People think of the Mod scene in terms of certain visual signifiers: parkas bearing the ubiquitous target motif plus multi-directional arrows, the black-and-white checkerboard of Two-Tone, the bowling shoes, and, of course, the scooters. To quote those revisionist latter-day Mods, the Merton Parkas, ‘You need wheels if you wanna make deals.’
But in my experience, it was two wheels OK, four wheels better. A scooter was just a way of getting about, no more no less; cleaner than a Greaser’s bike and redolent of the stylish Italianate aesthetics of a Pifco hairdryer.
By 1965 at the Twisted Wheel nobody called themselves a Mod anyway. People in Burnley called themselves Mods, people with targets on their parkas. We called ourselves ‘stylists’ and for the stylist it was a car all the way.
I was very fussy. I read Esquire, Nova, Town and similar publications, so I was abreast of the latest London looks. One location on my radar was the Ivy Shop in Richmond, later called J Simon,* which seemed to be where all the modern jazz crowd in London got their stuff.
We had also finally got a contemporary male boutique in Manchester. It was in St Ann’s Passage, a tiny glazed shopping arcade leading to King Street which housed an old-style Hyacinth Bucket-type tea room called Meng & Ecker, and two equally tiny shops, more like overstated glass cubicles – kiosks even.
The whole fantastical boutique consisted of a sleek, ultra-modern window display featuring a single outfit on a malnourished mannequin next to a Corinthian plinth bearing one shoe. It was all pared back to the extreme, beyond the Bauhaus, a form of entrapment with its tantalising glimpse of a better life. What other futuristic garments might be hidden in those Shaker-style cabinets within? They didn’t even have price tags; that would have mucked up the space-age integrity. The name rendered in chrome lettering above the window was all in lower case: ‘john michael’ – way out and way out of my price range.
A change of john michael’s window was a major event. On one occasion it featured a slash-neck hooped matelot top over a pair of cream hipster parallels, and on the plinth, a completely squared-off shoe, hyper-stylised with just one eyelet and a black shoelace. It was made out of a cream Italian glove leather with a coffee-coloured tuck-and-roll seam down the middle: soft as butter, it looked as if you could eat it. In no time at all there was a very well-known picture of Brian Jones wearing the entire strip.
Those shoes were an epiphany; they were the other side of the coin to the elastic-sided boot. If you were in St Trop, on a yacht, or down on the Boulevard de la Croisette in Cannes, they’d look right, unlike a big pair of shit-kicking boots with three-inch Cubans.
I’d been thinking about St Tropez a lot at that time, as I was borderline obsessional about the boyfriends of Brigitte Bardot. What common quality did they share? Mix me a person and I’ll be that guy. To that end I would buy Continental magazines that featured Swedish films in which chicks got undressed, aimed at the art crowd. I bought them at the Cinephone box office, which killed two birds with one stone. I affected an interest in Continental cinema: ‘Oh, I see Claude Chabrol is doing a searing indictment of the bourgeoisie again. What’s more, Jean Seberg gets her tits out!’
Such was my preoccupation with Brigitte Bardot’s love life that I started wearing my glasses because of Roger Vadim. After him came Serge Gainsbourg: she likes people in glasses and ugly boys with big noses. Double tick. Fantastic.
J. Simon, St Trop, fine knitwear, merino, cashmere, Sea Island cotton . . . the babysitting gig had been a sweet deal, but while I was waiting to get into printing, I needed more than cig money. Most of the layabouts I was getting to know in the bohemian world of literature and art were avoiding work. They were on the sausage,* but in order to get it, they had to be available for job interviews, praying for rejection each time. A normal job was anathema to these people, whereas I always needed money and didn’t see any way of getting it other than some form of stop-gap employment.
Dave Redshaw was already working as a cutter at Quellrain, and he seemed to be doing OK. Why not me?
I was taken on as a starter cutter by Seidelbaum’s, a clothing manufacturer that specialised in ladies’ outerwear. It was what would be called a sweatshop today, except you didn’t sweat if there was nothing to sweat over, and at least Seidelbaum’s was in a purpose-built factory in the Swan Buildings in Ancoats, rather than the inadequate premises of a lot of the other companies, which were often just a couple of knocked-through terraced houses.
Apart from the machine room downstairs, which was all women, the workforce was almost entirely Jewish and male. The only goyish exceptions were me, an ex-Ted called Albert, and the maintenance man, a hip Jamaican guy called Rupert, who wouldn’t have looked out of place fronting a rock steady combo. He had the whole strip: one of those V-neck leatherette slipovers with a nylon polo neck underneath, and the popular high-crown stingy brim hat.
I was on the cutting-room floor: eight hours of non-stop hilarious cruelty and state-of-the-art piss-taking. Les the foreman ran a tight ship, but if you weren’t busy, you didn’t have to try to look busy. If there was nothing to do, you didn’t do it, and a lot of the time we were just hanging around smoking cigs, drinking tea, betting on horses, and having a laugh. Ancoats was Manchester’s Little Italy. Signor Vincenti’s ice-cream van came round every afternoon and we took it in turns to get the orders in. It was a happy routine.
While we sweated in the comparative squalor of the shop floor, the business end took place front-of-house. Prospective customers were greeted in a swish showroom that looked like a Hollywood set with elaborate floral displays, fluted plinths, black marble feature panels, scalloped niches, and a raised catwalk along which sashayed Coral, Seidelbaum’s very own glamorous Creole supermodel.
As a starter cutter and a complete novice, I was started off with the easy stuff, which was difficult to get wrong. I was cutting canvases, which were used as a stiffening agent between the fabric and the lining on certain stress points of a garment, thus imparting the correct structure and drape. My job was to mark off the pieces from a pattern and cut them out with a slot knife.
Uniquely, apprentices in the rag trade were free to renegotiate their terms of employment at various stages in their training. The next stage was ‘improver cutter’, so I was entitled to go to another shop and broker a pay rise. Business is business. But in my case, this was pre-empted by a generous wage increase: I was now on about £12 a week.
As an improver, I moved on to marking and cutting out the expensive satin linings by means of an Eastman, a powerful bladed machine that resembled the outboard motor of a speedboat. It was very precise work. I had to layer up multiple lengths of satin to a maximum thickness on the cutting table and firmly secure the fabric with several clips. I marked out the pattern on the top layer with tailor’s chalk, then cut out all the layers rapidly in one go with the razor-sharp Eastman blade. It cut round corners like a dream, but it was a pretty lethal piece of kit. You had to pay attention, otherwise you could easily slice your hand off, or mis-cut a batch of linings that would have to be ditched. Seidelbaum’s didn’t like throwing valuable satin away. It was inevitable that there was some waste, but an important part of the gig was learning to mark up the fabric in such a way as to minimise scrappage.
As at my brief garage tenure, I never told any of my workmates at Seidelbaum’s about my poetic ambitions. In the world of industry, the writing of verse was a filthy secret, even if in my social life I was an open book: I always told girls I was trying to impress that I was a poet. If fronted out with the correct degree of self-importance, one way or the other it always got a reaction. As a consequence, I was seen as part of the emergent beatnik craze, rather than the effeminate fantasist I would have been three years earlier.
While I might have denied being a Mod, I didn’t mind people thinking I was a beatnik; indeed I cultivated my new-found bohemian reputation. In truth, I only knew about bohemians through reading some shock-horror magazine article or other, and I didn’t truly have a clue about my fellow beatniks. (Back then, you couldn’t just press a button and get all the dope on someone or something, you’d have to go to the library, actually read books and stuff to find things out.)
One cover of the ever-topical Mad magazine had featured Alfred E. Neuman sporting a chinstrap beard and a beret, but apart from that there was no visible evidence of the beatnik in my regular reading material, namely my mother’s Woman’s Own, cousin Mary’s Mirabelle, and the Daily Mirror. The brief was simple: what is the look? And how do I get it? I’d seen Alfred E. Neuman, I’d read a couple of articles, bought a set of bongos, and I had a few ideas of my own.
The French version of beatnik involved existentialism. I imagined a dog-eared paperback copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée sticking out of the back pocket of Brigitte Bardot’s jeans. Sartre regularly haunted my beatnik musings. I pictured him as one of those tremendously tasty Continental types: offbeat, prodigiously elegant, socially mobile, drunkenly insouciant even in the daylight hours, handsome to a fault: somewhere between Charles Boyer and Alain Delon. Boy, did I talk him up in the playground of my imagination. Then, on the dust jacket of Being and Nothingness, the long-awaited photograph. What a fucking demmick. Bloody hell, this is Jean-Paul Sartre?
By contrast, Jack Kerouac I discovered was Hollywood handsome, but what with his dishevelled Tony Curtis haircut and his Brooks Brothers three-button sport coat, he didn’t look like anyone’s idea of the bearded outsider either. He seemed clean-cut, respectable, bookish.
The beatnik girls in the UK followed the sexy monochrome Juliette Gréco template. Their male consorts, however, seemed to be an Orwellian collection of fruit-juice-drinking, sex-maniacal, sandal-wearing, quack-diet enthusiasts; malcontents of every stripe. As the sworn enemies of America, they even invented the skiffle group as the antidote to Elvis. It didn’t work.
As ever, the movies provided indispensable insights. As early as 1958 the mainstream studios had begun to feature beatniks as recognisable social stereotypes in movies such as Two for the Seesaw, starring Shirley MacLaine and Robert Mitchum and set in Greenwich Village; The Subterraneans, based on the novel by Kerouac, starring Leslie Caron and George Peppard; and The Sandpiper, starring Elizabeth Taylor as a painter with a studio in Big Sur, California. This was beatnik with a Hollywood sheen: needless to say, ça plane pour moi.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the art world, the Vendettas were having an identity crisis.
After Terry defected to Johnny B and the Beat League, we drafted in my cousin Sid, who had got hold of one harmonica and two maracas, three of the essential components of any Bo Diddley tune. Bo Diddley, Tommy Tucker, and Chuck Berry were the VIPs as far as we were concerned.
Basically, we wanted to be The Rolling Stones.
As I’ve said, Terry’s group were now renamed The Good Guys and they were doing all right. We held a group brainstorm meeting and decided that our gangster image had held us back for long enough. A complete break with the past was necessary, and we changed our name again, from the Vendettas to the Chaperones.
I fancied myself as the vocalist, but as I soon discovered, it was almost impossible for me to sing and play bass at the same time.* The only exception to this was ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, or any other number in which I didn’t have to multitask: in other words, when I could alternate the riff and my own unaccompanied voice: ‘Bam bam bam bam bam . . . Gipsy woman told my mother . . . Bam bam bam bam bam . . . Before I was born . . . Bam bam bam bam bam . . .’ Get the idea?
That was my one vocal contribution, because the rest of the time I had to concentrate hard on what my fucking fingers were up to. That’s why I have a grudging respect for Sting; Macca doesn’t seem to have a problem either. To me that’s genius. And don’t forget Mark ‘Thunder Thumbs’ King out of Level 42.
Our musical repertoire was still sorely limited. Three chords: OK. Two chords: better. One chord: fabulous. We had hitherto performed only covers, but I now became the Chaperones’ self-appointed designated songwriter (publishing royalties), and knocked out a few gonzoid lyrics to fit the strict metrical requirements of the only two riffs we could ever pull off.
Gonzoid lyrics always had a place in the world of rhythm and blues: ‘Transfusion’ by Nervous Norvus; ‘Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie’ by Louis Jordan; ‘Alligator Wine’ by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins; ‘Shombalor’ by Sheriff and the Ravels; and such Leiber/Stoller classics as ‘I’m a Hog for you Baby’, ‘Charlie Brown’, and ‘Smokey Joe’s Cafe’, first popularised by The Coasters. Also the fabulously obscene ‘Two-Time Slim’ by the Johnny Otis Show under their X-certificate alias Snatch and the Poontangs. Profanity would later become an essential component of my own house style.
One of my first compositions employed the ‘High Heel Sneakers’ riff, and was called ‘Mad Hat Madame’. I can only remember the first four lines:
Mad hat madame
Where d’ya get a hat that size?
I see where you’re coming from
It keeps the sun right out your eyes
I was quite pleased with that. Put it this way: it had its own internal logic.
‘Sick’ was the hottest ticket in town, and found a place in the pop universe with a whole package of untimely death songs often involving high-performance motor vehicles: ‘Leader of the Pack’ by The Shangri-Las, ‘Terry’ by Lynn ‘Twinkle’ Ripley, ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ by Ricky Valance, and ‘Johnny Remember Me’ by John Leyton, featuring the ghostly voice of his dead girlfriend, and produced by the genuinely homicidal sonic-trailblazer Joe Meek.
Even the tweedy Downliners Sect released the Sect Sings Sick Songs EP (try saying that with a lisp), featuring numbers such as ‘Now She’s Dead’ and ‘Leader of the Sect’.
Inevitably, the popularity of this aberrant subgenre triggered a whole new moral panic about the miserable psyche of British youth. Like anyone of my age, I had a morbid streak a mile wide and I found this flash-in-the-pan craze to be a rich seam of inspiration. I would listen to these records and conclude that these people didn’t know the meaning of heartbreak. Try ‘Teenage Cremation’ © John Cooper Clarke for size. I can’t remember the lyrics, but the hook line went like this:
Teenage cremation,
Oh, how I cried when you died.
As I’ve said, when I started writing these songs the big three for the Chaperones were Bo Diddley, Tommy Tucker, and Chuck Berry. Uniquely, in the case of Chuck Berry the lyrics are the tune. As Mr Malone said, great poetry insists upon itself. Technically, Chuck crams in too many lyrics for the allotted tempo. Take this verse from ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’:
Way back in history, 3000 years
In fact, ever since the world began
There’s been a whole lotta good women sheddin’ tears
Over a brown-eyed handsome man
It’s a lot of trouble for a brown-eyed handsome man
Those two words ‘in fact’ are entirely extraneous. A lesser songsmith would have left them out. The peerless Chuck Berry, however, adds them intentionally in order to deformalise the lyric, rendering it more conversational.
Chuck Berry’s back catalogue was mercilessly plundered by every rock and roll outfit of the period, especially The Beatles and the Stones.
Beatles or Stones? It was always presented as a choice. Even now, usually at funerals, people of a certain age still argue about it. By 1965 the two groups seemed to be worlds apart. The Beatles had their precocious sophistication, while the comparatively primordial Rolling Stones traded in a kind of snotty allure which chimed with the Chaperones’ corporate idea of ourselves. In our book, enthusiasm was the default setting of an idiot.
Our primitive approach was legitimised by the untutored likes of Jimmy Reed, T-Bone Walker, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Koko Taylor, and Elmore James, in fact anyone who exemplified the souped-up electricity of the Chicago blues. These names had gained mass recognition thanks largely to The Rolling Stones, The Pretty Things, the early Kinks, and provincial fellow travellers like The Animals, Them, and The Spencer Davis Group.
The Manchester Free Trade Hall was the UK stop on the annual American Folk Blues Festival tour, leading to occasional appearances at the various basement venues while the legendary visiting musicians were in town. I attended most of these shows: there was a sense of urgency owing to the visitors’ unhealthy lifestyles, plus their advancing years.
The 1965 package, for example, advertised Little Walter on harmonica. You may remember him from such tunes as ‘Off the Wall’ and ‘Boom, Boom Out Goes the Lights’. On the night, however, he was replaced by Shakey Horton: Walter had been shot through the ankle in a recent gunfight in the South Side of Chicago.