was a high possibility he would have that
Athena poster of the woman tennis player showing her bum.)
So I pulled these two in a pre-emptive strike. Fickle of me,
when you consider how avidly I had argued in the sixth form
- and against the prevailing intellectual grain, I should say -
that the band's decision to down-size from blown-up eleven-
minute, pseudo-classical epics to condensed, three- or four-
minute pop songs was the best move they ever made. Now it
was time to distance myself from these arguments altogether.
(And, in any case, there's only so many times you can listen to
`Squonk'.)

As it turned out, lOcc and Randy Crawford escaped. They
made the cut. And so did Jailbrea/z and Venus And Mars. And
I think this is because I realized, even as the purge raged, that
there is, in the end, a limit to the extent to which you can
rewrite your past, unless you are a Stalin or trying to get into
politics. It's like trying to claim you are the sum of your
edited highlights, when maybe you ought to be saying: `Yep,
look, How Dare You by l0cc, there it is. It was me, I did it, I
went out and bought it and I played it a lot, and I still don't
really know why, but I want you to know that I take that on
board about myself and I'm sorry, more sorry than I can
communicate without physical gestures borrowed from other
times and cultures. I am simply hoping to go on from here,
make something with this and out of this, rather than com-
pressing or twisting myself in its denial.'
  So they are still with me, the thirteen. It doesn't surprise
me
that I didn't attempt to sell or exchange them. Their com-
bined resale value, then as now, would have been ten pence
(excluding the Lennon album, for which, given the post-
humous clamour, I reckon I could have held out for at least
twenty-five). Also, the transaction was potentially embarrass-

ing, involving a public demonstration before the exchange-
store assistant (and maybe with onlooking customers) that
you once called these items your own.
  But neither did it occur to me - or not to the extent that I
acted on it - to take more drastic measures, to melt these
betraying items down, or sack them up and dump them in a
river. No. What I chose to do was to squirrel them away
where I knew I could always return to them. And that tells its
own story. They say, with respect to the law, you can run but
you can't hide. With respect to my old records, I could hide,
but I couldn't run. Now, as then, I have to live with it: there
is
a part of me which is for ever Rupert Holmes.
      The orphans of Babylon, take 2

The summer of 1982: a big break for the Orphans. An old
schoolfriend, now the social secretary at Exeter University,
gets us on to the bill for the end-of-term ball, supporting the
Boomtown Rats. Or, at least, playing in a room adjacent to
the main hall directly after the Rats have finished their set
(estimated time 1.30 a.m.).
  During the day of the gig, while the stages are being set up,
we hang around in the hall trying to look casual about Bob
Geldof being there. This is Geldof post-Boomtown glory days
and pre-Band Aid but we're still thrilled to be alongside him
and we take it in turns to go out on to the steps and walk past
him while he's lying there in the sun, unshaven, reading the
Daily Star
  Later we catch the start of the Rats' set and are impressed
to see that Geldof hasn't bothered to change before going on:
he's in the clothes he's been wearing all day Then we go off to
prepare for our own show.
  Our opening is timed perfectly. Just as we go on stage, the
crowd from the main hall floods the room on its way out
from the Rats' show. We give them `Teaching People To Fly
(Ain't Easy)'. And everybody, but everybody, leaves. They all
zoom out at the far end, to the comedy room, the casino
room, the bar, anywhere.
  Afterwards, we agree that you couldn't have cleared that
room faster if you had used a water cannon.
             Slade

Sometimes it's easy to buy records, but most of the time it's
intimidating and degrading. The browsing business, that's
fine. I can cope with browsing. Or at least I can cope until
someone comes and stands right beside me just as I've started
flicking guiltily through the section devoted to A Flock of
Seagulls. What's difficult is knowing that, at some point, I'm
going to have to take something to the counter. Because at the
counter I'm going to have to hand a sleeve or a CD case over
to a record-shop assistant, and with certain purchases I might
just as well be passing them an instant data read-out on my
personality, paying particular attention to its weaknesses and
its least-focused desires.
  At Christmas 1984, Geoff and I both managed to get holi-
day work at Parrot Records in Colchester, helping out with
the seasonal rush. By this time, Parrot had closed down the
poky shop where we used to spend lunch-hours and had
moved over into the centre of town, into a larger store with
aspirations to look as shiny and accessible as an Our-Price.
And rude Nigel? Nigel was long gone. A management ruling
insisted that the only records played in the shop were the top-
selling chart albums, to create an atmosphere in which the
broadest range of shoppers would feel comfortable. Any
record with `fuck' in it, or even a discord, had to wait until
after five-thirty, when the doors were locked and you were
sweeping the floor and wondering whether you'd make the
five-fifty bus home.
  That Christmas, a few rather serious-looking people came
in to choose from the extremely limited range of items in the
shop's plastic tray of Compact Discs. (Fools! we thought. It'll

never catch on.) But mostly people were buying the big ones -
the first Slade album (Diamond Life), Now That's What I Call
Music 3, Can't Slow Down by Lionel Richie, Legend by Bob
Marley and the Wailers. We emptied shelf after shelf of those.
  And it was really busy in the shop, most of the time, so it
was hard not to resent anyone who said, `I wonder if you
could help me .  .' Because this inevitably meant getting out
the catalogue while the queue built up and looking up the
title or the artist on an old record, which probably wasn't in
stock, for some sap who didn't manage to buy it the first
time. Much easier to reach behind you for the Sade album.
And another Sade album after that. And another Sade album
after that. And another Sade album after that.
  I took a camera in one day and got a picture of Geoff
behind the record shelves at the back of the counter. He is
holding up the sleeve of Deep Purple's 24 Cnrat Purple and
has scrunched up his face as if attempting to pass a kidney
stone. Some customer has brought this sleeve to the counter
and is now waiting for Geoff to fill it, oblivious to the fact
that the shop assistant is currently round the back, posing for
a richly contemptuous photograph.
  Knowing that that kind of thing goes on, how could I not
be nervous about record shops? How could anyone not be?
         The Cocteau Twins

A pop trivia question for you: what do Martin Fry, the singer
with the Sheffield group ABC, and I have in common?
  I'll have to hurry you.
  Give up ?
  The answer is: both of us went down with the same type
of cancer! And within months of each other, too! Martin
contracted Hodgkin's disease three albums into his career,
between How To Be A Zillionaire and Alphabet City. I got it
in my second year at university and before I'd had any
albums out at all. (Though I had all of Martin's.)
  I'd like to be able to ascribe my developing a potentially
fatal illness at this point to the creative chaos, the sheer
weight of zaniness in the life I was leading - the pressure of
all
those Orphans of Babylon gigs, the inevitable overspill of the
wild nights of rock'n'roll and chicks till dawn. Unfortunately
Hodgkin's disease is less glamorous. If you're going to get it,
you get it. During the glandular mayhem of early adulthood,
your lymph glands throw a series of wild parties, before set-
tling down for a quiet life. And in people like me and Martin
Fry, the party goes on too long and gets nasty and the police
have to be called.
  It's a cancer but it doesn't exactly blow a fanfare on its
arrival. I went down with something which felt just like flu,
except when it passed it left half a golf ball under my arm.
Only mildly concerned, I showed it to a GP who said, with
heart-stopping cheerfulness, `I think you'd better see a proper
doctor.' And then there was a biopsy and a lot of worrying
and I had to go back a week later for the results, sitting on
my own in a day room, in a ward on the ninth floor of a

Cambridge hospital, a cup of hospital tea in my lap, waiting
for the specialist to come round. And just knowing he'd got
something big to say from the way he asked his students to
wait outside the door.
  I had to have my spleen removed. `You don't need it,' the
surgeon assured me. Your spleen is the size of your fist. I
wondered how something as economically built as a human
body could do without something the size of your fist. After
all, you wouldn't happily agree to lose a body-part the size of
your fist if the body-part in question was your fist. The doctor
said I would be able to play the trumpet afterwards. Which
was good news, because I wasn't able to before.
  `Do you smoke?' he asked.
  `No,' I lied, because my father was sitting beside me and he
didn't know. Later, I crept back on my own and told the
doctor I had lied about the smoking.
  He said the disease didn't have anything to do with
smoking anyway. So I carried on smoking. `Maybe cut back
to cigars just before the operation,' he advised me, cheer-
fully.
  Tests conducted at the same time as the operation showed
the disease had not spread. I had it in one place. I was reliably
informed that you want it in one place, or less. Then you can
go at it with radiotherapy. I had that for a month. It wasn't a
problem. It was just like having an X-ray every day. At the
start of the third week, you're feeling a bit knackered, but
you're carried along by the fact that the lump is already
visibly smaller, shrinking daily. A doddle.
  Only they missed a bit. They didn't irradiate a sufficiently
large area, so a year later the lump grew back and this time it
had to be attacked with some fully fledged, properly nuclear
chemotherapy: six months of bi-weekly injections and eighteen
tablets every day, with vomiting, painful fluid retention,
permanent out-to-lunchness, mild hair-fallout and almost
complete loss of taste - my Lou Reed phase. And, after that
little lot, Hodgkin finally fucked off.
  In the middle of all this I was listening to Treasure, an
album by the Cocteau Twins. The Cocteau Twins were
reliably mournful - muted, chiming guitars, underwater bass,
just-out-of-sick-bed rhythms. I don't know where Liz Fraser's
voice was coming from, but no one was having fun there.
Maybe this was the wrong musical tactic for me right now I
had postponed my university course for a year to concentrate
on doing nothing. Perhaps there was an obvious argument
for breaking out the Stax, punching a hole in the gloom. Or
maybe I should have gone another route and played nothing
but the most calmative, late Steely Dan, just let its fine spray
play into the room.
  But, typically, my concern was not what effect the music
would have on my life so much as what effect my life would
have on the music. I was familiar from childhood with the
way that music heard while ill - lying in bed with a high
temperature and the radio on - tends, whenever heard again,
to be redolent of whatever you were suffering from when
you heard it: hot eyes, clammy sheets, medicinal tangs, fever
fuddle. It's another sense in which pop songs are catchy: they
catch whatever you have. But, unlike you, they never quite
shake it off. Even now, if I hear Laurel and Hardy's `On The
Trail Of The Lonesome Pine' I can begin to feel physically
uneasy, simply because, during its peak period of prominence
on the airwaves in 1975, I was stuffed away with Radio 1 and
a middle-ear infection. Imagine, then, inadvertently tainting
in this way some of the most important pieces of music
you knew by playing them while under the influence of

chemotherapy. Too risky, surely. I wasn't about to let this
kind of associational virus loose among my entire record
collection.
  It wasn't that, during this grim period, I never used pop's
optimism to lever myself out. A friend bought me a Walkman
to cheer me up, the first one I ever had. It had struck me, even
before I owned one, that the Walkman was, after the in-
car stereo, probably the finest technical achievement of the
twentieth century - about as refined as man was ever going to
get. Without having to go in for bells on our fingers and
bells on our toes (cumbersome and, let's face it, not all that
satisfying, musically speaking), we could have music wher-
ever we went. On my way to and from the endless clinics and
surgeries, I played almost to ribbons an old cassette of
Deniece Williams's ineffably joyful `Let's Hear It For The
Boy' (the way the words snap against the beat!) and sat there,
clamped between the skinny plastic headphones, enjoying its
friendly, life-affirming fizz. I could stare out of the windows
of the bus and the world would turn into a video, which is
not the kind of perspective you would want all the time,
maybe, but which seemed wondrously absorbing at this point.
  For the most part, though, upbeat and ritzy kinds of music
weren't what I needed. Somehow they had the opposite of the
desired effect. Let's say that, more often than not, directly
after a lengthy injection of virulent and purgative chemicals,
I
wasn't in the mood for Donna Summer. Music that had
seemed to be about a life which was excitingly unattainable
now just seemed to be about a life which was depressingly
unattainable. Hence the appeal of the Cocteau Twins whose
music appeared to me to be about a life which was perfectly
attainable - already attained, indeed - and utterly depressing.
I gathered myself into its velvety folds. (And to listen to it
now is to drag all that back, so I tend not to.)

  I also played A Wal/z Across The Rooftops, a painstakingly
miserable album by the Blue Nile on which the music has
been scrupulously pared away to the noise of someone tap-
ping despairingly on a radiator, while a voice just about
gathers the energy to sing above it. It's an astonishing record,
especially if you've got cancer. And Hats, which the band
released an impressively reluctant five years later, was, if any-
thing, even better. If Samuel Beckett had ever gone into the
studio, he would have come out sounding like the Blue Nile. I
cherished our moments together. (The Blue Nile I can still
listen to: they proved too good, too resilient to be used and
disposed of.)
  I seemed to spend a lot of time listening, not to music
but to my own noises, awake to every twinge and throb,
wondering whether the uninvited guest in my system had
kept a copy of the doorkey and was about to let h�nself in
again. Illness centres you in yourself. For one determined on
so many projects of self-escape and self-reinvention, this was
a bitter set-back. It was hard to know what to do with the
misery of it. There was nothing romantic about this cancer.
Utterly arbitrary, it didn't have a narrative. It was just blank-
faced and dutiful, a civil servant among diseases. So I went
deep into some glum pop music and constructed what stories
I could there.
  That's not how it is for everybody, I concede. Some people,
after brushing with a potentially fatal disease, burst forth
from the clinic entirely remade. They come out of it in a hurry
to live. They shine with purpose and commitment. They go
straight to their K-Tel compilations and dance, dance, dance.
Somehow, cancer failed to come good for me in quite this
way, failed to act as a Brasso of the soul. Afterwards, I looked
around me and it was still a toss up between Songs In The
Key Of Life and Innervisions for my favourite album. I still

couldn't see the point of jazz. I still couldn't play the guitar.
But there was a new sheen on at least some aspects of my
life: like friends and relations and a National Health Service.
Especially a National Health Service.
              Madonna

What shocked me about Madonna was not the pictures of
her trussed in rubber, licking people and leaning over a wall
with no knickers on. These and the other images in Sex,
the metal-covered, ring-bound photo-album she published in
1992, seemed to me fairly inevitable, given everything else we
already knew about her.
  And I wasn't especially perturbed either by her repeated
use of the word `fuck' in the interview she gave David Letter-
man on American television in 1994, which got transcribed
and quite widely reported in Britain. What was defended as
the noise of a provoked shock-artist, a righteous disturber of
our complacency, sounded to me more like the hum of a
smoothly operating publicity machine.
  No, what really shook me about Madonna was that
sequence in the movie In Bed With Madonna where she got
her dad up on stage. That took nerve. You've got to hand it
to her. I could never have done that.
  As my life in showbiz shaped up, I seemed to be taking my
parents along for the ride. At primary school, I put them
through utterly balls-aching school concerts - shrill-winded
recorder  orchestras,  triangle  bands,  buzzing  Stylophone
combos, after which, feigning gratitude and pride - they
limped into the car park with numb buttocks and tinnitus. As
if that wasn't enough, at secondary school I unsparingly
sought parts in terrible, unabridged productions of Julius
Caesar and sat my parents on hard seats in draughty halls
while kids wrapped in Alcan wandered around forgetting
their lines. The only point of being in these things was so that
your parents could watch you at it. If they had refused to

attend that North East Essex Combined Primary Schools
Celebration of Christmas gig at Essex University in 1971. . .
well, I would have been ruined.
  But when I moved up to rock, something snapped. In the
heyday of the Orphans of Babylon, and later with the
Cleaners from Venus, I would have cancelled a show rather
than put my mother and father on the guest list, assuming
they had ever wanted to come, which they didn't. Even so,
somewhere mid-adolescence it began to send a chilly hand up
my spine to think they might witness me on stage - caught
somewhere between what I was and some idea of what I
wanted to be. The shame would have been all too much.
I was quite ready, in the wake of my eventual success in the
world arena, to secure them a luxury waterside home near
Henley, parental relocation being one of the first commit-
ments of the top-earning rocker. But, in the meantime, I
didn't want them in the audience.

      The Orphans of Babylon, take 3

A letter from Geoff:

I've got a tape of our performance Saturday last and it's OK. New
songs needed? Yes. It's the 25th, and I'm listening through our
old songs to find new live material, and there's plenty of it:
e.g. `Call
Of The Mountain Sock', `(Not Surprising Really) She's Only Four
Days Old' and many more. I think we should drop the lot and keep
`Teaching People To Fly (Ain't Easy)' and `30, 40 Or More' as
encores, you?

As a final thought before he signed off, Geoff wrote:

I thought if you could play some of the numbers enclosed, we
could
become famous in Northants.

  `The enclosed' were a few pieces of sheet music, stapled in
a stiff, pale yellow cardboard cover on which was printed,
in a rudimentary typeface:

              A Collection of Scandinavian Folk Dances
    Introduced at the English Scandinavian Summer School
                      of Physical Education
   Published by the Nonington College of Physical Education

  In the index, on the inside cover, Geoff had underlined in
blue felt tip some of the titles: `Knurrifas', `Kliplev Marked',
`Heidilit, Kom Herom' and `With My Hand I'm Clapping'.
 The envelope also contained, without explanation, two
black and white negatives (which, when you held them up to

the light, were clearly portrait photographs of Geoff 's mother
and father) and a sizeable wad of fluff.
  I think it was around here that I began to have serious
doubts  about  the  long-term  future  of the  Orphans  of
Babylon.
            Scritti Politti

I go into record shops a lot - any record shop, anywhere -
sometimes to buy records, sometimes just to browse, but
frequently to indulge in other, less readily comprehensible
activities which have nothing to do with buying, or seeking
things to buy, at all.
  Very often I go into a record shop and look at records I
already own. I actively seek out in the browser bins copies of
albums which I already have and which I have no intention of
buying again, and look at them. Normally I won't trouble to
remove them from the rack or bin; I'll just flick to where they
sit, open up a little viewing space and then pause, not really
to think or anything, but as if seeking some kind of pointless
confirmation: `Yep, here's Scritti Politti's Cu�id And Psyche.
In front of the board saying Scritti Politti. In the S section.'
  I don't find this behaviour easy to explain, though clearly
there is wishfulness involved, that if only you didn't already
have this record you would be able to buy it. Chiefly, though,
I suspect it is descended from a piece of primary-school play-
ground business wherein someone would skim through their
bubblegum cards/football stickers or similar collectables
while someone else stood at their shoulder announcing the
relation of this collection to their own: `Goddit. Goddit.
Goddit. Haven't goddit. Goddit', etc. But in the playground,
this performance at least served a practical purpose, as a
prelude to swapping or some other form of trading, whereas
my pop-fuelled adult version feels much more like the con-
duct of an addict, standing there in isolation at the browsers,
reciting  to  himself  a  numb  mantra:  `Goddit.  Goddit.
Goddit . . .'

  Still more frequently, I go into record shops and look for
records which I know do not exist. I comb the sections of the
display devoted to favoured artists, with whose works I am
completely familiar and from whom I well know there is
nothing new due, as if, by an amazing warp of luck, I will
turn up something of which I wasn't already aware - some
extraordinary Norwegian import, some Chinese pressing of
studio out-takes unwritten about in this country. This indul-
gence arises, I think because however much music you have
by the artists you like it is never quite enough, and the pros-
pect of cheating the release schedules or history and opening
up whole new avenues for exploration is an enticing one. So
it is that I will find myself in, say, the cubicle-sized branch
of
Our Price on Victoria Station in London, which doesn't stock
all that many records that exist, let alone records which
don't, trying to will into being a third album by the Bible, or
some mysteriously unmentioned Take 6 recording.
  From here, it's a short step to record fairs. If you've got the
record thing, and you've got it bad, then eventually you reach
a degree of craving that mere record shops alone will not
satisfy and the next thing you know, you're pitching up at
town halls and hotel function rooms where dealers congre-
gate to flog their rarities and oddities and trash - the vinyl
junkie's equivalent of the car-boot sale. In the early 1980s I
got to be quite a swinger on the record-fair circuit. I was well
placed to score: at the time, I had a girlfriend in Bristol, a
university course in Cambridge and a family in Colchester.
With a very simple piece of co-ordination involving my
weekend arrangements and the small ads in the NME, I could
get my attendance up around the three fairs per month mark,
no problem.
  Record fairs represent an alternative shopping experience
and yet are as uniform as any branch of Our Price: the same

trestle tables, the same preponderance of Bruce Springsteen
bootlegs, the same poorly written section-dividers, the same
people in anoraks sifting round-eyed through box after box
of other people's junk. I used them most concertedly to
expand on all fronts my collection of XTC records, which
had fast become my central preoccupation. My commitment
to this band had created an appetite which would not be
content with straightforward albums and singles alone.
  I picked up a copy of Guillotine, a Virgin label sampler on
10-inch vinyl which included the otherwise unavailable XTC
track `Traffic Light Rock', one minute and forty seconds
long. I found an American radio copy of `Generals And
Majors' on 7-inch which had `Generals And Majors' on both
sides so that even the most cack-handed DJ could never acci-
dentally play the wrong side. It joined the other copies of
`Generals And Majors' I already had, on the Black Sea album
and on the British 7-inch double pack. I purchased an Austra-
lian pressing of `Making Plans For Nigel'. I rootled out a
bright red flexidisc, originally given away with Smash Hits,
with `The Olympian' by the Skids on one side and XTC's `Ten
Feet Tall' on the other - not the original aibum version but a
different one, rerecorded for the American market and fea-
tured on the B-side of the single `Wait Till Your Boat Goes
Down', which I already had. I jumped like lightning at a copy
of Five Senses, a 12-inch EP released in Canada, featuring five
fairly hard-to-find tracks, all of which I already owned but,
importantly, not in this form. And with a gasp, which had to
do with both delight and incipient bankruptcy, I spent eight
pounds on a 7-inch version of `Statue Of Liberty' in original
picture sleeve and signed by all four members of the band.
  Record fairs plunged me into the grubby waters of the
bootlegged live recording. Early on in my time as Lord of
the Fairs, I happened on a cassette of Stevie Wonder in con-

cert in Brighton - not the entire concert, just as much of it as
would fit haphazardly on a C90. Unfortunately, as I dis-
covered when I got the tape home, the bootlegger had been
seated close to one of those people who release a loud, senti-
mental groan of recognition (`Naaah!') at the beginning of
each number. `Lately I have had the strangest feeling,' sings
Stevie. `Naaah!' says the man in the audience, and so on, for
an hour and a half.
  But I was undeterred. Needless to say, my bootleg-buying
also took on a sizeable XTC dimension. At four pounds a
throw I picked up various unlistenable-to cassettes of them in
concert: at Marconi Youth Club in Swindon, at the Hammer-
smith Odeon, at somewhere unspecified in Holland. And I
bought a vinyl double album featuring a recording made at a
club called Hurrahs in New York in 1980 but manufactured
in Watford. It came in an ugly thick cardboard sleeve, set
me back twelve pounds and responded poorly to playing.
Somewhere at the heart of its storm of hiss was a barely
audible throb, as if the concert had been recorded by some-
one pressing a cheap dictaphone up against the venue's out-
side wall. I'm not sure I ever made it as far as disc two. I was 
 ,
needless to say, delighted with it. Possession was the point,
not listening to the thing.
  Soon, not even record fairs were getting me to the place I
needed to be. Shaky, lank-haired and bleached of face,
I turned to mail order I found in a fanzine the address of
a dealer in Amsterdam and, having contacted him for his
catalogue, arranged for him to send me no fewer than three
C90s filled with Andy Partridge's home demo recordings and
various scraps of bootlegs of XTC playing live in Sydney. I
stored these alongside my own tapes of a Partridge appear-
ance on the panel of Roundtable, Radio 1's Friday evening
singles-review programme, and a set of recordings of him in a

short-lived regular slot on The Janice Long Show, playing
a spoof agony aunt. I'm not sure I've ever listened back to
these tapes, but at the time it seemed a matter of some
importance to have them.
  Of course, this passion grows dim on you. It's too intense
to sustain, perhaps. The last XTC single I bought on both
7- and 12-inch was `Grass' in 1986. Then I missed a couple,
settling, with a vague sense of deprivation, for the album
versions only, before the singles side of the collection finally
fizzled out with `The Mayor of Simpleton' on 12-inch in
1989. But it still irks me that I never found the gatefold insert
which accompanied the first 15,000 copies of Drums And
Wires and which included the lyrics to that album and to the
two that preceded it. It grates that I failed to find a copy of
Blaclz Sea that still had the plain green paper outer-bag in
which the earliest batch of releases came. Nowadays I cannot
imagine getting interested in any new band to the extent that
I would track down ruthlessly and pay money I couldn't
afford for a Sweden-only, limited edition, coloured vinyl 12-
inch, in original picture sleeve with poster insert. If I'm feel-
ing feisty, I will claim that this is a reflection on the
indifferent
quality of new bands but I know deep down that it's a reflec-
tion on me, not rousable to those heights any more, but not
out of the game either: left instead with a dull ache that
throbs, at a record fair or second-hand store, each time I
see one of those XTC rarities again - they're not that rare,
obviously - and wish that I didn't already have it so that I
could buy it.
  Then again, in other respects I'm in as deep as I ever was.
The other day, I was in Colchester with my mother We had
gone into the town centre so that she could choose a birthday
present, but as we were passing the George Hotel in the High
Street, I noticed the placard leaning up against the door:

                    TODAY: RECORD FAIR. CD & VINYL

  I gave my mother an apologetic look and said, `Ten
minutes?' And she raised her eyebrows but said she would
meet me in Marks & Spencer's. So I paid my 25p and went in.
The usual scene: a couple of sad-looking people in anoraks
doing the slow drift, boxes of junk, endless Bruce Springsteen
live recordings. And, of course, the minutes flew and by the
time I got to Marks & Spencer's, my mother was standing in
the doorway, looking steamed up.
  She said: `If I'd known you were going to be that long, I
would have gone upstairs.'
  The conviviality rather drained out of our afternoon.
  Still, I got a Carleen Anderson CD single in a broken case
for two pounds, and a vinyl Minnie Ripperton album, com-
pletely wrecked, both outside and in, and utterly unplayable.
Only three pounds, though. Where else can you find bargains
like that these days ?

chapter 8
      The Cleaners from Venus

The word on the street about Martin Newell was that he was
an anarchist and also the Colchester district's top-ranking
songwriter. When I met him he was running a parallel career
as a daytime washer-up in one of the Colchester district's top-
ranking restaurants on North Hill.
  I was at a loose end in that empty year between school and
university which some people use for purposes both challeng-
ing and instructive but which I mostly spent wandering
around Colchester town centre in a daze.  Sometimes I
wandered around the back of Newell's restaurant to visit a
friend who worked on vegetable preparation. He introduced
me to Newell, on dishes. I would walk up a dank side-alley
and tap at the restaurant's back door, and there he was, at the
sink, in skinny black jeans and a Tshirt. I leaned in at
the doorway, midway between the smell of the hot suds and
the stench off the bins. Radio 1 was always on loud.
  Newell could cover more topics of conversation in half an
hour than most people find breath for in a couple of months.
He managed this by talking in torrents and by carefully mini-
mizing the time in which he did any listening. Stroppy anti-
Establishment rants mingled with outlandish tributes to the
genius of the Beatles and the occasional smutty joke. Period-
ically he would break off to say, `Now this is a good song',
nodding up towards the radio.
  He was eight years older than me, an unusual gap for
members of a pop partnership, which is what we became,
four years after these first meetings. When I joined the
Cleaners from Venus, Newell told people we were `pop's
first father-and-son duo'. The distance between us wasn't

unprecedented: Donny Osmond was eight years younger
than Alan, the oldest member of the Osmonds, and Marie
and Little Jimmy were younger still.
  I have often wondered how different our relationship
might have been if I had known Newell during the 1970s,
when he was a fully paid-up, card-carrying glam-rocker and
when his father, a gruff army man, who failed to share his
son's delight in long hair and eye-liner, would eye the glad-
ragged Newell up and down and remark, `What are my
friends going to say? Does it talk or does it bark?' Under-
encouraged in his desire to make it as a spangly, pouting
rock god, Newell had buried himself in his bedroom with his
guitar. If he was still playing when his father returned from
work, there would be a kick on the bedroom door - his
father's way of saying, `I'm home now. Let's have some
peace.' Once Newell heard his mother protesting on his
behalf.
  `But he's composing,' she said.
  `I don't care if he's decomposing,' his father replied. `He
can shut that racket up.'
  But he didn't shut up: he went on to become the Colchester
district's top-ranking songwriter. In 19 81, Newell was calmer
than the teenager who ran around taking more amphetamine
than was strictly necessary. Yet his hair was still long and
dyed a startling aubergine and he still fancied the odd dab of
eye-paint on occasions (just a lick of black along the lower
rim). The glam clothes were long gone and he had taken to
wearing a dusty top hat and tailcoat combo - Dickensian
chic. Also, he was married, with two children from his wife's
previous relationship, though family life didn't appear to
have deposited the conventional load on his shoulders. His
wife was a former doctor with an interest in the occult, who
caused quite a stir in the village where they lived when she

cured the family rabbit of myxomatosis by serving it some
kind of leafy soup. She read Newell's tarot for him period-
ically, looked after his yin and his yang and discussed with
him the possibility that the two of them had met in another
life.
  Newell no longer gigged in local bands. He was ex-Plod
(yes, the same Plod that Relic supported at Lexden Church
Hall, though, by then, sadly, Newell had left the band, to be
replaced by a Marc Bolan lookalike). And he was ex-Gyp,
with whom he had done his glam-rock best to come over like
Rod Stewart, tarting himself up in a Transit van, squeezing
himself into tight trousers in the unhappy confines of toilet
stalls. Gyp played the kind of halls where the manager would
come up before the band started and say, `Can you play
'eavy?'
  Now Newell spent virtually all his spare time in or around
the sail loft he rented in Wivenhoe, by the river just to the
east
of Colchester, where he brewed his own beer (`Newell's Old
Peculiar'), listened to the Beatles, tended the ducks and
chickens in the garden and made candles, which he sold in
bulk to restaurants. And on Mondays, his day off, he did pop
music under the name of the Cleaners from Venus.
 Just like the candles and the beer, the Cleaners from
Venus were, before I joined, a kind of cottage industry. They
didn't play live. The Cleaners from Venus was just a collective
name for anyone who recorded music with Newell in his
upstairs room on his four-track Portastudio - Newell's one
concession to consumer materialism, to which he was other-
wise vociferously opposed. (It was one of the ironies of the
next four years that Newell had albums out but nothing to
play them on. )
  The Cleaners from Venus was Newell's beast - he wrote
the songs, called the shots, dictated the pace - although

originally he had a regular collaborator called Lol, who lived
next door and played the drums. Similarly eclectic in his
energies, Lol had once spent a weekend painting his Hoover.
Eventually he moved to Bath, but not before the Cleaners
from Venus had filled several cassettes with tunes and spread
them about through a network to which Newell referred
darkly as `the cassette underground'. Newell would mail out
tapes to his contacts and the contacts would copy the tapes
up, sell them on and send Newell the money.  Newell
reckoned that some 250 people had bought mail-order-only
copies of In The Golden Autumn (1983), many of them in
Germany where there was already a hardcore postal Cleaners
from Venus following. This was Newell's way of `subverting
the corrupt, inept and lazy music-industry system'. One day,
he thought, all music would be made this way.
  The point about these cassettes was, they were brilliant.
They seemed to set themselves standards of songwriting
which pop elsewhere had pretty much forgotten. You had to
tune your ear to them - they were not like your other records.
They weren't even trying to compete, made as they were on
cheap, piercingly trebly instruments, passed through badly
wired effects units. But they were bristling with snappy har-
monies and jangling guitar lines and catchy melodies mari-
nated in the sixties. Newell's lyrics painted wistful pictures
of
England in the past, and sour and racy pictures of England in
the present. What you got on a Cleaners tape was a rare
coalition between hippie whimsy and back-street wrath. I
was a fan long before I was a Cleaner. I bought them all.
  In 1985, the year before I became an official band member,
one of Newell's regular mail-order clients in Germany took
the cassette version of a collection of songs called Under
Wartirne Conditions, pressed it up as a vinyl album and dis-
tributed it to the stores. Newell was jubilant. This was, he

reckoned; a real anarchist's triumph, a giant petrol bomb
through  the  record companies'  corporate  windows.  An
album of songs made in his house in his spare time, using
only a raddled guitar, an old piano with drawing pins in its
hammers, a bass which was a barely modified plank, and
a rusty xylophone, had gone down the system's blindside
and made it right into the shops. `And', he said victoriously,
`no one with a pony-tail and stupid plastic glasses came any-
where near it.'
  So this was the Martin Newell whom I joined full-time in
the Cleaners from Venus: an angered pop guerrilla with his
own agenda, a one-man music-biz resistance unit.
  Contrast these bristling principles with my own musical
attitude at this time, which was, roughly, `fame at any price'.
For two people about to set out on a journey into the world
of pop, matters on which Newell and I held conflicting views
were, I suppose, dangerously numerous. For example:
  Newell: big on artistic integrity; vehemently opposed to
anyone from a record company imposing a marketing strat-
egy upon his music.
  Me: ready to talk.
  Newell: firmly averse, on well-founded left-wing prin-
ciples, to wasting time and money in expensive foreign
recording studios, `like the rest of those pampered nancies'.
  Me: the Bahamas look nice.
  Newell: angry that machines have taken over many of the
performance aspects of pop music, replacing its flawed but
vital heart with a brutal perfectionism; concerned to re-
establish a sixties ethic - energy first, accuracy second.
  Me: unhealthily obsessed with the clean lines of Scritti
Politti's Cupid And Psyche, an album on which nobody does
anything unless a computer says so.
  Newell: strictly anti-producer.

  Me: hoping very shortly to have Trevor Horn's home
phone number.
  Newell: strictly anti-touring, on the grounds that it is
unnecessary in the age of television and video, wasteful of
resources and endangers a songwriter's mental equilibrium
by removing him from the life that inspired him to become a
songwriter in the first place.
  Me: looking forward to Wembley.
  Newell: hostile towards partying, schmoozing, ligging,
showbiz insincerities and `all that "star" rubbish'.
  Me: Rod! Great to see you!
  Newell: utterly convinced of his moral responsibility, in the
event of success, to remain unaffected by staying close to
the normalizing influence of his roots at home.
  Me: the Bahamas look nice.
  As if this wasn't enough, we presented a striking visual
contrast, too: Newell with his shaggy hair and Fagin kit, and
me with my spiked crop and Oxfam suits, continuing a phase
begun at university. (Newell frequently referred - satirically
but with a hint of jealousy, I sometimes felt - to my `sensible
teaching trousers' . )
  Then, again, consider what we had in common. Both of us
believed in the sanctity of the three-minute pop song. Both
of us were fundamentally pro-Beatle. Furthermore, though
Newell was a Lennon man and could accurately ape the gritty
disdain of his singing voice, neither of us hated McCartney.
Both of us considered the theme tune for University Chal-
lenge to be the funniest piece of music we had ever heard.
And both of us thought jazz was for tossers. This was, surely,
more than enough cement for a musical relationship.
  So the differences didn't bother me. Or not initially. On the
contrary, they were a kind of guarantee. Most of the top
rock and pop partnerships have depended on a chemistry of

contrast, some attitudinal give-and-take to keep them sparky.
Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Simon and
Garfunkel . . . I suspect even Donny and Alan Osmond had
their points of departure, philosophically speaking.
  As for Newell, he had his act and his attitudes sorted out
well in advance of my arrival, so what he was looking for
in our relationship I am hard pressed to say. Except that
songwriting is lonely work. And, if you happen to be on your
own, so is putting together anarchist pop albums and plotting
the downfall of the music industry. Newell was a one-man
group - which defeated the object, given that one's reasons
for being in a band include a determination to escape the
solitariness of one's experiences as a listener. Chiefly, I would
say, he was looking for company.
  But let me be clear: I wasn't just a sleeping partner here, I
was by no means the Andrew Ridgeley to Newell's George
Michael (if Newell could be said to have a George Michael,
which is unlikely). I had my role. I could play the piano better
than him. I also made a better cup of tea than he did. And
though my creative input was destined to be smaller than
his, I comforted myself that I was crucial to the partnership
on another level. Temperamentally, my new partner was a
Molotov cocktail, ready at the slightest prompting to break
open in a puddle of flaming petrol. I was more level-headed, a
diplomat. This was how I saw our pairing: Newell as
inflamed visionary; me standing by as the Emergency Fire
Blanket.
  We didn't collaborate until I left university. It was 1985. I
was at a loose end after graduation and, with an uncanny
symmetry, was again spending my time wandering round
Colchester town centre in a daze. I had no idea what I was
going to do. I had an English degree certificate, which, in the
shrivelled job market of the 1980s, was about as useful as a

brass-rubbing. Torpor had set in. Just thinking about careers,
I became tired. I found it hard to think of more than four or
five jobs that anybody did. The university had said I could
start another degree if I wanted to. But I was fairly sure I
didn't. I wanted to be a pop star I registered at the DSS and
moved back in with my parents.
  I figured it would solve my problems if I could just write a
couple of chartbusters - get some songs out there to Whitney
and Tina, look on as they hoisted them effortlessly into the
Top Ten and then order a house with a pool and wave good-
bye for ever to those post-graduate career blues. It was time
to grab this songwriting business by the horns, or else face a
life of indeterminate gloom. Starting as I meant to go on,
early on a Monday morning, I set out on the bedroom floor
my Crumar keyboard and my primitive beat box. There was
just enough room left for me to wedge myself between them,
cross-legged, with my back against the bed. In this position I
doodled and plinked and awaited the muse.
  The producer Quincy Jones has talked about feeling, at
moments of creativity, the power of God surging down like
lightning through his arms to his hands. After two hours of
hunching awkwardly over the keyboard on that first day, I
began to know what he meant. But it turned out to be
recurrent tennis elbow and a touch of shoulder cramp.
  In more than a decade of music, I had never written a
complete song on my own. Instead I had amassed an exten-
sive catalogue of bits: half a chorus, part of a verse, a nice
bridge. I was always trying to bolt some of them together, but
they never seemed to fit. As for lyrics, they were a nightmare.
Where do you begin with lyrics? Occasionally a line for a
chorus had flashed into my head, or something I could
imagine as a song title. Going any further than that seemed
burdensome. Part of the problem was, I knew what the desire

to write songs felt like but I never experienced the desire to
write a song about anything.
  I can't say this changed on that morning when I sat down
to write Whitney a hit. No sense of an irresistible calling drew
me on but, for once, I could muster some determination and,
after clenching and straining for five hours, I had at least
written a song. It had a title. It had lyrics. It had a
beginning,
a middle and a fade. I was jubilant. I could already envisage
the interview in Rolling Stone, some years hence.

"So, Giles, tell us about writing `What's Going On In Your
Heart?' "
"God, let me think . . . Well, I remember I lifted the drum
pattern
directly from Stevie Wonder's `Uptight (Everything's Alright)'.
Great drums on that track - they motor really hard. And the key-
board riff was just something I'd had knocking about for ages.
Put
it together in my bedroom at my parents' house, actually!
[Laughs]
And I wrote the lyrics on a sheet of A4 paper on a deck-chair in
the
garden there. The chorus line just sort of came to me, kind of
a
chant thing, `What's goin' on in your heart?'. I was thinking
about
how most love songs are about wanting to get really close to
some-
one. So what if you wrote a song that said, actually, I don't
want to
know you - turned that cliche upside down? So you get [Sings):
       I'd be a fool to want to get to lznow you better
       And I'd like to think I didn't know you well
That kind of thing, with negatives. Anyway, I don't want to get
too
deep about it. It's up to the listener in the end. It's about
whatever
you hear in it, you know? Originally, I showed it to Whitney. But
when she heard it, she said: `You know what, Giles? You should
do
this song. Really. Keep it.' Whitney's great like that. Very
giving."

  I had the song, but I still needed to make a recording of it.
I
found my mind turning to Newell. He was the man to help

me out. He had the right sixties pop sensibility. He would
understand where the song was coming from. With his
recording experience, he could realize my aims for the
number artistically. Plus he was the only person I knew who
owned a four-track Portastudio.
  `I've written this song,' I blurted, from the door at the back
of the restaurant. `I didn't know whether you could record it
for me.'
  `What's it like?' said Newell.
  `Kind of Motown-y.'
  Newell looked sceptical. `Well, come over next Monday,'
he said.
  I'd been to Newell's on several occasions, normally after
evenings in the pub when we would return to his upstairs
room so that he could play me his latest indictment of
Thatcher's Britain, arranged for guitar and beatbox. Situated
at the top of a narrow wooden staircase, the room had a
scrubbed floor, a couple of stools, a few cushions - a friendly
yet Spartan feel. It was by no means the usual musician's
hovel with a spaghetti of wires on the floor, dotted with
packets of strings, split plectrums and abandoned beer cans.
The place was ordered and dusted, bohemian but tidy, sug-
gesting a brisk efficiency. Newell kept his Portastudio under
wraps when not in use.
  But now I was in there as a recording artist. Newell, wear-
ing a black beret today, busied himself at the miniature
mixing desk, pausing only to roll cigarettes. He recorded the
drum machine and made me play two layers of keyboards.
Then he recorded himself playing bass guitar, bright and
tuneful, which sounded just right. It was exciting, listening to
the thing take shape, hearing it pick up speed and weight.
Both of us seemed buoyed up by it.

  `You'd better put the vocal on now,' said Newell.
  The microphone was Sellotaped to an old metal music
stand, which had to be placed on a desk to bring it up to
head height. As you sang, you were staring directly into some
bookshelves. Newell handed me a pair of headphones (Boots'
own brand, possibly).
  `Let's see what you're made of,' he said, and ran the tape.
  The point was, although I had written this song I had
never, until now, sung it. I had murmured it to myself and
heard it in my head, but I had never attempted to belt the
thing out at volume. This is one of the disadvantages of song-
writing in your parents' house: you get all self-conscious
about being overheard and end up whispering to avoid detec-
tion.  As  a  result,  the  song  was  uncomfortably  out
of my range. Too late to go back now, with all the instru-
ments recorded. By squeezing my throat, I could just about
get up high enough, but only with an indignant squawk.
After three lines of this, I coughed and dropped an octave.
Down there I sounded like a monk at prayer. Two more lines,
and I was glowing with embarrassment and uncomfortably
hot.
  `Let me have a go,' said Newell.
  He clamped on the headphones and punched the Play
button. Sitting dejectedly on a stool behind him, I heard the
introduction fizz in his ears and the sound of Newell breath-
ing heavily, waiting for his cue. Suddenly, with a sharp inha-
lation of air, he exploded into song. One hand held the lyrics
out in front of him, the other pressed a headphone deep into
his ear. His voice was high, clear, affectingly grainy. His knees
flapped wildly and occasionally he brought a foot clean off
the ground in the exertion of delivering this vocal. The words
poured into the microphone as if he had had them on his

mind for ages and was just dying to get them across. And
suddenly I was sitting up straight. It sounded great. It
sounded like a pop song.
  As I would have added, in that Rolling Stone interview: `I
guess you'd have to say it was "What's Going On In Your
Heart?" that got me into the Cleaners. And into eve:ything
that followed from that.'
           Elvis Costello

The late 1980s and the early 1990s were years of great politi-
cal and sociological shift. It was a period in which old orders
began to fall away, yielding ground to the vital green shoots
pushing through from beneath. There was the collapse of
Communism and the troubled ascendance of new democrac-
ies in Eastern Europe. There was the transition, in Britain,
from vinyl to compact disc.
  During the 1970s it was impossible to imagine that any-
thing would  rise to challenge the single-party supremacy of
vinyl. Cassettes came in, of course, and achieved considerable
popularity although even their grass-roots loyalists would
have conceded that this kiddy-scale format was never a
serious  candidate  for  government.  Big,  12-inch  square,
cardboard-covered records: they were the law, they were
what we had and what we stood by. And then in the mid-
1980s - and in little more than a few months - we were
shown new hardware, new product and the map was com-
pletely redrawn.
  CD: it was always going to be a tough one. So many of us
were rooted in the traditional way of things, bitterly resistant
to change - vinyl-dependent. The record companies and the
hi-fi manufacturers did their best to calm the inevitable popu-
lar unrest. (Given the money at stake, it was, of course, in
their interest to do so.) We heard a lot in those early days
about the stunning improvement in sound quality that com-
pact disc was going to bring us; how the new format was
capable of a glassy clarity of which our old vinyl records
could only dream. We were fed copious propaganda about
the discs' indestructibility, how they were scratch-proof,

dust-proof, water-proof; how you could heat them up, roll
them into little tubes, stuff them with prawns, serve them
as hors d'oeuvres at cocktail parties and they still sounded
brilliant.
  Here, we were promised, was a music format that would
not degenerate with use. A pet is for life but a CD is for ever.
`Play them as many times as you like,' they said, `and no
quality loss.' Of course, no one has really been around long
enough yet to offer proper guarantees on this. Recently a few
science wizards have expressed doubts about CD perma-
nence, raising the dire prospect that one day, say in thirty
years' time, all that encoded digital information will soak out
of them and your entire collection will turn to blank plastic in
a matter of hours. Just thinking about this now, as someone
with major holdings in Compact Disc, I can sense the colour
draining from my face. I have not come this far, I feel, to be
left with a van-load of neatly boxed frisbees.
  It would be a rich irony, though. Everything else about
compact discs looks permanent enough, certainly by contrast
with 12-inch vinyl. They are extremely difficult to snap. They
don't turn into salad bowls if left in the sun on the back shelf
of a car. And although they can jump, be jogged, get stuck,
skitter and generally play up, it's unusual when they do.
Whereas, with records, the prospect of a physical flaw,
leading to major listening dissatisfaction, was a very real
consideration every time you bought one, and every time you
played it.
  Naturally I was wary in those early days. I thought it was
best to consider first the domestic implications and then work
carefully outwards from there. It was readily apparent that
compact discs were going to be an easier thing to bring home
from the shops. Here was something in their favour They
wouldn't flap about wantonly in the wind like albums and

you were far less likely to cause injury by jamming one
between your knee and the handrail, coming down the stairs
on the bus home, which happened with me and a vinyl copy
of Heaven 17's Penthouse and Pavement. (A cosmetic woun-
ding only, but still nasty. My knee didn't come out of it all
that well either.)
  And transporting CDs thereafter, taking them to other
people's houses, was clearly going to be considerably simpler,
too, the only plastic bags which fit a 12-inch record being
bags from record shops, and if you happen not to have any of
those knocking around the house, then you've got a problem,
as you'll know if you've ever tried to wedge a couple of
albums into a standard supermarket carrier-bag. (They go in
just about OK - though at the risk of snubbed corners - but
then you can't bring the bag's handles together.)
  No, the durability and convenience arguments struck me
as winningly solid. Mostly I was concerned about the sleeve
situation.
  To one reared on the open plains of the album cover, the
images at the front of compact discs were comically cramped.
They looked like snapshots of record covers; and, like snap-
shots, they had a mostly disappointing relation to the real
thing. Plus that half-inch of thinly ridged grey plastic down
the left-hand side was an ugly distraction. This wasn't how
music was meant to look. Did they really mean us to stare at
these things and solemnly pass them around while the album
was playing?
  And then there were those tacky plastic boxes, with their
push-together fastenings and hinges. Tricky, too. I know
people even now who own large quantities of CDs but who
have yet to master the art of opening them. (As a rule, any
approach that involves use of the nails under the right-hand
edge is flirting with disaster in the shape of a possible popper

rupture up at the hinge-end. I myself go for a left-hand domi-
nant, two-thumb manoeuvre, which was about eighteen
months in development. The left hand is spanned across the
front of the disc with the little finger clamped firmly against
the spine low down, the thumb parallel with it, working at
the opening edge. Meanwhile the right-hand thumb, cupped
round from the back in a mostly supporting role at the top
edge, woggles the back free of the front.)
  And once inside, you've still got to get the disc loose from
its surprisingly cunning central mounting. (I'm a two-digit
right-hander on this one - thumb depressing the spongy
sprockets as the forefinger prises the disc forward from the
top edge.) I've looked on in agony at novices attempting to
claw them out with all five finger-tips, but what were any of
us meant to do? At least milk cartons came with operating
instructions - push back wings, pull forward, etc. With CD
containers, we were all on our own. In the dark. With raw
fingers.
  As for the booklet, if it's an effort to extract the thing
(you've got somehow to slip it out from under the semicircu-
lar retaining tabs while getting it over the nobbles that hold
the lid shut) then this is as nothing compared with getting
it back in again, which requires the combined skills of a
watchmaker and a seamstress. (I would suggest rotating the
open case ninety degrees clockwise and easing the booklet
upwards with both thumbs from the bottom but, to be
honest, I'm fallible here. ) All highly unsatisfactory.
  So I chewed worriedly on these reservations for quite a
while before I bought into the CD dream. I would cast anxi-
ous looks at my shelved LPs and remember how much of
me was invested there. I didn't like the idea of them being
outstripped by time. I wasn't keen to see them go the way of
the oil lamp and the horse-drawn plough.

  People would say, `So, do you think you'll get a CD, then?'
  And I would say, `No, I don't reckon. Because of the
sleeves. I'd miss the sleeves.'
  And they would nod and say, `Exactly, exactly.'
  But then, at some point in 1987, a friend became the first
person we knew to own a CD player and a group of us went
ritually to his house one evening and clomped upstairs into
his bedroom to give it an audition.
  `Listen to this,' he said.
  `What?' I said, hearing nothing.
  `That!' he said.
  It was the nothing he wanted me to listen to, the silence
between the tracks. And it was impressive, the total absence
of clutter: no swishing of needle in dusty groove, no ticks and
spits from the encrusted grit, no soft lumping where the plas-
tic arse-end of the stylus humped rhythmically against the
vinyl, which happened on some of my more spectacularly
warped singles. And here was the neurosis-inducing cor-
ollary: if all that noise was going on between the tracks,
it was going on during them, too. It became apparent that
everything you were hearing on vinyl was struggling to shrug
off a thin coat of fuzz or hiss to reach you, its immediacy
drastically diminished. CD - a miracle - offered sound in the
nude, as the Good Lord intended it: hosed down, fanatically
scrubbed, beautifully oiled, punching and popping out at you
from this perfect digital hush.
  If you're a genuine vinyl fetishist, this perpetual flawless-
ness is a mixed blessing. A friend's copy of the free single
that came with the first editions of Elvis Costello and the
Attractions' Armed Forces acquired, somewhere along the
line  (doubtless  during  some  sort  of  late-night  student
gloomfest), a small glob of candlewax, which the record play-
er's stylus either lodges against or slaloms over, depending on

        its whim. Far from being annoyed, my friend has been
known
        to boast about this blip as though it was some kind of
battle
        scar That's how he knows it's his copy and nobody else's;
        and, more than that, it's his marker for how far he and
Elvis
        go back.
          And it's true: in a world where it often seems
important to
i,      assert that you were in on some things right at the start
(that,
�       no, you haven't only just acquired Talking Heads 77, you
got        it when it came out, which is why the record is
beginning to
        peep from a worn slit at the bottom of the inner sleeve),
        those blemishes - scratches, bits of old candle,
staunched beer
        spillages - are a crucial historical index. Records left
their
        mark on you, and, in the spirit of co-operation, you left
your
        mark on records. What hope for this two-way relationship
if
        CDs have the gift of eternal youth?
          Yet I confess: on the whole I don't find it hilarious
and
        touching that my copy of Aretha Franklin's Greatest Hits
is
        so badly pressed (or so shockingly mastered) that the
sound
        suddenly clarifies and swells in volume bang in the
middle
        of `Chain Of Fools', the third track on side one. Nor am
I
        encouraged to shed tears of nostalgia over the two jumps
        which happen inside the first ten seconds of `Rikki Don't
        Lose That Number' on my copy of Steely Dan's Pretzel
Logic
        (grit inside the inner sleeve, I think). The music format
which
        was going to rescue me from these mini-dramas couldn't
        come quickly enough.
          So the combined weight of the industry propaganda and
        my own accumulated anxieties - that there was this format
        out there which was somehow truer, more faithfu! - built
up
        and swung me over Finally, grindingly, I chose CD. Not
that
        my decision meant anything: the record companies in col-
        lusion with the hi-fi manufacturers had already decided
long
        ago that we would all change to this new, more expensive

format and they got their way by the simple expedient of
slowing down vinyl production and drastically limiting our
opportunity to do anything else (other than butt out alto-
gether, and that wasn't an option). It was never a question of
fighting. It was only ever a matter of how peacefully you
would give yourself up. And after a brief, inconsequential
paddy, I ran, gurgling, into CD's outstretched arms.
  In 1988, I scraped the money together for a cheap Phillips
ex-display model. It had a rather unsatisfying rubberized
push-pad on the front, for stop, start, forward and reverse;
and the disc-tray emerged with a creaky metallic rumble, like
a train going slowly over points. But it was a CD-player none
the less and its arrival excited me probably as much as the
arrival of other key pieces of musical hardware in my child-
hood: the Phillips cassette recorder, the Amstrad cassette
deck, the Garrard turntable. Waking up on the first few
mornings after I had acquired it, I would cross the room and
just look at it.
  And, of course, I took the solemn oath that everyone takes
when they first trade up to CD: that I would never waste
money buying on CD anything I already owned on record.
Because, though my new CD player was clearly crunchier to
listen to and less troubled-sounding than my old record deck
and though it gave me the promised silence between the
tracks, it still had to pass through the rest of my battered
hi-fi
- my weary amplifier and baggy speakers - so the improve-
ment wasn't exactly quantum. The sound was slightly smar-
ter, as if freshly ironed, and that was about it. In fact, as I
furtively admitted to myself in occasional moments of pun-
ishing honesty, some of the old vinyl sounded more lively for
a few creases, a bit of air and static . . .
  So, no pointless duplication of albums, no CD and vinyl
overlap. My decision to go compact was, I avowed, a simple

piece of company rationalizing in response to the new tech-
nology - but with no redundancies. The vinyl collection had
its job to do and always would have.
  Hollow words. Even as I was pledging, I was buying my
first CD: Characters by Stevie Wonder, an album I had
bought (and been quietly disappointed by) only six months
previously on vinyl. The CD had two additional tracks, so I
suppose I can justify this on some academic basis. But, even
so, how easily I was lured in.
  And ever since then, with increasing alacrity, I have
shopped wildly for CD versions of records I already possess,
prowled the browsers wide-eyed and tensed up, as if I was
involved in some mad, self-generated game of Snap.
  As a result, albums of which I own two copies include:

  The entire 1970s and 1980s output of Stevie Wonder
  Everything by Steely Dan
  The first three Rickie Lee Jones albums and the mini-album
    (originally a 10-inch on vinyl) Girl At Her Volcano, the CD
    version of which cost me an absolute fortune on Japanese
    import
  The first Blue Nile album
  Meat Is Murder and Strangeways Here We Come by the Smiths
  Rapture by Anita Baker
  The first four Prefab Sprout albums
  Everything by XTC except Nonsuch (CD only)
  The Beatles double White Album
  Little Criminals by Randy Newman
  And many more

  Albums which I currently have only on vinyl, but which I
know - just know - that in the near future I'm going to be
redundantly supplementing with CD versions include:


  Love by Aztec Camera
  Sign O' The Times and Graffiti Bridge by Prince
  Goodbye Cruel World by Elvis Costello and the Attractions
   and Spike by Elvis Costello
  Naked and Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads
  Avalon Sunset by Van Morrison
  I Feel For You and the first two self-named Chaka Khan albums
  Partners in Crime by Rupert Holmes (only joking)

  Album sales were in decline before the arrival of CD.
When people like me started going out and buying our record
collections all over again, well, blow me down if they didn't
start  surging  back  upwards.  It's  a  perfectly  legitimate
ambition for any business in a consumer society - getting us
to buy something we do not need. And long may it continue,
because all of my favourite things are things I do not, under
any serious analysis, need.
  But only the record business - fabulously shameless in
every stunt it pulls - has managed so seamlessly the ultimate
marketing trick: getting us to buy something we do not need
which we've already got.
     The Cleaners from Venus, take 2

As well as being an anarchist and Colchester's top songwriter
and the daytime washer-up in a restaurant on North Hill,
Martin Newell was also a proxy landlord. The sail loft in
which he had his studio and ate with his family was annexed
to a large Victorian house, slightly crumbly and spooky-
looking, with the kind of overgrown front garden that
children's stories get a lot of mileage out of. The owner had
gone to work in Australia indefinitely, leaving Newell to tend
the place and collect rents from a small group of lodgers,
students mostly, who occupied the giant rooms in the main
house. Towards the end of 1986, one of these rooms fell free
and, to facilitate Newell's and my rise into the upper stratum
of the rock and pop songwriting greats, I took it.
  It was clear that, given the two potential career paths open
to me at this time - further university course leading, pos-
sibly, to academic teaching job; or major effort to hit the big-
time rock-wise leading, inevitably, to major drug habit - by
moving in with Newell, I was favouring the latter I appeared
to have reached one of life's crossroads and this was some-
thing I thought I should communicate to my father. It was
time we had a pivotal exchange.
  So far, my father and I had managed to skip pivotal
exchanges. Nothing had occurred in my life so far that I had
felt obliged to raise with him, in appropriately sober tones,
when the two of us were alone together For instance: `Father,
I have decided to go into the Church.' Or: `Father, I am
going to marry a Dutch masseuse and live in Santa Barbara.'
Neither had he, for his part, ever felt the need to take me
aside, sit me down and impart essential fatherly wisdom of

his own: `Now, pretty soon you're going to start having feel-
ings. Feelings towards the opposite sex' etc. There had been
none of that. Mostly we had just carried on, both of us
quietly praying that nothing personal or crucial would arise
that we would have to deal with, father to son, or, worse still,
man to man.
  There was more at stake in the conversation we were
about to have than there might have been. For while my
father had never shown the slightest interest in joining, say,
the Who, he had always wanted to be an academic. Maybe he
would have been one, except that the Second World War had
intervened and his opportunities closed down around him.
He drew consolation from the thought that, although this
possibility had been denied him, at least it was open to me.
And now I was about to toss it away.
  I knew better than to thunder in and put it to him straight.
I
chose my words carefully from a selection of what I imagined
were parent-sensitive phrases for this kind of thing. I tried to
make it sound a matter of `having a career as a musician', of
`trying to get into the music business'. Both turns of phrase
seemed to me brisk, purposive, clean-shaven, crisp-shirted
and, as such, preferable to phrases like `go big-time', `do the
rock thing', `make it mega', `hit the road to Chick City', etc.
  `Do you think there's any future in that?' said my father,
responsibly, after a long pause.
  `Yes,' I said, and I wasn't kidding.
  My father's eyes were somewhere far away, unfocused. His
bottom lip pushed up against the top one, and he nodded
gently as if seeing my reasoning. Though clearly he didn't see
it at all. As far as he was concerned, I might as well have
announced that I had decided, after protracted negotiations
with Nelly the Elephant, to run off and join the circus. Finally
he said, `Well, if you really think so. . .'

  I really thought so.
  Among other things, the move to Newell's represented the
chance at last to emancipate my records, most of which had
remained cruelly caged within their boxes since my return
from university, the collection having expanded to such a
degree that there was no longer room in my parents' house to
spread it out and let it breathe.
  There was no space problem at Newell's house. Mine was
a large room with a giant bay window, through which it
was impossible to see anything on account of a large over-
grown tree in the garden which spread its branches thickly
against the panes. The albums slotted in perfectly on the floor
along the end wall: conditions there were dry, cold, no direct
sunlight - virtually museum standard, but for a plinth. I had a
bookcase, a bed that was bigger tha.n a single but not as big as
a double, a rickety desk and an acre or so of uncarpeted floor-
boarding.
  On a preliminary tour of the building, just after I had
humped my boxes and bags of clothes up into the room,
Newell showed me where a chip had been taken out of the
woodwork on a doorpost downstairs. He said it had hap-
pened one Saturday evening when a poltergeist entered the
house, got bored with rattling the cups on the kitchen dresser,
picked up a glass ashtray and flung it the length of the hall.
Evidently Newell's wife, with her superior knowledge of the
occult, had dealt with the matter swiftly and efficiently -
shown the bastard straight to the door, or something. I asked
if paranormal forces made themselves evident in the house
very frequently. Newell said it had happened a couple of
times last year, but it wasn't, like, a weekly occurrence. I
nodded hard and tried to look reassured.
  And then, as we got upstairs, he explained about the ghost.
`Entirely benign,' he said cheerfully. Evidently, the shape of
a

woman in a grey, hooded robe was sometimes to be seen
about the place. Once or twice she had shown up in the
kitchen, and occasionally she had been seen in the hall, but
the real hot-spot for sightings, the place the old biddy liked
to
hang out the most, was on the landing outside the door to my
room .
  I didn't get a wink of sleep in the house that night. That's
because I was back at my parents, getting a full set of winks
there. I had returned early in the evening, mumbling to
Newell something about `letting the room air a bit' and `sort-
ing myself out properly first', and I repeated the same shoddy
lie as I let myself into my parents' house and went sheepishly
to my recently emptied room.
  Still, I settled in eventually. Or sort of settled. The other
tenants were a female Goth, who wore black leather and lace,
had a mane of raven hair and an identically dressed friend
with whom she listened to the Damned a lot; and a male
drama student who had draped his room in sheets of silk,
owned some surprisingly stripy trousers and possessed a large
collection of albums by all-girl singing groups from the
1960s. (Of the hooded biddy, there was no sign the whole of
my time there.) Our relations were never less than sunny as
we brushed past each other on our way in and out of the
kitchen and the bathroom, but I had the residual sense that I
fitted here like a foot in a mitten.
  I had the whole week free for songwriting, having found
willing and largely undemanding sponsors for my lifestyle in
the shape of Colchester's Department of Social Security. But
Newell was only free on Mondays which tended to limit our
output. We were looking to write the big one: a smash hit for
Cliff or Tina. But, at the same time, we fancied ourselves as
the kind of witty jokesters whose compositions you might
hear on Radio 4's Loose Ends on a Saturday morning. We

wrote a song called `Hockney Paints The Stage', which was
the title of a London exhibition at the time, a show of David
Hockney's design work for the theatre, but which we inter-
preted literally and converted into a bouncy music-hall ditty
in which a number of famous contemporary artists were
forced to take menial jobs while they waited for their Arts
Council grants.
  On our second Monday, we wrote ourselves a press
release, to mail out with tapes as yet unmade of songs as yet
unwritten. It was headed: `Smith and Newell: Songs? We
Godd'em', a straightforward lie at this point, and underneath
came a lavish assessment of our ability to deliver quality
material, in any style, at the drop of a hat. We popped out to
the local stationery shop and, at searing expense, printed up
forty copies on bright yellow paper.
  `These should keep us going,' said Newell.
  Unfortunately, we'd written that day's date at the head of
the master copy so, by the following week, the whole stack
was useless.
  We weren't entirely indolent, though. We wrote a song
called `Clara Bow', a sweet folky shuffle for which Newell
had the chords already and whose lyrics we wrote together
Newell came up with a mid-tempo Motown pastiche called
`Stay On', a sort of musical riposte to my `What's Going On
In Your Heart?' Newell also pulled out a wedge of songs
from his recent past, as yet unrecorded : `Victoria Grey',
a song picturing Mrs Thatcher as a haughty and uncaring
Victorian grande dame, passing in a carriage, splattering mud
on urchins; `Illya Kuryakin Looked At Me', a fantasy song
about the sixties, featuring Rita Tushingham, green electric
trains and the blond one from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
We taped these too. After a while, we had an album's-worth
of material, which Newell suggested would convert decently

into a Cleaners from Venus tape. We had some copies made
and Newell then pushed it out in the usual way through his
contacts on the tape underground. We called it Living With
Victoria Grey and, to cheer ourselves up, talked loudly and
seriously in the pub about `our new album' and `the new
material'. The note Newell wrote on the sleeve said, slightly
forlornly: `If you've enjoyed this tape, tell your milkman
about it.'
  This� all happened over a period of weeks - weeks in which
I had time to spare. I told myself that a shivering-in-the-attic
phase was almost obligatory for musicians: it was not a sign
that I was desperate but, on the contrary, a bright indication
that I was on the right path. This helped me put up with the
draughts in my room, where I commonly bunched myself up
as close as possible to one of those free-standing, metal-box
gas fires on wheels which, after about ninety minutes of con-
stant use, cause your eyes to cloud over and soot to accumu-
late in the back of your nose. (Eventually I took to operating
it for no more than fifteen minutes in any one hour because of
a paranoid fear that its fumes were slowly destroying me
from within.) I spent the days tinkering with my keyboard
and beatbox or, ferocious cold permitting, fiddling at the
piano downstairs. I tooled around with lyrics, without actu-
ally finishing any, and listened to records. I stared out of the
window a lot. I wore a ragged mohair jumper. I thought of
myself as strange and bohemian.
  After working for a twenty-four-hour emergency car-
accident service and as a lorry driver, my brother Simon and
his wife Dorothy had become landlord and landlady of the
Station Inn, Wivenhoe, a pub just a hundred yards up
the street from where I now lived. Tiny, with a semi-circular
bar, the Station took most of its trade in the evenings from
home-coming commuters and at lunchtimes from the dockers

who worked on the quay. On especially bleak days, I would
escape the cold of the house in the middle of the day and go
and sit in the pub's back kitchen and drink coffee. From their
position at this epicentre of chat and gossip, my brother and
sister-in-law were able to inform me - with some alarm for
my safety, I felt - that the house I was living in was regarded
by the more conservative elements of the village as a hippie
commune and all-round drug haven. I laughed when I heard
this and said that was all wrong. They didn't seem convinced.
I had also told them that Newell and I were intending to
make it as songwriters. They didn't seem convinced about
that, either.
  1985 passed into 1986 and winter became spring. We had
heard nothing back from any publisher, manager, or song-
hungry pop star. And we hadn't heard from Loose Ends,
either In March, I decided to go and live with my girlfriend in
Bristol.
          Aretha Franklin

There was never any suggestion, when I moved in, that we
would combine our record collections. I can see how to do
so would have obeyed a kind of cold-eyed logic: we did, after
all, have a lot of records in common. Records had been the
currency of our courtship, when I wanted her to havc and like
the music I had and liked, when I wanted her to hear words I
could never have brought myself to say. I couldn't, for
instance, imagine any circumstance in which I might have
leant over to her and muttered, `You make my soul a burning
fire.' But I was happy to give her Hotter Than July by Stevie
Wonder and direct her to `All I Do', side one, track two.
  I had often looked along her record collection and seethed
at how much cooler it was than mine. It was smaller, but so
much more perfectly formed. It wasn't bloated by any daft
Nik Kershaw allegiance. There was no trace of a tedious 1 Occ
loyalty. I had the mostly disappointing, Arista-period Aretha
             
Franklin albums - Aretha  um  To It, Who s Zoomin Who,
which did contain the stormer `Freeway of Love', but not a
lot else - while she had the very early live album recorded in
a supper club which, though it comes from Aretha's unhappy
period at Columbia, predating the great Atlantic years, does
at least include a blinding version of `This Could Be The Start
Of Something Big' and is, in any case, a darn sight cooler
than Jump bloody To It. The galling thing was, the trim,
sophisticated triumph which was her record collection was to
a large extent the fruits of my research. These were albums I
had given to her or pointed her in the direction of. She hadn't
had to truffle through the crap to find these pearls. She simply
got to glass-case the prime specimens - my greatest hits.

  But supposing we had, on the night of my arrival, pains-
takingly sorted out the albums of which we had two copies
and prepared a pile to take to the secondhand record shop
(and, rest assured, there was no way that it would have been
my copy we got rid of). What would we have been saying by
doing this? That we were never going to split up? Possibly.
But also - and more pressingly, I felt - we would have been
saying that my records were now hers to call her own, to use
as she wished. And I don't wish to dish the dirt, but this was
a
girl who had been known to leave records out oftheir sleeves.
A girl who sometimes returned records direct into the card-
board outer sleeve without bothering to put them in the inner
sleeve first. A girl who laughed openly to discover records
inside the wrong sleeve. Or worse, in the right inner sleeve,
but in the wrong outer sleeve. A girl who had never in her life
seen the need to buy even one clear polythene album sheath,
so would almost certainly have scant regard for all mine. And
alphabetical order? I don't think I need to say anything about
alphabetical order.
  There was a major hi-fi issue to resolve as well. I knew I
could never be satisfied with her stereo. A secondhand, all-in-
one music centre, it was subject to intermittent and utterly
mysterious popping fits in the right-hand speaker. She calmly
endured this, much in the way she calmly went out and
bought the thing in the first place. For me, any new purchase
- not just hi-fi but any domestic appliance - could take weeks
of deliberation, with zealous scanning of the consumer
literature:  What Answerphone,  Kettle  �' Kettle  Owner,
HooverMart. Not to become an expert - I've never been on
some boffin-style quest to know these things inside out - but
just to get a sense of what's out there and then to take some-
body else's word about it. All the women I've ever known, if
they wanted a hi-fi, they went out and bought one.

  In the end, I got the spare room in the flat for my own
stereo and my own records. We talked maturely about this in
terms of the `space' I would doubtless `need', though it wasn't
me who needed the space, it was my albums.
chapter 9
     The Cleaners from Venus, take 3

Needless to say, about two months after I moved to Bristol,
things started to happen for the Cleaners. And when they did,
it was the result of a connection forged long ago, bearing out
the old rock'n'roll adage: it's not what you know, it's who
you used to play in a band with.
  When he was younger and singing with Gyp, Newell had
shaken his spangly trousers alongside someone named Tony
Phillips who went on to become a distinguished studio engin-
eer. In time Phillips would work with Joni Mitchell and
Prefab Sprout but for now he was employed as the engineer
on the sessions for a new Captain Sensible album at a studio
in Dorking. Captain Sensible had been the bassist in the
Damned. He was one of the original punks. A friend of mine
once claimed that Sensible had urinated on him mid-gig from
the stage of the Town and Country club in London, which
seemed perfectly likely. Post-punk, though, Sensible had big
hits as a slightly more cuddly solo artist - `Happy Talk',
`Wot', `Glad It's All Over' - and got to spend a lot of time
wearing a beret and round sunglasses, opening supermarkets
and appearing on Saturday morning television. Now he was
trying to make a new album for A&M, but struggling, as
Newell's friend reported, for a lack of songs. At Tony
Phillips's urging, Newell sent Sensible a copy of our tape.
  What happened next was conveyed to me by Newell in a
series of increasingly breathless phone calls between Wiven-
hoe and Bristol. First of all, Tony Phillips rang Newell to say
that Sensible liked the tape. Then Sensible himself phoned
Newell to invite him down to the studio. I experienced some
fairly sharp prickles of jealousy here. Actually, `prickles'
isn't

quite strong enough. Jealousy knifed me in the guts is more
like it. I would have liked to have been swanning off to a
residential recording study in Surrey to hang out with Cap-
tain Sensible. But I could hardly complain. I had rights in
only one and a half sangs on that tape. And I had moved to
Bristol.
  Newell travelled down on a train, taking his bicycle with
him to cover the last couple of miles between the station and
the studio. He wasn't the only lyricist summoned to Dorking
that summer. Other songwriters had been called upon to help
Sensible get round his writing block, including Graham
Gouldman who, before he became successful as the bassist in
l0cc, wrote `Bus Stop' for the Hollies. In a richly significant
piece of timing, Newell arrived on his bike just as Gouldman
was leavinb in a helicopter
  Newell described his days in residence at Dorking in glossy
terms. In the morning one would descend from one's five-
star-hotel standard bedroom for breakfast, spend one's days
working undistracted in the air-conditioned hush of the lav-
ishly equipped studio and enjoy home-cooked meals round a
large dining table every evening, before adjourning to the
pub. I thought this sounded like Eden.
  The best news from my point of view was thac Sensible had
decided to record `Clara Bow', which was a Newell/Smith
composition. When he got back from the studio, Newell sent
me a copy of the backing track, on which Sensible had yet to
record his vocal. It was all tidy, clicking drum machines and
neatly regimented keyboards - nothing like the home-made
original, but crisp, even in this uncomplicated state, buffed to
a high sheen. I tried to imagine it finished and playing on the
radio. Just suppose Sensible chose to release this track as a
single; just suppose it enjoyed popularity at `Happy Talk'
levels and sparked him off on another round of supermarket

openings . . . Think of the royalties, the future commissions.
It would be weekends in Dorking for the rest of my life. In all
my fantasizing, it never once occurred to me what would
actually happen: that Sensible would never get to put his
vocal on the tape; that he would decide he was unhappy with
everything recorded in those sessions; that he would ditch the
lot; that his deal with A&M would close shortly after.
  In the meantime, though, Sensible convinced Newell that
the Cleaners from Venus should strike a deal of their own
with the management company he used, to whom he would
recommend us. He said there were people there who might
put up the money to make a record and would maybe work
on our behalf to attract some interest from the major record
companies. I imagine Newell raised all his traditional objec-
tions to this notion: that the Cleaners from Venus were a
thoroughly alternative organization who wanted no part of
the capitalist construct which was the mainstream music
industry, the very term `music industry' itself being indicative
of the extent to which the corrupt business stood in basic
opposition to the fundamental freedom of all musical endeav-
our. But something here - perhaps that he was talking to a
pop star in the context of a luxury residential studio - per-
suaded him in a way that I had never managed, or even dared
to try. And so, shortly before eleven o'clock one morning in
the early summer of 1986, Newell and I met in the Charing
Cross Road in London and walked round the corner to our
appointment with destiny. Or, rather, our appointment with
two extremely young Scotsmen.
  Sensible's management traded under the less than catchy
name Ammunition Communications. The address we had
was 22 Denmark Street. Once the centre of London's song-
publishing world - London's Tin Pan Alley, indeed, where
pianos had sounded from the closet offices of songwriters,

working on hits, nine to five - Denmark Street was now a
brash strip of guitar shops stuffed tight most days, but
especially on Saturday afternoons, with just about everyone
who ever wore denim playing the riff from `Smoke On The
Water' on instruments they had no intention of purchasing.
A couple of the basements still contained studios and one
contained an after-hours drinking club. The tide of litter from
the Charing Cross Road seemed to wash up here and then
get stranded - hillocks of wet and broken cardboard boxes,
scattered hand-out leaflets for English-language teaching
schools and all-you-can-eat salad bars.
  Number 22 was fronted by what appeared to be a much-
jimmied wooden door beside the entrance to one of the guitar
shops. One of us pressed the buzzer There was a long pause.
We pressed it again. Another pause. Finally there was a
crunching noise in the tinny speaker and the muffled voice of
someone recently woken said: `Gnar?'
  `It's the Cleaners from Venus,' said Newell, unselfcon-
sciously.
  A remote lock buzzed and sprang and we passed through
and walked up three dank flights of stairs to where the door
to a flat was ajar. We stood awkwardly on the threshold until
a tall figure in jeans, a T shirt and bare feet emerged from a
darkened room and led us through to the front, tousling his
hair with both hands.
  A close fug hung over the room as if a student party had
raged in it for thirteen weeks and had only come to a gutted
halt an hour before our arrival. The sole furnishings were a
stained, clapped-out brown sofa and a matching armchair,
both of which seemed to have been run over by a lorry. There
was also a television and a video, and ashtrays were dimly
discernible under mounds of ash and squashed butts. There
was a small spillage of rented video cartons in the shadow of

the television and, beside the sofa, a couple of gaping pizza
boxes spotted with grease. Later, when we got to know our
manager better, he would claim that he kept the flat that way
to make it `hospitable to musicians'.
  The figure in bare feet was the manager's partner He intro-
duced himself as Pete, though he was known, for no good
reason, as Pete the Bastard. Andy the manager entered from
out of the darkness a little after, wearing a black T shirt and
the trousers from a cheap suit, black with little flecks of
colour in it. (Over the next two years, those trousers and their
matching jacket would become extremely familiar. I don't
think I ever saw the manager wear anything else.) His hair
was medium length and parted down the middle, framing a
face whose pallor suggested a brief acquaintance with day-
light at some point in the 1970s. There were some gruff
hellos, some handshakes. On the train up from Bristol, I had
fondly imagined this scene unfolding across a shiny black
desk in some chrome-and-glass office environment, rich with
the smell of fresh coffee. As it was, Newell and I perched
warily on the sofa while the manager and the co-manager
spread themselves on the crappy carpet and we all lit
cigarettes.
  They came from Edinburgh and they were younger than
either of us. In fact, Newell would only have had to have been
mildly precocious, sexually speaking, to have fathered them.
The manager had married Pete the Bastard's sister at a young
age and there had been a divorce not long after. But the
manager and Pete the Bastard had stayed together
  There was some awkward chit-chat and a general awaken-
ing period while their eyes became used to the light. Needless
to say, it was Newell who got down to business first. The pair
of them lay there and listened as he set out, firmly and clearly,
the limits beyond which, as a musician and composer of

integrity, he was not prepared to go: he wasn't going to tour;
he wasn't going to have a producer anywhere near any of his
records; he wasn't going abroad, etc. And to my amazement,
at no point did they burst out laughing. They simply nodded
sagely and said things like, `most certainly' and `quite under-
stand'. Then we went to a cafe over the road, ordered coffee
and squeezed round a table where, finally, they did some
talking of their own.
  The manager spoke firmly and determinedly and without
smiling very much. (His sense of humour, it turned out, was
tremendously dry, at least until he soaked it in lager.) The pair
of them had been appointed by the man who owned the
property to run a studio in the basement at Number 22. They
were doing a bit of band-management on the side and they
were starting up an independent record label. They could
offer us studio time in which we would make an album,
using, they hoped, the songs from our tape. They could then
put the album out on their own label. Naturally, their ability
to distribute and promote the record would be limited. But
the idea would be to impress the major companies with the
finished product and then license it to them at a vast profit.
  As I sat and listened to all this, they began to take on a
romantic glow. Sure, they didn't exactly exude conventional
business togetherness. And their flat was short of the trap-
pings of success - furniture, for instance. But it was possible,
without much effort, to imagine them as Colin MacInnes
figures, young gunslingers chancing it. Didn't you hear about
these kinds of people in the music business all the time? Guys
who came out of nowhere, operating on sheer bravado, guts
and pluck, people with a canny feel for what sells and what
smells, muscling their way into the big bucks and never look-
ing back? In any case, this pair had their own record com-
pany and a recording studio and they liked our music. And it

wouldn't have taken us long to sift through our alternative
offers at this point. Without having said so, or communicated
it to each other by so much as a look, Newell and I were both
already hooked.
  After an hour or so in the cafe, we went back over the
road, though this time the managers took us down into
the basement where they had their office and their studio. In
my imagination, the studios in which I would eventually
make my debut album had tended pleasingly to combine the
decors of a sauna and an Alpine breakfast nook. Here,
though, in a situation reminiscent of a million bad-package-
holiday stories, the studio was still being built. The control
room had been gutted and now waited the arrival of a new
24-track mixing desk. The door through into the sound room
dated possibly from the 1840s, was the thickness of a tank's
walls and clanked like the entrance to a meat freezer The
sound room was large, low-ceilinged and empty, but for a
clutch of old plastic headphones and a battered grand piano,
untuned. Water, seeping through from the pavement, had
made the drum booth at the back an unusable hazard area.
Sensing our unease, perhaps, Pete the Bastard tried to cheer
us with the story that the Rolling Stones had made some early
demo recordings on this very spot. (I was never able to verify
this, though interestingly the studio over the road and the
guitar shop next door made exactly the same claim for their
own premises.) There was some more handshaking, some
exchanging of numbers and some promises of phone calls,
and we left.
  It took several attempts to fix up a date on which we could
begin recording. The completion of the building work in the
studio took longer than anticipated and our starting date
went back and back. Eventually we returned to Denmark
Street in the early autumn. We had ceased to think of our-

selves as Smith & Newell: Songwriters. We were now, despite
our earliest intentions, officially the Cleaners from Venus, a
band on the hit trail.
  Denmark Street was ours to use for three weeks. That's the
amount of time it takes a band like the Human League to
work up a bass drum sound that they're happy with. To us it
seemed luxurious. On the first day, Newell went up to the
guitar shop above the studio and took out a long-term rent
on a Rickenbacker guitar - the chiming, jangling instrument
you hear sparkling on Beatles records. We thought we were
making our Revolver, packed with shiny shards of pop. We
wondered briefly about calling it With the Cleaners.
  John Parish, a friend from Bristol, played drums on a
couple of tracks. John was an avant-garde percussionist in his
own band, Automatic Dlamini. Newell had to talk him out of
using the rusty ploughshare which he had erected on a stand
in among the drums and cymbals, but otherwise things went
smoothly. Lol, Newell's friend and original partner in the
Cleaners from Venus, came up from Bath and played drums,
too. Captain Sensible arrived from Brighton one evening and
played some electric guitar on one of the tracks. He was
coming out of a depression at the time. He seemed quiet,
thoughtful, not about to urinate on anyone. The spiky perox-
ide crop he used to display on the telly was now a bowl of
black curls. The manager reasoned that an appearance by
Sensible on the record might attract some of his fans to buy it.
What appealed rather more to me about having him on our
album was that we would be able to write in the sleevenotes
on the back, `Captain Sensible appears courtesy of A&M
Records', which seemed to me thrillingly professional.
  We had an engineer, Nigel Haslam, to work the equipment
for us, but no producer, in line with Newell's laws. In truth,
we knew little about musical arrangement, about leading and

supporting, big sounds and small sounds, about directing the
listener's attention to bring out the best in the song. We
worked with the sketchy knowledge we had in the arrogant
belief that it was all we needed to know And as a result the
album seemed to come together in a joyful rush. We'had our
punchy opener, `Julie Profumo', and we had our big ballad,
`A Mercury Girl', all milky keyboards and sleighbells shaken
softly at the periphery of the mix to give the whole thing a
frosted edge. Well, that's how we feit about it.
  Newell insisted that we work civilized hours with no
wrecking ourselves by ploughing on into the middle of the
night. This meant evenings tended to be free. As the recording
progressed, I began phoning up friends that I hadn't seen in
ages and arranging to meet them for drir.ks so that, when
they asked me what I was up to these days, I would be able to
say: `Well, actually, I'm in the studio right now, just finishing
off an album.' Afterwards we would go back to their houses
where I forced my cassettes into their hi-fi's and bullied them
into listening to mixes, snippets, outtakes. I wasn't especially
after approval or constructive criticism: I was in pure display
mode. Sometimes, it's true, I got opinions I hadn't asked for I
played a mix of `What's Going On In Your Heart' to John
Parish. He said, `It sounds like Phil Spector's Wall of Sound
remade in Lego.'
  But my excitement was inextinguishable. And it was
mainly the excitement which helped both me and Newell
ignore aspects of the set-up at Denmark Street which would, I
think, have been unacceptable to, say, Phil Collins. Our
financial arrangement with Ammunition Communications
was casual. Every now and then, the manager would take a
slim wedge of banknotes from his trouser pocket and thumb
off a tenner `Here,' he would say. `Expenses.' We lived off
tuna sandwiches from across the road and pizza from around

the corner and drank coffee made with the kettle in the back
room, which could probably have done with sterilizing or,
better still, throwing away. Who knows what viral hell lurked
in its calcinated tubes? At night we slept on the floor of the
flat upstairs, selecting carefully the more acceptable items
from a grubby and disquietingly stiff collection of sleeping
bags and shredded blankets.
  Newell and I were, in effect, living with our managers. Our
relationships intensified fast. The manager became for us the
topic of limitless fascination and speculation. Pete the Bas-
tard seemed more easily understood: he was enthusiastic,
energetic, a little naive. He went swimming occasionally to
keep fit. Whereas the manager was alluringly opaque, not
prone to give much away - particularly if it was money. We
were amazed by his ability to sustain himself, deep into the
day, on a diet of instant coffee and Embassy cigarettes. He
was a sixty-a-day man and his hands shook, but it never
seemed to bother him or betray itself in his voice. When he
wasn't on the phone he would tap the tips of his fingers on his
desk and disappear into himself. He had authority, which
was partly to do with the bark of his voice but was also in
his demeanour. Because he appeared so unsurprisable, you
assumed he knew what he was doing. Pete the Bastard was
firmly under his spell. And so, in a very short time, were we.
Whatever the manager said, we did. And always the same
crumpled suit with, underneath it, a black T shirt bearing the
legend `Voice of America', the name of a synthesized dance
duo from Blackpool whom Ammunition Communications
were touting at the same time as us. A box of these T shirts
was stored in the office. On one occasion, the manager sat at
his desk and complained of feeling unfresh. Then he stood
up, peeled off the T shirt he was wearing, flung it into the far
corner, plucked a new one from the box, pulled it on and sat

down again. `That's better,' he said, and picked up the phone
to make another call.
  It was impossible to think of him in a domestic context. In
the tedious empty periods - and there are lots of those, wait-
ing while engineers tinker and set up sounds and rig up effects
- Newell and I sat with our feet up on the mixing desk,
wondering if the manager had ever done anything normal.
`Do you think he's ever mown a lawn?' Newell said.
  We pondered this for some time until the need to know
overwhelmed us. We walked down the corridor to the office
and stood just inside the door, shuffling like children going
before a teacher `You ask him,' I said.
  Newell cleared his throat. `Um, can I interrupt?'
  `Yes?'
  `Um . . . we just wanted to ask. Er . . . have you ever mown
a lawn ? '
  The manager blew out some smoke and narrowed his eyes.
`What is this about?' he said.
  `Nothing. Really. Just - have you ever mown a lawn?'
  `Of course I have.'
  Newell and I nodded thoughtfully. There was a long
glance.
  `Where?' asked Newell.
  The manager shifted in his seat and said nothing.
  `Was it at your mother's? In Edinburgh?'
  The manager sighed deeply. He pursed his lips. `Maybe.'
  There was another long pause.
  `And what did you use?'
  `Oh, for Christ's sake . . .'
  `No, really. What kind of mower?'
  `One of those electrical ones.'
  `A Flymo, you mean?'
  `Look, I'm extremely busy. Perhaps we can continue this

conversation at a later date. But for now - fuck off back to
the studio and get on with your record.'
  Around this time we posed for a publicity shot - a Walker-
print, just like Pony's, with our name in tidy Letraset along
the foot. It was taken by Geoff one weekend in front of a
random piece of statuary in Wivenhoe. In the photograph I
am wearing a black beret, pushed right to the back of my
head where it forms a dark halo and a snug backdrop for
my ears. Why am I wearing this? I had never worn a beret
before and I have never worn one since. The other feature of
this photo is a highly visible food stain in the centre of my
jumper.
    Paul Carrack

In order to be able to have the time to record with the
Cleaners from Venus, I had had to change my circumstances.
Before the band's deal came along, I had been as purposeless
and unmotivated in Bristol as I had been in Colchester and
Wivenhoe in the year before. I had had one short-lived job -
editing the in-house periodical of the Bristol Industrial
Archaeological Trust. The woman interviewing me had said,
`So, Giles, industrial archaeology. Does it grab you by the
balls?' I confessed that it didn't and she gave me the job. I
managed to get one issue out, containing a detailed report on
the excavation of a nineteenth-century pin-making factory
near Weston-super-Mare, before I packed it up.
  And then things had begun to look tantalizingly possible
for the Cleaners and all I could think was that this was my big
chance, the opportunity I should put my weight behind. The
thing about being in a band is, you're holding out for massive
riches in the end but in the meantime it's time-consuming and
pays you absolutely nothing. What I was looking for was
something to go alongside the Cleaners, which guaranteed an
income while allowing infinitely flexible free time. The only
place you could really pull that off was inside a university.
The place for me as a postgraduate was still open, so I took it:
to ease my passage towards a future life as Sting. I signed
up to do a PhD on Dr Johnson. I figured that if it turned out
that I was in a recording studio more often than I was in a
library, I was only reinterpreting my grant as an Arts Council
award.
  In September, I moved out of my girlfriend's flat and went
back to Cambridge. Of course, when the band really took off,

I was going to return in triumph. The way she saw it, faced
with the choice between our relationship and the Cleaners
from Venus, I had chosen the Cleaners from Venus. Our
relationship continued across the distance for a while, but
looking back, there were many, many obvious signs that she
had found someone else, signs I should have picked up. Like
the weekend that she came to visit me with two new piercings
in the rim of her left ear and a velvet hat. How come I didn't
think that through?
  But no. What it took in the end was the appearance in her
collection of a Paul Carrack solo album, secondhand. Who
had told her about that? Where had that come from? There
was no way she could have gone through those secondhand
racks and pulled out Paul Carrack and thought, `Maybe I'll
give this a try.' Hell, she was listening to Judy Tzuke before
I
met her. And now here I was, pulling from a scruffy, unalpha-
beticized wodge of LPs, packed unsatisfactorily in the space
beneath the side-table which supported her popping stereo, a
copy of a hard-to-find solo album by the man whose voice
you hear on `How Long' by Ace. Someone had led her that
way. Someone else had shared this with her Not me.
     The Cleaners from Venus, take 4

Going to England, the first album by the Cleaners from
Venus came out on the Ammunition Communications label
in February 1987. Catalogue No: CLEAN 1LP Harper's �
Queen described it, in a three-quarter-page piece accompany-
ing a large black and white photograph of Newell and myself
petting a cat, as `an obsessive new addiction' and furthermore
said of us: `They have come to hoover your musical home and
throw out all the junk.' But the article was written by a friend
of mine.
  Reviewing the album in the NME though (two and a half
inches, bottom right corner of the page but, God, we were
grateful), Campbell Stephenson wrote:

I've had it with nostalgia but I like this record. The references
are
`Senses'-period XTC and the Smithereens playing All Mod Cons .
. .
Their ticket to the past is a return . . . `You Must Be Out Of
My
Mind' is `Imagine' for pessimists. Were it not for the thankful
lack
of clever dick trickery, the whole caboodle might end up close
to
l Occ territory . . . Quite what year their calendar shows it's
unclear,
but it's a fine vintage.

And I swear I have never met Campbell Stephenson in my
life.
  We were also reviewed in the short-lived alternative rock
magazine  Underground (`what we have here is an old-
fashioned form of sampling known as imitation .  . at times
uncannily reminiscent of the beat-age Beatles, choc-a-bloc
with  distant  echoing  harmonies,  strumming  guitars . . .
Forget your fab four CDs, Going to England is period

perfect') and in Sounds (`harbours plenty of well-crafted
songs that would like to capture the essence of Squeeze's
pop ditties . . . it's on the "Every Breath You Take" twang of
"Mercury Girl" and the refined, jazzy shuffle of "Clara Bow"
that they're most effective'). The London Evening Standard
said we were `Charming and idiosyncratic. The song "Illya
Kuryakin Looked At Me" is the best yet evocation of the
swinging sixties on record.' And the Essex County Standard
said: `Martin, from West Street, Wivenhoe . . .' etc. This was
quite a good haul of press for beginners. But almost nobody
bought the record.
  At some point after the album was finished, the manager
had issued us with a contract - thirty sheets of closely typed
and intimidating legal jargon in which we were hereafter
referred to as `the artist' and the manager was hereafter
referred to as `the company' and the album was hereafter
referred to as `the album'. After the lax sixties, in which
people like Pete Townshend would sign away vast portions of
their life and earnings while drunk backstage after a show, it
is now legal practice to insert into a recording contract a
clause in which the artist acknowledges that he has taken
independent legal advice before signing. Even here, record
companies have found a loop through which to wriggle. If
you lack independent legal advice and don't know where
to find it, some record companies will set up and pay for
`independent' legal advice on your behalf, and these `indepen-
dent' lawyers will look through your contract and say they
can see absolutely nothing wrong with it. Which gets that
little problem out of the way in no time.
  Feeling that it was imperative to employ the sharpest
showbiz lawyers in town, but lacking the necessary money,
I handed the contract to a friend's father who was a solicitor
in Chelmsford. He was not, strictly speaking, an entertain-

ment expert, although he had once told me that, had things
worked out differently, he would very much have liked to
be a violinist. Chiefly he did houses and divorces. This was
probably the first record contract he had ever seen. But at
least he was familiar with the language in which this docu-
ment was written, a language in which even the conjunctions
seemed to have been poorly translated from the Latin:
`whichsoever', `heretofore', `thereafter'.
  It was, I have since discovered, an entirely standard
arrangement between record company and artist, and yet it
drew from my newly appointed legal consultant three closely
typed pages of his own, explaining in words he thought I
would understand why this deal represented a breathtaking
constriction of our right to earn a living. We stood to receive
twelve per cent of the income generated by our albums, once
our albums had generated sufficient income to settle all the
costs involved in making them, packaging them and market-
ing them. The cost of any videos and television advertise-
ments would be borne by us in the form of a reduced royalty
on records promoted by those means. The contract bound us
up for six albums, without increase in this royalty rate in the
event of our becoming successful. The company had, at any
moment, the power to terminate the arrangement; we had no
such power until we had complied in full with its terms. His
advice was, Do not sign this contract. So I signed it.
  Let me make something clear; I did not go into this deal
blind. I had read my copy of Expensive Habits by Simon
Garfield, a book about rip-offs and sad deals and swindles in
the music industry. Indeed, I had taken notes on sheets of A4
as I read it, believing that the tales it told were tales I had
better get by heart if I was intending to go anywhere as a
musician. I knew how George Michael was still on fifty
pound per week when Wham! were having No.1 hits; I knew

that Gilbert O'Sullivan had signed a deal of such medieval
unfairness that his ability to make any money at all was
shackled for years. I knew about Elton John and all the others
who had put their names on dodgy dotted lines early in their
careers and earned the right to be referred to hereafter as `the
complete saps'.
  I didn't think I was like that. I was more modern. I was
something like the chastened person that George Michael
became after Wham!, one of the smart new breed of 1980s
musicians who understood the business side, not like those
sad old rockers of the 1970s, too blitzed on tequila and coke
to notice that their managers were opening Swiss bank
accounts and buying most of Oxfordshire. The point is, these
transactions are often painted as instances of a greedy indus-
try taking advantage of naive musicians. But I was pretty
genned up when that contract was passed over to me. And
against my own better judgement and against the advice of an
informed legal mind, I had signed it. Signed it, indeed, and
initialled every crippling page.
  I wasn't a victim of naivety in this, or of the cruel machi-
nations of a cynical business. I was a victim, not for the first
time in my life, of the lure of vinyl. The truth was, I wanted
simply to be able to have and hold a piece of vinyl which I
had played on, part-produced, part-written - a record of my
own. I wanted to scrutinize its sleeve, I wanted to slide the
record from the inner sleeve. I wanted to read the small-print
of the publishing details on the label and see my name in
brackets after some of the titles. I wanted to put the album on
the deck, lower the needle and hear me coming out - yes!
Unbelievable! There I am! That piano bit, there! That's me!
  And I wanted to know the bliss of seeing that record in a
record shop. Consider the possible public culminations of
other kinds of artistic endeavour: having your play staged at

a theatre, say; having a painting hung in a gallery; having a
book out. Can any of these things really hold a candle to
being available in Our-Price? On record and cassette? On 7-
inch and 12-inch? I don't think so. And why let mere contrac-
tual details threaten to retard a lifelong thrill like that? If
the
contract with Ammunition Communications had bound me
to lead monthly karaoke evenings at the Basildon Young
Conservatives Club, well, I probably would have signed it
eventhen.
  Perhaps I would feel differently about this if the whole
thing had been a vast success and the manager was currently
investing in his third Caribbean island while Newell and I
were living in a squat off the Bayswater Road. But, as it is,
I'm inclined to think the gamble paid off. First a small batch
of test pressings with blank white centre labels arrived at the
office, one of which I carried home gingerly and stored away
Finally there were finished copies and I went down to London
to pick some up. The lettering on the sleeve wasn't really
bright enough to show up against the illustration, which was
a bit of a blow, but at least the sleeve was square and the
object within was certainly round, flat and black, twelve
inches across and with a small hole in the middle. There was
no denying it: it was a real album.
  Celebration collapsed into anxiety soon enough. After a
neurotic testing-session in the privacy of my own room -
quick bursts of the Cleaners, followed as closely as possible
by quick bursts of big-selling albums - I managed to work
myself into a fit of childish resentment. Why, when heard
back-to-back with Scritti Politti's Cupid And Psyche '85, did
out album sound so much flatter, so much duller? Why didn't
its top notes gleam like that? Why didn't the bass thump out
at you as if determined to free itself from behind the speakers'
gauze? Why was it so much quieter? Why did it sound as


though the needle was having to press down through a layer
of wet bread to get to the music? A simple answer: our album
had cost, maybe, four thousand pounds in studio time and
expenses. Scritti Politti's had probably cost something in the
region of a quarter of a million and I suppose it's only fair
that they should have got an increase in quality for that kind
of spend. Even so, a new ambivalence entered my feelings
about our record. It was at once, it seemed to me, the real
thing and a cheap imitation.
 There were consolations, though. We had a cardboard
record divider with our name on in the Virgin Megastore in
Tottenham Court Road. We were under `C' in Cambridge
Our-Price. And we were under `B' in Andy's Records, Col-
chester, a mistake that I hastily rectified. In fact, whenever
I
was in a record store over this feverish period, I made sure to
move our sleeve to the front of the rack, for maximum brow-
ser temptation. (I should add that this kind of in-store med-
dling is not just the preoccupation of the sad wannabe. Much
later, as a journalist, I interviewed Neil Tennant who arrived
a little late, confessing that he had just promoted the Pet Shop
Boys video to the No.1 slot in the Our-Price at Notting Hill
Gate.) Eventually - after about two months - I would know
the indignity of happening upon our album in the Notting
Hill Record and Tape Exchange. Three copies of it. For now,
though, I was a blissful innocent.
  Late that spring we played our first live shows. This, of
course, was something Newell had vowed he would never do.
He would later claim it was the slow but consistent erosion of
the principles he held dear that finally forced him to go mad
and leave. When the possibility of a gig was first floated, he
fought off the manager, saying, `No, absolutely not,' his
mouth tightening. But the manager talked him round, saying
it would benefit the album. And it wasn't like he was asking

him to tour or anything, just to do one or two shows . . . And
I began to see how subtle they had been in that first meeting
in the flat with their nods and their `indeed's and `quite
understand's, initially accepting any condition Newell laid
down, with a view to changing his mind about it later or
letting circumstances overtake.
  We picked the two best musicians we could find in Col-
chester. On bass, Nel, who had already played on the album
and who would later become involved with New Model
Army, and on drums, Ichiro Tatsuhara, who would later
become  involved with  the  immigration  authorities.  We
rehearsed where nearly all Colchester's bands rehearsed - in
the tiny sideroom of a nightclub in Priory Street. Nel and
Ichiro were disciplined and fast. Somewhat alarmingly, they
seemed to know the songs better than we did. We had three
days to prepare a forty-five minute set so there wasn't time to
go in for finesse, let alone to programme lasers, explosions or
video sequences. We ripped out most of the fiddly stuff from
the re�orded versions, squared the songs off at the edges and
prayed we would get away with it on the `gutsy' ticket.
  We played at Dingwall's in Camden Town, London, on a
special Ammunition Communications label night, organized
by the manager and Pete the Bastard. They hired a barge with
a bar on it, filled it with people from record companies, and
set off up the canal to get everyone drunk. An hour later, the
boat docked outside the club, everyone staggered ashore and
those still capable of standing and watching came in to see
live performances from us (bottom of the bill owing to a
bad call by me in the coin-tossing that afternoon), Voice of
America (the synthesizer duo from Blackpool) and a trampy
glam rock band called West End Central, featuring Rene
Berg, who was a former member of Hanoi Rocks.
  It was hot and crowded. I wore a white shirt and a tie

in the hope of affecting a kind of mid-eighties stylish-but-
businesslike look and mostly because Green was wearing one
in the photograph on the inner sleeve of Cupid And Psyche.
Much like the beret in the publicity shot, I never wore ties.
Newell, meanwhile, was in bus-conductor's hat and a sleeve-
less T shirt. These were things he wore all the time. We were
somewhat under-rehearsed, but we were at least refreshingly
loud. I know this because John Parish was in the audience
and I asked him afterwards: `What did you think, John?'
  He thought long and hard, his brow creased. Finally he
looked up and said: `It was very loud.'
  Later came our big outdoor appearance. `We've got you on
to an open-air festival,' the manager said. I had visions of
something  sun-drenched,  possibly  Italian.  `It's  in  Scun-
thorpe,' he added. It took place on a Saturday afternoon and
we were supporting Furniture, who were a year on from their
solitary hit with `Brilliant Mind'. A giant white van was
hired, with two rows of seats to accommodate the four of us,
a pile of drums, guitars and keyboards, Pete the Bastard, who
was on minder duty, and Captain Sensible, who was also on
the bill, singing and playing guitar over backing tapes of his
greatest hits. It was raining and cold. We played, without a
soundcheck, from a large scaffolding stage to a small wind-
whipped crowd in kagouls. Quite badly.
  Afterwards, Newell was approached by a girl of around
fourteen.
  `Which band are you in?' she said.
  He said, `I'm in the Cleaners from Venus.'
  She said, `I've only just arrived. How did you get on?'
  He said, `I don't know, really. Seemed to go OK.'
  And she said, `I bet you were crap,' and walked away.
  Gigs like this were a test of one's digestive system as much
as anything. On the way back in the van, as I was opening a

can of lager, I paused to reflect on what I had thus far con-
sumed that day:

                One cup of tea with sugar
                A Star Bar
                One stick of Wrigley's Spearmint Gum
                Two cans of Special Brew
                A hot dog with onions from a van
                Another cup of tea with sugar
                A Kit-Kat

  All  interspersed  with  three-quarters  of  a  packet  of
Benson & Hedges. I was aware that, next to what hardened,
night-after-night bands consider an on-the-road diet, this was
positively nutritious. (High in smoke and sugar, it's true, but
some encouraging roughage there in the form of the onions.)
But if it only took a one-night stand to reduce the contents of
my stomach to a hot zone of fizzing acids, how was I going to
stand up to a tour?
  Further on in the journey, I made an important discovery
about Newell: he had a bladder like a fishnet stocking. We
had already made two unscheduled stops and Pete the Bas-
tard, who was driving, refused a third, muttering something
about how it would be nice if we could be home before
Wednesday. So Newell stood up in the back of the van, with
one arm outstretched to steady himself against the side wall,
and as the van continued to lurch and sway down the M1, he
relieved himself into an empty beercan. I made a mental note
not to put my beer down. I made another mental note never
to go in a van with Newell again.
  Everyone got drunk, but Newell got drunkest. Which was
amazing given that the liquid was only fleetingly inside his
body. At his feet sat a squadron of slowly cooling beer cans.

Every time I saw brake-lights flare red on the road up ahead,
it occurred to me that, in the event of an emergency stop, I
was in danger of being crushed from behind by numerous
weighty instruments in flight cases, a former member of the
Damned and several tins of piss.
  I wanted to be at home, in bed.
  It was hard to know whether this limited live exposure was
advancing our career. But back in the office, the manager
was clearly doing his utmost to broaden the operation. One
day I got a phone call in Cambridge. `You'd better let your
tutors know you're leaving,' said the manager. `We've got the
Enigma deal.'
  This was staggering news. Talk of `the Enigma deal' had
rumbled on for some time. Enigma was an American inde-
pendent company intending to set up in Britain and looking
for a lively British act with which to launch their new oper-
ation. They would have money to promote our records and
money to pay us wages. To secure `the Enigma deal' was to
become, finally, after these years of struggle, a professional
musician.
  I phoned Newell and we gibbered feverishly at each other
for a few minutes. Then I went out for the evening to
celebrate.
  Lager was ordered. Friends toasted my future and wished
me well. The lager mixed with my uncontainable excitement.
More lager was ordered and there was more well-wishing. I
tried to respond to this decorously, thinking of the feelings of
those, less fortunate, around me. I tried to bear in mind what
Nietzsche said about there being no feast without a tragedy. I
fought to remember that, though I was now free of gloomy
academe for good, liberated to make my way in the glamor-
ous world of pop, my friends would not be coming with me.
They were still prisoners here, good-naturedly enjoying the

salvation which had come my way. But the next weeks,
months and maybe years would find them trudging to the
university library rather than jetting out to the Miami beach
house, carefully supping a grant-stretching pint in the pub of
an evening rather than slipping from the limo and heading,
with a dark grin, through the thrilling flash and jostle of the
paparazzi and into the nightclub.
  So when I said my few words of thanks and farewell, I was
suitably meek and reassuring. Although I was leaving them, I
said, they weren't to think of me in any real sense as `gone'.
I wasn't the kind of guy to be changed by superficial things
like fame and money. I wasn't the kind of guy to forget where
he came from. Depend on it. They were my friends. If they
needed me, they would always know where to find me. (And
failing that, they could always ring the switchboard-operator
at the record company, who might be able to put them
through to a secretary or a publicity officer or someone who
might know where I was, although, of course, a busy sched-
ule is a busy schedule.)
  Outside afterwards, I mounted my bike. The air was cold
and clean, and on the way back to my room, in the middle of
a wide common, I paused and turned dizzy circles in the
night, fit to whoop into the silence, `Free at last, my Lord,
free
at last!'
  Waking late the next morning, dry-eyed and with a
stripped tongue, I thought immediately back to that cycle
ride. And I remembered that I didn't have a bicycle. So I
wonder whose bike that was. And then I realized that the
phone was ringing and I got out of bed and crossed the room.
 `Hello ? '
 It was the manager
 `Forget the Enigma deal,' he said. `It's off.'
            Two Hymns

My father's illness came on him very fast. We didn't know
at first that it was a brain tumour  It started with him
having strangely calm fits, moments of absence in which his
left hand would shudder. He would recall nothing of them
afterwards. One Christmas Eve, his left side seemed to
give  out  altogether,  just  briefly,  and  he  had  to  hold
himself up against a kitchen cupboard. The fits increased
in  frequency  and  duration,  and  eventually  his  doctor
sent him to a specialist in London. I went with him that
day, up to Liverpool Street by train, round on the tube.
Afterwards, he tried hard to look untroubled, unfrightened.
Sitting opposite me on the train back, he had another
attack.
  The operation to remove some of the tumour was radically
debilitating. He started with a clock and a calendar beside the
bed until he remembered about time and days. It wasn't too
long before he could speak. Then he began to think about
learning to walk again.
  When he was convalescing at home, I made him a tape of a
Spike Jones record I had borrowed from the library because I
thought there was nothing that could prevent you laughing
when you heard Spike Jones. Actually, though, there are
plenty of things.
  He lived for fifteen months after the operation. Some-
times he seemed fitter than he had ever been. Other times he
could not stand. When he died he had been in a coma for a
week. I was on a train back from Bristol and I wasn't with
him.
  At my father's funeral we sang `He Who Would Valiant Be'

and `Lead Us, Heavenly Father, Lead Us', which were his
favourite hymns. No pop songs, obviously. Because my father
didn't like pop songs. And because there isn't a pop song
written that could have been played there.

chapter 10
        The Cleaners from Venus, take 5
   The manager triumphed in the end. He got us our dream. He
   secured, for the Cleaners from Venus, a deal with a major
   record company. But only in Germany.
     The deal stemmed from a meeting the manager had at
   MIDEM, the record industry's trade fair Held annually in
   Cannes, MIDEM is an excuse for music-industry people to
   get drunk and pretend to be in the film industry. When the
   manager and Pete the Bastard announced that they were
   flying out for three days at MIDEM '87, Newell and I
   were sceptical. We had seen how they behaved outside office
   hours. Older than they seemed when behind our desks, both
   of them regressed rapidly, under the influence of lager, to
   become archetypal, on-the-town Scots lads. Over the course
   of an evening in the pub, they would pass from being garru-
   lous and charming in the first hour to dangerously oversexed
   in the second, and finally incoherent and doing impressions
   of a pirate (`A-HARRRRRGGHHH!') by the third. I was the
   victim of a night out with the manager which had started
   quietly at 7.00 p.m. in the pub along the road from the studio
   and had ended at 4.00 a.m. the next day over a plate of
   something disgusting upstairs in a Chinese cafe in Soho. My
   memories of what happened in  between are  inevitably
   patchy, though I dimly recall a record-industry party, an
   after-hours club just north of Oxford Street and a lot of
   walking and shouting. I then caught an early-morning train
   back to Cambridge, one that stopped everywhere. At one
   point I was jolted awake to find that the carriage had filled
   with schoolchildren, a number of whom were looking at

me with round eyes and open mouths, silent and terrified at the
drooling state I was in.
  From Newell's and my point of view, there was no reason
to believe that, for the manager and Pete the Bastard,
MIDEM would be anything more than a thinly disguised,
expenses-paid brewery tour We pictured them laying waste
to the duty-free trolley on the plane out, and again on the
plane home. We thought it highly likely that at least one of
them would come off the plane at Heathrow without his
trousers.
  We weren't entirely wrong: a story they returned with
involved one of them ending up naked in a hotel corridor. But
they found time to do some business. They passed our tape to
a German music publisher called Ulrika Schoen, who owned
publishing rights in Latin Quarter and The Bible. Ulrika
returned to Hamburg and discussed us with RCA. And now
RCA were making us an offer They would release and pro-
mote Going To England in Germany. They would contribute
to our recording costs for two further albums. In short, this
was our opportunity to be big in Germany. Some bands are
years ahead of their time. We would have to settle for being
an hour behind ours.
  Why had Germany gone for what England had thus far
refused? For one thing, perhaps, over there the name of the
band didn't seem immediately duff. Perhaps it even had a ring
of the exotic and funny about it rather than a naff tang of the
wilfully surreal. For another thing, we sounded - or we
thought we sounded - like the Beatles, only more commer-
cial. And in Germany at that point Beatle-alikes remained a
viable business proposition, as indeed did anything redolent
of 1960s British pop. We would have preferred to have been
big in our own land but, with the way things appeared to be
going, we would have settled for being big in Turkey.

  On the day our deal was announced, we went to a Mexi-
can bar in the Charing Cross road where the manager called
for tequila slammers and a horrifying quantity of lager in
large glass jugs. Inside a week, he and Pete the Bastard had
managed to secure not just our deal, but also a contract for
Voice of America to record two singles for Virgin Records.
Virgin Records in England, indeed. They looked extremely
pleased with themselves and I began to believe our faith in
them was well placed. The ship had come in and it was
loaded with American beer.
  How do you get on in the music industry? My personal
step-by-step guide would have to read something like this:

  You send your music to a former member of the Damned.
  He plays it to a twenty-four-year-old Scotsman in a cheap suit.
  The Scotsman flies to Cannes and gets drunk.
  A German woman picks up the tape in Cannes and flies with it
   back to Hamburg.
  The German woman plays it to a Beatles fan at RCA Germany.
  A major record company awards you a three-album contract.

  It's easy when you know how.
  RCA pressed up their own copies of Going To England
and released them in the summer. We received some samples
in London. The sleeves were bright and glossy, and this time
the lettering stood out boldly. I enjoyed the fact that the
album now had an authentic bar-code on the back. High-
quality printwork on the spine, too. But it was the label I was
most proud of, with RCA's angular block capital logo,
exactly as it appeared on my copy of the Al Stewart single
`Year of the Cat'. It was a better quality pressing, too - or so
I
was told. It didn't really sound any different.
  In September 1987, RCA invited us to Hamburg to play a

promotional showcase gig, and here another of Newell's
early stipulations crumbled into dust. He tried to make him-
self feel more comfortable about it by holding out for unusual
treatment. He wanted to travel by ferry. And he wanted to
stay in a bed and breakfast outside the city. Neither of these
requests was met.
  On the day of our flight, we assembled at the office in
Denmark Street at 7.00 a.m., myself and Newell, Nel and
Ichiro, the manager and Pete the Bastard. I had never seen the
manager ready for work this early in the morning. But,
despite the hour, he had all his business wits about him. To
save money, we travelled to Heathrow by tube.
  We were met at Hamburg airport by Ulrika, the publisher.
She spoke English perfectly and with a hint of the aristocrat,
like a woman who had been educated at Roedean. This was
because she was a woman who had been educated at Roe-
dean. Alongside her was a photographer from a Hamburg
evening paper, who started snapping at us as we walked into
the Arrivals lounge. One photographer is not exactly the
paparazzi treatment, but even so it was one more than I had
expected and strangely flattering. Not even members of my
family have taken photos of me arriving at an airport.
  The photographer wanted to do some posed pictures, too,
and led us outside to a sort of playground area near the
viewing deck where there was a large hardboard cut-out of a
cartoon plane with smiling eyes and puckered red lips. We
poked our heads and arms through the windows and waved.
Then we posed in front of a highly polished airport truck
with a sign on its roof which read: `Follow Me'.
  A taxi took us to our hotel, which was sensitively located
in the heart of Hamburg's extensive and explicit red-light
district, just a condom's throw from the notorious Reeper-
bahn. Anything less like a bed and breakfast outside the city

it would be hard to imagine. Newell and I shared a small
square room, three flights up, with orange curtains and one
double bed. We felt like Morecambe and Wise. Directly
below our window, a prostitute stood waiting for tricks. We
watched her for a while until she moved on. I flipped th�rough
the television channels: a news programme, a daytime game-
show, some children's cartoons, an overweight man inserting
an enormous vibrator between the splayed buttocks of a . . .
`Hang on a minute. What was that?' said Newell. I flipped
back. It was our very own, twenty-four-hour hardcore porn
service, piped into the room by the thoughtful Swedish hotel
owner, who later explained to Newell that he `thought
English rock bands liked that kind of thing'. Maybe English
rock bands like that kind of thing, but not nearly as much as
their managers. Pete the Bastard christened it `the pink bits
channel'. Later that night, from our room, Newell and I
would  hear him  and  the  manager  down  the  corridor,
thoroughly refreshed, singing, `Bring out the pink bits!' and
shouting `A-HAAARRGGGGHHH! '
  That first evening we had an appointment with our man
from RCA, the person responsible for signing us to the label.
He met us in the hotel lobby and took us to a bar along the
street. He was not the leather-jacketed, pony-tailed berk of
record-company legend. He was softly spoken and talked
seriously about our music and how much he liked it. He said
he thought we could do very well in Germany. He said he
didn't want to force anything: he wanted to develop us slowly
and patiently He didn't see us as a flash-in-the-pan singles
act; he thought we were an albums band, in it for the long
run. Going To England was all about getting the ball rolling.
Our second album would establish us firmly. Our third
would push us over the top into the big league. After an
extremely comfortable hour and a half, he left us, saying he

needed an early night and that he would see us at the gig the
next day. We stayed on in the bar a while longer, talking
about how solid and straightforward our A&R man seemed,
hardly believing our luck.
  It was still fairly early when we finished our drinks. Newell
went back to the hotel, Nel and Ichiro went off to do some
exploring and the managers took me out for a quiet drink in a
live sex club. Pete the Bastard was insistent that we should
find a place where you could see people `actually doing it',
so we scouted Hamburg's bleary streets for some twenty
minutes, weighing up the various implausible claims writ
tall on hoardings beside neon-lit doorways. All Action Sex
Show.  Full  Frontal  Non-Stop.  Real  Male-Female  Live
Viewing.
  Inevitably, the one we plumped for turned out to be a bar
the size of a railway buffet with a small stage at one end on
which a bored woman in her forties lay naked on a revolving
deck-chair while another woman, slightly older, sat nude on a
seat beside her. When we walked in, joining the four or five
other dupes nursing absurdly pricy beers and disappointed
expressions, the woman on the chair stood up and danced -
or, at least, moved her arms like someone jogging very slowly.
There was no music for her to dance to anyway. After about
twenty seconds she sat down again and resumed her conver-
sation with the woman on the electric garden furniture. We
finished our drinks, the manager called to arrange a mortgage
to cover the tab, and we left.
  Back in the hotel bar, we found Nel and Ichiro in a state of
excitement. On their walk, they had found what used to be
an underground car park where men now went to pick
among the prostitutes who stood themselves on sale against
the concrete. In that crowd they had bumped into a familiar,
friendly, though now rather sheepish-looking face. It was our

man from RCA, getting an early night. Like they say in
Hamburg: if you're not in bed by ten, come home.

I had never played anywhere as big as Hamburg's Grosse
Freiheit (`The Freedom Hall'), a giant ballroom with a high
stage, directly opposite what used to be the Star Club where
the Beatles played. And I had never played a gig where the
equipment was set up before you arrived. It was waiting for
us when we turned up in the afternoon to soundcheck. And
the dressing room was huge and warm and well-lit, and along
one wall was a table stacked with fruit and meat and salad
and chocolates and there was more beer there in crates than
even the manager and Pete the Bastard could have seen off in
one sitting.
  And that night, we stood in the wings, skipping from foot
to foot, until we saw the lights go off in the hall, and Newell
said, `Right, then' - no pre-gig prayer routine for us, no intra-
band hug session or feel-good basketball huddle, just Newell
saying, `Right, then' - and we ran out on to this spacious
stage in the dark, hearing the whistles from the audience,
feeling, as we went on, that swift switch in temperature, from
the cool of the corridor to the heat from the hall. And a single
light came up and Newell said, `Good evening' - not `Good
evening, Hamburg' which would have been naff, but just
`Good evening', which was cool - and Ichiro rapped his sticks
together and shouted the count-in, which never sounded like
numbers the way he did it, but was just `An! An! An-an-an-
an . . .' And we clattered into `Julie Profumo' - Going To
England, side one, track one - with Newell's high, lazy Essex
voice clearing the racket:

                    I'm going to England
                    I'm leaving to-dzay . . .

  And I was on guitar for this song, with space to skip
around in, room to run to the microphone for the backing
vocals in the chorus:

        And one day soon, I will forget this junkyard,
        Take you with me if you're going that way . . .

  And from the stage, against the lights, you couldn't really
see the audience, just silhouettes and glow, but you could
sense that the place was packed and heaving in time with the
beat. And it was one of those rare times when the noise
the four of you are making gathers a momentum which
doesn't seem to be running away from you, but instead car-
ries you aloft. I felt us bowling down the runway. I felt our
wheels lift off the tarmac and fifteen hundred people raised
their hands up at us and cheered us into the air.
  Packing up afterwards? Pah! We had roadies to do that for
us.
  Our flight home the next morning was punishingly early.
The plane arrived at Heathrow at 10.00 a.m. As we pushed
our trolleys through Customs, a man in a uniform beckoned
Newell over to a table and asked him to open his guitar
case. Newell promptly went into a fit of shivering. It was
strange and frightening to behold. He had nothing to worry
about. He wasn't carrying any drugs. He wasn't over the limit
on his duty-free. He didn't even have any money they could
steal. But, at the very sight of someone in authority, some sort
of hippie gene woke up inside him in a hurry and sent him
into a dizzy paranoia. The fuzz were on his case and he didn't
like it. I tried to say something to calm him down but he was
just a blur of anxiety. It was over in seconds: the Customs
officer took one look at the guitar, shut the case and that was
that. But on the tube train back into London, with the time

now approximately 10.30 a.m., Newell had to quieten his
jangled nerves by consuming an entire bottle of duty-free
cherry liqueur
  One other thing: we later learned that tickets for the Ham-
burg show had cost the equivalent of eight pounds. For eight
pounds we had given the audience a skinny, forty-five-minute
set, RCA having informed us in advance that forty-five
minutes would be `perfectly adequate'. Our night of glory in
Germany was also a stunning rip-off.

In all about ten thousand copies of Going to England were
sold in Germany. This wasn't enough to make us household
names (except in those particular ten thousand households),
or even to allow us to figure in a bestselling chart. But RCA
seemed happy enough. They talked about it as a base to work
from. In the late autumn of 1987, we started to record our
follow-up.
  Buoyed up by our experience on stage in Hamburg, our
continental sales success and the imminent global break-
through that I felt sure these things portended, I was keen
that we should step up to another, better studio. I wasn't after
a state-of-the-art 48-track place in the South of France. I just
thought something with a window or two might be nice. But
we were locked in with Ammunition Communications, who
could only advance us studio time on their own premises and
not money to use in other studios. It was back down to
Denmark Street again.
  Except that Denmark Street was not quite the same. A year
on from the recording of Going To England and cracks were
beginning to appear in the empire of the manager and Pete
the Bastard. They may well have managed to get two of their
acts on to the books of major labels, but neither of these deals
had generated much in the way of cash. Commercial business

in the studio was next to non-existent: that side of things had
been run down to keep the studio free for our use and for
Voice of America. It was clear that the money was running
out.
  It was also obvious that some of the money had never
actually existed. Certain bills for the hiring of instruments
and studio equipment had not been settled. Certain hire com-
panies were no longer dealing with the studio. The company
had ceased being able to afford the flat upstairs. The manager
had moved in with his girlfriend in Notting Hill and Pete the
Bastard was now living in the office. Every night he made a
bed up in the windowless, stuffy back room. Everything he
owned was wedged into a corner, which might have pre-
sented a problem for the day-to-day workings of the com-
pany, except that everything he owned was a pile of T shirts
and jeans, a pair of trainers and some underwear. Also a
badminton racket, which grew to look like a symbol of some
long-forgotten golden age. After recording, Newell and I now
slept in the studio, one of us under the mixing desk, one of us
under the piano, both of us under a selection of the same
crusty items of bedding that had been available to us in the
flat. We slept clothed, for fear of what those blankets might
do to our skin.
  Under pressure of its use as studio, office and doss-house,
the basement grew lank and more than commonly airless.
Occasionally Pete the Bastard, admirably unfazed by his pre-
dicament, would pass the office Hoover over the carpeting
and for half an hour or so the place would fill with the smell
of freshly heated dust. The manager tended less and less to
peel off a tenner and say, `Expenses.' There was an acute
cash-flow problem during which, across one desolate week-
end, the studio was without coffee and loo roll - but having
only an absence of coffee and loo roll to complain about

would come to seem like luxury. One day the phones were
cut off until some money was hastily drummed up from
somewhere and they were reconnected. We expected the hi-fi
and the pair of Captain Sensible silver discs off the wall to go
at almost any time. In the most symbolic event of all, the
unwashed bedding finally rebelled. There was an outbreak of
scabies.
  In order to have more flexible time to devote to the band,
Newell had left his washing-up job and had started a garden-
ing round in Wivenhoe. I had my `Arts Council' grant, so I
was OK, but clearly Newell could not earn any money while
he was recording, so the company had put him on a tiny
weekly retainer. There were weeks when this money didn't
appear, bringing Newell close to destitution. At one point
during the recording, he went home to Wivenhoe and was
briefly stranded because he had no money for the train fare
back. I don't imagine it was ever like this for Duran Duran.
  We thought we had some strong songs for our second
album - `Blue Swan', `Let's Get Married', `I Wasn't Drinking'
- but when we came to record them, Newell and I were
pulling the material in different directions and it stretched
and split on us. I wanted to proceed cautiously, build the
album gradually. Newell wanted to get the songs down in a
burst, let them keep some energy and some rough edges.
These approaches were not designed to complement one
another. One afternoon, after a tedious bout of retakes, he
and Ichiro ended up shouting insults at each other through
the control-room window.
  In an ill-judged attempt to make the album sound ritzy
and shimmering, like Prefab Sprout as produced by Thomas
Dolby, I started ladling rich keyboard sounds all over the
place, like chocolate sauce. Newell wasn't interested enough
to insist that they be scrubbed off. The whole process took

about two months. When the album was finished, we were
united at least in being dissatisfied with it. The tapes went off
to Hamburg for mastering.
  Newell was also subject at this time to a slow but relentless
campaign of persuasion from the manager who was bent on
getting him to go on tour - which Newell had said from the
start he would never agree to. Evidently RCA were talking
confidently of a German national tour in the spring of 198 8
to accompany the release of the second album. The manager's
feeling was that Newell had now shown that he could go on a
stage and that he could go abroad, so what was the problem?
Newell gamely reassembled his arguments about the absurd-
ity of touring and the danger it posed to anyone's, but par-
ticularly his, mental equilibrium. The discussions lasted over
a period of about a month before Newell finally gave in and
said he would go, thus binning the last of his major scruples.
  In between the completion of the album and the scheduled
date for the start of the tour, I went back to Cambridge and
Newell returned to his gardening round. I kept in touch with
the office in London but Newell didn't. Later he explained to
me  that two  months'  living underground  and  sleeping
between potentially scabrous sheets had damaged him more
than he realized at the time. He had gone sour on the whole
business. He felt he had been manipulated into precisely the
position he had intended to avoid. He had been cajoled into
going on a tour he didn't want, to support an album he didn't
like. And he wasn't getting paid. He called the manager at the
office. With two weeks to go until the start of the tour, with
rehearsals and musicians booked in, with RCA plastering
tour-date stickers all over our new album, Newell decided he
wasn't going.
  I got on a train that afternoon and went down to Wiven-

hoe to see him. He was in a bad way - shaky, tense about the
jaw.
  `If I was a baker,' he said, `and I baked a really good loaf
of
bread . . . well, you wouldn't send me all round the world,
baking it in a different city every night.'
  I said I wasn't sure the analogy held.
  He said he couldn't believe he had ever been talked into
touring. He said he was lying awake, panicking about it. And
when he slept, he had nightmares involving Transit vans full
of musicians. He looked at me plaintively. `I don't want to be
a pop Messiah,' he said.
  My initial reaction was selfish. All I could think was, This
is a bit bloody previous. If he had cracked up after the pair of
us had enjoyed a couple of weeks of blazing fame - hell, if
he'd cracked up after a couple of days of it - I could have
coped. But to have the breakdown in advance of the pressure
seemed to me slightly joyless: the cold turkey without the
drugs, the clap without the groupie.
  But then there surfaced in my mind the image of him tug-
ging energetically on that bottle of cherry liqueur at 10.30
a.m. on a tube train from Heathrow and I softened. He
wasn't faking this: it was no prima donna tantrum. Newell
wasn't the touring type and he had never pretended to be. He
was a songwriter and a bag of nerves. He deserved protec-
tion. He deserved support.
  Back in Cambridge, the phone rang. It was the manager
He said he had been talking to RCA. They were too far down
the line with the plans to cancel the tour They thought it
should go ahead without Newell.
  `That's impossible,' I said. `He sings. He's the front-
man. He writes the poxy songs. It's Newell's band, for God's
sake.'

  `Well, Brian Wilson gave up touring with the Beach Boys.
He stayed at home and the rest of them went out and per-
formed his songs. So why not you?'
  I said, `I don't believe this.'
  `Listen,' he said, and his voice seemed suddenly more
ominous. `There's an opportunity to salvage something from
this. RCA are being very patient. What I'm saying is, your
career is in the toilet. But they haven't flushed it yet.'

I went on that tour I had to. It was too late to pull out. To
ditch the tour was, in the elegant metaphor of the manager, to
pull the chain. Nobody stood to benefit from that. And, yes,
the Cleaners from Venus without Newell would probably be
like Starsky without Hutch, or Peters without Lee. But if
Newell eventually came out of his depression and we were
still signed to RCA, I thought it would come to look like a
fortnight well spent. It wasn't an agreement to tour that I
was entering into, so much as an undertaking to bandage a
haemorrhage.
  Now I had to front the band. I could impersonate Newell
up to a point, but in the end my voice was dull, inexpressive.
I
could see that we were flirting with disaster. But I can't pre-
tend that some part of me didn't thrill to the prospect. An
open stage! A chance to shine! And I can't deny either that I
didn't, in some respects, feel happy at the prospect of not
having Newell around - much like when the person you sleep
with has to get up earlier than you and you get the whole bed
to spread out in for a while.
 We hastily recruited Dan, a friend of Captain Sensible's
from Brighton. He was a balanced and calm person who did
forty minutes of yoga every morning. He had a long, black,
curly MTV hairstyle, he could play guitar and he could sing,
too. He did about a quarter of the songs and I covered the

rest. Ichiro the drummer came, but Nel the bassist refused, as
a show of solidarity with Newell. Nigel and Dave from Voice
of America were coming as a support act. We used their
bassist, Winston, and their guitarist, Tony, and gave them
Ichiro in return. In other words, in a complex musical time-
share scheme, three of the touring party had to play twice
each night. Needless to say, this arrangement was devel-
oped by the manager to save money. He evoked history to
justify it. `That's how the old Motown tours used to be in the
sixties.'
  A white tour bus was rented with a large hold at the rear in
which to stow the instruments. A set of secondhand aero-
plane seats had been bolted into the back. They were pep-
pered with cigarette burns, but high on comfort, at least
while the van was stationary. In transit, the shot springs flung
themselves about drunkenly underneath you, launching you
towards the ceiling at various random, jaunty tangents. It
struck me, as we pushed through London towards the motor-
way, that we were about to drive half-way across Europe in
what was, to all intents and purposes, a motorized Kiddy
Castle.
  If you were of a superstitious cast of mind, you would
possibly read some significance into the fact that we were
nearly arrested on the way to our opening show in Berlin.
Our driver was from Manchester and he'd never driven to
Berlin before. Indeed, as I discovered in a confidence-sapping
conversation with him on the ferry, he had never driven
abroad before. Still, he seemed to be coping fine, driving us
through the night across Belgium and into Germany, speed-
ing us down to the border controls on the East German
border and lining us up on the corridor route which, before
the collapse of Communism in the East, took you directly to
isolated West Berlin.

  That was when it went wrong. The journey seemed to go
on too long. I remember looking out of the window, noticing
a surprising drabness in the architecture, a strange absence of
neon and people dressed in leather, and many of the other
things one might have expected from West Berlin. I also
noticed that the people we passed on the pavement tended to
stare after us very hard. Also, that all the other cars on the
road seemed to have shrunk.
  Eventually, the driver conceded that he couldn't find the
club we were heading for and we stopped by the kerb. Pete
the Bastard got down and crossed the road to talk to a sol-
dier. We watched their exchange from the van, Pete the Bas-
tard pointing to his map, the soldier looking very doubtful
and shaking his head.
  Pete the Bastard ran back and got in beside the driver
  `This is East Berlin, you fucking idiot.'
  Somehow, the driver had managed to turn off the corridor
and sink us deep behind the Iron Curtain. Without visas.
  `I'll go back,' said the driver
  `Too fucking right you will,' said Pete the Bastard.
  As we retreated, the van was tense and silent. I could envis-
age us needing the assistance of a British consulate very
shortly. But I wasn't even sure if East Germany had one. At
last, though, we began to see signs again for the corridor
and shortly after that we were rounding a bend and heading
joyfully up a sliproad back to the motorway and safety. At
which moment, four soldiers stepped out of their checkpoint
booth and pulled us over.
  This time we all got out. The soldiers walked round the
van, opened up the back, got inside, trying to work out why
this foreign vehicle was attempting to pass out of the East,
stocked with foreign electric equipment and a collection of

     pale, Tshirted British youths, some with pony-tails, none
     with adequate paperwork.
       One of the soldiers said, `We will have to take you to
     Potsdam for interviews.'
       I said, emotionally, `But we have a show to do', which
     would have sounded fine in a movie, but sounded pretty
     pathetic at a military checkpoint by a motorway in East
     Germany.
       I felt a strong desire to weep. I had come to rock
capitalist
     Germany and here I was about to become a prisoner of the
     Communist East. And they hadn't even heard the album.
     Remembering the Heathrow Customs incident, I was relieved
     that Newell wasn't with us. It is quite likely he would have
     attempted to sprint for the woods and been shot.
       At this juncture, Pete the Bastard came good. Awesomely
     good. He produced a roll of Deutschmarks from his back
     pocket and said, `Can we pay a fine?' The soldiers
deliberated
     in silence for a few seconds, until the one who had done the
     talking stepped forward, removed the entire roll from Pete
     the Bastard's hand, and said, `OK. You can go.'
       As we pulled back on to the corridor, there was a barrage
     of cheering and whooping and much congratulating of Pete
     the Bastard for his audacity We took it in turns to lean
     through from the back, ruffle his hair, clap him on the
     shoulder, flick him on the ears. He calculated that the
incident
     had cost us in the region of sixty pounds. We reckoned this
     was a small price to pay to avoid disappearing for ever into
a
     Communist slammer
       In Berlin, we had just enough time to set ourselves up
     before the club's doors opened. We were playing upstairs in
     some sort of converted office space and there were about six
     hundred people in the audience, most of them terrifyingly

fashionable. A handful near the front seemed to know the
songs, and were mouthing along with the words, which was
hugely  inspiring,  though  I  wasn't  about  to  swing  the
microphone  out  to  the  audience,  Bono-style,  shouting,
`C'mon, sing it', cupping a hand to one ear Personally, I
always hate it when rock stars do that, but I can imagine it
must be pretty gratifying to hear the lyric you dashed off in
ten minutes one night on a sheet of hotel stationery passion-
ately echoed back by ten thousand fans.
  Afterwards, the woman who owned the club - a deep-
voiced Dietrich figure, in her fifties probably, in thick make-
up and swirling black gown - took us to a restaurant and
passed round a small black box filled with neatly rolled
joints. Ichiro, wasting no time at all, went home with the
waitress.
  We had most of the next day free to sightsee. Nigel, Tony,
Dave and I went to the Berlin Wall and, under a low sky,
climbed one of the sets of wooden viewing stairs which
enabled you to look over across the mined sand, past the
military control tower to the grey apartment buildings on
the other side. We stood silently for some time, staring out
across this division, each of us doubtless pondering the fate of
nations and planning the meaningful pop song we would
write on our return.
  At each destination the RCA press office had set up inter-
views for me, with fanzines and rock magazines called things
like Ya!, Rockfest OK! and Boom!. The first question was
always: `Where is Martin Newell?' (except on a couple of
occasions when the interviewer assumed I was Martin
Newell). To which my stock response was, `He's at home
doing the garden.' Then I would go into a few details about
his problem with touring. Then we would talk earnestly
about the Beatles. In the afternoon before we played at Heid-

elberg University, a cable television station filmed an inter-
view in a disused concrete auditorium in the hills above the
town. In the car on the way back, I asked the producer what
this building had been. He said it had been built by Hitler for
rallies.
  In an unlikely concession to luxury, the van had an on-
board video, but a strictly limited supply of films. The defi-
nition of boredom is sitting in a traffic jam between Dort-
mund and Munich, watching Airplane for the ninth time in a
week. We sustained ourselves through the longer journeys by
drinking warm vodka and orange mixed in plastic cups.
  This was only a fortnight's touring, but it wasn't without
its insights into what a life like this might be. Every move on
every day was routined. I passed from hotel to van to venue
to hotel . . . At no point did I have to think or make any
decision for myself. Rather like the Queen, I didn't even have
to carry money around. Whatever I drank or ate was silently
settled for in my absence. I felt removed from the world,
cosseted, rigorously overseen. It reminded me most of all of
that stay in hospital when I had my spleen removed. This is
what it would be like to be Phil Collins. It would be like being
in hospital.
  In the window of a large record store in Munich, we spot-
ted our album sleeve, mounted right there beside Prefab
Sprout's From Langley Parlt To Memphis. Tony the guitarist,
who had a strong instinct for the impermanence of our
condition, took a photograph.
  In a converted railway building in Dortmund, a huge,
bare-shouldered skinhead eased himself out of the crowd and
on to the stage. At the microphone, I could see him coming
out of the corner of my eye. I wondered about dumping my
guitar and leaping over the monitor into the audience. But the
next moment, he was upon me. I felt his hot arm go round my

neck. And then I felt the smack of his lips on my cheek as he
kissed me. With that, he bounced away. It was the best sex I
had all tour There had been a distinct absence of screaming
girls under our hotel windows when we arrived. There still
weren't any as the fortnight went on. A couple of the shows
went well, but mostly we were just getting away with it. We
arrived in Stuttgart to find our gig had been cancelled without
explanation.
  In Hamburg, on the tour's penultimate night, we were
booked into the Grosse Freiheit again, scene of our former
triumph. That afternoon taxis sped me smoothly from radio
station to newspaper office (`Where is Martin Newell?') and
then to a cafe in a park where I recorded an interview for use
on the radio that evening. It was here that the press girl asked
me if I needed a drink. I said an orange juice would be very
nice. She returned from the counter carrying not one orange
juice, but two. It wasn't as if they were uniquely small
orange juices. This was Germany: the orange juice came in a
giant frosted tumbler, slopping tidally on a bed of ice and
sprigged to the hilt with innumerable, deftly origami'd
orange slices. But she �brought me two anyway, just in case.
And in this absurd over-provision, I glimpsed the pampering
that must accompany real rock stars all the time.
  I wasn't aware of the precise moment that the chairman of
RCA Germany walked out. I learned afterwards from our
publisher that it was during the third number. This was
always interpreted afterwards as a sign of his contempt
although, of course, it may simply have been that he had an
urgent appointment in an underground car park. I'm not sure
what my reaction would have been if I had seen him leaving,
but I suspect I would have left my guitar on the stage, jumped
do�vn and run after him across the room towards the exit,

shouting, `No! Stay! It gets much better towards the middle.
Really! We're just warming up! Please!'
  His leaving so early was a shame for many reasons (not
least for the future of the band's career), but it did mean he
was spared the sight of me dealing ineptly with a small crowd
disturbance half-way through `Follow The Plough'. A fight
started at the front, right below me - nothing too nasty, just
two blokes who had grown tired of colliding as they leapt
about and had decided to thump each other a bit instead. If I
had been a pop star in the Messianic tradition I would have
handled this much better than I did, perhaps by raising my
hand to silence the band before leaning into the microphone
and saying, in a low, yet resoundingly contemptuous tone:
`Our music cannot be the soundtrack to your violence.' Cue
gargantuan applause and appreciative roaring and whistling
from the audience and an immediate outbreak of lighted
candles.
  As it was, with the music continuing to rage, I broke off
from singing and, more than a little panicked, shouted, in a
voice which chose this moment to go strangely high on me:
`Don't!'
  They ignored me, hit each other a few more times, got
bored and went back to dancing.
  I didn't think the gig that night was too bad. It would have
been better if Newell had been there, but we were tight and
loud, and people jumped about and we were called back
three times. Maybe at the Grosse Freiheit people don't feel
they've had a proper night out unless the band plays four
encores and, at the conclusion of the last, induces a large-
scale religious vision and announces a peace process for the
Middle East. Because in the dressing room immediately after-
wards, slumped in a chair trying to get my breath back, I

received a visit from Ulrika the publisher and someone
I didn't know from the RCA office, walking behind her as if
he was on his way to a funeral. Ulrika stood solemn-faced
directly in front of me and said, `Can it be any better?'
  The room swam slightly. For an instant it occurred to me
that, exhausted and partly deafened as I was, I had misheard
her and what she had actually said was, `That was the single
most shuddering musical experience I have ever had. You
took me to places I had no idea rock could go. I love you, and
I want you to live with me here in Hamburg and have my
children.'
  But, as I continued to look up at her, the mist cleared and
her face came into focus again. She was saying, `Can it be any
better?'
  And I thought hard about this question before I answered.
  `Er . . . no. It probably can't be.'
  And I was right. It couldn't. It didn't. It wasn't.

Back in Cambridge, I talked excitedly about the tour - about
the skinhead in Dortmund, the sight of our album sleeve
next to Prefab Sprout's in Berlin, the orange-juice incident.
Especially the orange juice incident. I dined out on that
orange juice. What I tended to leave out were the stories of
the chairman's desertion and of my backstage confrontation
with Ulrika. I felt too sore about them. And I knew what they
foreshadowed.
  I calmed myself down by listening to a lot of records that I
really loved. It may be one of the definitions of true greatness
in a pop song that you cannot even begin to think about
emulating it while it is playing. It's the last thing on your
mind. I began to wonder whether my problem wasn't that I
had listened to too much bad music, but to too much
mediocre music, music which was only half good and so

encouraged you to believe you could do as well - that maybe
on an exclusive, high-fibre diet of Aretha Franklin, Otis
Redding and the Temptations, I would never have begun to
evolve the appetites I did. Maybe there's a case for stickering
albums - in addition to the Parental Advisory stickers, which
warn  that  a  recording  contains  strong  language,  an
Emulation Discourager sticker reading: `Don't Try This At
Home'.
  I went down to Denmark Street a few more times, fiddled
around in the studio to no particular end, talked to the man-
ager and Pete the Bastard. Newell wasn't in touch with them   ,
and they weren't in touch with him. The studio was more
run-down than ever, close to the brink. One day, the manager
called me through to his office.
  `They sold four hundred copies of the CD,' he said.
  `Brilliant!' I said.
  He looked at me sternly. `No,' he said. `Not brilliant. Forty
thousand would have been OK. Four hundred is piss poor.'
  And, shortly after that, the manager quit - walked out and
was gone. Pete the Bastard hung on grimly for a while, long
enough to receive the call from RCA cancelling our deal.
  Not long after this, the owner of the studio appeared to
assess the damage. The company was run down so far that he
had little choice but to close up and sell. A middle-aged man
in a nylon shirt turned up to write an inventory. I had to have
a meeting with him and the owner to ask for permission to
keep the master tapes of the Cleaners, which were now in
danger of being flogged for scrap.
  The man in the nylon shirt sat back in his chair and said,
smugly, `I do not believe some of the things I have found in
this building. It will be very interesting if any of this ever
goes
public. Very interesting indeed.'
  I wasn't sure what this veiled threat could refer to, other

than an old pair of Pete the Bastard's socks. But at least he
agreed to hand over the tapes.
  Occasionally, I get asked, `Did you see any money from the
Cleaners from Venus?' and yes, I am still seeing money from
the Cleaners from Venus. As many people know, the big
bucks in music are made from publishing and performance
royalties, the fees paid by radio and television for the use of
your work. My royalty statements from the Performing
Rights Society arrive twice a year, regular as clockwork. Last
summer I received thirty-two pence.
  The last I heard of Pete the Bastard, he was involved in
exporting videos to war-torn Yugoslavia. The manager went
into music publishing. Not long ago, I received in the post a
tape containing a remixed version of `A Mercury Girl', a song
from our first album. A cheery letter from the manager
informed me that he was intending to punt this number
towards the publicity people at Mercury Communications in
the hope that they would notice the striking similarity
between the lyric and their corporate name and begin using
the song in their advertising. `If they accept it,' he wrote,
`it's
Milky Bars all round.' But they didn't.
              Phil Collins

When the Cleaners collapsed, I tried to reconcile myself to the
fact that a position in the rock aristocracy would lie for ever
beyond me. I had to realize that Bob Geldof would not be a
guest at my wedding, that Annie Lennox's daughter would
not be a bridesmaid, that confetti would not be thrown by an
elegantly morning-suited and broadly smiling David Bowie. I
had to realize also that my grant was about to run out and
I needed to earn some money. I started writing about pop
music, which I suppose had the consolation that it was one of
the few other occupations in which you might get to hang out
with Bob and Annie and David.
  The truth is, in the 1990s, `hanging out' is something pop
journalists don't do a lot of. If you were Nick Kent in the
1970s, or Lester Bangs, or if you were a Rolling Stone staff-
writer, hanging out was the centre of your craft; you would
get to hang out until you could hang no further Covering the
Who, say, would have involved spending a couple of weeks
with them in the studio, just sitting around, watching, gas-
sing, taking notes and drugs in dangerously unequal quanti-
ties. Or maybe you would join them on tour, be on the bus
with them and in the hotel and under the table. You had
access to all areas. You got to know how it looked, how it
sounded, how it smelt.
  Typical that by the time I started interviewing pop stars,
journalists were down to an hour (if you're lucky) in a
London hotel room, rented specially for the occasion - prob-
ably the same London hotel room in which you interviewed
some other rock star on the PR treadmill just the week before
- outside which would be a queue of other journalists, all

waiting to get their hour (if they were lucky) and all carefully
marshalled by the record company PR (who might wish to sit
in on an interview with you, just in case you asked the ques-
tion about the little boys). In the 1980s, record companies
learned the meaning of Public Relations, and they learned
it principally from Hollywood, which taught the virtues of
controlled exposure, of doing your utmost to obstruct and
cajole and boil journalism down until you had it right where
you wanted it, until it was little more than an extension of the
industry's PR arm or marketing department, another selling
tool.
  Tvpical of the modern way of doing things would be the
day I spent in Rome with Phil Collins. This was for a piece for
Q magazine. I got two hours each way in a four-seater Lear
jet from Gatwick (paid for by Atlantic Records, Phil's over-
seas label) with Phil, Phil's assistant and Ken the photog-
rapher. And in between, a hectic dash by limo round Italian
TV and radio studios for Phil to plug his latest album. Spot
the fish-with-its-tail-in-its-mouth aspect of that and win a
Genesis boxed set. This is how self-contained the public-
relations machine has become. Record companies can now
set up situations in which you watch the artist doing inter-
views that the record company has set up. This grants you the
illusion of access, but really only makes you play the PR game
at one remove - seeming to observe how Phil lives and works,
but only observing how he lives and works while he's doing
publicity.
  Still, I had a high old time, especially the bit where we
came out of the side-door of the TV studio surrounded by
bouncers who had to manhandle us through the thronging
fans (Italians have got a bit of a thing for Phil) and duck us
down into the limo. I'd always wanted to do that.
  Some eight months later, drifting stupidly round a record

company party after the Grammy awards in New York, I
bumped into Phil on his way out. I know that pop stars meet
many journalists in the course of their business. I knew that
the odds on Phil Collins recognizing me were not great. I
wasn't expecting any high-fiving, any mutual clapping of our
suited shoulder-blades; I didn't think there would be a grate-
ful hug, from which he would pull back, still holding me
firmly by the elbows, and say, `Giles, boy, long bloody time,
my friend! Jesus, but I've missed you!'
  And given that any other outcome would have been dis-
appointing, the obvious thing to do was to walk on by. Who
needs a stilted and embarrassing exchange of hellos with Phil
Collins?
  Me, clearly.
  `Er, Phil? Giles Smith? I went with you to Rome?'
  Collins gave me a suspicious squint. I could see his mental
Rolodex spin and come up blank.
  `And now you're here,' he said.
  Well, it was true. He couldn't say fairer than that. I was,
indeed, there.
  `Gotta go,' he added. `Very tired.'
  You have, of course, to retain your perspective somehow.
The  interviewer/interviewee  relationship  is  a  temporary
arrangement for business purposes. It will not lead to your
being asked to join Simply Red on congas. But it doesn't help
when the interviewee pretends to befriend you. My interview
with Lionel Richie took place in his dressing room at the Top
of the Pops studio. He was eating a King Cone, which had
melted badly, forcing him to sit forward in his chair with a
wastebin on the floor between his knees to catch the drips. At
the conclusion of the forty-five minutes for which Lionel was
prepared to share his thoughts, he and I shook hands - his
was rather sticky by now - and suddenly he had an arm

round my shoulder and was wagging a finger at his assistant.
`I want you to make sure', he told her, `that this person
becomes one of my special people.'
  But does he ever write? Does he ever call? Does he hell.
  What dies hard is the conflict between your duties as a
reporter and your instincts as a fan. It wasn't, for example,
exactly professional of me a minute and a half into an inter-
view with Paul McCartney in 1989, to come over all faint. (I
was a bit overexcited and I hadn't had an;� lunch.) He was
extremely nice about it and covered for me during my con-
fusion by chatting amiably until I'd recovered strength
enough to ask him a question. But it was always going to be
hard for me to conduct a deeply probing inquisition after
that.
  And what were the odds on me nailing Stevie Wonder to
the wall? I did get to meet him eventually, in 1991 on the top
floor of the Chelsea Harbour Hotel, just after the release of
the Jungle Fever soundtrack album. I was more nervous than
before any Cleaners gig: worried about not liking him,
worried about him not liking me, w hich is perhaps not some-
thing an interviewer should care about, though how could I
not? And, yes, I asked the photographer to take an extra
picture or two of us together - the only time I've done this, I
swear (There used to be a pop columnist on one of the tab-
loids whose walls were practically held together by pictures
of himself at parties with his arms around the famous. But
most of these images of chumminess had been acquired by
subterfuge - him and the photographer jumping out simul-
tan�ously, snatching the shot and leaving - so what you saw
was the columnist with a shocked Cher, an amazed Seal,
a frightened Kylie, etc.) That first meeting took place in a
cramped annex to his hotel suite and lasted for all of twenty
minutes with, for the last five of these, an intrusive press

woman from Motown America hovering behind him making
wind-it-up signals at me, helping to render the experience
about as intimate and unstressful as a prison visit.
  Yet, at the end, Stevie took me through to the room next
door, where various members of his entourage were draped
on the sofas, sat down at the set of keyboards which travel
everywhere with him and played and sang me a new,
speeded-up version of `All I Do', which made the hair on my
arms stand up. These were precious and powerful moments.
They were moments I will never forget. But it's not as if he's
been pestering me at work ever since.
  Say what you like about Lou Reed, at least he's honest.
The second time I interviewed him, his assistant showed me
in, saying, `Lou, you remember Giles Smith.'
  `No,' said Lou, a block of ice in shades. `No, I do not.'
  So, pop journalism as vicarious star-mingling? It doesn't
work out. You get closer to them than in your wildest
dreams. And further away from them than you ever imagined
you could be.
The Orphans: still alive

 I'm at this wedding in Oxfordshire in the summer of 1991.
 It's midway through the evening, quite a long time after the
 dinner, and people are loosened up, many of them dancing
 in large, well-dressed clumps to a surprisingly good reggae
 band. Holding a glass, I step outside the marquee for some air
 and there, in the half-light, a tall, expensively suited man in
 his early twenties comes up.
   I don't recognize him at first, because he's the youngest
 brother of a friend from university and the last time I met him
 he was a small boy with a high voice. And this in itself is a
 startling moment for me, because for the first time in my life
 I have to stop myself saying that thing which I thought
 only aunts were supposed to say, `Good Lord! Haven't
 you grown! '
   But I just manage to swallow those words and we get the
 reintroductions over, and just as I'm readying myself to go in
 on some kind of so-what-are-you-doing-now? angle, he
 drops the big one.
   `I am the Orphans of Babylon's biggest fan.'
   I narrow my eyes slightly, because naturally I'm thinking,
 This is a wind-up job. Someone here has put him up to this.
 The Orphans of Babylon didn't have fans: we had curious
 onlookers. And, anyway, that was about six years ago, some-
 where else. I offer a wary smile, waiting for the catch, the
 punch-line, but it doesn't seem to be coming.
   `Pinch Me, I Think I'm In Kent!' he says. `What an album!'
 And then he tells mc how, along with a friend, he broke into
 his brother's bedroom one day, years ago, looking for tapes to
 steal.

  `We read the title, put it on and thought, Now, this is what
we want.'
  They took it back to school with them, he says. They
introduced it to their friends. It became a shower-room
singalong, a dorm classic. I am agog, confused, suspicious.
  ` "Ray Reardon",' he says. `Great song!' And suddenly,
and utterly without embarrassment, he starts singing.

      That was a helluva break by Ray Reardon
      That was a helluva break by old Ray
      That was a helluva break by Ray Reardon . .

  And on the fourth line, I join in, very quietly, just mouthing
the words really, in disbelief.

      Green, yellow and blue.

  Second verse, now, and his voice is strong and proud:

      That was a helluva break by Ray Reardon
      When he potted them down that lucky day . . .

  And my voice is rising in volume to meet him:

      . . . He potted, he potted the lot
      Green, yellow and blue.

  Into the middle section and we're starting to motor, eye to
eye.

      Down he went for a little old red
      And he potted it, he potted it, it went down the hole
      Followed by a yellow and a green and a blue

       And it made up a hundred and two
       It made up a hundred and two!

  And then round the bend into the final verse, snatching
little handfuls of the air in between us, pointing home some
of the lines with our forefingers, heads tipped back, elbows
out wide, wriggling on the spot in a version of the twist . . .

      That was a helluva break by Ray Reardon
      That was a helluva break by old Ray-ee-ay-ee-ay
      That was a helluva break by Ray Reardon
      Green, yellow and blue
      GREEN, YELLOW AND BLUE!

  . . . until we hit the endnote, shouting with laughter, hoot-
ing into the darkness.
  It all goes a bit quiet after that. There's a rather difficult
period where we both rock gently on the balls of our feet
and I look down into my empty glass, which is now hot and
misted for having been held too long. Finally I lift my head.
`So, how is your brother, anyway?'
  And he says, `Fine. Yes. Very well. Fine.'
  There's another pause and he says, `Well, nice seeing you
again.'
  And I say, `Yes, nice seeing you, too,' and he goes back into
the marquee.
            Grace Jones

Just recently, I've been thinking about upgrading my speaker
wire. Evidently the wires which come as standard on most
factory-fitted speakers are inferior sound carriers by compari-
son with the posh, furiously expensive copper cabling avail-
able from specialist stores. The copper stuff, they say, sends
the noise down a treat. This is what a friend told me. So
I've been stooped behind the sofa, thoughtfully fingering the
ridged plastic shoelaces, brittle with age, which currently
transport the music from my amplifier to my speakers and
speculating on what might be getting lost along the way.
  It's a little alarming to find oneself worrying in such detail
about the performance of one's hi-fi, but I console myself that
I am not alone. In 1993, a lot of people seemed to get caught
up in the excitement which followed the revelation that CDs
performed better if, before playing them, you placed them for
a while in the freezer compartment of your fxidge. Somehow
this crisped them up. The fad briefly gave a new dimension to
the old joke about the contents of the sad bachelor's Indesit:
one carton of milk (half empty), one hazelnut yoghurt (off)
and a Led Zeppelin boxed set.
  What kind of person originally thinks of these things? To
whom does it suddenly occur: `I wonder what this CD would
sound like if I put it in the fridge for a while?' Someone, I
would speculate, for whom pop isn't doing quite what it used
to. Someone a bit like me.
  Not that I was ever tempted to experiment with disc-chill-
ing, partly because it was so nerdy, but mostly because it
would have involved me defrosting the fridge, the freezer
compartment of which would have been, as usual, bulging

with accumulated ice, to the degree that I would never have
got a CD in there other than by bashing it home edge-wise
with a mountaineer's mallet.
  Anyway, my resolve on this one was never tested. The
fridge-as-CD-rack notion didn't take off, chiefly, I suppose,
because, short of finding room to freeze your entire collec-
tion, you would be forced to select and cold-store your CDs
some hours in advance of listening to them; and in the end
you can't reliably plan ahead with music the way you can
with, say, food.
  Just like the disc-chillers, though, I find I am increasingly
drawn to think about hi-fi in more peculiar, microscopic
terms. If you are genuinely interested in music systems, you
can make an appointment with one of the top-notch, perfec-
tionist dealers. Some kind of woofer consultant or tweeter
expert then comes round to your house and performs a thor-
ough investigation of the acoustics in your living room and at
the end of this advises you what system to buy, where to place
the speakers so that they function most gloriously, how to
house the amplifiers to avoid unwanted interference from
other electrical sources like lights and televisions (inaudible
unless you're a gnat, but there it is), and at what volume to
operate the system for maximum joy. If you're serious about
this, he may come up with a list of recommended acoustic
adjustments to further enhance your listening pleasure: line
your curtains with egg boxes, cut all the pages out of your
books, wrap the cat in tin foil, etc.
  And I am desperately, desperately drawn to this as a con-
cept: that you would tailor all of your domestic arrangements
to the construction of the ultimate stereo, the perfect system,
from which the sound would zing around you, massaging
every pore. (I like to imagine that in some of the more volatile
set-ups the listener isn't even allowed to go into the room,

because to do so would screw up the minutely refined sonic
balance.) Costs a fortune, of course. So, in the absence of
that, perhaps those copper speaker wires . . .
  I think I first became aware of my increasing commitment
to nearly pointless hi-fi tweaking in 1992, when I bought a
pair of speaker stands. Speaker stands are not, by most
people's reckoning, essential items. In some respects, they are
to hi-fi what the manager and trainer figures and the TV
tower were to a Subbuteo football set: nothing to do with the
game, and yet, once the initial excitement of owning a pitch
and players had died down, utterly crucial. (True, you're less
likely to snap your speaker stands by kneeling on them when
going up for a corner, but I think the analogy holds firm.)
  In the flat I had at the time, my speakers were positioned
against the wall on a low shelf. I was perfectly happy with
them there until a friend came round and explained the prin-
ciples behind stands: how they allow the air to circulate
round the speakers, how they minimize the amount of sound
being soaked up by whatever the speakers rest on or against,
and how you might just as well dump your speakers in a lead
casket and bury them in the garden as not sit them on stands.
  A certain kind of neurosis takes over following conver-
sations like this, the same kind of paranoia that originally
induced me to buy a CD player. Even before the friend had
left, I had managed to convince myself that 50 per cent of the
sound generated by my hi-fi was passing through the wall
into the house next door, 40 per cent was dropping through
the ceiling to the flat downstairs and that I should count
myself lucky if I could catch the remaining 10 per cent by
pressing my ear to the gauze.
  The stands I bought were tall, a fusion of matt black metal
tubes and plates, with steel needles for feet - the kind of
thing advertising executives in the early 1980s bought to sit

on. They were, needless to say, not an impulse buy, but a
completely pre-scripted purchase, based on about a month of
in-store reconnaissance, yet informed, finally, by no genuine,
purposeful  knowledge  whatsoever  I  had  dismissed  the
smaller ones on display because . . . well, because they were
smaller.
  From an interior design point of view, the effect of the twin
towers I chose was to make the speakers rather dominant.
You could now see them from anywhere in the room. In
fact, you could see them from almost anywhere in the street.
Impressed, I subjected the whole revised arrangement to what
was then, and remains, my standard test when any new piece
of equipment arrives, or when any aspect of the existing set-
up changes position: playing, at volume, the 12-inch version
of Grace Jones's `Slave To The Rhythm', perhaps the most
sonically gorgeous record I know.
  Actually, I prefer to think of it as Trevor Horn's `Slave To
The Rhythm': he produced the track and it's he who casts its
parts and creates its drama - the film-score strings and wind,
the tremendous tambourine, the little flute theme that sud-
denly lifts out of the track's booming core and skips along the
top for a while. The arrangement is clearly intended to glorify
Jones, to make a big, glossy fuss of her as she sings, but
for me she's just doing her usual, one-dimensional, draggy
cabaret act and she's way down the bill here.
  The minute `Slave To The Rhythm' started to take off -
that bright `ching' from the finger-cymbal, that little huff of
synthesized breath underneath it - the improvement in sound
quality was startling. Startlingly small, that is. There was
perhaps a touch more at the top end, a touch more at the
bottom, maybe a touch more in the middle too, I don't know.
Was that a more chingy `ching' I heard? A more huffy huff?
Possibly. But how much of the increased immediacy was

down to the fact that speakers which were once neatly tidied
to the side of the room now had me forced back in my seat
with my nose squashed ? It's hard to say.
  The point was, something was different, and when the
initial disappointment about the scale of the difference sub-
sided, this small betterment began to look welcome and
important even. Indeed, that the stands had made a minor
improvement rather than a giant, ball-bustingly obvious,
major one, seemed appealingly professional of them. I felt
they flattered me with their precision. I was the kind of
person for whom these almost incalculably minute distinc-
tions mattered.
  I imagine the effect of attaching new copper speaker wires
would be similarly imperceptible and similarly gratifying. It
might afford me some of the pleasure I got late in 1992 when
I upgraded my Phillips CD-player to a Marantz `Bitstream'
model. I had no idea what `Bitstream' was, but the word
sounded good - nubby and computer-related and at the same
time sexily fluid - and the machine came with a hand-held
remote control, so you can make the disc-tray go in and
out from the other side of the room, which I enjoy doing
enormously. (You still have to get up to load it, of course, but
what the heck.)
  Cables, stands, remote controls . . . it seems clear to me
that this twitchy hi-fi business is a displacement activity. It
is
one of the ways in which I attempt to settle with my con-
science over this continuing commitment to pop. It's my way
of grounding it - however spuriously - in science and at the
same time making it seem a bit more like work, a bit more
like a proper adult preoccupation. Which is to say that, at
my age, I might feel a little self-conscious in the newsagent
queuing with the NME, but I kid myself I can escape from
this if I wrap around it a copy of What Speaker Wire.
chapter 11
         Blur

Back in Colchester for Christmas Eve in 1992, I went to a
very civilized, early-evening drinks party at the house of
a close friend's family and was startled to find myself in the
same room as Damon Albarn of Blur and his parents, Mr
and Mrs Albarn. Incredible: you spend the best part of your
childhood looking out for pop stars in Colchester and then,
when it no longer matters quite so much, they start wander-
ing into your friends' parents' homes. Damon was sporting a
punky rug and had a bootlace knotted round his neck. Mr
and Mrs Albarn were wearing casual Christmas evening wear
and, just briefly, all four of us were involved in one of those
parents-plus-son-combination Christmas conversations.
  `Damon has had rather a good twelve months,' Mr Albarn
told me enthusiastically, as his son fidgeted with slight embar-
rassment beside him. `We're just hoping he can keep it up
nextyear'
  And, of course, he did keep it up, next year and the
year after, going from strength to strength, touring like a
fiend, recording the Parklife album, narrowly missing the
Mercury Music Prize and generally getting written about
everywhere as a fine thing.
  Later, when carols were sung around the piano, Albarn (all
credit to him) joined in unashamedly and I found myself
looking on at a unique Christmas tableau - an impromptu
choir featuring the parents of some of my oldest school-
friends, my mother and the lead singer of Blur.
  Utterly predictable, of course, that when someone from my
family finally got to duet with a chart-topping pop hero, it
was my mother.

         Sisters With Voices

1993, autumn. I am on holiday in America with my girl-
friend. We've heard a song we like on the radio in the car   ;
we've picked it up at least three times but without ever hear-
ing the DJ say what it is. We are determined, though, that we
will hunt it down and own it, in the knowledge that in the
future, played in any car, anywhere, this song will now
summon effortlessly to mind this particular hired car and
whole portions of our journeying, complete strips of road
and landscape and weather, better than any roll of film or
video camera.
  So the next time we're in a town we find a record shop and
I lead the way cockily over to where the cassette singles are,
an entire wall of them, and begin looking.
  `What are you doing?' she says.
  I say, `I'm looking for that song.'
  `But we don't know who it's by. Or what it's called.'
  `Well, it had the word "weak" in it a lot. It's probably in
the title. We're just looking for a title with the word "weak"
in it.'
  There is a pause. I am standing on tiptoe, running a finger
very slowly down a towering stack of shrink-wrapped
cassettes. I already sense the next question and I don't want it
to come.
  She says, `Why don't you ask the man behind the counter?'
  `No!' I squeak, in a voice suddenly high with panic. `You
can't do that.'
  `But he might know it straight away-'
  `No! He won't. Well, he might. But don't.'
  No, I would rather stare until I am squint-eyed at this wall

of some seven thousand thin cassette spines in search of a
song of which I know neither the name nor the performer. It
seems to me that permanently impaired vision would be a
small price to pay for not having to go and talk to the man
behind the counter, for not having to confess my ignorance,
for not having to make myself vulnerable in that way. And I
may well be in my early thirties and capable, more or less, of
mature, balanced behaviour in relation to some of the clutter
(bills, tax, insurance) which comes with an adult life but I
will not asl� a question in a record shop. (And this despite the
best efforts of the music-retailing profession worldwide to
make record shops safe for people like me.) Because of the
risks. Because what if this song turns out to have been at
the top of the American chart for the last seventy-three
weeks? What if it is this giant, phenomenally naff item, and
somehow we don't know about it? What if, what if . . .
  There's another pause and suddenly she's not standing
beside me. And I'm worried, because I think I know where
she's gone.
  Next thing, I hear her at the counter saying, `I wonder if
you could help me. We're looking for this song, but we don't
know what it's called, or who it's by . . .'
  At this point, I have to put out a hand to stop myself
collapsing face first into the display module. The room swims
slightly and I'm thinking, This is terrible. But it's OK, I'm not
going to pass out.
  And then . . . and then she starts singing it to him.
  I can't believe this. Singing in a record shop! Where does
she think she is?
  He, though, immediately bounces out from behind the
counter and leads her back over to where I am, crouched
now with my neck bent sideways through ninety degrees,
somewhere in the `Fs', teeth clenched, breathing hard, having

absolutely nothing to do with this. And he leans into the rack
above me, with a light `Pardon me, sir' and pulls out the
single we're looking for (Which is, we now learn, `Weak' by
Sisters With Voices, so nothing to panic unduly on the non-
recognition front, although, for some reason, I still feel that
I
really ought to have known.)
  The two of them trip happily back to the counter and settle
up. I straighten slowly, pull myself together a little and follow
her out of the door a short while after
  `I knew it was called "Weak",' I say, trying lamely to sal-
vage something from this. But she is a long way ahead of me
and doesn't hear.
 The Cleaners from Venus and then some

Since the Cleaners from Venus, Martin Newell and I have
got on just fine. There are no outstanding legal cases, no
undignified fights for rights, few personal recriminations.
Ours is not a Roger Waters/Dave Gilmour situation. As at the
end of any relationship, there was a cooling-off period in
which neither of us was particularly bursting for each other's
company until finally we realized we could be adult about it
and see each other again.
  Newell came out of the whole business intact. For a while
he did no music at all, just buried himself, as it were, in the
gardening. Then he got the urge again, as musicians are
cursed to, and he became involved with Nel in a kind of folk/
pop busking duo called the Brotherhood of Lizards. This
was, I suspect, a project through which Newell hoped to
wash the mess of the last three years right out of his hair,
to forget all the delusions of grandeur and the spent hopes
and get back to his roots. The Brotherhood of Lizards did a
tour of Britain by bike.
  And then Newell cut out the music again and started writ-
ing poetry. I-le wrote comic verse, much of it about pop
music, and he got himself on to the poetry gig circuit in a sort
of John Cooper Clarke role. And finally, in the autumn of
1993, he signed another record deal with a small independent
company and was given a budget to make an album on his
own.
  And who agreed to produce it? Only Andy bloody Par-
tridge of XTC, that's all.
 Newell rang me up to tell me about this. There is a whole
range of emotions you run through when your former musi-

cal partner ends up making an album with one of your
all-time heroes. And not all of those emotions are cha-
ritable. `I can't believe it,' Newell said. And neither could
I. In fact, I was hoping, right at that minute, that I would
wake up and discover he had never phoned me at all with
this news. My first reaction was to shimmer at the injus-
tice of it. Sure, Newell admired XTC, but it was me who had
all  the  singles  in  plastic  slip  covers.  It  was  me  who
could accurately mime-drum any Terry Chambers part you
cared to mention. It was me who had the back numbers of
Limelight,  the  XTC  fanzine,  to  which  I  had  once
contributed an eight-hundred-word article on XTC's sleeve
designs.
  But then I began to see that this was precisely the reason
it was Newell, and not me, who was about to be sitting in
Andy Partridge's home studio for a month. Because Newell
was first and foremost a musician, and I was first and
foremost a fan. There was still room for Newell's rela-
tionship with Andy Partridge to become a professional one,
whereas I'd have been getting him to autograph things all the
time.
  Those initial pangs of jealousy soon made way for another
kind of anxiety: what if the fruits of this collaboration
between Newell and Partridge made Newell exceptionally
famous? What if, now free of our relationship, he thundered
into the Top Ten and I started seeing his face everywhere and
hearing his music in shops? I care about Newell way too
much ever to wish him ill. I care about him enough always to
wish him well. But not that well. And once again, I'm forced
to use the boyfriend/girlfriend analogy. I felt uneasy about
Newell's possible future in the way in which you would feel
uneasy about your ex-girlfriend going on to marry Hugh
Grant. I wasn't that keen to end up a Pete Best figure: Giles

Smith, Colchester's nearly man, interviewed briefly for the
`Martin Newell at 50' celebrations on BBC2.
  It was Newell himself who nursed me through the worst of
this. In a small but significant way, he cut me in on the deal:
he invited me to visit him during the recording sessions in the
green shed at the bottom of Partridge's garden in Swindon. I
arrived in the afternoon and made myself comfortable at the
back of the room. Partridge had just put down a soaring,
Mott the Hoople-style guitar solo. Now he was recording
Newell playing some rhythm-guitar parts. If you had told me
in 1986 that I would one day sit in Andy Partridge's shed,
watching him recording a track by Martin Newell, and that
later all three of us would go up the pub, I would have
laughed in your face. I felt strange and uneasy for most of
that afternoon and �vening, as if I was about to be exposed as
the victim of some elaborate practical joke. It didn't make it
any easier to swallow that Partridge was just as funny and
clever and approachable as we had always imagined he
would be.
  When the album was mixed and finished, I went down to
Newell's house in Wivenhoe and he played it to me on tape
all the way through, the two of us crouched in front of a
ghetto blaster (still no hi-fi round at Newell's!. He had named
it The Greatest Living Englishman, after one of its best
tracks. As we listened, Newell glazed over with pride and was
clearly, from time to time, trying to control smiles of pleasure
at vrhat he had achieved here. This might strike you as insen-
sitive behaviour but it is normai and acceptable conduct for
musicians. Writers tend to be much more guarded and shifty
about the way they expose new work. Musicians whack their
tapes into your machine, crank the volume high and sit down
right there with you while it plays. I've been in this position
with musicians countless times and I have never known

someone wear a look which says, `I'm a bit unsure about this:
what do you think?' On the contrary, music seems to fill its
makers with a prickly excitement about themselves.
  Of course, this wildly compromises your critical responses
as a listener I once interviewed Janet Jackson and midway
through the interview, to my stomach-sinking horror, she
passed her Walkman across the table to me, saying, `Here,
take a listen to this. It's my new single.'
  And I had to sit there, under a pair of expensively padded
headphones, while she sat opposite, picking at a packet of
Crackers and wearing one of those `I'm about to laugh, I'm
so pleased with this' looks. I, meanwhile, went into a flat
spin. How was I supposed to respond? Toss my head from
side-to-side, with my eyes closed, smiling blissfully? Whoop
at some crucial moment - like where the verse slotted into the
chorus? Talk to her during the song about the bits I liked,
shouting embarrassingly, as people do when they're wearing
headphones? In the end, I settled for a steady nod and an
expression of eager pleasure from start to finish, at which
point I took off the headphones and said something excru-
ciating like, `Just sensational', though I had been concentrat-
ing way too hard on how I was reacting to listen to the
music.
  I had no problems like this auditioning Newell's new
album. At the end of it, I was able to tell him - and I really
meant it - that his album was great, the best piece of work he
had ever done, infinitely superior to anything the two of
us had managed. I thought Partridge had brought out things
in his voice that Newell himself probably didn't know were
there, and had filled the music with all kinds of lovely
touches. The album was crisp and professional-sounding, yet
retained something of a warm, home-made feel - which was
the balance Newell had always been after, the whole time I'd

known him. And the songs were as fluently melodic as ever. It
was Cleaners from Venus and then some.
  And every night for about a month when I went to bed, I
prayed to God that it wouldn't be a hit.
            Tony Blair

`Language', wrote Ben Jonson, `most shows a man. Speak
that I may see thee.' Failing that, he might have added, let me
have a quick flick through your record collection because if
anything else is going to give away the kind of person thou
art, that is.
  Shortly after he succeeded the late John Smith as leader of
the Labour Party, Tony Blair was asked in an interview what
kind of pop music he liked. (As the 1960s generation ascends
to positions of political prominence, this is a question we're
going to be hearing a lot more.) Mr Blair came up with REM,
Seal and Annie Lennox. I'm prepared to believe he fired these
names off the top of his head, that these are indeed the three
acts whose tapes are in ceaseless rotation on Mr Blair's in-
car stereo. Yet if the party had commissioned an expensive
advertising agency to spend seven months in collaboration
with a public-relations firm researching this declaration, it's
hard to believe they would have come up with anything so
beautifully poised. REM, Seal and Annie Lennox: an Ameri-
can rock group and two British singers, one black male, one
white female, with fingers in pop, soul and dance, an ample
musical spread, economically achieved.
  Note how the balance tips in favour of the British artists,
to avoid the suggestion that Mr Blair might be somehow in
thrall to American culture. All the chosen ones are alive,
commercially active, high profile: there's no dust on Mr
Blair's taste. And he manages the supple feat of bowling right
down the middle while appearing to be coming in from the
outside edge. None of these acts is obscure - you'll find all
three of them in Woolworth's - and yet the selection does not

have the giant, gallumphing obviousness of, say, Phil Collins,
U2 and Whitney Houston. We read Mr Blair as sincere and
involved enough to have at least scraped off the surface,
and yet there is no alienating specialism here, which would
have been the risk of declaring a fixated passion for grunge
core or for some of the obscure cuts of the legendary but
little-known Delta bluesman, Otis B. Stankmeyer.
  There's something for all of us there. Better still, even if
you don't especially care for one or two of these artists, it
would be next to impossible for you to take exception to
anyone who did. `Can you believe that Tony Blair? He likes
Seal, REM and Annie Lennox!' It is beyond the capacity of
the human voice to make that sentence ring with scorn.
  But let's not be fooled by this. It's a self-editing trick that
each of us plays with our record collections every time we
clear the naff ones away before people come round. This is
my pre-university purging tactic, writ large for the world
stage. Seal, REM and Annie Lennox are unlikely to be the
whole story; they are only the publicly acceptable version of
the facts. Until we can peep into the corners of that record
collection, we will riot know the man whole. All of which
opens up the possibility of a completely new kind of political
scandal:

             BlAIR IN RICHaRD CUIYDER IAH SHOCK
          Secret album was 'for his mum' claims Lab leader

          Todd Runalgren

I've liked Todd Rundgren ever since Geoff played him to me
and talked me through the best bits - the `la-la-la' section in
the middle of `Can We Still Be Friends?', the key changes
at the end of `Marlene', the live version of, `A Dream Goes On
Forever', the way he screams `if you need a friend' at the end
of `Love Is The Answer'. These were moments at which Geoff
would screw his face into a wince, point at the speaker with
his forefinger and let out a clipped `Ah!'
  The difficult thing about Rundgren is, he's a musician of
no settied mood or style. One minute he's the Beatles, the
next he's an acid-rock casualty, and the next he's Rick Wake-
man. On the worst albums, he's all those things at once. The
records of his that interested Geoff and me were the pop ones
and we hated it whenever Rundgren rocked out or, as he was
prone to do, filled entire sides of albums with turgid guitar
odysseys. There was only one thing to recommend his eclecti-
cism: it made him the perfect artist for home-made compi-
lation tapes. Friends - if they have any opinions about
Rundgren at all - will tend to denounce him as a dope-
sozzled 1970s weirdo, or as the producer of Meatloaf's Bat
Out Of Hell. At which point, you slip away to your stock of
Rundgren albums, tweezer the gorgeous pop ballads out
from between the stomach-churning synth epics, line them up
on a C90 and hand this over with a smug smile, saying, `I
think you'll be surprised.'
  But Rundgren has bequeathed me more than just this. The
Rundgren records that Geoff nudged me towards tended also
to be the ones on which he played and sang everything him-
self, even operating the studio. Both of us would have liked to

try that. Though we were attracted by the gregariousness of
bands, these demonstrations of solitary prowess appealed to
us powerfully. For all that Geoff and I shared the music we
liked, there were still whole areas of our experience as lis-
teners that were inward and private and which - other than
through a wince, a pointed forefinger and a clipped `Ah!' -
we did not communicate to each other Music that was itself
the result of self-absorbed labour seemed especially resonant.
  An image on the sleeve of the Something/Anything? album
shows Rundgren in what looks like a surburban front room,
cluttered with musical instruments and tapes and one man's
debris - the scene, we're to presume, of the making of the
solo portions of this record. Rundgren has his back to
the camera. He's standing on a coffee table with a guitar
round his neck. His arms are aloft and his fingers point vic-
tory signs at the ceiling, the gesture a rocker might make to a
large crowd at the end of a gig. Except he is facing not an
audience but the light coming dimly through the closed
curtains.
  The first time I saw this image it was lying on the floor of
Geoff's bedroom where it formed part of a clutter similar to
the one it depicted - of guitars and guitar leads and scraps of
paper and records out of their sleeves. When I got my own
copy of the album, I was struck by the image again and pored
over it frequently thereafter. It suggested a musical hermitude
which spoke directly to my own adolescent broodiness, to the
sense I had that my moods were something I would like to
hole up with and dwell on alone.
  Even after adolescence, this was a feeling that I never quite
shook off. I have a tendency to be sullen and self-absorbed in
the face of adversity, as if there is no personal dilemma I
could not work out, given a solo recording deal, six months
to myself and a home studio. Geoff is like this too, so I am

forced to conclude that our predicament is largely the result
of listening to Todd Rundgren records - to Stevie Wonder
records, too, though Wonder's one-man-band recordings, in
which I have steeped myself more deeply even than Rund-
gren's, are different. Wonder, even at his most self-involved,
seems always to be working towards some kind of release;
release is the last thing a Rundgren solo record finds, or
wants.
  I have kept in touch with Todd Rundgren in the inter-
vening years. I got excited in 1986 when, quite out of the
blue, he produced the XTC album Slzylarking, in the same
way that I had got excited a year earlier vcrhen Scritti Politti
worked with Arif Mardin, one of Aretha Franklin's pro-
ducers. I'd introduced these people to each other years before
in my record collection, and here they were getting together in
real life. (As it happened, Rundgren and Andy Partridge of
XTC bickered throughout the making of the album. So much
for my social engineerir.g.)
  And intermittently, I have bought Rundgren's new albums.
Buying a Todd Rundgren record unheard is about as big a
risk as you can take in a record shop. It could be good, or it
could be the worst thing you've ever acquired. You just have
to hand over the money and pray. It worked out OK in 1985,
with the album A Capella, on which Rundgren uses nothing
but his own voice, layered into thick harmonies in the studio.
A heart-stopping piece of falsetto at the end of `Pretending To
Care' showed he still had an amazing enthusiasm for his own
company.
  The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect (1984) was,
though, the worst thing I had ever heard. Until I got 2nd
Wind (1991). Yet between those, in 1989, I gambled on
Nearly Human, gritted my teeth as I lowered the needle to the
deck and found it contained no twenty-minute epics and two

pop songs as sweet as anything Rundgren has come up with -
`The Waiting Game' and `Parallel Lines'.
  Not until 1994 did Todd show any sign of losing me. It
was the year he placed himself on technology's frontline. He
rechristened himself TR-I, meaning Todd Rundgren - Inter-
active. He released a CD-ROM called New World Order
Given the right computer hardware, you could toy with the
music's constituent parts and mix the album for yourself.
There was also a primitive version for conventional CD play-
ers, allowing you to use your machine to sequence brief
chunks of New World Order in the order you desired. So
much for Todd the hermit. Now he was asking us all to get
involved.
  In the race to establish CD-ROM, David Bowie and Peter
Gabriel were quick off the blocks too. But Rundgren went a
stage further and extended the principle of interactivity to his
live show. On his 1994 tour, members of the audience were
free to come and go on the stage and influence the course of
the show by pressing a button here, playing an instrument
there. He told Andy Gill in the Independent: `At one point
in New York, the audience got so enthusiastic they pushed
me off the stage, and I wound up in the crowd. I was just
wandering about while they were geeking around on the
stage.' Not content with participation from ticket-holders,
Rundgren even managed to involve people who had stayed
at home. In Amsterdam, he contrived a show to which
people  could  contribute  from  their  computers  on  the
Internet.
  This is the future. This is what our relationship with music
will become - challenging, involving, interactive. But I'm not
ready for interaction. I've yet to exhaust the possibilities of
reaction. The ambition of the new musical technology is to
stir us from our passivity as listeners. But as listeners, how

passive are we? When Geoff first played me Rundgren's
`I Saw The Light', I suppose I was passive in the sense that I
just sat there on the floor in his bedroom listening to it. But
when that beautifully curly guitar solo finally spiralled up
into the last verse . . . well, I've rarely felt more active in
all
my life.
  It's possible that my generation will consider itself lucky
that it can remember a time when you could pay to see a rock
show without having to perform in it; when you could buy an
album and play it without having to mix it yourself first. In
the past, Geoff might ring up and say, `Come round and listen
to the new Todd Rundgren album.' Geoffs in the future will
be saying, `Come round and listen to me mixing the new
Todd Rundgren album.' We will become a nation of self-
appointed George Martins.
  I didn't go to Todd Rundgren's 1994 Interactive shows in
London. I couldn't face it. Something about that audience
participation aspect put me in mind of the nightmare of pan-
tomime-going as a child. I imagined I would spend the entire
show feeling sick with the imminent prospect of being hoisted
on to the stage. Call me old-fashioned, but if I go and see
Todd Rundgren, I want to see him at the piano playing some
of his tunes; I want to hear him sing `Hello, It's Me' and send
the hair up on the back of my neck; I want to see what he
does with that `if you need a friend' line. I don't want to see
some geek get out of the audience and noodle around on
Todd's synths. I can see the radical thrill of this idea, as
political philosophy: deconstruct the `star' system, eliminate
the controller, empuwer the audience, throw the process wide
open. But I'm quaint enough to believe that, while geeks are
everywhere, Todd Rundgrens are few and far between. The
democracy advocated here seems to me illusory. The message
is: we can all of us be creative. If only.

    The Cleaners from Venus . . . finally

There's a scene at the end of the movie This Is Spinal Tap
where the estranged guitarist, Nigel Tufnel, suddenly shows
up backstage at some disastrous Spinal Tap show. The band
have been spiralling downwards ever since he left and the
meeting is a tense one, all bruised pride and wounded ego.
But Tufnel brings news. He chews hard and says, `I bumped
into Ian [the manager]. Seems that "Sex Farm" is in the charts
in Japan. It's No 5 last week, actually, so he asked me to ask
you - Tap - if you'd be interested in reforming and doing a
tour.' Bingo - a reunion back on the road again, the road that
never ends.
  So it was hard, at first, to suppress a laugh when Newell
phoned the other night, He, too, was chewing hard. And he,
too, was talking about Japan. `My solo album is selling quite
well over there. They want me to go out and play a few
shows. Nothing too strenuous - just for a week or so. But I
have to get a band together and . . . well, do you want to be in
it?'
  I've got to hand it to him - he tried to sell it to me very
gracefully. It wouldn't be the Cleaners from Venus, it would
be Martin Newell, which would be nice for me because I
would have no responsibility, other than to sit somewhere to
the side of the stage and play the keyboards on his splendid
songs and enjoy myself. And then there would be all the
peripheral fun - the flight, the mucking about, the hotel,
the funny things that just inevitably happen if you set out
somewhere  with  a  pop  group.  And  all  on  expenses.
(Probably.)
  I didn't know how to tell him that obviously I couldn't.

How to put it in words? Because I am thirty-two now.
Because I have a girlfriend with whom I live and a cat and a
mortgage on a proper house with its own front door and
stairs and a garden. Because I have a job and a car Because
last weekend I had my first ever bonfire. Because the weekend
before that I found myself in Sainsbury's Homebase buying a
lawn-mower (after consulting one of those `Tried and Tested'
articles in the Sunday paper, of course). Because there are
unnerving signs that I might, after all, like jazz. Because if
it
was going to happen to me, if I was really going to have a life
in pop, it would have started by now, and all that stuff is
dreams and wishfulness and bloody brilliant sometimes but
absolutely agonizing and a pain in the arse most of the rest,
and there just comes a time when you've got to say no, put
the whole thing behind you and simply - for God's sake -
grow up.
  `When are the rehearsals?' I said.