EIGHT
A giant cream cracker hung in the air above the Jacobs factory at baking hour. The dirigible aroma followed me the short step from the bus stop to the staff house near Walton Gaol.
Mr. Mayes, the father of my new singing companion, was a medical officer at the prison. I wondered if he thought playing the guitar was a bit daft, or perhaps it was me who he thought was a bit daft.
Undoubtedly, his son, Allan, was more confident. He was a better guitarist than me and sang with a strong, true voice, but he must have seen something in me, as we were now up in his room working through his record collection, trying to find songs to sing together. He was making the case for the Buffalo Springfield, and a great song called “Raider” from Farewell Aldebaran on the Straight label by Judy Henske and Jerry Yester, while I sang the praises of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Moondance.
We eventually settled on a couple of songs from another Van record, His Band and the Street Choir, realizing that we could make a decent fist of “Domino,” or even “I’ve Been Working,” but we could have never carried off “Slim Slow Slider.”
Our repertoire soon included songs by The Byrds, The Band, and Lindisfarne and one or two by Crosby, Stills & Nash, but what I liked most of all were a handful of little-known Nick Lowe tunes from the Brinsley Schwarz album Silver Pistol.
“The Last Time I Was Fooled” was a shrug of a title that appealed to a romantic dunce like me. The same could be said for Jim Ford’s “I’m Ahead If I Can Quit While I’m Behind,” which Nick Lowe also sang and we would learn before the year was out. However, the song with which I probably most identified was Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.”
My parents were now living in different cities. When I moved to Liverpool with my mother in the middle of 1970, I had just turned sixteen and knew no one other than my relations.
My Dad, meanwhile, moved back into our old family home in Twickenham and was toying with forming a group of his own, a poetic enterprise involving a harp and a flute that went under the name The Hand-Embroidered Lemon-Peel. I was never really sure if this group really existed or if it was just an excuse for him to seduce hippie girls.
Nevertheless, my father knew I didn’t have his gift for making friends and thought I might want to make contact with a local group that he’d heard about. They were called Medium Theatre and claimed to combine poetry, dramatic scenarios, and psychedelic songs.
It was an invitation that was hard to resist.
When I walked in, they were playing to a nearly deserted upstairs room at O’Connor’s Tavern on Hardman Street. The joint was definitely not jumping.
Their songs were pretty terrible, full of overwrought recitations with raga accompaniment, but the youngest member, a blond lad in glasses about my age, had a taste for less epic songs and seemed to want to play electric guitar rather than the bongos. A short while later Allan Mayes and I met up at a New Year’s Eve party and tried to outdo each other with the songs we knew how to play. As 1970 turned into 1971, Allan invited me to join his new group, Rusty. That was probably a pretty good description of how well we played, but naturally, we thought we were going to conquer the world. We had a bass player, Alan Brown, and a feller called Dave, who owned a microphone and tambourine and was nominally our lead singer, but as is often the case with late-teenage combos, the conflict of ambitions soon took care of the balance of power. Within a few weeks, the singer had sold his microphone and we were a trio.
If there had been a moment after The Beatles hit when it seemed any Liverpudlian scruff with a guitar could get signed, that moment had definitely passed.
During my summer holidays in the ’60s, I used to kick a ball around a scrap of grass with a gang of local kids that included Lewis Collins. He’d briefly been a teenage member of The Mojos, before finding success playing the tough guy Bodie in the cop show The Professionals, around the same time that I released my first record.
I’d always known that infamy lay around every corner on Merseyside. One afternoon in 1963, I was treading water in the big open-air 1930s swimming pool at New Brighton, where the Mersey opens up to the Irish Sea. It was a magnificent concrete palace of primitively formed art deco curves, like an ice cream cake of pale green and vanilla paint. The pool structure jutted out over the shoreline and was open to the skies, but even on sunny days, the bathers often shivered in the winds blowing in off Liverpool Bay. The place would eventually be destroyed by a minor hurricane. The photographer Martin Parr cast a not uncritical eye on all of this in his photo essay The Last Resort, but I remember the place with the fondness of lost summer.
When swimming was done, there was a treat to be had from the double-sided shops that served ice cream, candy floss, sticks of rock, fish-and-chips, lemonade, and cups of tea to both the bathers and the promenaders walking by outside the pool. Sometimes there would be an announcement over a feeble Tannoy speaker, perhaps proposing a bathing beauties contest but usually just giving the name of a child who had lost its parents in the crowd.
On this afternoon, there was a group set up by the end of the pool. They were playing some beat music, but the amplification was so puny it was hard to hear with your head half underwater.
There was suddenly a commotion and lifeguards appeared to be chasing a fully dressed young man up the ladder to the high diving board. This tall, blond, gangly fellow stripped down to a pair of swimming trunks and, with his arms outstretched to the world, plunged into the fifteen feet of water below. There was some screaming and laughter.
I swam to the concrete shore of the shallow end to tell someone what I’d seen, and I heard an older man say to a young girl eating ice cream, “Don’t pay any attention, it’s just Rory Storm, trying to get his name in the paper.”
When Rory Storm and The Hurricanes played the Kaiserkeller in Hamburg in 1960, their opening act was The Beatles, who, by 1962, had poached The Hurricanes’ drummer, Ringo Starr, and were getting ready to head out of town.
By 1970, everything needed to be made up again.
When I first got to Liverpool as a teenager-in-residence, I stayed for a while with my aunt and uncle in Anfield. The windows at the front of the house would rattle from the roar of a goal being scored at the Liverpool ground, less than a quarter of a mile away.
My uncle Arthur had been a milkman, but at the time was working as a foreman in an electronics factory. He spent most of his spare time tending vegetables at his allotment or keeping his 1959 Ford Consul on the road with the sort of skill for mechanical things that has always eluded me.
His wife, my auntie Pat, was a beautiful woman of Irish descent with dark hair and a sharp tongue. She was almost in show business, as she worked part-time as a receptionist at the Wookey Hollow, a vaguely notorious Anfield nightclub at which middle-aged women swooned to the operatic voice of the American singer Lovelace Watkins.
Every evening, I’d scan the Liverpool Echo for folk club notices, trying to find somewhere to play. Most of the adverts specified “Traditional Folk Night.”
I quickly found out that they’d show you the door if you sang your own songs, while a flush-faced fellow in an itchy sweater, who’d never been farther out to sea than the ferryboat to New Brighton, would go off to great acclaim if he sang “The Holy Ground” or some endless whaling song.
I developed an unreasonable hatred of folk music.
There were just one or two places that promised “Contemporary Folk,” with the footnote “Floor Singers Welcome.” You could play a few songs for the honor and the experience. One such club sprang up a flight of narrow stairs above a clothes shop on Bold Street.
I was waiting my turn to play when a lad with a vaguely dangerous demeanor called Terry, like in the song by Twinkle, got up and proceeded to play three startling songs in open tunings that put my trite little ditties to shame. You could learn a lot by watching and listening to how others held the spotlight.
The former Great George Street Congregational Church, on the edge of Chinatown, had been turned into an arts center, but funds were so scant that the building was still in some state of disrepair. The exterior of the Victorian sandstone facade was so darkened by soot that it was known locally as “The Blackie.”
When I played my first paying gig there in 1971, the seating in the basement amounted to a few mildewed mattresses thrown over stone steps on which the audience reclined. I played third on the bill to a folk trio called Halcyon and a local stalwart named Steve Hardacre, and got paid a handsome fifty pence for my pains.
It was a start.
My first patrons, Vinnie and Jenny Finn, also ran a Friday-night “Lamplight” music evening at the Remploy Social Club in Wallasey, over the Mersey. I’d sing a few songs and sometimes get a small cut of the door, but nobody was making any money, they were barely covering their costs.
The regular host and star of the evening was a hearty singer called Hal Crabtree, who played rousing songs on a big Levin dreadnought guitar. I wanted to be able to raise my voice like Hal and command people’s attention but always seemed to spend half of my stage time tinkering with my guitar after a disastrous experiment with open tunings, or I’d thrash the damn thing so hard to lift my performance above the conversation that I’d start the song with six strings and end up with only four or less.
Someone saw me howling away there one night and recklessly booked me to sing at the British Legion Hall on the posh side of Birkenhead Park.
I can’t say my set was a triumph. I went off to a round of feeble applause from a handful of pensioners supping mild beer and a smattering of teenagers in army greatcoats drinking cider.
However, once I found a singing partner in Allan Mayes, my performances became a little more controlled and his superior musicianship and more melodious voice balanced my chaotic approach. Alan Brown held things down on a bass with a 15-watt amplifier and an impressive head of hair. Given that foundation, I’d even venture into the occasional guitar solo for which Allan claims I used to clutch a rabbit’s foot for luck. I’m sure this foot was just a figure of speech, but then I’d usually run out of fingers and fortune at around the same time.
We played our songs anywhere they would have us: pubs, clubs, even a Catholic girls’ school called Mary Help of Christians, known locally as “Mary Feed the Pigeons.” A ledger of our gigs, preserved in Allan’s old school notebook, reveals that we were paid “Nil” for that appearance, but I suppose we might have imagined other rewards for playing there, even if none were forthcoming. Most of the fees paid were in the range of £2 or £3, split among the three of us until our bass player took off to university in the summer and we pressed on as a slightly more viable duo. I think the most we ever earned in one night was £10, and that seemed like an absolute fortune.
We sang our Rusty songs during poetry readings at a local library. The organizer was a kind man named Harold, who looked like a picture of a bearded poet in a book and wrote passionate books about the struggle of the trade union movement. One local agent even tried to persuade us to change our name to “Procyon,” perhaps imagining that we might be mistaken for a prog rock outfit and get more bookings, but as nobody knew how to pronounce “Procyon,” this interlude was mercifully brief.
For a short while, our Friday-night gig was at The Crow’s Nest, a pub in Widnes, a short drive in Allan’s Ford Anglia, overburdened with guitars and equipment, along the north bank of the Mersey into rugby league territory, where the accent tips to the sort of flat Lancastrian dialect that sounds as if the speaker has just been hit with a plank of wood.
We hauled in our “PA,” two heavy, homemade wooden speaker cabinets painted lime green, through which both our voices and guitars were amplified. The few bored-looking girls, nursing Babycham, sat puzzled through a few of our more esoteric songs and then ventured out of their corner to make a sarcastic-sounding request.
“Do you know any Slade?” they said with a sneer.
None of our songs bore any resemblance to “Cum On Feel the Noize,” so we gave up on Widnes, or maybe Widnes gave up on us.
Eventually, someone persuaded the manager of the Yankee Clipper nightclub in Liverpool city center to allow us to run our own music night with our mate Vinnie on slow Tuesday evenings. We would all be impresarios. The scheme was that we would keep the fifty-pence entrance fee to pay the musicians, and the management would keep the bar takings from the hordes of beer-swilling bohemians we attracted.
We thought we’d arrived when we booked the fine local blues guitarist Sam Mitchell. He played bottleneck on a National resonator guitar and sounded convincingly as if the hellhound might have known his address. Unhappily, the club was down a narrow side street where there was little passing trade and the small audience that did turn up to see Sam either were not thirsty or nursed one drink all evening. We lied and told the club owners that more alcoholic patrons would eventually show up, but we should have known that any establishment named after a line in “The Leaving of Liverpool” was not likely to be our home for very long.
Our agreement lasted all of two weeks. We were shown the door and had to strike a deal to lodge our music nights within the more popular Temple Bar.
Despite these modest returns, our faith in our future was pretty unshakable. We even made a raid down to London while my Dad was away playing the northern clubs, staying at his now swinging pad, the walls of the bathroom papered with pages from Playboy magazine.
We did the rounds of London folk clubs, looking for work, taking floor singer spots at the Troubadour and the Half Moon in the underbill to Ralph McTell, but there was no longer any novelty in a couple of lads from Liverpool turning up with guitars.
My mother and I had moved from our now broken family home in the south to a small terraced house off Muirhead Avenue. It was a pleasant but unremarkable suburban street, although a row of older cottages nearby retained some semblance of the leafy “West Derby village” of which my Mam could only dream when she was a girl, growing up in Liverpool 8.
Although it was shielded from my eyes, I realized after a while that my Dad was never quick with any maintenance payments, so my Ma was soon obliged to take a second job in addition to working in the office of a biscuit factory. An evening shift at a late-night chemist in the center of town brought tedium punctured by the occasional threats from people looking to purchase preposterous amounts of Dr. J. Collis Browne’s Compound.
This potion had been developed to treat cholera in the Imperial Indian Army and had originally contained laudanum and cannabis. The formula had been changed to diluted morphine and peppermint, but people still believed it could be distilled to yield a mild, if unreliable, high. Chemists (or pharmacists, as some would know them) were not permitted to sell multiple bottles of the potion, so chancers would return in the late hours with the hope of being served by someone with a short memory or a blind eye, and didn’t always take kindly to being told no. After one or two such menacing encounters, my Ma thought better of it.
Once I got settled into my new school, I took a Saturday job at a fancy grocery shop called Cooper’s. I needed money for guitar strings, so I tried not to feed my fingers into the bacon slicer. Eventually, I saved up enough to begin a hire-purchase agreement on an electric guitar from Frank Hessy’s shop off Whitechapel.
I’d already been chased out of the store a few times for obviously not having any money. Now I was absolutely determined that I was going to buy this small Rickenbacker that would vanish and then reappear on the wall of the shop with strange regularity. Behind the strings there was always a card that read FORMERLY OWNED BY GEORGE HARRISON.
After proving that I really did have the money for the initial deposit, I finally got to take the guitar down and try it out. They let me plug it into an amp but told me not to turn it up too loud. I started to play George’s old Rickenbacker . . .
It was a terrible guitar.
I quickly found out the reason why it kept disappearing and rematerializing. Anyone who bought it sold it straight back to the shop, as the damn thing was nearly unplayable.
So I settled for a white Japanese-made Vox Les Paul copy with incredibly garish fake-gold fittings that left a sparkle of dust on your fingers when you turned up the volume control. It was also a pretty dreadful guitar, but it was in my price range and I thought holding such a flashy-looking instrument might somehow transform me.
However, it was also the quietest guitar you’ll ever hear, as I couldn’t actually afford an amplifier. So I soldiered on with a DeArmond pickup slapped onto my acoustic guitar, which I plugged straight into a PA amp. This ended up being a much more original sound, one which I employed right up until 1977.
Pretty soon I decided that playing the electric guitar was passé after I read something in a magazine about people in Laurel Canyon playing something called “wooden music.” That was good enough for me. We’d been doing that in Liverpool since I’d arrived in the city. I used to walk over to my friend Paul’s house in Norris Green and we’d play “Down by the River” on two acoustic guitars until his mother would throw us out of the house.
It was one thing to read some flowery hymn of praise to the Laurel Canyon idyll, but it was quite another to rise at dawn, bunk off school, and get the morning train to Manchester to be first in line at the box office to get Joni Mitchell tickets.
The shock of hearing the songs from Blue live for the first time—several months before they were released on record—meant that my friends and I stayed for all of the encores, missing the last train back to Liverpool, and had to spend every last penny we had on a forty-mile taxi ride home, still having to wake up our parents upon arrival to make up the balance of our fare.
When Blue was finally released, we gathered at a house on Cantril Farm, an estate on the edge of Liverpool and not exactly a place where you lingered after dark.
Another pal of mine, called Tony Tremarco, lived there. I remember thinking his parents were great because they seemed to live feast-or-famine style, having parties or going on holiday when the money came in from his Dad’s work, or maybe it was just an impression I got because there hadn’t been any family parties in my house since I’d been a teenager. In any case, we had the house to ourselves.
Tony’s girlfriend, Anne, had a pal called Geraldine, who would even up the numbers on our outings to Manchester but would never quite call it a date.
We all gathered around the record player and drank coffee and listened to every word and note of Blue over and over again, until dawn.
There were no romantic ideas that I could have offered Geraldine that would have sounded half as transporting and as abject as those coming out of the speakers. I wondered what it really felt like to drink a case of someone. It surely didn’t feel like the chill of fatigue, disappointment, and the jitters brought on by the instant coffee as the sun came up.
Tony even got Rusty a gig playing at his cousin’s wedding, but our original songs and West Coast classics were not really what the older relations had in mind. They were dismayed when we admitted that we didn’t know “Spanish Eyes” or “The Last Waltz” by Engelbert, and we had to quickly rustle up a medley of Chuck Berry songs in order to satisfy the dancers.
A little while later, I met a doctor’s daughter from one of the tidier towns on the Wirral. Her Dad didn’t want me in the house because I was the wrong religion, but her mother spent a lot of time trying to convince herself that I might be acceptable. She wouldn’t have thought so fondly of me if she’d known what we were up to in the greenhouse in the garden, even if we lacked the courage of our convictions and were more likely to be overcome by greenfly than by passion.
So, the doctor’s daughter and I talked on the phone for hours. About what I could not tell you now, but probably the usual absurdity and offense that teenagers find in regard to the adult world.
We didn’t have any money to speak of, so we’d ride the ferry over to Liverpool, but having nowhere to go we’d wait until everyone had got off and then we’d ride the ferry back across the Mersey to Birkenhead. There was a lot of time spent sitting on buses, laughing into our hands at something we imagined in the faces of strangers.
I never wrote anything as crass as a love song for Joanna. She eventually left me for a soldier living on a kibbutz.
Before that postcard arrived, I’d already started to do things to horrify her friends, who were given to melodrama and crying while listening to mawkish Cat Stevens records. One of them, who occasionally took her mother’s tranquilizers, had a copy of Blonde on Blonde, which she seemed to like to be seen holding. I’m not sure she’d actually ever listened to the record.
Thinking about it now, I probably harbored a secret desire for this spoiled little creature, as I went out and bought myself a secondhand copy of the album, too. Up until then, all I knew of Bob Dylan was a stack of singles and some sheet music. I’d worked out the changes to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” but the first Dylan songs I actually learned to play and performed in public were “Tears of Rage” and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” The rest of the songs were just absorbed by osmosis or from being alive. You can learn a lot of songs that way.
It was also at this time that I threw in my allegiance with the Grateful Dead, as saying that you liked the Dead was a conversation stopper with people who preferred Yes or Barclay James Harvest.
Pop shows on television were full of men with permed hair or feather-cut specimens poured into lamé and glitter outfits, with eyeliner, and mascara smudged on their beery faces.
I didn’t think that I could pull off the glam look at all, even after I discovered that Brian Connolly of Sweet was originally a Scottish McManus, so might have even been my very, very, very distant cousin.
However much we all pretended that music was about a small handful of albums and the long dark hours spent pondering them, there was still a guilty pleasure of tuning in to Top of the Pops on a Thursday night.
I never went for any of Tyrannosaurus Rex’s songs with bongos about wizards and unicorns, but when they shortened their name to T. Rex and released “Jeepster,” well, that was something I could understand.
• • •
ON A FRIDAY EVENING in May 1972, Rusty had played down the bill from the whimsical baroque Irish folk duo Tir Na Nog at a beautiful little auditorium at St. George’s Hall, where Charles Dickens had once given a public reading. My only previous appearance in that giant building had been at the adjacent Liverpool Courts and Assizes, where I’d had to give evidence to the coroner about the death of my school friend Tony Byrne a month or so earlier. I held his sister Veronica’s hand during the differing accounts of the incident. I was sworn in to give evidence, stating that I believed the car must have been going over the speed limit.
In the corridors, during a recess, a policeman threatened me with a charge of perjury if I stuck to my story, as the skid marks had determined there had been no such offense. It was hard to accept, but I was only saying what I believed I’d seen. In the end, whatever I said made no difference to the verdict of accidental death.
The monolithic temple actually contained two concert venues alongside the law courts and a catacomb of cells in which to keep prisoners. The building was decorated with painted friezes celebrating Liverpool’s mercantile power in the nineteenth century. A relief out of carved stone had at one time shown figures representing the nations of the world kneeling before Britannia. Some argued that the African supplicant was a broken slave. Others said the same figure was giving thanks for the abolition of the wicked trade on which much of the city’s wealth had once been founded. Everywhere you looked there was a noble statue of a Victorian politician, an admiral, or a general.
In 1915, Lord Kitchener had stood on the balcony of St. George’s Hall to salute the massed ranks, including my Grandad Ablett, before they went off to the slaughter in France and Flanders.
I walked out to that same, now deserted, plateau after our insignificant little show and the rain was sweeping along Lime Street like cold needles. I never imagined that this weather might ruin the rest of my weekend.
The next morning, I took the train to the Bickershaw Festival in a field near Wigan, with just a blanket and pair of boots to protect me.
We’d all seen the film Woodstock, so we knew that girls ran around without their shirts on at rock festivals, a prospect nearly as exciting as seeing The Flamin’ Groovies.
The scene that actually confronted the latecomer looked like a slow day behind the lines on the approach to the Western Front. I remember seeing The Kinks wearing pastel suits and wondering how they could have remained so remarkably untouched by the filth. I wandered around dazed and damp until I quite accidentally ran into some friends who allowed me to curl up at the end of their tent in one of the human-size padded-paper sleeping bags that were being sold at a profit on the edge of the muddy field. Then I fell asleep, shivering.
I was awakened by the distorted voice of Captain Beefheart booming “I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby.” I thought the Martians had landed.
The running order was in utter chaos by this time, and I think it was about three a.m., or maybe it just felt that way, but The Magic Band sounded perfect at that hour.
I read later that a young Joe Strummer was also at the festival and might have said that it was his favorite-ever gig, but then neither of us was known to the other back then. We were just a couple of soaking-wet kids.
The smell of damp smoke and overflowing latrines hung over the next afternoon as first Brinsley Schwarz, then the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and finally, the headliners, the Grateful Dead, took to the stage.
The Dead performed in front of Owsley’s giant wall of amps and played for what seemed like four hours. They debuted a whole series of great tunes that were never put down in the studio—“Tennessee Jed,” “Ramble on Rose,” and “He’s Gone.”
I remember the line “I’m gonna sing you a hundred verses in ragtime” jumping out, and although the band never did any such thing, the songs seemed to come from some imaginary time and place that could make you forget about having trench foot.
My sodden days in the Lancashire swamp were a pretext for Allan and me to engage Nick Lowe in conversation when I saw him next, six months later, propping up the bar of the Grapes public house on Mathew Street in Liverpool.
Brinsley Schwarz were playing The Cavern, twelve months or so before the original venue was demolished to make way for a railway tunnel.
Nick and I disagree about the details of our meeting, but as I recall it, I offered to buy Nick a pint of beer. He will tell you that he stood me the price of drink.
Nick seemed approachable and good-humored and indulged my naive questions about his songs and music in general. For all the time I’d spent around musicians growing up and the few encounters that I’d had as a child, that meeting with Nick was the first time I’d spoken to someone whose records I really admired since I’d learned to write my own songs.
The Cavern was not full that night, but it was the only time I set foot in the original venue and The Brinsleys put on a great show, the first of many that I’d see over the next couple of years in various cellar dives and smoky pubs. What they were doing had charm and seemed achievable even to a novice.
A lot of the songs I was writing at that time were probably pretty purple and forgettable, but we sang out as if we believed in every word of them. One, called “Warm House,” that owed a big debt to half a dozen Neil Young songs, was written after I was pursued by some hooligans on my way home from Wallasey late one evening. Allan and I harmonized well on a big open chorus and especially on the tag in which just one word was repeated, over and over. The word was “Running . . .”
By November ’72, we had gathered enough original material to make our first demo tape. It’s a shame I didn’t think to clean the heads of the recorder, as there are 78 rpms by Memphis Minnie or Charlie Patton that have better fidelity, but there is enough of an imprint on the oxide to show that we weren’t entirely deluding ourselves.
We might not have been Crosby, Stills & Nash, but we knew the name of the horse that they rode in on, if you catch my drift.
At the end of the music, I faithfully and trustingly recited the names of our songs, giving Allan’s telephone number as a contact, but no one ever called us and our dreams were dashed. Allan and I would sometimes even try collaborating, but I wrote much faster, so I’d get impatient and tend to finish the songs alone. One song on which we did work together was the sorry tale of a married double act called “The Show Must Go On.” I’d got the idea for the lyric after going with my Dad to a couple of his club dates. To my somewhat unsympathetic teenage eye, each publicity eight-by-ten framed on the club walls contained a little tragedy. We named the couple in the story Maureen and Dan, two people who were ill-equipped for the beauty contest of fame.
I revised and reworked the song and the story many times, until nothing much of the original remained. I eventually put the woozy recording of what became “Ghost Train” on tape in 1980, armed only with a couple of guitars, a marimba, and a headful of smoke.
In 1969, my father had cast off the routine of singing in the dance hall and refused another long-term contract with Joe Loss. He decided to strike out on his own on the cabaret and social club circuit, most of the work concentrated in the still-industrialized areas of South Wales, Scotland, and the North of England. He had gradually grown his hair until it no longer looked right with the uniform of Italian suits and tuxedos, so he started wearing crushed-velvet frock coats and brocade jackets, a chain with a cross and a string of Nepalese beads over a long-collared shirt of satin or embroidered cotton.
His engagements were often in workingmen’s clubs attached to factories and coal mines, booked by social secretaries who often filled the part-time role between shifts. They rejoiced in names like Sid the Bastard, reportedly a man impatient with the vanities of showpeople.
Ross was now making his own choices from the hit parade and picking songs from contemporary albums that would have never made it into his Hammersmith Palais repertoire. Just as he had done with chart singles, he would memorize these records and then pass them on to me. One stack of records he arrived with contained Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane, Oh Yeah by Charles Mingus, and Easy by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, which contained “The Onion Song” with its immortal lines:
The world is just a great big onion
And pain and fear are the spices that make you cry
My Dad seemed determined to take this message of love, peace, and tolerance the length and breadth of the country. In his show, he included Tim Hardin’s “Simple Song of Freedom” alongside the more populist sentiments of Ray Stevens’s “Everything Is Beautiful.”
I’m not sure everyone in a workingmen’s club necessarily felt that “Everything Is Beautiful” after a hard week of toil, but if they were unprepared for this repertoire, then my Dad’s new stage presentation might have also come as a bit of a surprise.
He began cavorting around in the beam of a portable strobe light and carried with him a liquid light projector to provide psychedelic visual effects that were not often seen in the social clubs of Merthyr Tydfil and East Kilbride.
By now, my father’s appearance began to resemble that of Peter Sellers in What’s New Pussycat? Admittedly, he had given up his Triumph Spitfire sports car for a more practical Citroën estate car, better suited to the long miles and for carrying his stage clothes, but with his shoulder-length hair flowing over an Edwardian policeman’s cape and knee-high brown leather boots, he must have cut an unlikely figure to Sid the Bastard.
If there was any resistance to his genially expressed message of goodwill to all men, then he was still enough of a showman to throw in an Irish tune, whether it be “Seven Drunken Nights” or “Danny Boy,” and failing this, could pick up his trumpet and tear off a couple of impressive choruses of “Georgia on My Mind.”
This curious transformation took place over the last year or so that I was still at school in Hounslow and shifting around uneasily at parties to The Isley Brothers’ “Behind a Painted Smile” or The Pioneers’ “Long Shot Kick the Bucket.” My hair was cut short but never quite fashionable. I was too late to be a mod and skinheads were just local idiots who wanted to beat up my Indian school friends.
You might say that the generation gap worked in reverse between my Dad and me. Okay, maybe he never actually said, “Grow your hair, you’re a disgrace to the family,” but you get the picture.
My Dad had been a grammar school scholarship boy. He read avidly all his life, and this encouraged my interest in a rich but narrow shelf of books in the house. Each fresh interest was passed on to me. He read the Irish playwrights, so I read the Irish playwrights, from Sheridan to Oscar Wilde to O’Casey to Brendan Behan. If his curiosities took a more Romantic turn, then I was handed a collection of verses by Shelley or Keats.
My Dad also began to read sociopolitical texts, from McLuhan to Marcuse. I precociously dropped these names into school essays without always fully understanding the texts. This got me into trouble, but then, misquoting a Marxist scholar in a Catholic school is always likely to do that.
The mimeographed, smudged screeds from the alternative society—copies of Oz and the International Times—were all left lying around for me to peruse along with poetic pamphlets with spidery, spiral graphics and illustrations that I later learned were really just knockoffs of Aubrey Beardsley or Egon Schiele. Among them was a home-produced magazine called Medium, from a loose collection of Liverpool poets and musicians who provided my first introduction into the Liverpool scene.
I knew that I’d eventually have to go back to London. I realized after a couple of years that, if I stayed in Liverpool, I’d paddle around and around the same shallow pool of possibilities and wake up one day at thirty, embittered and disillusioned with music.
Allan had a much more presentable and appealing personality. He could say, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, it’s good to be back,” with a straight face, even when he’d never been in the room before. When he wasn’t singing his own songs, he could make a passable job of singing a song by John Denver, if it helped get the show across, even if it wasn’t his favorite song. He would eventually get himself booked into social clubs as a solo turn, at a time when I was far too ill-at-ease and clumsy to make such accommodations.
We had great plans and made a good team for a while, but I had a place to stay in London at my Dad’s house until I got settled, while Allan found it hard to break from his day job and the gigs that he could pick up on his own.
I later had a group called Flip City, while Allan was in one band called Restless and another called Severed Head. He then traveled the world performing at sea, before settling in Austin, Texas, where he relocated more than thirty years ago. He makes his living playing music to this day.
One of our less than finest final hours together was in what appeared to be a lonely-hearts club. It was as if we had been hired to provide a musical distraction for an audience of the chronically shy and socially inept. Actually, it was a contemporary folk music night called The Octopus Club that lodged in the RAF Association Club on Bold Street. The evening began with nervous young women smoothing their skirts over their knees, resolutely fixed to the chairs to one side of the room while uncomfortable-looking men in unfortunate-looking jumpers clung to the opposite wall.
Our first five numbers met with little applause, as no one wanted to draw attention to themselves by lifting their hands to clap. As the evening wore on and some sherry and shandy loosened inhibitions, our efforts became superfluous to the tentative courtships and nervous conversation that gradually drowned us out completely. I looked for any sign of encouragement and spied a seedy-looking shark in a regimental blazer who was probably there looking to pick up vulnerable women.
He was standing under the “Way Out” sign.
