chapter two “THE THINGS LONELY BOYS DO”
NEVILLE “NEV” CHARLES:
I was an only child, and I wanted for nothing but company. Someone to kick the football round with, or even better, a girl who’d let me kiss her. Ah, such tragic cliché! My dad [Morris Charles] owned a chain of chip shops called Charlie’s across Birmingham, a couple of them in Coventry, and when I was in primary school it was a splendid thing, because at his shops the cod came wrapped in white paper and then underneath that, lining the baskets, he would put the newspaper comics. And the lads got a kick out of that, reading what Buck Ryan was up to between the splashes of vinegar. After school I’d walk to the closest location in Hagley Road, and Dad would be behind the counter, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his hands covered in flour, and the boys from class would stop in. They’d see me in the back booth, with my nose stuck in my notebook as per usual, and when they were leaving they’d wave and shout [affecting child’s voice], “All right, Nev!” and I’d shout right back, “All right, then! Tomorrow!”
At secondary, it was a different story. All of a sudden everyone cared about how people made their money, and my old mates’ fathers were bankers and solicitors and mine made his life standing over crocks of spattering grease. Hooray for the British class system! [Laughs]
In her early twenties, Mum [Helen Charles] had a job at a greengrocer’s, stacking the produce and helping to check the customers’ ration books, but she wanted to act and sing and model—that’s actually how she met my dad. When he was expanding the shops, he had the idea to take out an advertisement in the newspaper, and so he went to an agency to hire a good-looking girl he could put in it. I have that old ad framed in one of my homes. Mum is wearing a flowery dress and holding up a chip and smiling, and there’s a word bubble over her head and she says [imitating woman’s voice], “Choose Charlie’s!” and underneath her the new locations are printed along the bottom.
Some people, especially you Americans, you look at photographs of my mum and my dad and you make a face and you wonder how the two of them got together, him being so much older and stodgy. Funny how people said the same thing about Opal & Nev—“odd couple” and that bit. But I say my parents made a very smart pair. When her mood was up, my mum was delightful and so talented, and I wish people knew that—how the smallest things she did were sunshine. How sometimes, on weekends when I was little, she’d turn on Radio Luxembourg and make me dance with her. And my dad gave my mum a stable home, which is what everyone needed, wasn’t it, coming out of the war? And she had the freedom to pursue all those pleasures that she still had an interest in. Their marriage, I’d say, was a feminist model.
When I was younger I would go with her on auditions for all kinds of things, not just for advertisements but these godawful theater productions. She was a looker, a ginger like me except with blue eyes, but for whatever reason it never really happened for her. Nothing beyond small parts in the panto every Christmas. My dad and I would be in the audience wearing our finest, and everyone in the theater would be laughing and singing along except for him—because he would get choked up, my dad, watching my mum in the chorus in her silly makeup and petticoats. He thought it was the most magical thing in the world, her on the stage, any stage, really. But she always dreamed of the bigger roles.
This is a long way round to me telling you how I started songwriting, isn’t it? It’s a bit like I’m in therapy, yeah? [Laughs] The point of it is, my mother stopped trying when the Christmas shows stopped being enough, when she aged out of the chance to play the principal girl. And then she got depressed, although of course we weren’t calling it that then, but in any case she wasn’t in a mood much to bother with me. Dad was a dear but always gone, tending the shops. So I was alone much of the time, and did the things lonely boys do, I suppose. Yes, that’s right, wanking every possible moment. [Laughs] No, well, I mean imaginary friends and all that. And then when I was older, that transitioned to making up stories about people I wanted to know, boys I wanted to be. I always had a composition notebook filled with pieces of stories, and companion drawings too. I went on a tear once, three notebooks full about this character I kept coming back to, a poor outcast boy named Thomas who had fits, and during his fits he’d travel to different times and realms. One time he’s climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and at the top he meets a girl his age who has fits too, and they fall in love. Another time he’s on a rocket ship visiting the aliens who live on the different rings of Saturn. And every one of his adventures would end with him coming out of his fit and back to the present, and reflecting on everything he’s learned while eating a tin of his favorite hazelnut biscuits. That’s from an absolutely deranged mind, I tell you!
My mother never paid attention to my crazy stories, until one day she overheard me trying to work out a theme song. Because I thought my stories would be good for telly, you know, and you need a good theme song for telly! But I knew nothing about music, and so I was just testing lyrics to classic melodies, figuring out the notes and pecking them out on her upright piano—“Baa Baa Black Sheep,” “Frère Jacques,” “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” stuff like that. [Singing to the tune of “London Bridge”] “Thomas Chapman writhes and shakes / Pulls up stakes, goodness sakes! / Thomas Chapman, trips he takes / Come home, Thomas.” Not exactly “When I’m Sixty-Four,” is it? [Laughs]
But Mum heard me plunking away and it seemed to brighten her up, the idea of me being into music. She started coming out of her bedroom and she’d sit on the piano bench with me, try to show me some chords and play some of the old songs she used to do. “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” that was her favorite. One day she asked me if I wanted to take lessons, and the look on her face was so hopeful, so changed toward the better, that I couldn’t say no.
And so I started with the piano, and my first teacher was George.
GEORGE RISEHART:I
I was twenty-two, just out of a program at Birmingham City University, when I started coming round to give him lessons. Mrs. Charles was a pretty woman—beautiful, really, with that fiery hair—and she’d hover when I was there, trying to make herself look busy but really keeping an ear out. I think Nev could feel that anxiousness. So he gave it a good try, he did, but at the piano, at least at first, he was shit.
NEV CHARLES:
I thought George was brilliant—coolest person I’d ever met. During the day he taught pathetic sods like me, but by his sideburns and the scuff on his loafers you could tell he had a whole different story going at night. At first he’d wear a cheap-looking black blazer and his hair slicked back very neat, trying to make an impression—but then Mum increased his visits to twice a week, and he relaxed enough to let his curls loose and put on the corduroy. Dad raised an eyebrow but he didn’t say much, as long as Mum was happy.
GEORGE RISEHART:
Oh, you know, I was playing in a band like everybody else at the time. We were a quintet: lead and rhythm guitars, bass, drums, and me banging away on piano. We called ourselves the Boys from Birmingham. We worshiped the trinity: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis. In another universe maybe we were the Beatles. Maybe even slightly tighter, though, because we had formal training—although to our parents’ horror we had no interest at all in playing classically.
The other lads and I shared an infested flat that cost entirely too much, more than we could scrape together from our pitiful club shows, so the lessons were necessary and among the least dreaded ways I could make a few quid. Most of the kids I taught were brats, very entitled—I didn’t care as long as their parents were paying me to babysit. But there was something about Nev that just broke my heart, this kid so eager to please but simply not connecting in a traditional way to the music. I felt I was robbing his lovely mother.
One afternoon I was considering quitting after watching Nev wrestle for the hundredth time with something simple—“Yankee Doodle” or something like that—and Mrs. Charles invited me to stay for lunch. When you’re young and poor, you don’t turn down free food. So I sat at the table with her and Nev, who was so bashful he kept his head down in his notebook, scribbling away. I asked him, “What’s that you’re writing, Nev-o?” That’s how he started telling me his Thomas stories, on and on about the boy with epilepsy and the travels to Kilimanjaro and the hazelnut biscuits. What he wrote was so bizarre and delightful, it got me thinking that there might be a different way, a different mode entirely, of teaching him.
NEV CHARLES:
George asked me if he could borrow a couple of my notebooks because he wanted to read the stories, and of course I was chuffed—it was an honor to get the attention of someone so with-it, someone who had friends and girls and a life filled with all sorts of debauchery! The next time he came round, he brought the notebooks as well as Jerry [Cardinal, the Boys’ lead guitarist and singer]. Instead of going into another dreadful lesson, he and Jerry began to play music they’d done based on my stories. There were no lyrics, just the instrumentation, but in the music I could feel Thomas: He was twitching between George’s sharp notes, he was lifting away during a transcendental bit of guitar, he was calm and reflective at the close. It told a beginning, middle, and end in a way I’d never understood before.
When they finished playing Jerry said, “Well, go on, mate…. What do you think?”
GEORGE RISEHART:
And he’s looking at me with those green saucer eyes and he says, almost in a whisper, “Show me how to do that. But with the words this time.”
Newly passionate about the possibilities of music, Nev continued studying under George Risehart and wrote the lyrics for a handful of Boys from Birmingham tunes—including 1963’s “Rosy,” the first Nev Charles song captured on record. Although the band was never signed, they found enthusiastic patrons in Nev’s parents, who paid for studio time and allowed their son to join in their raucous nightclub concerts.
GEORGE RISEHART:
I never met anyone with a creative mind like Nev’s. We were good musicians, the Boys and I, but we weren’t so good at the lyrics. “I’m in love with you, doo-doo-doo, ooh-ooh-ooh….” It’s difficult to break through the noise like that.
But Nev was a sponge. He’d come to our practices with his notebook and watch Jerry working through a new melody, all of us straining to string together something that we wouldn’t be embarrassed to sing in a room full of people. And one day he felt bold enough to chime in with his suggestions.
NEV CHARLES:
With “Rosy,” Jerry and the bassist were playing these call-and-response riffs in the chorus—the guitar was “wah-wah-WAH-la-la-la, wah-WAH-la-la-la-la” and then the bass was “dum-dum-doo, dum-doo-doo-doo”—so I wanted to play off that, write a conversation between two people, the guitar being the woman called Rosy and the bass the man who wanted to know her. “ ‘I like afternoon skies, lit up in every hue’ / ‘Yes, Rosy, and I do too.’ / ‘Would you walk by my side, forever staying true?’ / ‘Well, Rosy, that’s up to you.’ ”
GEORGE RISEHART:
Of course we didn’t have a girl in the band, so in our rehearsals we’d have Nev sing the girl part because his voice hadn’t fully dropped yet. He’d exaggerate and put on a posh accent, and I’d do the deep man’s voice. Eventually, I asked another student from my university days, a singer I knew called Carrie, to sing the part of Rosy for the recording, so that’s who you see credited for the vocal.
CARRIE JOHNSTONE:
At the time, I couldn’t have known it was going to be anything even close to rock music history—the first recorded song written by Nev Charles! I simply did it as a favor to George… well, because I’d fancied him since uni, in the fawning way girls that age tend to fancy boys.
The day we recorded, Nev was there in the studio with his parents. His mum was very pretty and, what’s the word… poised. I don’t remember much about his dad, except that he was balding and older and sort of pleasantly confused by everything. I remember wondering why they were there, and the Boys seemed annoyed as well. Then I realized they were footing the bill for the studio time.
As for Nev, he was quite serious about his song, you know, which was amusing. He kept telling me how he thought I should sing it, how to emphasize certain syllables—my “motivation” and all that. He had a lot of nervous energy. I remember asking George, “Is he meant to be a member of the band?” and George said, “No, darling, but he makes a good mascot.” Certainly that hurt Nev’s feelings, by the look in his eyes the rest of the session, and I felt bad about that. But maybe it also gave him ideas, because not long after that weekend, during the time George and I were having our moment, I noticed he began hanging round more and dressing in the style of the Boys—the long hair and loafers, the corduroy jacket and gray T-shirt. I’ll admit it did look adorable on him, such a tough look on a sweet, nervous kid. I told him as much, and he’d blush and blush.
GEORGE RISEHART:
The Charleses paid for a small pressing of “Rosy,” and we sold a few copies here and there out of some local record stores. We had Carrie come do it for some of our gigs, with me singing the male part, but then she and I had an enormous row because she’d caught me with another girl. God forgive me, Carrie, if you’re out there! [Laughs] We couldn’t afford to pay a girl singer for what Carrie had been doing for free, so we thought we’d just scrap doing “Rosy” at the gigs. Then Nev volunteered to sing the girl part, since he used to do it at the early rehearsals, and we figured why not. Nobody came to our shows much anyway.
So Nev started coming up onstage, acting out the part as well in a funny way. The audience got a kick out of it, and it became sort of a novelty thing, a signature of our shows. Suddenly Nev’s shyness started melting away, and one day the other Boys and I looked up and thought, you know, Bloody hell, what’s happening here? Our shows had got more popular, but we weren’t all that thrilled because it wasn’t down to us. It was because of this little lad who was charming the knickers off everyone.
When he switched from the piano to the guitar, that was the last straw; we’d all got fed up. Especially Jerry, who felt very threatened because Nev was catching on fast. The Charleses were floating us by then—everything we’d done that was worth anything was subsidized by them—and because of that we felt obligated to keep Nev in the mix. But he was clearly eager to break out. At the shows the crowd would clamor for him, and he’d make his way to the front, standing next to Jerry like it was his rightful place. He made us look like the backing band, the accompaniment. At which point, as kindly as I could, I told Mrs. Charles we could no longer accept her money.
NEV CHARLES:
They kicked me out. Actually, no, they didn’t, because they never truly decided I was in. [Laughs] Ah, can’t blame them, really. It all worked out, you could say.
Encouraged by his mother, Helen, who was stung by the Boys’ rejection but more determined than ever to push him to success, Nev continued writing songs, teaching himself guitar, and performing on any stage that would have him. During holidays from school—and sometimes even when school was in session, depending on Helen’s mood—the two took a train to London in the hopes of stumbling into a break.
NEV CHARLES:
Mum wanted it as much as I did—more, maybe. We’d still listen to the radio, yeah, but watching television together is what really sticks: It was Top of the Pops on Thursday nights, Juke Box Jury on Saturdays.II At the same time, she was writing letters to the people at the labels and putting them in manila envelopes along with the “Rosy” single, and before she dropped each package in the box she’d close her eyes and whisper a prayer and kiss the back of the envelope for good luck. Not one letter back, not even a “Thanks but no thanks.” Still, she never did give up on me.
I. Interviewed by telephone in Birmingham, England, George Risehart, 76, still manages a piano shop and gives lessons out of its cramped back room. “Rosy,” he tells me, remains the most popular sheet-music request among his new students.
II. Top of the Pops featured live performances by the day’s chart-climbers, while Juke Box Jury, an adaptation of an American show, had a panel of musicians, actors, sports figures, popular DJs, and other notable types critiquing new releases and declaring each a “hit” or a “miss.” As a solo artist, Nev Charles appeared on Pops several times, and on the other BBC series once, during a 1990 reincarnation hosted by Jools Holland.