It was my mum who introduced me to Elvis Presley. Every Friday, after work, she would pick up her wages, stop off on the way home at Siever’s, an electrical store that also sold records, and buy a new 78. It was my favourite time of the week, waiting at home to see what she would bring back. She loved going out dancing, so she liked big band music – Billy May and His Orchestra, Ted Heath – and she loved American vocalists: Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine, Nat King Cole, Guy Mitchell singing ‘she wears red feathers and a huly-huly skirt’. But one Friday she came home with something else. She told me she’d never heard anything like it before, but it was so fantastic she had to buy it. As soon as she said the words Elvis Presley, I recognized them. The previous weekend I’d been looking through the magazines in the local barber shop while I was waiting to have my hair cut, when I came across a photo of the most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen. Everything about him looked extraordinary: his clothes, his hair, even the way he was standing. Compared to the people you could see outside the barber shop window in the north-west London suburb of Pinner, he might as well have been bright green with antennae sticking out of his forehead. I’d been so transfixed I hadn’t even bothered to read the accompanying article, and by the time I got home I’d forgotten his name. But that was it: Elvis Presley.
As soon as Mum put the record on, it became apparent that Elvis Presley sounded the way he looked, like he came from another planet. Compared to the stuff my parents normally listened to, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ barely qualified as music at all, an opinion my father would continue to expound upon at great length over the coming years. I’d already heard rock and roll – ‘Rock Around The Clock’ had been a big hit earlier in 1956 – but ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ didn’t sound anything like that either. It was raw and sparse and slow and eerie. Everything was drenched in this weird echo. You could barely understand a word he was singing: I got that his baby had left him, after that I completely lost the thread. What was a ‘dess clurk’? Who was this ‘Bidder Sir Lonely’ he kept mentioning?
It didn’t matter what he was saying, because something almost physical happened while he was singing. You could literally feel this strange energy he was giving off, like it was contagious, like it was coming out of the radiogram speaker straight into your body. I already thought of myself as music mad – I even had a little collection of my own 78s, paid for with record tokens and postal orders I got on birthdays and at Christmas. Until that moment, my hero had been Winifred Atwell, a big, immensely jolly Trinidadian lady who performed onstage with two pianos – a baby grand on which she played light classical and a battered old upright for ragtime and pub songs. I loved her sense of glee, the slightly camp way she would announce, ‘And now, I’m going to my other piano’; the way she would lean back and look at the audience with a huge grin on her face while she was playing, like she was having the best time in the world. I thought Winifred Atwell was fabulous, but I’d never experienced anything like this while listening to her. I’d never experienced anything like this in my life. As ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ played, it felt like something had changed, that nothing could really be the same again. As it turned out, something had, and nothing was.
And thank God, because the world needed changing. I grew up in fifties Britain and, before Elvis, before rock and roll, fifties Britain was a pretty grim place. I didn’t mind living in Pinner – I’ve never been one of those rock stars who was motivated by a burning desire to escape the suburbs, I quite liked it there – but the whole country was in a bad place. It was furtive and fearful and judgemental. It was a world of people peeping around their curtains with sour expressions, of girls being sent away because they’d Got Into Trouble. When I think of fifties Britain, I think of sitting on the stairs of our house, listening to my mum’s brother, Uncle Reg, trying to talk her out of getting divorced from my dad: ‘You can’t get divorced! What will people think?’ At one point, I distinctly remember him using the phrase ‘what will the neighbours say?’ It wasn’t Uncle Reg’s fault. That was just the mindset of the times: that happiness was somehow less important than keeping up appearances.
The truth is that my parents should never have got married in the first place. I was born in 1947, but I was effectively a war baby. I must have been conceived while my father was on leave from the RAF – he had joined up in 1942 at the height of World War Two and elected to stay on after the war ended. And my parents were definitely a war couple. Their story sounds romantic. They met the same year my dad joined up. He was seventeen, and had worked in a boatbuilding yard in Rickmansworth that specialized in making narrowboats for canals. Mum was sixteen, her maiden name was Harris, and she delivered milk for United Dairies on a horse and cart, the kind of job a woman would never have done before the war. My dad was a keen amateur trumpet player, and while he was on leave, he apparently spotted my mum in the audience while he was sitting in with a band playing at a North Harrow hotel.
But the reality of Stanley and Sheila Dwight’s marriage wasn’t romantic at all. They just didn’t get on. They were both stubborn and short-tempered, two delightful characteristics that it’s been my huge good fortune to inherit. I’m not sure if they ever really loved each other. People rushed into marriage during the war – the future was uncertain, even by the time of my parents’ wedding in January 1945, and you had to seize the moment – so maybe that had something to do with it. Perhaps they had loved each other once, or at least thought they had, in the time they snatched together. Now they didn’t even seem to like each other. The rows were endless.
At least they subsided when my dad was away, which he often was. He was promoted to flight lieutenant, and was regularly posted abroad, to Iraq and Aden, so I grew up in a house that seemed to be filled with women. We lived with my maternal grandmother, Ivy, at 55 Pinner Hill Road – the same house I was born in. It was the kind of council house that had sprung up all over Britain in the twenties and thirties: three bedrooms, semi-detached, red brick on the ground floor and white-painted render on the top floor. The house actually had another male occupant, although you wouldn’t really have noticed. My grandfather had died very young, of cancer, and Nan had remarried, to a guy called Horace Sewell, who’d lost a leg in World War One. Horace had a heart of gold, but he wasn’t what you would call one of life’s big talkers. He seemed to spend most of his time outside. He worked at the local nursery, Woodman’s, and when he wasn’t there, he was in the garden, where he grew all our vegetables and cut flowers.
Perhaps he was just in the garden to avoid my mother, in which case I couldn’t really blame him. Even when Dad wasn’t around, Mum had a terrible temper. When I think back to my childhood, I think of Mum’s moods: awful, glowering, miserable silences that descended on the house without warning, during which you walked on eggshells and picked your words very carefully, in case you set her off and got thumped as a result. When she was happy she could be warm and charming and vivacious, but she always seemed to be looking for a reason not to be happy, always seemed to be in search of a fight, always had to have the last word; Uncle Reg famously said she could start an argument in an empty room. I thought for years that it was somehow my fault, that maybe she never really wanted to be a mother: she was only twenty-one when I was born, stuck in a marriage that clearly wasn’t working, forced to live with her mum because money was so tight. But her sister, my auntie Win, told me she was always like that – that when they were kids it was as if a dark cloud used to follow Sheila Harris around, that other children were scared of her and that she seemed to like that.
She definitely had some deeply weird ideas about parenting. It was an era when you kept your kids in line by clobbering them, when it was generally held that there was nothing wrong with children that couldn’t be cured by thumping the living daylights out of them. This was a philosophy to which my mother was passionately wedded, which was petrifying and humiliating if it happened in public: there’s nothing like getting a hiding outside Pinner Sainsbury’s, in front of a visibly intrigued crowd of onlookers, for playing havoc with your self-esteem. But some of Mum’s behaviour would have been considered disturbing even by the standards of the time. I found out years later that when I was two, she’d toilet-trained me by hitting me with a wire brush until I bled if I didn’t use the potty. My nan had, understandably, gone berserk when she found out what was going on: they didn’t speak for weeks as a result. Nan had gone berserk again when she saw my mother’s remedy for constipation. She laid me on the draining board in the kitchen and stuck carbolic soap up my arse. If she liked to scare people, she must have been overjoyed by me, because I was fucking terrified of her. I loved her – she was my mum – but I spent my childhood in a state of high alert, always trying to ensure that I never did anything that might set her off: if she was happy, I was happy, albeit temporarily.
There were no problems like that with my nan. She was the person I trusted the most. It felt like she was the centre of the family, the only one who didn’t go out to work – my mum had graduated from driving a milk cart during the war to working in a succession of shops. Nan was one of those incredible old working-class matriarchs: no nonsense, hard-working, kind, funny. I idolized her. She was the greatest cook, had the greenest fingers, loved a drink and a game of cards. She’d had an incredibly hard life – her father had abandoned her mother when she was pregnant, so Nan was born in a workhouse. She never talked about it, but it seemed to have left her as someone nothing could faze, not even the time I came howling down the stairs with my foreskin caught in my trouser zip and asked her to get it out. She just sighed and got on with it, as though extracting a small boy’s penis from a zip was the kind of thing she did every day.
Her house smelt of roast dinners and coal fires. There was always someone at the door: either Auntie Win or Uncle Reg, or my cousins John and Cathryn, or else the rent man, or the man from Watford Steam Laundry, or the man who delivered the coal. And there was always music playing. The radio was almost permanently on: Two-Way Family Favourites, Housewives’ Choice, Music While You Work, The Billy Cotton Band Show. If it wasn’t, there were records playing on the radiogram – mostly jazz, but sometimes classical.
I could spend hours just looking at those records, studying the different labels. Blue Deccas, red Parlophones, bright yellow MGMs, HMVs and RCAs, both of which, for reasons I could never figure out, had that picture of the dog looking at the gramophone on them. They seemed like magical objects; the fact that you put a needle on them and sound mysteriously came out amazed me. After a while, the only presents I wanted were records and books. I can remember the disappointment of coming downstairs and seeing a big box wrapped up. Oh God, they’ve got me Meccano.
And we had a piano, which belonged to my nan. Auntie Win used to play it, and eventually so did I. There were a lot of family myths about my prodigious talent at the instrument, the most oft-repeated being that Win sat me on her lap when I was three, and I immediately picked out the melody of ‘The Skaters’ Waltz’ by ear. I’ve no idea whether that’s actually true or not, but I was definitely playing piano at a very young age, around the time I started at my first school, Reddiford. I’d play stuff like ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, hymns I’d heard in assembly. I was just born with a good ear, the way some people are born with a photographic memory. If I heard something once, I could go to the piano and, more or less, play it perfectly. I was seven when I started lessons, with a lady called Mrs Jones. Not long after that, my parents began wheeling me out to play ‘My Old Man Said Follow The Van’ and ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ at family gatherings and weddings. For all the records in the house and on the radio, I think an old-fashioned sing-song was the form of music my family loved the most.
The piano came in useful when my dad was home on leave. He was a typical British man of the fifties in that he seemed to regard any display of emotion, other than anger, as evidence of a fatal weakness of character. So he wasn’t tactile, he never told you he loved you. But he liked music, and if he heard me playing the piano, I’d get a ‘well done’, maybe an arm around the shoulder, a sense of pride and approval. I was temporarily in his good books. And keeping in his good books was vitally important to me. If I was marginally less terrified of him than I was of my mother, it was only because he wasn’t around as much. At one point, when I was six, my mum had made the decision to move us away from Pinner and all her family, and go with my dad to Wiltshire – he had been posted to RAF Lyneham, near Swindon. I can’t remember much about it. I know I enjoyed playing in the countryside, but I also recall feeling quite disorientated and confused by the change, and falling behind at school as a result. We weren’t there for long – Mum must have realized she had made a mistake very quickly – and after we came back to Pinner, it felt like Dad was someone who visited rather than lived with us.
But when he did visit, things changed. Suddenly, there were all these new rules about everything. I would get into trouble if I kicked my football off the lawn into the flower bed, but I would also get in trouble if I ate celery in what was deemed to be The Wrong Way. The Right Way to eat celery, in the unlikely event that you’re interested, was apparently not to make too loud a crunching sound when you bit into it. Once, he hit me because I was supposedly taking my school blazer off incorrectly; sadly, I seem to have forgotten The Right Way to take off a school blazer, vital though this knowledge obviously was. The scene upset Auntie Win so much that she rushed off in tears to tell my nan what was going on. Presumably worn down by the rows over potty training and constipation, Nan told her not to get involved.
What was going on? I haven’t got a clue. I’ve no more idea of what my father’s problem was than I have about my mother’s. Maybe it had something to do with him being in the forces, where there were rules about everything as well. Maybe he felt a bit of jealousy, like he was shut out of the family because he was away so much: all these rules were his way of imposing himself as the head of the household. Maybe that was the way he had been brought up, although his parents – my grandad Edwin and grandma Ellen – didn’t seem particularly fierce. Or maybe both my parents just found dealing with a child difficult because they’d never done it before. I don’t know. I do know that my dad had an incredibly short fuse and that he didn’t seem to understand how to use words. There was no calm response, no ‘now come on, sit down’. He would just explode. The Dwight Family Temper. It was the bane of my life as a kid, and it remained the bane of my life when it became apparent it was hereditary. Either I was genetically predisposed to losing my rag, or I unconsciously learned by example. Whichever it was, it has proved a catastrophic pain in the arse for me and everyone around me for most of my adult life.
Had it not been for Mum and Dad, I would have had a perfectly normal, even boring fifties childhood: Muffin the Mule on TV and Saturday morning children’s matinees at the Embassy in North Harrow; the Goons on the radio and bread and dripping for tea on a Sunday night. Away from home, I was perfectly happy. At eleven, I moved up to Pinner County Grammar School, where I was conspicuously ordinary. I wasn’t bullied, nor was I a bully. I wasn’t a swot, but I wasn’t a tearaway either; I left that to my friend John Gates, who was one of those kids that seemed to spend their entire childhood in detention or outside the headmaster’s office, without the range of punishments inflicted on him making any difference at all to the way he behaved. I was a bit overweight, but I was all right at sport without any danger of being a star athlete. I played football and tennis – everything except rugby. Because of my size, they put me in the scrum, where my main role involved being repeatedly kicked in the balls by the opposing team’s prop. No thanks.
My best mate was Keith Francis, but he was part of a big circle of friends, girls as well as boys, people I still see now. I occasionally have class reunions at my house. The first time, I was really nervous beforehand: it’s been fifty years, I’m famous, I live in a big house, what are they going to think of me? But they couldn’t have cared less. When they arrived, it might as well have been 1959. No one seemed to have changed that much. John Gates still had a twinkle in his eye that suggested he could be a bit of a handful.
For years, I lived a life in which nothing really happened. The height of excitement was a school trip to Annecy, where we stayed with our French pen pals and gawped at the sight of Citroën 2CVs, which were like no car I’d ever seen on a British road – the seats in them looked like deckchairs. Or the day during the Easter holidays when, for reasons lost in the mists of time, Barry Walden, Keith and I elected to cycle from Pinner to Bournemouth, an idea I began to question the wisdom of when I realized that their bikes had gears and mine did not: there was a lot of frantic pedalling up hills on my part, trying to keep up. The only danger any of us faced was that one of my friends might be bored to death when I started talking about records. It wasn’t enough for me to collect them. Every time I bought one, I kept a note of it in a book. I wrote down the titles of the A and B sides and all the other information off the label: writer, publisher, producer. I then memorized the lot, until I became a walking musical encyclopedia. An innocent enquiry as to why the needle skipped when you tried to play ‘Little Darlin” by The Diamonds would lead to me informing everyone within earshot that it was because ‘Little Darlin” by The Diamonds was on Mercury Records, who were distributed by Pye in the UK, and that Pye were the only label that released 78s made from new-fangled vinyl, rather than old-fashioned shellac, and needles made from shellac responded differently to vinyl.
But I’m not complaining at all about life being dull – I liked it that way. Things were so exhausting at home that a dull life outside the front door seemed oddly welcome, particularly when my parents decided to try living together full-time again. It was just after I started at Pinner County. My dad had been posted to RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire and we all moved into a house in Northwood, about ten minutes away from Pinner, 111 Potter Street. We were there for three years, long enough to prove beyond any doubt that the marriage wasn’t working. God, it was miserable: constant fighting, occasionally punctuated by icy silences. You couldn’t relax for a minute. If you spend your life waiting for the next eruption of anger from your mum, or your dad announcing another rule that you’d broken, you end up not knowing what to do: the uncertainty of what’s going to happen next fills you with fear. So I was incredibly insecure, scared of my own shadow. On top of that, I thought I was somehow responsible for the state of my parents’ marriage, because a lot of their rows would be about me. My father would tell me off, my mother would intervene, and there would be a huge argument about how I was being brought up. It didn’t make me feel very good about myself, which manifested in a lack of confidence in my appearance that lasted well into adulthood. For years and years, I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror. I really hated what I saw: I was too fat, I was too short, my face just looked weird, my hair would never do what I wanted it to, including not prematurely fall out. The other lasting effect was a fear of confrontation. That went on for decades. I stayed in bad business relationships and bad personal relationships because I didn’t want to rock the boat.
My response when things got too much was always to run upstairs and lock the door, which is exactly what I used to do when my parents fought. I would go to my bedroom, where I kept everything perfectly neat and ordered. It wasn’t just records I collected, it was comics, books, magazines. I was meticulous about everything. If I wasn’t writing down the details of a new single in my notebook, I was copying all the different singles charts out of Melody Maker, the New Musical Express, Record Mirror and Disc, then compiling the results, averaging them out into a personal chart of charts. I’ve always been a statistics freak. Even now, I get sent the charts every day, the radio chart positions in America, the box office charts for films and Broadway plays. Most artists don’t do that; they’re not interested. When I’m talking to them, I know more about how their single’s doing than they do, which is crazy. The official excuse is that I need to know what’s going on because, these days, I own a company that makes films and manages artists. The truth is that I’d be doing it if I was working in a bank. I’m just an anorak.
A psychologist would probably say that, as a kid, I was trying to create a sense of order in a chaotic life, with my dad coming and going and all the reprimands and rows. I didn’t have any control over that, or over my mother’s moods, but I had control over the stuff in my room. Objects couldn’t do me any harm. I found them comforting. I talked to them, I behaved as if they had feelings. If something got broken, I’d feel really upset, as if I’d killed something. During one particularly bad row, my mother threw a record at my father and it smashed into God knows how many pieces. It was ‘The Robin’s Return’ by Dolores Ventura, an Australian ragtime pianist. I remember thinking, ‘How can you do that? How can you break this beautiful thing?’
My record collection exploded when rock ’n’ roll arrived. There were other exciting changes afoot, things that suggested life might be moving on, out of the grey post-war world, even in suburban north-west London: the arrival in our house of a TV and a washing machine, and the arrival in Pinner High Street of a coffee bar, which seemed unimaginably exotic – until a restaurant that served Chinese food opened in nearby Harrow. But they happened slowly and gradually, a few years between them. Rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t like that. It seemed to come out of nowhere, so fast that it was hard to take in how completely it had altered everything. One minute, pop music meant good old Guy Mitchell and ‘Where Will The Dimple Be?’ and Max Bygraves singing about toothbrushes. It was polite and schmaltzy and aimed at parents, who didn’t want to hear anything too exciting or shocking: they’d had enough of that to last them a lifetime living through a war. The next, it meant Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, these guys who sounded unintelligible, like they were foaming at the mouth when they sang and who your parents hated. Even my mum, the Elvis aficionado, bailed out when Little Richard showed up. She thought ‘Tutti Frutti’ was just a terrible noise.
Rock and roll was like a bomb that wouldn’t stop going off: a series of explosions that came so thick and fast it was hard to work out what was happening. Suddenly, there seemed to be one incredible record after another. ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’, ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘That’ll Be The Day’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Reet Petite’. I had to get a Saturday job to keep up. Luckily, Mr Megson at Victoria Wine was looking for someone to help out in the back of the shop, putting empty beer bottles in crates and stacking them up. I think there was a vague idea of my saving up some money, but I should have realized that idea was doomed to failure from the start: Victoria Wine was next door to another record shop. Mr Megson might as well have just put the ten bob he paid me straight into their till and cut out the middleman. It was an early example of what turned out to be a lifelong attitude to shopping: I’m just not very good at keeping money in my pocket if there’s something I want to buy.
Sixty years on, it’s hard to explain how revolutionary and shocking rock and roll seemed. Not just the music: the whole culture it represented, the clothes and the films and the attitude. It felt like the first thing that teenagers really owned, that was aimed exclusively at us, that made us feel different from our parents, that made us feel we could achieve something. It’s also hard to explain the extent to which the older generation despised it. Take every example of moral panic pop music has provoked since – punk and gangster rap, mods and rockers and heavy metal – then add them all together and double it: that’s how much outrage rock and roll caused. People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my father. He obviously disliked the music itself – he liked Frank Sinatra – but more than that, he hated its social impact, he thought the whole thing was morally wrong: ‘Look at the way they dress, the way they act, swivelling their hips, showing their dicks. You are not to get involved.’ If I did, I was going to turn into something called a wide boy. A wide boy, in case you don’t know, is an old British term for a kind of petty criminal – a confidence trickster, someone who does a bit of wheeler-dealing or runs the odd scam. Presumably already alive to the thought that I might go off the rails thanks to my inability to eat celery in the correct way, he resolutely believed that rock and roll was going to result in my utter degradation. The mere mention of Elvis or Little Richard would set him off on an angry lecture in which my inevitable transformation into a wide boy figured heavily: one minute I’d be happily listening to ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’, the next thing you knew, I was apparently going to be fencing stolen nylons or duping people into playing Find-the-Lady on the mean streets of Pinner.
There didn’t seem much danger of that happening to me – there are Benedictine monks wilder than I was as a teenager – but my father was taking no risks. By the time I started at Pinner County Grammar School in 1958, you could see the way people dressed was changing, but I was expressly forbidden from wearing anything that made me look like I had some connection to rock and roll. Keith Francis was cutting a dash in a pair of winkle-picker shoes that had pointed toes so long the ends of them seemed to arrive in class several minutes before he did. I was still dressed like a miniature version of my father. My shoes were, depressingly, the same length as my feet. The closest I got to sartorial rebellion was my prescription glasses, or rather, how much I wore my prescription glasses. They were only supposed to be used for looking at the blackboard. Labouring under the demented misapprehension that they made me look like Buddy Holly, I wore them all the time, completely ruining my eyesight in the process. Then I had to wear them all the time.
My failing eyesight also had unexpected consequences when it came to sexual exploration. I can’t remember the exact circumstances in which my dad caught me masturbating. I think I was attempting to dispose of the evidence rather than engaged in the act itself, but I do remember I wasn’t as mortified as I should have been, largely because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was a real late developer when it came to sex. I wasn’t really interested in it at all until I was well into my twenties, although I made an impressively concerted effort to make up for lost time after that. But at school, I’d listen to my friends talking about it, and it would just leave me really bemused: ‘Yeah, I took her to the cinema, got a bit of tit.’ How? Why? What was that supposed to mean?
So I think what I was doing was more about experiencing a pleasant sensation rather than a frantic expression of my burgeoning sexuality. Either way, when my dad caught me, he came out with the well-worn line about how if I kept Doing That, I would go blind. Obviously, boys across the country were given exactly the same warning, realized it was a load of rubbish and blithely ignored it. I, on the other hand, found it preying on my mind. What if it was true? I’d already damaged my eyesight with my misguided attempt to look like Buddy Holly; maybe this would finish it off. I decided it was better not to take the risk. While plenty of musicians will tell you that Buddy Holly had a massive impact on their lives, I’m probably the only musician that can say he inadvertently stopped me wanking, unless Holly happened to walk in on The Big Bopper doing it while they were on tour or something.
But despite all the rules about clothes and warnings about my sure-fire descent into criminality, it was too late for my dad to tell me not to get involved in rock and roll. I was already in it up to my neck. I saw Loving You and The Girl Can’t Help It at the cinema. I started going to see live shows. A big crowd from school headed up to the Harrow Granada every week: me, Keith, Kaye Midlane, Barry Walden and Janet Richie were the most devoted, regular members, along with a guy called Michael Johnson, who was the only person I’d met who seemed just as obsessed as me about music. Sometimes, he even seemed to know things I didn’t. A couple of years later, it was he who came to school brandishing a copy of ‘Love Me Do’ by The Beatles, whoever they were, claiming that they were going to be the biggest thing since Elvis. I thought that was laying it on a bit thick until he played it to me, when I decided he might have a point: another musical obsession was sparked.
A ticket for the Granada was two and sixpence or five bob if you wanted the posh seats. Either felt like good value, because they packed the shows with singers and bands. You would see ten artists in a night: two songs from each until the headlining act, who would do four or five. Everybody seemed to play there, sooner or later. Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, Johnny And The Hurricanes. If by any chance someone declined to grace the Harrow Granada with their presence, you could get the tube up to London: that’s where I saw Cliff Richard And The Drifters at the Palladium, before his backing band changed their name to The Shadows. Back in the suburbs, other, smaller venues started putting on bands: the South Harrow British Legion, the Kenton Conservative Club. You could easily see two or three gigs a week, as long as you had the money. The funny thing is, I can’t recall ever seeing a bad gig, or coming home disappointed, although some of the shows must have been terrible. The sound must have been dreadful. I’m pretty certain that the South Harrow British Legion in 1960 wasn’t in possession of a PA system capable of fully conveying the brutal, feral power of rock and roll.
And when my dad wasn’t around, I played Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis songs on the piano. They were my real idols. It wasn’t just their style of playing, although that was fabulous: they played with such aggression, like they were assaulting the keyboard. It was the way they stood up while they played, the way they kicked the stool and jumped on the piano. They made playing the piano seem as visually exciting and sexy and outrageous as playing the guitar or being a vocalist. I’d never realized it could be any of those things before.
I was inspired enough to play a few gigs at local youth clubs, with a band called The Corvettes. It was nothing serious; the other members were all still at school too – they went to Northwood, the local secondary modern – and it only lasted a few months: most of the gigs we played, we got paid in Coca-Cola. But suddenly, I had an idea what I wanted to do with my life and it didn’t involve my father’s plans for me, which centred around either joining the RAF or working in a bank. I would never have dared say it aloud, but I quietly decided he could stick both those plans up his arse. Maybe rock and roll had changed me in the rebellious way Dad feared after all.
Or maybe we never really had anything in common, except football. All the happy childhood memories of my dad are related to that: he came from a family of football fanatics. Two of his nephews were professional players, both for Fulham in south-west London – Roy Dwight and John Ashen. As a treat, he would take me to watch them from the touchline at Craven Cottage, in the days when Jimmy Hill was their inside right and Bedford Jezzard was their highest scorer. Even off the pitch, Roy and John seemed like incredibly glamorous figures to me; I was always slightly in awe when I met them. After his career ended, John became a very astute businessman with a thing for American cars – he’d turn up to visit us in Pinner with his wife, Bet, parking an unreal-looking Cadillac or a Chevrolet outside the house. And Roy was a fantastic player, a right-winger who transferred to Nottingham Forest. He played for them in the 1959 FA Cup Final. I watched it at home on TV, with a supply of chocolate eggs I’d saved from Easter in anticipation of this momentous event. I didn’t eat the chocolate so much as cram it in my mouth in a state of hysteria. I couldn’t believe what was happening on the screen. After ten minutes, Roy scored the opening goal. He was already on the verge of a call-up for England. Now he’d surely sealed his fate: my cousin – an actual relative of mine – was going to play for England. It seemed as unbelievable as John’s taste in cars. Fifteen minutes later, they were carrying him off on a stretcher. He’d broken his leg in a tackle and that was what sealed his fate. His football career was basically over. He tried, but he was never the same player again. He ended up becoming a PE teacher at a boys’ school in south London.
My dad’s team were the substantially less glamorous and awe-inducing Watford. I was six when he first took me to see them play. They were toiling away at the bottom of something called the Third Division South, which was as low as you could get in the football league without being thrown out entirely. In fact, not long before I started going to Watford games, they had played so badly that they actually had been thrown out of the football league; they were allowed to stay after applying for re-election. Their ground at Vicarage Road seemed to tell you all you needed to know about the team. It only had two very old, very rickety, very small covered stands. It doubled as a greyhound racing track. If I’d had any sense, I would have taken one look at it, considered Watford’s recent form, and opted to support a team that could actually play football. I could have saved myself twenty years of almost unmitigated misery. But football doesn’t work like that, or at least it shouldn’t. It’s in your blood: Watford were my dad’s team, therefore Watford were my team.
And besides, I didn’t care about the ground, or the hopelessness of the team, or the freezing cold. I loved it all straight away. The thrill of seeing live sport for the first time, the excitement of getting the train to Watford and walking through the town to the ground, the newspaper sellers that came round at half-time and told you the scores in other games, the ritual of always standing in the same spot on the terraces, an area by the Shrodells Stand called The Bend. It was like taking a drug to which you instantly became addicted. I was as obsessive about football as I was about music: when I wasn’t compiling my chart of charts in my bedroom, I was cutting football league ladders out of my comics, sticking them to my wall and making sure the scores on them were completely up to date. It’s one addiction I’ve never shaken, because I’ve never wanted to, and it was hereditary, passed on to me by my dad.
When I was eleven, my piano teacher had put me forward for the Royal Academy of Music in central London. I passed the exam, and for the next five years that was my Saturday: studying classical music in the morning, Watford in the afternoon. I preferred the latter to the former. At the time, the Royal Academy of Music seemed to smell of fear. Everything about it was intimidating: the huge, imposing Edwardian building on Marylebone Road, its august history of turning out composers and conductors, the fact that anything that wasn’t classical music was expressly forbidden. It’s completely different today – whenever I go there now, it’s a really joyful place; the students are encouraged to go off and do pop or jazz or their own writing as well as their classical training. But back then, even talking about rock and roll at the Royal Academy would have been sacrilege, like turning up to church and telling the vicar that you’re really interested in worshipping Satan.
Sometimes the Royal Academy was fun. I had a great teacher called Helen Piena, I loved singing in the choir and I really enjoyed playing Mozart and Bach and Beethoven and Chopin, the melodic stuff. Other times, it seemed like a real drag. I was a lazy student. Some weeks, if I’d forgotten to do my homework, I didn’t bother to turn up at all. I’d ring from home, putting on a voice and saying I was ill, and then – so my mum didn’t realize I was dodging – take the train up to Baker Street. Then I’d go and sit on the tube. I’d go round and round the Circle Line for three and a half hours, reading The Pan Book of Horror Stories instead of practising Bartók. I knew I didn’t want to be a classical musician. For one thing, I wasn’t good enough. I don’t have the hands for it. My fingers are short for a piano player. If you see a photo of a concert pianist, they’ve all got hands like tarantulas. And for another, it just wasn’t what I wanted out of music – having everything regimented, playing the right notes at the right time with the right feeling, no room for improvisation.
In a way, it’s ironic that I ended up being made a Doctor and an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy years later – I was never going to win an award for star pupil while I was there. But in another way, it isn’t ironic at all. I’d never, ever say the Royal Academy was a waste of time for me. I’m really proud to have gone there. I’ve done benefit gigs and raised money for a new pipe organ for them; I’ve toured with the Royal Academy Symphony Orchestra in Britain and America; I pay for eight scholarships there every year. The place was full of people I’d end up working with, years later, when I became Elton John: the producer Chris Thomas, the arranger Paul Buckmaster, harpist Skaila Kanga and percussionist Ray Cooper. And what I learned there seeped into my music: it taught me about collaboration, about chord structures and how to put a song together. It made me interested in writing with more than three or four chords. If you listen to the Elton John album, and virtually every album I made afterwards, you can hear the influence of classical music and of the Royal Academy on it somewhere.
It was while I was studying at the Royal Academy that my parents finally got divorced. In fairness to them, they had tried to make their marriage work, even though it was obvious they couldn’t bear each other; I suspect because they wanted to give me stability. It was completely the wrong thing to do, but they made an effort. Then, in 1960, my father was posted to Harrogate in Yorkshire, and while he was there, Mum met someone else. And that was the end of that.
My mum and I moved in with her new partner, Fred, who was a painter and decorator. It was a really hard time financially. Fred was a divorcee too; he had an ex-wife and four children, so money was really tight. We lived in a horrible flat in Croxley Green, with peeling wallpaper and damp. Fred worked really hard. He did window cleaning and odd jobs on top of his decorating: anything to make sure we had food on the table. It was tough on him and it was tough on my mum. Uncle Reg had been right – there really was a stigma around getting divorced in those days.
But I was so happy they’d got divorced. The daily friction of my mum and dad being together was gone. Mum had got what she wanted – rid of my father – and, for a while at least, it seemed to change her. She was happy, and that happiness trickled down to me. There were fewer moods, less criticism. And I really liked Fred. He was generous and big-hearted and easy-going. He saved up and got me a drop-handlebar bike. He thought it was funny when I started saying his name backwards and calling him Derf, a nickname that stuck. There weren’t any more restrictions on what I wore. I started calling Derf my stepdad years before he and Mum got married.
Best of all, Derf liked rock and roll. He and Mum were really supportive of my music career. I suppose there was an added incentive for my mum, because she knew that encouraging me would infuriate my father, but, for a while at least, she seemed to be my biggest fan. And Derf got me my first paying gig, as a pianist in the Northwood Hills Hotel, which wasn’t a hotel at all, it was a pub. Derf was having a pint there when he learned from the landlord that their regular pianist had quit, and suggested they give me a try. I would play everything I could think of. Jim Reeves songs, Johnnie Ray, Elvis Presley, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’. Al Jolson numbers: they loved Al Jolson. But not as much as they loved old British pub songs that everyone could sing along to: ‘Down At The Old Bull And Bush’, ‘Any Old Iron’, ‘My Old Man’, the same things my family liked to have a sing-song to after a couple of drinks. I made really good money. My pay was only a pound a night, three nights a week, but Derf would come with me and take a pint pot around and collect tips. Sometimes I could end up with £15 a week, which was a massive amount for a fifteen-year-old kid to be making in the early sixties. I saved up and bought an electric piano – a Hohner Pianette – and a microphone so I could make myself better heard over the noise of the pub.
As well as earning me money, the pub pianist’s job had another important function. It made me pretty fearless as a performer, because the Northwood Hills Hotel was by no stretch of the imagination Britain’s most salubrious venue. I played in the public bar, not the more upscale saloon next door, and virtually every night, when enough booze had been consumed, there would be a fight. I don’t mean a verbal altercation, I mean a proper fight: glasses flying, tables being pushed over. At first I’d try and keep playing, in the vain hope that music might soothe the situation. If a burst of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ failed to work the intended magic, then I would have to turn to a group of travellers who regularly came to the pub for help. I’d become friendly with one of their daughters – she’d even asked me around to their caravan for dinner – and they would make sure I was all right when the pub kicked off. And if they weren’t in that night, I would have to deploy my last resort option. This involved climbing out of the window next to the piano and coming back later when things had calmed down. It was terrifying, but at least it made me mentally tough when it came to playing live. I know artists who’ve been completely destroyed by the experience of playing a bad gig to an unappreciative audience. I’ve played bad gigs to unappreciative audiences as well, but they’ve never impacted on me too deeply. If I don’t actually have to stop performing and climb out of a window in fear of my life, it’s still an improvement on how I started out.
Up in Yorkshire, my dad met a woman called Edna. They got married, moved to Essex and opened a paper shop. He must have been happier – they had four more sons, all of whom adored him – but he didn’t seem any different to me. It was like he didn’t know any other way to behave around me. He was still distant and strict, still moaning about the terrible influence of rock and roll, still consumed by the idea that I was going to turn into a wide boy and bring disgrace on the Dwight family name. Getting on the Green Line bus to Essex to visit him was the reliable low point of any week. I stopped going to Watford with him: I was old enough to stand on The Bend by myself.
Dad must have gone berserk when he found out I was planning on leaving school before sitting my A-levels, to take up a job in the music business. He really didn’t think it was a suitable career for a boy with a grammar school education. To make matters worse, it was his own nephew who got me the job: my cousin Roy, he of the goal in the FA Cup, who had stayed on good terms with my mum after the divorce. Footballers always seemed to have links with the music industry and he was friends with a guy called Tony Hiller, who was the general manager of the Mills Music publishing company in Denmark Street, Britain’s answer to Tin Pan Alley. Via Roy, I found out that there was a job going in the packing department – it wasn’t much, the pay was £4 a week, but it was a foot in the door. And I knew I had no chance of passing my A-levels anyway. Somewhere between the Royal Academy, practising playing the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis and climbing out of the window of the Northwood Hills Hotel on a regular basis, my schoolwork had started to slide.
I say he must have gone berserk, because I honestly can’t remember his reaction. I know he wrote to my mum demanding that she stop me, but you can imagine how that went down: she was absolutely delighted. Everyone else seemed pleased for me – Mum and Derf, even my school headmaster, which seemed almost miraculous. Mr Westgate-Smith was a very stern, strict man. I was absolutely terrified when I went to see him, to explain about the job. But he was really wonderful. He said he knew how much I loved music, he knew about the Royal Academy, and that he would let me leave if I promised to work hard and give everything I had to the project. I was amazed, but he meant it. He could easily have refused; I would have gone anyway, but I would have left school under a cloud. Instead he was really supportive. Years later, after I became successful, he used to write to me telling me how proud he was of what I’d done.
And in a perverse way, my dad’s attitude helped me, too. He never changed his mind about my career choice. He never said well done. Not long ago, his wife Edna wrote to me and told me that he was proud of me in his own way; it just wasn’t in his make-up to express it. But the fact that he never expressed it instilled in me a desire to show him that I’d made the right decision. It made me driven. I thought the more successful I got, the more it proved him wrong, whether he acknowledged it or not. Even today, I still sometimes think that I’m trying to show my father what I’m made of, and he’s been dead since 1991.