Steve once told his mother, ‘Mum, if I had stayed at Sandringham I would have ended up in prison, no doubt about it.’ And he was right.
Like all natural born anarchists, Steve Marriott was never going to take any education system seriously unless it allowed him to do exactly as he pleased. As that was never a possibility, Marriott quickly set himself against the school system. He would go his own way. If they didn’t like it, then let them try and stop him. He didn’t get too much opposition.
At Sandringham secondary modern school, the pupils were viewed as fodder for the factory lines. The majority of teachers were of the opinion that most, if not all of the pupils, were incapable of gaining qualifications. They would all leave at sixteen and head straight into work. Therefore little effort was required from either pupil or teacher.
‘To go there,’ confirms Ken Hawes, one of Marriott’s classmates, ‘was to be condemned to a life of doing nothing and being a nobody.’
The teachers offered the pupils a simple deal. If anyone wishes to study, fine. We will help you. If you don’t, make sure you don’t bother us and we won’t bother you. In the absence of a moral centre, of a collective direction and purpose, bullying flourished at Sandringham.
‘I’ll never forget that first day at Sandringham,’ Marriott’s schoolfriend, Ken Hawes states. ‘The initiation was for first year pupils to have their heads pushed down into the sinks. The sinks were outside on the playground and the taps would be turned on.
‘The bullies would block the sinks with large amounts of paper and literally try to drown you.’
Sandringham was a large and impersonal beast which swallowed Steve Marriott up, denied him the chance to be the centre of attention. Instead, he was surrounded by several tough boys who often picked on him.
To protect himself, Steve Marriott joined the school boxing club. His first fight pitted him against the school champion. It wasn’t much of a contest. Steve stood helplessly in the corner of the ring trying to protect himself as his opponent waded into him.
Kay, his mum, sat in the crowd, shouting, ‘C’mon Steve hit him back!’ but with arms like his, what chance a knockout? Steve was small in height (he would only reach five foot five inches), and skinny in appearance.
Yet according to Ken Hawes, Steve was not usually the cowering type, quite the opposite, in fact.
‘Steve,’ Hawes insists, ‘was a downright bully, a real hard case. The school had a very undesirable atmosphere and there was an underlying level of violence in the playground, a lot of terrorising going on. I just used to keep out of everybody’s way to survive but you got noticed by bullying younger, smaller pupils.’
It’s hard to imagine a boy of Marriott’s diminutive size throwing his weight around. Equally, hard to imagine a boy as boisterous as Steve, an attention seeker of the highest order, allowing himself to be rendered silent.
More probable is that Steve stood his ground, learnt to use his mouth in threatening ways, learnt in other words to create an aura of toughness. It was perhaps the first flourishing of his talent as an actor.
At the same time, Marriott was busy developing his musical ability. He now had a new instrument to master. In his first year at school, his mum and dad had presented him with a guitar. They then directed him over the road to the house of one Tunky Jordan who played in a band supplying Hawaiian music for the BBC.
It was Jordan who showed Steve the instrument’s basic chords.
‘Then we got somebody to teach him,’ Bill Marriott recalled, ‘but they said it was useless because he’d got his own way of teaching. He taught himself. Very good.’
Very good, indeed.
Within three years, Steve Marriott would have his name printed on a record sleeve. He would also have formed his very first band and thrown everything his family wanted for him back in their faces.
***
In 1959, aged twelve, Marriott put together his first band with his school friends, Nigel Chapin and Robin Andrews. They were called the Wheels although they later changed their name to the Coronation Kids.
The band’s repertoire entirely reflected Marriott’s tastes, the set list full of Cliff Richard and Buddy Holly material. There was also room for one of Marriott’s first ever compositions, a song, named after his aunt, entitled ‘Sheila My Dear’.
According to the few who heard it, the song was a Buddy Holly style affair played at a jaunty pace. Not surprisingly, the band’s nickname for Steve was ‘Buddy.’
This youthful beat combo played the coffee bars in East Ham as well as Saturday morning gigs at cinemas such as the Essoldo in Manor Park. Then they changed their name yet again (due to his overactive nature, Marriott often switched band titles until chart success with the Small Faces made it silly to do so), this time turning into the Mississippi Five when their line-up was augmented by the arrival of Simon Simkins and Vic Dixon.
Soon, though, Marriott’s attention would be diverted towards another form of music, one that would allow him to write some of the best songs of his career and help secure his place as one of the great vocal talents.
The story of R&B music in Britain is a fascinating, still hidden history deserving of its own time and space. It is a story of people’s obsession, of the beauty that such love and dedication creates. It is the story of entrepreneurs and hustlers, of fabulous lives and fabulous records. It the story of a music that remains underground to this day but has never lost its power to bind people together. It is the story of a music that sings in a million different voices about joy and pain, smiles and tears, ecstasy and delight, speed and love, mohair and madness.
For Steve Marriott, American R&B music forcefully reflected his own inner passions and fires. It moved him like nothing else and soon he would seek to replicate the very same emotions that musicians such as Ray Charles and Bobby Bland had infused their work with.
All his life, until the day he died, Steve Marriott loved, respected and honoured Rhythm and Blues. It was the music that he would remain the most faithful to, the music he would become a servant of, preaching its glory wherever he went, and it was the music that would serve to ignite one of the biggest rows in the Marriott family history.
***
‘Food, glorious food...’ The weekly diet of the Marriott family, Manor Park: on Sunday, a roast beef dinner; on Monday, meat leftovers with mashed potato; Tuesday, a stew concocted from the final remains of the joint; meat pie and processed peas on Wednesday; shepherd’s pie on Thursday; fish and chips on Friday and on Saturday, a great big fry up... Food, glorious food!
One day at work, Bill Marriott spotted an ad announcing auditions for Lionel Bart’s acclaimed musical Oliver!, his ingenious adaptation of Charles Dickens’ famous novel, Oliver Twist.
The show was being successfully staged at the New London Theatre in London’s St. Martin’s Lane. However, the law stipulated that after three months performers of school age had to take a break. New cast members were required to replace them – hence the advert.
Bill came home, showed Kay a copy of the ad. That very night, without their son’s knowledge, they sent their son’s details to the show’s producers. A few days later, a letter arrived, inviting Stephen Peter Marriott to audition for the stage production of Oliver!.
That day, that momentous day, Steve came home from school to be told by his mum that they were going out.
‘Where? I just got in.’
His mum didn’t want to tell him where they were going or what they were doing. She didn’t want any nervousness to affect him until the very last moment.
‘I’ll tell you on the train,’ Kay replied. ‘Change your trousers as well. Put on your khaki shorts.’
‘I’m not wearing khaki shorts. I’ve got my long trousers.’
‘Stephen, I don’t want any nonsense out of you today. Now go and put on your shorts and your ankle socks. Just trust me.’
‘Why?’
‘Stephen, please don’t argue. Do as I say.’
‘But why?’
Oh, that son of hers. He would stand there all night until he got an answer.
‘Because you’re going for an audition. For Oliver!’
‘Blimey.’
‘Now put your shorts on. I want you to look younger than you are.’
‘But mum...’
Still arguing, Steve changed his clothes and he and Kay left, went ‘up West,’ to London’s West End. Throughout the whole journey he didn’t say a word to his mum. Why should he? Making him wear khaki shorts. Imagine if anyone saw him. The embarrassment of it all. He would die of shame, right on the spot.
‘For my first number, I would like to play ‘Who’s Sorry Now’ by Connie Francis,’ he says.
The thirteen-year-old Steve Marriott stands on an empty stage with his guitar in hand. The song he is about to sing was released in April 1958, and became the second best selling single in Great Britain that year. Only ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’ by the Everly Brothers fared better.
‘For my first number, I would like to play ‘Who’s Sorry Now’ by Connie Francis.’
The chart both these songs entered was filled with records dripping in cloying sentimentality. They were sung by bland artists like Perry Como, Frankie Vaughan, the McGuire Sisters, raking it in for their manager and record company by successfully selling a world of lightness, a world where lust and sweat and animal instincts had never existed, where sweetness reigned supreme.
Of late, there had been some records which had challenged the status quo. Fats Domino had hit home a few times, as had others. But as far as most people were concerned, including the music industry, the rock’n’roll revolution of 1956 was finished.
Elvis Presley, the man supposed to lead the battle charge, had swapped his jive clothes from Beale Street in Memphis for US Army fatigues. Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis had been publicly disgraced for revealing their penchant for very young flesh, Buddy Holly was dead and Little Richard was about to discover God.
If you were young and restless in 1960, musical excitement was in pretty short supply.
‘Thank you very much indeed.’
Steve Marriott has just finished performing his Connie Francis number.
Before anyone can say a word, he announces, ‘For my next number, I would like to do ‘Oh Boy’ by Buddy Holly.’
Nobody on the judging panel is quick enough to stop him, to tell him the rules, that applicants only get to play one number. And if they had pointed out that fact, would he have taken note? Probably not!
Marriott launched into a rendition of one of his favourite songs, written by Holly in 1957.
‘Okay Stephen,’ said a voice from the stalls as the last Holly chord drifted away into the roof of the St Martin’s Theatre, ‘very nice, very nice indeed.’
Marriott, flushed with adrenaline, thanks the panel and walks towards his mum who is standing in the wings. She feels so proud.
‘Mrs Marriott?’
One of the play’s assistants is standing next to her.
‘Yes.’
‘We would like to keep Stephen for a while.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
A shot of delight such as she has never known before zips through her. She was right. Her boy was special. It wasn’t mother talk. She was right. Her son was unique.
‘But how’s he going to get home?’ she wonders out aloud.
‘Don’t worry. We’ll see him home alright.’
Bill Marriott was standing at the gate of their house when Kay came home. As he watched his wife skip down the road and then joyfully throw her arms around him. He knew straight away that something momentous had just happened to their lives.
***
A deal was struck; Steve would play different boys throughout the production, singing different songs depending on which character he had been assigned. He would be paid eight pounds a week (eight pounds a week!), and there would be an enforced break of ten days every three months. A woman called The Matron would supply extra schooling.
The matron. Ah yes, the matron. Steve’s mum Kay smiles ruefully.
‘Steve would have loved to have played the Artful Dodger and if he hadn’t been so cheeky and so rude, he would have got the part easily. But he didn’t like the matron because she was posh and she didn’t like him because she thought he was cocky and disrupted her boys. He would have been marvellous as the Dodger but there you go.’
Steve Marriott, like Dickens’ famous boy character the Artful Dodger, was a quintessential Londoner. The London spirit was his, had entered him at an early age. It made him, like Dickens’ creation, cheeky, sly, flash, talkative, sensitive, humorous, resigned, brusque, but above all it gave him an energy that others simply couldn’t keep up with.
Steve stayed with Oliver! for twelve months. During that time, his low boredom threshold was partly assuaged by the acting approach of the show’s leading actor, Ron Moody, who played Fagin.
‘He loved being on stage,’ Kay says of her son, ‘he enjoyed every minute of it. He said that although they did the same thing every night it was always different because you never knew what Ron Moody was going to say. He changed little things here and there and that made Steve laugh. He kept it spicy, kept it good.’
It was typical of Marriott to warm to someone who bent the rules and didn’t stick to the script. And such was the vocal talent Steve displayed in his time in Oliver!, it was he who was selected to sing the Artful Dodger songs for the official album of the show, released by the World Record Club label in 1960.
Prior to recording, the album’s producer Cyril Ornadale invited Steve and his mother to his London home to assess the boy’s vocal talent.
‘Can’t remember where his house was,’ tuts Kay. ‘Somewhere posh.’
Steve duly sang and, afterwards, Ornadale theatrically exclaimed,
‘Why, you’re an absolute natural.’
Unlike the other cast members, Marriott’s was the true cockney voice, perfect to replicate the Artful Dodger with. The others who had applied for the job were, in truth, singing out of their class.
On the Oliver! album recorded at the famous Abbey Road studios, the first studio to capture the Marriott voice, Steve sings three songs: ‘Consider Yourself’, ‘Be Back Soon’, and ‘I’d Do Anything’. His voice is how you would expect a thirteen-year-old’s to be – thin, tuneful and lively and one which displays his Cockney roots. On ‘Consider Yourself’, Marriott sings ‘the drinks are on the harse,’ as opposed to ‘the house.’
The Oliver songs were the creation of Lionel Bart, a man who not only shared Steve’s East End background but also many similarities. Both were men of wayward ways, both could lay a claim to being the most talented songwriters of their time, both had problems with authority and above all both men’s work created a musical line that takes us directly back to the music hall of the East End.
Music halls had risen to great prominence in the early part of the 20th century, but the advent of cinema, television and finally pop music rendered this working class form of entertainment absolutely redundant. That said, the genre spawned much memorable music.
‘These are songs,’ writes London’s restless biographer Peter Ackroyd, ‘that still retain enormous power and feeling. Who could fail to be moved by verses like ‘My Shadow Is My Only Pal’ or ‘When Those Old Clothes Were New?’ Who could fail to be amused by ‘Why Don’t We Have The Sea In London?’ or ‘Don’t Stick It Out Like That’ or ‘I Don’t Suppose He’ll Do It Again For Months And Months And Months’?’
Who indeed? Except maybe the Royal Family and the uptight.
‘When Steve left Oliver! after a year he had stars in his eyes,’ his mum simply states. ‘He wanted to be in show business.’
The exciting and so thrilling journey to stardom had now begun.