‘Here’s the story of a boy Jekyll and Hyde... a shaggy-haired 14-year-old who leaves his neat council home every evening to join London’s worst gang of juvenile cut-throats’, ran the Stratford Express in 1961. ‘Pocket sized Stephen Marriott likes swimming, billiards, table tennis and English... but hates maths’.
‘I want to go on the stage when I leave school,’ Steve tells the reporter.
The article goes on to reveal that ‘Stephen is putting aside a third of his weekly wage to buy a new guitar’.
Oliver! taught Marriott many things, not least that a lack of educational qualifications did not equal disaster. For years, successive generations had been told to pass exams and better themselves. At the age of fourteen Steve Marriott had bettered himself on entirely his own terms. He had earnt good money doing something he absolutely adored and had done so without a qualification in his pocket.
So who’s sorry now?
He now knew what he was going to do about school, the place he hated so much. Put simply, he was going to make it vanish. Literally.
‘I remember being selected to go into this art class,’ says Steve’s classmate Ken Hawes, again. ‘I don’t know why. I hated art. It was in a large room with large windows. The school was a big Victorian building. The floor was a plain polished floorboard with gaps between them where they had shrunk over the years.
‘They were creaky floorboards. The desks were in pairs and in several rows across the room. About ten rows in all.’
‘When I walked in for the first time this kid who turned out to be Steve Marriott said, “You’re sitting next to me.” I was the smallest in the year. I weighed under six stone and people always thought I was ill. I sat next to him. I wasn’t at all interested in art and neither was he. I sat there in complete silence and he sat there looking at the art teacher as he got out of his bag several sheets of paper.’
Marriott then proceeded to tear the paper into little squares which he then wrapped around his ruler and stuffed into the floorboard space beneath him.
‘Throughout the whole lesson he continued to tear paper and push it through the floorboards,’ Hawes continues. ‘He didn’t do any art at all and of course the teacher wasn’t bothered in the least about anybody that didn’t want to work. Steve just stared at the teacher all the time and carried on tearing up these bits of paper.’
The following week, Marriott again grabbed Hawes and told him, ‘You’re sitting with me.’ He then made him sit one chair up from where they had previously sat. Again, he spent the whole lesson staring at the art teacher as he stuffed bits of paper into the floorboards. The following week, the same scenario was again played out, the two boys again moving up another chair until, as Hawes puts it, ‘Eventually, we had worked our way right across the whole class.’
Finally, after about ten weeks, Marriott was sitting against the wall at the far end. Halfway through the lesson, he dipped into his pocket and pulled out a box of matches. He lit the match under his desk and then dropped it down the floorboards.
‘Suddenly,’ Hawes says, ‘smoke just shot out of the floor. The fire caught on in no time at all and everybody scrambled down the stairs. The playground was right underneath the art room and that’s where everybody had to gather and stand in line. Marriott turned to me and said, “You didn’t see a fucking thing, alright?”’
It was a sizeable fire and the fire brigade had some trouble bringing it under control. All the time, Stephen Peter Marriott stood in the playground watching the proceedings, his face betraying nothing, but a huge grin was writ large upon his soul.
‘The whole room went up and it demolished that side of the school,’ Hawes recalls. ‘Nobody spoke to me afterwards. I think a teacher may have just said, “What was that all about?” And I looked at him and said I didn’t know anything about it.
‘See Steve was not an academic but he obviously had this sheer determination to make it in show business whether it be acting or music. With the arson thing, I suppose in a way I was impressed about how he had meticulously planned the whole thing months in advance, the sheer dogged determination to see it through. He could quite easily have been caught and would have had to face the consequences. There was no danger in anybody getting hurt because we were at the back of the room. We had to be at the back otherwise somebody would have noticed what he was doing. There was no malice against the other pupils, he just wanted to burn the damn school down.’
Fire. The man who would die far too young from being exposed to its fierce properties was a boy arsonist.
Naturally, he never admitted to the crime. Even when Hawes bumped into Marriott many years later, Marriott’s immediate instinct was to deny everything.
‘In 1984,’ Hawes recalls, ‘I was working as a sound engineer at the Mean Fiddler pub in North West London when Steve Marriott came in wearing a long herringbone overcoat down to his ankles.
‘He was just standing around with his band while a sound check was going on. I crept up behind him and introduced myself, but my name initially meant nothing to him, so I said, “We last met at Sandringham Road school when we were about twelve years old. You must remember the place, you burnt it down.”
‘He turned round and said, “It wasn’t me!”
‘I just laughed and said, “Steve, I was the one who sat next you.”
‘He said, “Do you want to have a drink after the gig?”
‘Which we did. We went to the bar upstairs. I said, “Steve, there’s no one else around. Can we just get over the fact that I know it was you?” He laughed and said, “I hated that school, really hated it.”
‘He said that after he had lined up in the playground where we all got ticked off by the fire marshal, he nipped off home and, as he turned into his road, he heard his mum, who was standing at the gate of the garden, say “Steve, that was you wasn’t it? I’ve heard the fire engines and I’ve heard that the school is on fire. You wait until your dad gets home.”’
Ken Hawes pauses and then adds, ‘Steve Marriott had a pent up passion about him. He was dedicated, concentrated, focussed on what he was doing. But he was very much a loner. He didn’t have any close pals back then. He kept himself pretty much to himself.’
The artful dodger as a shy retiring sort is an interesting image – perhaps it went part and parcel with his artistic talents. The nineteenth century writer Stendhal believed, ‘Every great poet with a lively imagination is shy; in other words he is afraid of men because they can interrupt and disturb his exquisite reveries, and he trembles for his ability to concentrate.’
His mother disagrees with Hawes’ assessment though: ‘People just followed him,’ she wistfully recalls. ‘He always had a gang. He was small and cheeky, not the sort of person you think of as a leader but he just had that magnetism about him.’
One thing’s for sure: Steve Marriott hated school and everything to do with it. To survive it, he acted tough and aloof but his irrepressible energy could not be contained and it obviously attracted others. Part of Steve’s appeal must have been his growing confidence in his own abilities, bolstered by his time in Oliver! and the fact that everything he had attempted so far had been a success. Steve Marriott would not taste failure for a very long time but when he did, it would inevitably hit him much harder than most.