Our father was a classical violinist, and a very restless one at that. He left us when I was seven – but not before an abortive kidnap attempt involving the dead of night, a smelly tartan rug, the back of a Leyland Land-Rover and the early-morning knock-knock-knocking of a Tayside policeman’s knuckles on his door. It was the early seventies and I was confused.
After that, he sold our home, a sprawling country pile outside Kinross known as ‘Warwick House’ (over 30 years later I’m still confused – how could he have afforded it in the first place?), before leaving The Edinburgh String Quartet and disappearing to the west coast of Scotland to dive for scallops and build himself a yacht. Two years on, Monkey Hanger set sail for the Caribbean and he’s been there ever since.
On the surface, Austin Patterson had a stable family background, and yet he was never satisfied with his lot – if you’ve ever been to Hartlepool in the north-east of England, you’ll probably have a good idea why. Mollycoddled by a gentle mother and demonised by a tyrannical father, he was in many ways the classic war baby, torn between a sense of duty and a sense of disgust at said duty – a rebel in a straitjacket. The unhappy soul became a driven individual, determined to: a) prove a point to the bullying patriarch, and b) get the hell out of there.
He duly won a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music in London and pretty soon he was fiddling his way through the Swinging Sixties – albeit decked out like a penguin in dinner suit and dickie bow for the BBC Concert Orchestra. ‘Fiddling’, in fact, became the recurring motif of his life. More of which later.
Contentment never led to any revolution, it’s true. And restlessness leads to change, which can be better or worse than the original state of affairs. Perhaps restless people shouldn’t live on an isolated farm. Then they wouldn’t wallop their five-year-old son over the head for singing ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ while feeding the geese (blasphemy, apparently, though he wasn’t religious himself) or throw their wife’s homemade pizza against the wall because it wasn’t hot enough.
Some people are bad but their bad intentions result in something good. Take Guy Fawkes, for example – he tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and now we get bonfire parties every year. But I’m not going to burn my ‘Guy’, despite the shadow he’s cast over our life. Instead, what I’d like to try to do now is forgive him. And the best way of doing that is to celebrate his mistakes. Because, without his mistakes, I wouldn’t have got to where I am now: a retired rocker spouting a lot of psycho-babble.
