THE WAY I remember it is something like this.
He drags himself into the room, eyes to the floor, hands buried in the arms of his long-sleeve t-shirt. Jenny says, ‘Pete, meet Tom’; he mumbles hello. He roots around in the cupboard for a packet of crisps. I ask him what CDs he’s bought recently; he mumbles something about the second AC/DC album. He shuffles away, back to his bedroom.
I say, ‘So. I’ll pick him up a week on Tuesday, then?’
Jenny says, ‘If you could, that would be wonderful. He’s got fencing class from ten till eleven, then he’s all yours.’
I say, ‘Right, er, cool. I guess I’ll be off.’
Jenny says, ‘Mind out for those roadworks on the North Circular.’
And that’s how it all started.
Did I miss a bit out? Possibly. There’s a chance he picked up one of his bass guitars and plucked disconsolately at it for thirty seconds before he rooted around for the crisps. Perhaps we even shook hands. What’s pretty certain, however, is that our first meeting couldn’t have been described as ‘unforgettable’. Nothing screeched, sparked or went ‘Kapow!’ Nobody called the police or drove a 1969 Aston Martin.
Like many men who’d grown up playing with too many model cars and watching too many films starring Warren Oates, I’d often fantasised about this moment: the beginning of my Great Road Trip. I’d pictured Jeff Bridges haring out of nowhere in a Dodge Charger to save Clint Eastwood from a shower of bullets during the opening scene of Thunderbolt And Lightfoot. I’d pictured a big sky, a fast car, a hopelessly romantic meeting of inseparable outlaws, perhaps with the added bonus of a couple of loose women looking for a ride to nowhere in particular. But now this was it: I was here, finally embarking on my adventure, and all I could see was a North London kitchen, the first flowering of acne, some rather fetching Ikea units and a Slipknot t-shirt.
Outside the window, a wicked wind took a running jump down Alexander Palace hill, whipping along Crouch End Broadway, making a couple of local underfed aesthetes unsteady on their feet. Double-parked, my slightly-lower-than-middle-of-the-range Ford Fiesta waited for some action beyond the hot wax it had been lavished with earlier that day. Upstairs, in his room, the Thunderbolt to my Lightfoot attempted to master the riff to Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’. North London slept. Nothing continued to not happen. I decided, on balance, I’d settle for it.
Then again, by this point I would have settled for just about anything.
My whole life, I’d been planning some kind of four-wheeled journey into the unknown, but as the years piled up – that is, the years when it is still dignified to drive around for the hell of it while dressed in a loud shirt, listening to even louder music – my Great Rock And Roll Road Trip had become in danger of turning into My Great Bag Of Hot Air. The original idea had been something fairly vague that I’d dreamt up on receiving my first plastic pedal car as a seven-year-old: I would drive, anywhere, mindlessly, just for the thrill of driving. In my late teens, this was modified to the cliché of all Great Road Trip clichés: I would fly to New York, buy an ineffably cool second-hand car and drive cross-country to San Francisco, picking up hobos, buskers and itinerant jazz musicians on the way. However, in 1997, as I was travelling back from an Italian holiday, the plane had been struck by lightning, plummeting 1,000 terrifying feet before righting itself. As a result, I’d vowed not to take to the air for the foreseeable future, thus making America a less viable option. Additionally, I’d finally got around to reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, rather than just talking about it, and discovered it was a vacuous pile of antelope droppings.
More recently, my thoughts had turned towards the winding B-roads and endless Little Chefs of my homeland. Everyone talked about the American Dream, but what about the British equivalent? Did it exist and, if so, what did it look like? How come you never saw rootless outlaw types cruising through the Lake District just for the existential hell of it? Was drifting banned in Britain, and had someone forgotten to tell me?
I wanted to discover the real Britain. Whatever this was, I felt certain it was out there: a rock and roll place every bit as weird as the backwoods America that writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe had discovered. But more than anything I wanted an excuse to drive around aimlessly, getting lost in places with names like Snafbury and Little Piddling. All I needed was someone willing to ride shotgun: a relentlessly up-for-it soulmate – the kind of partner who’d be willing to help me out of a gambling debt, come to my aid in a tussle with Hell’s Angels, or, more importantly, navigate me out of a council estate on the outskirts of Hull. But circumstances had changed since I’d begun to lay down the plans for my Great Rock And Roll Road Trip. Many of the friends who’d shared with me in the nihilist’s vision of films like Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop as twenty-year-olds now held down steady jobs in insurance and the civil service. Most of them simply couldn’t afford to up sticks and abandon their jobs and girlfriends for six months. The ones who could, meanwhile, just couldn’t see the same romance in driving up the M4 listening to Fairport Convention as they’d once seen in cruising along Route 66 listening to The Byrds. There were still the isolated loose cannons I knew I could count on, of course: Colin and Surreal Ed, a couple of relentlessly cheerful womanisers with a penchant for jumping out of cars at red traffic lights and running into nearby woodland for no apparent reason. These, though, were the kind of insatiable single and free party animals for whom ‘a good book and an early night’ meant the latest issue of Mayfair and only two nightclubs instead of the normal four. In other words, great company in moderation but a veritable health hazard if you were talking about six months on the road, and not one I could afford as a married man with a mortgage and five pet cats to support.
In short, I was beginning to lose hope.
The call from Jenny couldn’t have come at a more desperate moment. Jenny, I could be fairly certain, wasn’t the type of woman who would jump out of your car at a red light and hide in adjacent shrubbery. She was fifty-three, for a start – the same age as my parents – and in full-time employment as a college lecturer. I’d known her since my third birthday party, when, seated in her lap, I’d smeared an ice cream sundae in her hair for reasons I can only remember as ‘to see what it felt like’. Since then, I’d enjoyed the kind of respectfully distant relationship with her that one enjoys with surprisingly cool friends of one’s family whom one has disgraced oneself in front of. I tended to see her, when it came right down to it, at fiftieth birthday parties and weddings. Jenny liked a lot of good blues music and, unlike many of my parents’ other friends, still occasionally found time to go out to the cinema, but it had never occurred to me to call her up to arrange a friendly drink. You just didn’t do that kind of thing with your parents’ mates. Besides, she and her ex-husband, Ian, had their hands full with Peter, a teenage son whom I’d never met but who relatives assured me was just making the transition into the ‘melancholy’ stage of adolescence. For a couple of weeks now, my parents had been hinting that she might get in touch with me with a mysterious proposal, but I couldn’t guess what it could possibly be.
‘It’s about that road trip you’ve been planning,’ Jenny explained to me, after we’d caught up on some random family gossip.
‘Oh. You heard about that? Bit of a non-starter, really.’
‘Yes, well, I had a bit of an idea that I’d like to put to you that might make it a starter again.’
Abruptly, my mind filled with incongruous images of me and a flame-haired ex-hippie cruising along a sun-splashed highway, radio on, sunroof open, discussing the meaning of life. Part of me kind of liked the idea. Part of me didn’t. The remainder was alive with questions. What would my wife think? Where could this journey possibly go? How many times would we have to stop at Ikea?
‘It’s to do with Pete,’ continued Jenny.
I let out a silent lungful of relief. ‘Oh yes? How old is he now?’ I asked.
‘Well, let me tell you all about him,’ said Jenny.
And, for the next half an hour, she did.
Peter, Jenny explained, had recently turned fourteen and, virtually overnight, an unfathomable transformation had come over him. Just yesterday, it seemed, he’d been a cheery, fluffy-haired kid whose main priority in life had been where his next Pokemon toy was coming from; now he stalked the house in black clothes, guitar slung over his shoulder, a storm-cloud in trousers looking for somewhere to rain. The funny thing was, Jenny couldn’t remember ever buying him any black clothes. And what were those strange dangly chains that hung from his trousers? Try as she might, she couldn’t work out what had detonated the change in her son. It could have been a friend. It could have been a video or record he had heard. It could merely have been a new set of hormones. Peter certainly wasn’t giving anything away. But he was certain about one thing: one day, in the not-too-distant future, he was going to be a rock star, and he wasn’t going to let anything stand in his way.
Jenny didn’t have anything against producing a rock musician, per se. She’d liked plenty of rock music when she was younger, and had even been on dates with a few of the hairy people who made it. But now, three or four months into her son’s obsession, it was becoming obvious that it was having an adverse effect on his schoolwork. Peter’s teachers were starting to use words like ‘enigma’ and ‘unfulfilled’. And it got worse, said Jenny. Two weeks ago, Gaynor, the nanny Jenny relied on to look after Peter when she was off in Europe on lecture tours, had handed in her notice, having decided to go and work on a kibbutz in Israel. Meanwhile, Ian, who worked as an actor, was due to spend most of the summer as part of a travelling theatre on the American West Coast. It was going to be a busy summer for Jenny, too – lecture tours in Norway, Greece, France and Spain – and she was beginning to panic: about the effect her son’s new interest would have on his future; about what he would do with his free time; about where she would find a nanny as reliable and inspirational as Gaynor. But, during a conversation with my parents at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party, a strange idea had popped into her head – a long shot, which wouldn’t solve all her problems, but which might just work.
It’s always hard to work out what your parents tell their friends about your life, but you can normally guess that they make it sound considerably more interesting than it is and backdate it at least a couple of years. I couldn’t tell exactly what mine had told Jenny at the party, but it had given her the idea that a) I wrote about music for a living, b) I hung out with rock stars all the time, c) I had a lot of free time this summer, d) I was desperate to take part in a road trip, and e) I was a responsible adult. What, Jenny had started to wonder, if Tom were to give Peter a kind of summer school in the realities of the rock musician’s lifestyle? What if he were to take Peter around Britain, visiting landmarks and musicians, passing on his knowledge? Yes, Jenny would still have to find a new nanny, but it would take some of the pressure off her. It would also mean that Peter had someone to hang out with who was closer to his own age. Peter might be equally determined to pursue a career in music afterwards, but at least he’d have a more pragmatic, less impulsive view of his future, and plenty of ammunition to make decisions pertaining to it.
‘So what do you think?’ asked Jenny.
‘Er . . . phew!’ I said.
‘I know it’s a strange proposal, and I’ll totally understand if you want to say no. But er . . . don’t. Please!’
The truth was, I didn’t quite know what to say, or whether to find her belief in me flattering or misguided. In reality, I probably wasn’t quite who Jenny thought I was – or at least not any more. I had made my living by writing about music for national newspapers for much of the previous five years, but I was in the final stages of a career change. Like many of my contemporaries who’d opted to move from music journalism to other forms of writing, I’d gradually had my soul sucked dry by the industry, until listening to new CDs and conducting thirty-minute interviews in hotel rooms were in danger of becoming what I’d never thought they would be: chores, like those you encounter in real jobs. But I wasn’t kidding myself that The Man was to blame for my weariness with a career deconstructing Eminem lyrics and being horrible to The Stereophonics. The real blame could be assigned to three much more persuasive factors:
1. With a few rare exceptions, I only liked music made between 1957 and 1980.
2. Gigs made my ears hurt.
3. I would rather be playing golf.
These days, my music writing amounted to an article every couple of months, focusing almost exclusively on the work of someone dead with a beard who’d once been in possession of an alarmingly large collection of lutes. The last CD I had bought was Chicago’s Greatest Hits. The only semi-famous band I had ever made friends with had stopped returning my calls after one of them was invited to appear on Never Mind The Buzzcocks. HMV bewildered me, MTV made me want to hide behind the sofa, excessive live music was known to give me ear infections, and the indie rock I’d bought as a teenager now sounded tuneless and I couldn’t recall how or why it had ever sounded any different. I could hardly remember the last time I had stayed until the end of a gig, much less hung out backstage.
‘The thing is, Jenny,’ I told her, ‘I love the idea in theory, but I might be a bit rubbish.’
‘The thing is, Tom,’ said Jenny, ‘I don’t mind. I’m not asking for much here. It’s not that I want Peter to meet anyone really well-known or anything. Even if you were just to pass on some of your experiences, play him some records, take him to meet some of your mates – you know, even people who are involved in music in a minor way – that would be enough.
‘I mean, surely you can rustle a few of your old contacts up? What about that bloke, the one in the photograph that your mum and dad have got? You know, the one where he’s sticking his tongue in your ear.’
‘Oh, Julian Cope?’
‘Yeah, that’s him. He’d have time to meet up with you, wouldn’t he? I bet he could teach Peter a thing or two.’
I pondered this for a second. Cope, who licked his fans’ ears almost as often as he modelled his hair after a root vegetable (i.e. at least three times per month), had once been the lead singer of the excellent new wave group The Teardrop Explodes, but now divided his time between writing books on Neolithic Britain, recording the occasional solo album and turning up unannounced in small villages in Wiltshire to play gigs with his novelty band, Brain Donor, while dressed in preposterously large leather boots. I thought back to the last time I’d met him: the electricity in his handshake, the inspiring logic at the heart of his surreal, breathless ramblings. It had been like meeting a real rock star, hadn’t it?
I couldn’t be sure that Cope would agree to meet with me. He was kind of elusive, and at one point in the mid-Eighties had locked himself in his room for several weeks, surviving only on the water biscuits his wife pushed under the door. But perhaps there were more like him out there. In fact, I knew there were. I’d met several of them over the last few years: eccentric, damaged icons, folk heroes and psychedelic loons who shunned the corporate trappings of the modern music industry, yet found their own niche within the essential musical fabric of the British Isles. I might not manage to locate many of them, and those that I did find might not fancy spending time in the company of a golf-loving Eagles fan and a bored teenager in oversized trousers, but a sliver of hope began to emerge. Maybe I wouldn’t find that elusive ‘real’ Britain after all, but here at least was the chance to have a lot of fun failing to do so. I tried to think of the worst thing that could happen. All I came up with was getting lost in an industrial estate in Greater Swindon. I wanted to get lost in an industrial estate in Greater Swindon.
‘Come on, Tom,’ said Jenny. ‘It will be fun! Why not come and meet him, and we’ll take it from there?’
Irresistible vanity washed over me: I was going to be in charge here. This would be my version of a musical education. I could do this in any way I chose.
‘Which day’s good for you two, then?’ I said.
One factor I hadn’t really stopped to consider was Peter himself. What were fourteen-year-olds like these days? Moreover, what were teenagers like? It was only seven years since I’d been one, yet it struck me, somewhat frighteningly, that I seemed to have entirely forgotten what it was like. Now, when I thought of adolescents, I thought of the pavement outside the London Astoria in the build-up to a nu-metal gig: the pseudo-threatening band names . . . my inadvertent need to cross to the opposite side of the road . . . the accoutrements of a new kind of hollow-eyed corporate rebellion . . . the cries of ‘Nigel, where’s Jasmine? She’s got my System Of A Down t-shirt!’
I’d found teenagers scary and slightly confusing when I was one myself; now I just found them perplexing and unsavoury. I did my best to live and shop in places where they didn’t, and generally avoided them in the street, half-convinced that they were either going to ask me to give them a counselling session or beat me up for looking at their ‘bird’. Earlier in the year, a national newspaper had commissioned me to write a feature which involved manufacturing my own boy band. My editor had instructed me to head out on to the streets of the capital to recruit ‘talent’ between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, but I’d spent the afternoon browsing in second-hand bookshops instead. In the end, my band, Boyzcout, had been constructed out of a group of friends in their mid-twenties, all of whom, after the influence of make-up, had the common trait of looking twenty-four instead of twenty-seven. We’d tried hard to pack plenty of *NSync harmonies and hip, modern references to text-messaging and the dot com world into our single, ‘Zcouting For Boyz’ – ‘I’ll zcout for you babe while we’re out zcouting for boys’ – but record company A&R men had rejected the demo for being too mature. ‘It’s a bit like Mojo magazine in musical form,’ said one.
I knew I was turning into an old fart, perhaps prematurely, but I didn’t care. There was no shame in my love of The Eagles, Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’, fuzzy dressing gowns, Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference range, weak beer, golf and the VH1 Classic Rock channel; just lots of self-righteous enjoyment. I’d spent the previous seven years becoming increasingly scornful of my former self. I’d sold his records, taken the piss out of his hairstyle and mercilessly mocked his tactics with women. Occasionally I felt the odd bit of reluctant affection for him, of course, but ultimately I thought he was a wally – although I certainly believed his spiritual descendants to be a thousand times worse.
I was fully aware that it was a cliché to feel like your generation had made better things of their youth than the generation that followed, but that didn’t stop me feeling the same thing with every fibre of my being. To put it bluntly, today’s teens repelled me. I didn’t like their grunting, complaining music, I didn’t like their shapeless clothes, I didn’t like the prongs of gel-plastered hair on their fringes, I didn’t like their baseball caps, I didn’t like the big speakers in their cars, I didn’t like their piercings and I didn’t like the way they hassled me for bus fares in the market square of my home town. And, from the little bits of evidence I could gather, they probably weren’t gagging to add me to their speed dial either. When I had tried to convey my honest sentiments about youth trends such as nu-metal, skateboarding and gangsta rap in a newspaper article, I’d inevitably received an angry letter in response from a frustrated sixteen-year-old with a name like Toad or Jemima, lambasting me for a) my lack of understanding of the isolation the modern adolescent feels, and b) my lack of comprehension about why Slutbone or Composition Of A Horse had to insert the word ‘plasma’ into every second verse of their lyrics. This, naturally, had the effect of making me feel even more righteous.
Peter was an anomaly in that he didn’t fit into either of the categories in which I’d come to place teens: he didn’t remind me distastefully of the old version of me, but he didn’t remind me distastefully of the people I used to have fights with at school either. From our initial, fleeting encounter, I’d worked out several things about him: that he was tall for his age, that he was considerably better educated than I had been at his age, that black was his favourite colour, that he was uncomfortable with his hair, and that he had watched the Oliver Stone biopic The Doors at some point in the previous twenty-four hours. He was the essence of sub-Jim Morrison hangdog adolescence, yet he was something alien to me, too – a kind of teenager that I’d never been in a position to have to understand. Jenny might have been friends with my parents from her student days, but while they still lived in a cosmopolitan enough area of North Nottinghamshire, she had long ago moved to a subregion of North London where it was possible to buy a jar of pimento-stuffed olives from any one of seven local outlets at three o’clock in the morning. She’d sent Peter to the local independent school, where, among the children of art gallery owners, daytime TV presenters and pop stars, he was groovily encouraged to learn in the direction that he wanted to learn. Having been to a comprehensive school whose twin areas of progressive excellence were football and beating the living crap out of the year below you, I didn’t quite comprehend what this style of education involved, but I was almost certain that it meant Peter knew a lot bigger words than I’d known at his age, and probably a few bigger ones than I knew now.
Would we get on? Did Peter have any enthusiasm for the project, or did he just see it as something his mum had pushed him into? It was far too early to tell. By the end of Peter’s first encounter with me, his only gestures of communication had been ‘Mmmmawwwrighttt’ and ‘Yeah, s’even better than Back In Black.’ Jenny, ever helpful, had assured me that in normal English this translated, respectively, as ‘Hello! You must be Tom, the music writer who is going to help me further my development and learn about multifarious aspects of our musical heritage!’ and ‘I’m so glad we both like the work of AC/DC! I think this provides an indication that we’re going to get along just spiffingly!’, but I wasn’t so confident. It occurred to me that, as a premature fogey, I’d spent my whole adult life hanging around with people older than me, people who treated me as their equal but always with the unspoken agreement that I was their apprentice. It didn’t matter how many Hall And Oates albums I bought; providing my mates were older than me, I would always feel slightly wet behind the ears. Now the situation was reversed. I was about to spend six months feeling old for the first time in my life, and I wasn’t sure I liked the idea. My parents, who had both made a living as teachers while I was growing up, had warned me from an early age not to follow their career path, and I wondered if I was about to find out why. Sure, moulding Peter in my image would be a great way to get my own back on a generation that got on my nerves, but I could see, from five minutes in his company, that there would be minimal effort on his part. He wasn’t going to make me feel like he was the least bit interested in me, my life or my friends. And I would have to learn a whole new way of speaking and acting: patient, cool, encouraging, effervescent, selfless, yet somehow disciplined and slyly exemplary.
In the week that preceded my first official journey with Peter, Jenny and I began to draw up an itinerary for the summer. Due to Peter’s school commitments, this would be no ordinary road trip: it would take place in carefully planned stages, featuring minimal late nights and plenty of wholesome food. Long journeys might be a problem, particularly on school nights, as would the distance between my house, in Norfolk, and Jenny’s, in Crouch End. I started to wonder just how much time I would be spending on the London Orbital and what I would do to relieve the boredom. So much, I thought, for my loose, free-livin’ road trip, where every day was a magical mystery tour.
I began to make lists of people Peter could hook up with, but always in the sceptical knowledge that rock stars are an awkward bunch and getting them in the same place at the same time as a recalcitrant adolescent might be a task no less arduous than persuading your favourite fragmented musical casualties to reunite and perform at your birthday party. In my planning I leaned heavily towards mates of mates and the kind of real people who’d be generous with their wisdom, and tried to ignore the more famous, plastic ones who might, if we were lucky, grant us twenty-five minutes of platitudes in a hotel room with their press agent eavesdropping outside the door. I could guarantee that someone out there would want to talk to us. What I couldn’t guarantee was structure, or that Peter would become a more rounded person as a result. Jenny explained again that she simply wanted Peter ‘to get more ammunition to enable him to make the right decision about his future, and to fill his spare time with something that wasn’t computer games’. Was it just British music she wanted me to teach him about? ‘No. Not really. Anything.’ Did she want me to persuade him that he didn’t want a career as a musician? ‘No. I just want him to be sure of what he’s getting himself into.’ The problem was, I wasn’t sure that I knew what he would be getting himself into. I wasn’t even sure whether the people I was taking him to meet would know what they’d got themselves into. That was the point of rock and roll, surely: it wasn’t supposed to be a carefully planned career choice.
Gradually, reality was beginning to replace my Thunderbolt and Lightfoot fantasy. Originally, I’d thought only of the concept of me teaching a teenager the laws of rock and roll on the road, as if the whole thing was nothing more than a movie, a series of easy-to-swallow images spliced together by Steven Spielberg for popular consumption: Peter and me in the car, arguing over a late-Sixties folk album; Peter and me being taken to an archaeological site by Julian Cope; Peter and me getting lost in Runcorn.
Well, okay. Maybe not Steven Spielberg.
The point was, this was going to be nowhere near as easy as I’d thought. Looking at the coming months with a clear head, the chances seemed slim that I would be picking up random hitch-hikers and playing surreal practical jokes at traffic lights. What had seemed like a great opportunity to be even less responsible than normal was suddenly looking like the most responsible thing I’d ever had to do. I wasn’t going to be spending countless hours sitting next to a caricature of a teenager; I was going to be sitting next to the real thing, with all the messy eating habits, imbalanced taste and raging angst that that implied. I was devoting the best part of my summer to this, I realised, as I set off home from Jenny’s place. I’d gone past the stage where it was going to be possible to back out. What was more, in all my meditating I’d forgotten to circumnavigate the roadworks on the North Circular, and was bringing up the rear in the South East’s most monotonous traffic jam.
Not every great road movie starts with a bang, does it? I thought back to the sleepy opening frames of Seventies films like Vanishing Point and Badlands: nothing events in no-horse towns with negligible hints of the mayhem to follow. Besides, who said I was at the start? The real beginning could come at any moment I wanted it to, in virtually any setting. I was director, writer, producer and cinematographer here. There was scope for freedom, anarchy and adventure in this project, after all – it was simply a matter of loosening up, using my imagination and letting it happen. Liberated by this thought, I clicked The Best Of The Steve Miller Band satisfyingly into the tape machine, pushed the gear-stick back into neutral for the ninth time in as many minutes, and turned my attention to the evening’s shopping list.