MUSIC DIDN’T END for me in 1982. Of course it didn’t. But that cassette I sent to Elvis Costello was my last attempt of any kind to fulfil my boyhood ambition to be a rock ’n’ roll star. My other adolescent aspiration was to be a writer, and things have gone rather better for me in that respect.
It’s early in 2018 and, as the Beast from the East roars its defiance against the coming of spring, I’m finishing this account of my twenty-five-year quest for rock stardom. It has been fifty-four years since my English teacher, Mr Carlen, encouraged me to send off those stories and poems to the publishers whose addresses, on his advice, I gleaned from The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. I kept the inevitable rejection slips for a long while but I was too young and optimistic to feel that they in any way represented a door slammed in my face, especially since Mr Carlen had told me that every successful writer received enough rejection slips early in their careers to paper their walls. I kept them as certificates of my endeavours. And in 2013 I made sure that Mr Carlen was present at the launch party for my first book.
I never intended to return to writing but I did. I always intended to return to playing music but I never have.
A news item catches my eye. The Rolling Stones are to make their first UK tour in twelve years. They will fill huge stadiums with devoted fans of all ages, although it’s safe to predict that most will be from My Generation.
The Rolling Stones were formed fifty-six years ago, in 1962. It is impossible to imagine that, in 1957, when this book begins, a bunch of popular musicians who had been stars since 1901 could have been about to embark on a sell-out tour. Yet that would have been the equivalent longevity.
It was two years into their existence that I first saw the band live, at the Wimbledon Palais (which, the last time I passed it, had been converted to a furniture store, the Stones having outlived most of the venues they played in their early days). Colin James was with me that evening in 1964 to witness the early hysteria that surrounded the band.
Mick Jagger was chased off the stage by some over-enthusiastic girls and, as he sought the sanctuary of the dressing rooms, with the fans in hot pursuit, he brushed past Colin and me. He rushed through a door leading off the dance hall but one of the girls managed to squeeze through after him and follow him up the stairs. A few minutes later we saw her legs dangling almost directly above us as the ceiling gave way (I distinctly remember that she was wearing tights). I don’t think any harm was done, except to her modesty.
The Stones keep rolling on, linking me and millions more to a childhood that was also the infancy of rock ’n’ roll. I’ve never believed that the music of my teens is all that’s worth listening to; quite the opposite. I’ve always felt that the greatest period in pop history is the current one: new artists and bands emerge, the choice becomes wider, the genre richer. Today I listen to Arcade Fire, Laura Marlin, St Vincent, Everything Everything, the 1975, the Arctic Monkeys, Courtney Barnett, the Blue Aeroplanes, John Grant, Villagers, Regina Spektor … I’m introduced to amazing new artists on a regular basis. But the genesis of all of them, every single one, lies back in the 1950s and 1960s with Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and, of course, the Beatles.
The evolution of pop music is not a linear progression, or the replacement of one kind of music with another, but an accumulation of all the talent, experimentation and influences that have contributed to it since its inception.
Sometimes it feels more circular than linear. Who would have foreseen, in 1973, that Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ would still be blaring out of shops, pubs and parties every December? Or, even more improbably, in 1969, the year humankind first set foot on the moon, that a half-century on David Bowie’s voice would be posthumously calling to Major Tom on an infinite loop in space? It is now issuing from the speakers aboard, of all things, a red Tesla Roadster car in a projected billion-year elliptical orbit of Mars. It is said that nothing can be heard in space. What a shame Bowie couldn’t have written ‘Is There Sound in Space?’ to go alongside ‘Is There Life on Mars?’
Down on Earth, vinyl and CDs continue to co-exist with iTunes and Spotify, and the government has never succeeded in completely eradicating pirate radio stations, in spite of periodic clampdowns. None have had the huge audiences or influence of the pirate ships of the 1960s, of course. Still, there have been waves of land-based, urban stations that reflect the musical tastes and community interests of an increasingly diverse Britain. All that was needed in the 1970s and 1980s was a decent cassette-player and the roof of a tower block to transmit from. Today there are fewer pirate stations, probably about 150 of them around the country, mostly in London. Research suggests their listeners feel that licensed broadcasters do not provide enough of what a younger public want, or air enough new music. The more things change, the more they stay the same, as they say.
After 1982 I became even more immersed in the Labour movement, from which I emerged only in 2017. In the eleven years I spent as a government minister I never picked up my guitar once. As soon as the electorate dispensed with our services in 2010 I went to a music shop not far from Parliament and bought a Yamaha acoustic six-string. I began to play again, the fingertips on my left hand gradually becoming callused as they reacquainted themselves with the strings and frets.
Then a guy in Edinburgh contacted me, having read about me once playing a Höfner Verithin. He had one for sale and drove down to Hull to show it to me. We met in the Holiday Inn on the marina on a crisp autumn day and exchanged smalltalk before he opened the heavy black guitar case that rested across the arms of a wooden chair in the deserted hotel lounge. As the hinged lid lifted, so did my heart. I felt sure that this was the very guitar I’d first fallen in love with when I gazed at it through the window of that music shop in Wardour Street all those years ago: the beautiful, cherry-red Höfner purchased for £35 and cruelly taken from me on that night of skulduggery in an Islington pub.
I had no way of proving it, but very few Verithins were made with this particular combination of distinctive features and none at all, I believe, after 1963. In a strong light, a serial number was visible through one of the Venetian cutaways, but as I didn’t know the number of the one that was stolen, I had nothing to check it against. I did not, I hasten to say, suspect my new friend from Edinburgh of being involved in the theft. The fact that he wouldn’t have been born when the robbery took place seemed a reasonable alibi. Whatever adventures my beloved Höfner had experienced, it had obviously been well looked after by its subsequent owners. I coughed up the asking price of £800, the transaction was completed and it was at last back where it belonged.
And so I have (probably) got the guitar I bought in 1965; the weather has been as close to the dreadful winter of 1962–3 as I’ve seen since; the Stones are touring; students in Paris are protesting and the UK will soon be out of the European Community, just as we were back then. It may well be time to put the band back together again.