MY MOTHER DIED on 4 March 1964. Her final stay in hospital lasted five months, culminating in the surgery she dreaded, which led to the outcome she had feared: death, at just forty-two, the age at which both her mother and grandmother had died. Just as I was experiencing the hormonal explosion that made my blood run richer and my heart beat faster, that seemed to open all life’s possibilities, Lily’s life ended.
It had been an unrelentingly hard one. Denied educational opportunities throughout a tough Liverpool childhood and plagued by illness, at eighteen she grasped the chance to escape a tyrannical father by joining the NAAFI in London upon the outbreak of war. After walking out with several soldier admirers, she was swept off her feet by the dashing Lance Corporal Steve Johnson, who played the piano at army concerts in immaculate white gloves. He took his new wife back to his home territory in North Kensington to occupy the awful slums into which my sister and I had been born. Lily deserved better than a philandering husband, a debilitating heart condition and an early death.
Linda had always believed this better life would materialise after Lily had undergone a ground-breaking operation to replace the mitral valve in her heart. We’d soon be allocated the council house that was long overdue, she reasoned. Hammersmith Hospital would repair Lily’s heart, London County Council would rescue us from the slums and Lily would have what she’d always dreamed of: her own front door.
Linda had bought our mother the latest Bachelors LP for Christmas (amid the explosion of British music talent, they remained the only group Lily liked). After she had finished opening her presents on Christmas Day 1963, her hospital bed still strewn with wrapping paper, she handed us the record to take back with us to Walmer Road for safekeeping, so that she could listen to it when she got home. That evening we had carefully placed it in our record collection, alongside With the Beatles, to await her return.
But Lily never came back and the record went unplayed. Two of the tracks, ‘Diane’ and ‘I Believe’, were released as singles and, as if in tribute, dominated the Top 10 the week she died. The album remained in our collection, a forlorn reminder of when our mother had shape and form, likes and dislikes, views and opinions, before she became just a memory.
I’m not sure how I ended up owning Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day. It probably came with the Spanish guitar my mother bought for me out of her pools win.
I now know how influential Bert’s self-help manual has been to all kinds of musicians, with great guitarists such as Eric Clapton, George Harrison and Keith Richards having paid homage to its instructive powers. I doubt, though, that anybody actually learned to play in a single day – a year, perhaps, or a decade. All I can say is that I sat in my squalid bedroom, with its damp, peeling wallpaper hidden behind the centrefold photographs of football teams torn from Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly, perched on the edge of my bed, strumming away remorselessly for month after month without making much progress.
I recall that Bert’s book had ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’ or some such song scored for those who wanted to pick out a tune, but all I wanted to do was strum, like Lonnie. I was interested in chord formations rather than melodies, in rhythm rather than lead guitar. I was far from being a natural but by 1964 it all seemed to be falling into place. By then I knew my chords, I could strum rhythmically – I could even knock out the occasional folk song, putting down the plectrum to ‘pick’ rather than ‘pluck’.
My expanding Pye International collection was providing me with plenty of source material. I’d purchased every Chuck Berry single, EP and LP on the label, which wasn’t that many. Such was my appetite for his music that I wrote to London Records to find out if there was any chance of accessing the material by the great man I’d heard had been released in Germany. I received a typed reply informing me that their Chuck Berry catalogue had been ‘deleted’.
Jimmy Carter had also been ‘deleted’ from my sister’s life after she found out that her fiancé was heading to the West End for extracurricular activities, having kissed her goodnight outside our front door. Linda was now ‘going steady’ with Mike Whitaker, who was at least five years older than her and drove his own car. Mike’s quiet sophistication and diverse taste in music enhanced my education. He’d brought to our Dansette in the ‘parlour’ of 6 Walmer Road albums by an obscure young American folk singer named Bob Dylan, the Belgian chansons of Jacques Brel and the coolest record of the moment, ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T. and the MGs.
Our television, while it opened up new horizons to us in general, was not exactly a rich seam of pop music until the advent in 1963 of Ready, Steady, Go!, the innovative Friday night ITV show that provided a platform for both new artists and the big names to play their latest singles and pioneered interaction with studio audiences.
There were only two channels – the BBC and ITV (‘the other side’) – and back then, if you wanted to watch a particular programme, you had to make sure you were at home to see it at the time the broadcaster chose to air it. Ready, Steady, Go! had the perfect slot, which it made the most of by opening every programme with its trademark slogan ‘The weekend starts here!’
The BBC, always more reactive than proactive, offered shows like Juke Box Jury, hosted by David Jacobs, where celebrity panellists predicted which new records would be ‘hits’ and which ‘misses’. Their first stab at a pop programme, Six-Five Special, had been screened in the late 1950s, produced by Jack Good. It was very popular, but when the BBC meddled with Good’s non-stop music format he defected to ITV, where he would be free of the influence of the BBC’s public-service remit, and created Oh Boy!. The ITV show overwhelmed Six-Five Special in the ratings and helped to launch the career of Cliff Richard, who appeared on it regularly. Both of these pioneering programmes had come and gone before we had a television, and I don’t remember seeing either of them.
Eventually the BBC were persuaded that what teenage pop fans wanted was live performers and uninterrupted music rather than family-oriented musical parlour games or artists appearing in one-off guest spots on Saturday night variety shows. In 1964 they launched Top of the Pops, initially from a studio housed in a former church hall in Manchester. Although it could never have been described as innovative – being a chart-based show, it featured acts and singles that were already selling – it did help to push records up the charts, and it gave us the current hits and the bands in the flesh (even if they were miming). Top of the Pops would continue for forty-two years and become a national institution. It was the only TV programme I rarely missed.
Also in 1964 came the pirate radio stations, spearheaded by Radio Caroline, which was soon joined by others, including Radio London. The pirates were able to circumvent the UK ban on commercial radio, the BBC monopoly and all of the regulations, including the ‘needle time’ agreement, by broadcasting from ships anchored in international waters, just outside the three-mile offshore limit of British sovereignty. Unhindered by the restrictions of legislation, they played pop records round the clock, sometimes airing new singles before they were even officially released. At the time I didn’t have a radio capable of picking up these stations, so I was still denied proper access to the music I craved.
For my fourteenth birthday in May, Mike and Linda bought me a present so wonderful it might have come from a celestial source: tickets to see Chuck Berry at the Hammersmith Odeon.
Just as I’d been made aware of Chuck through the British bands that had recorded his songs, so had millions of others. Now he was the headline act on a rock ’n’ roll tour of the country, supported by a rockabilly legend, Carl Perkins, of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ fame, and a couple of new British groups promoting their debut singles.
There were three tickets, for Linda, Mike and me, but when Mike had to drop out at the last minute because of a work commitment, Linda suggested giving the spare ticket to her schoolfriend, the aforementioned Kathleen Kelly. Completely unaware of my secret infatuation with Kathleen, she even asked if I would mind. I managed to sound casual as I gave my consent. Alas, I was immature even compared with girls my own age. Kathleen was a contemporary of my sister’s and way out of my league. Still, I was entitled to dream.
Having been presented with the perfect opportunity to press my suit with Kathleen, I wished I was more like my happy-go-lucky friend Andrew Wiltshire. He was a ‘doer’, uninhibited by shyness, whereas I was burdened by timidity and lacked Linda’s adamantine nature. I fantasised that I was taking a gorgeous redhead to a rock concert for which my sister also happened to have a ticket and set off that evening with hope in my heart.
Unfortunately, as we took our seats high in the upper tier, Linda plonked herself between her friend and me. My disappointment, though crushing, was brief: once the concert began, such earthly considerations hardly seemed to matter.
First there was a spirited rendition of ‘Tobacco Road’ by the Nashville Teens, of whom nobody had ever heard before. In fact they came from Weybridge rather than Nashville, but that song was a hit for them in the States as well as in Britain. Next up were the Animals, performing their debut single (and minor hit), a rock treatment of ‘Baby Let Me Take You Home’ – an old US folk song I knew as ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down’, from the Bob Dylan album to which Mike had introduced me.
Then the lights were lowered and the Animals launched into the climax of their set, another revamped track from that same Dylan album. ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ would be a massive hit around the world, but I doubt its effect would ever have been as profound as it was when it was first played to the audiences on that tour. It is said that it was the response of these live crowds that led to the Animals’ decision to nip into a little studio off Kingsway in London between tour dates and record it as a single. Today it is credited by some as the first folk-rock hit. With its slow build-up, dark lyrics, Eric Burdon’s powerful vocal and, above all, that incredible organ solo by Alan Price, lit by a single spotlight on the Odeon stage, it was an absolute showstopper. Except that the show was just getting going.
Still to come was the headline act, Chuck Berry, with his big white Gibson guitar, doing his famous duck walk backwards and forwards across the stage. I knew every word of every song: ‘Maybellene’, ‘School Day’, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ … all rock ’n’ roll mini-operas performed with wit and verve.
I glanced sideways occasionally to catch Kathleen’s perfect profile and to try to ascertain if she was impressed by my musical hero. I think she was. This, however, was no place for conversation. But outside the Odeon afterwards she went straight off to catch her bus home to Fulham and I never saw her again. Still, we had shared a magical evening: me, Chuck and Kathleen Kelly.
My solitary autodidactic efforts in my bedroom with Bert Weedon and my guitar may not have made me fully proficient, but I was without doubt the finest guitarist in Colin James’s basement. None of the other Vampires could play a note, and with Jimmy Robb’s drumkit composed of Tupperware bowls (Lonnie would have been proud of us), our sessions were an exercise in imagination and improvisation rather than musicianship.
The captive audience of Yvonne Stacey and Pauline Bright displayed a healthy indifference to our artistry. If they ever screamed, as young girls were inclined to do at Beatles concerts, it was likely to have been from pain as we massacred another of their favourite songs.
With Yvonne and Pauline, I learned that platonic friendship across the gender divide was possible. Colin had grown up with them, so he knew that already. But there was nothing platonic about the friendship we struck up with two other girls who entered our social circle early that year. Christine Roberts and Susan Kelly weren’t Carlyle Grammar School girls. Christine, who went to a secondary modern in Parsons Green, lived in a block of flats on the Hurlingham estate with her parents and younger sister. She was Colin’s girlfriend.
Susan Kelly (no relation to Kathleen) was mine. She lived at the Fulham end of the King’s Road in a house we never entered but towards which my gaze is still drawn on the odd occasion I drive by it. She was a bit of a mystery, was Susan. I don’t know which school she attended, only that it wasn’t Carlyle. She claimed to be at stage school and to have been a finalist in a TV talent contest, but I was never sure if that was true.
Colin had met Christine at a party and was soon ‘going out’ with her. He suggested that she bring a friend so that we could make up a foursome. The friend was Susan. So it was a kind of blind date. We all met up at Christine’s house one Saturday morning and decided we’d go to Carnaby Street. Colin and I had been there once, but talked as if we were there all the time. Within a couple of hours, as we were looking in the window of a chic West End clothes shop, Susan reached for my hand.
I knew that we’d properly assumed the status of ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ when I was invited to accompany her to her cousin’s wedding a few weeks after my mother died. I wore my very best clothes, a pale blue collarless Beatles jacket with tight black trousers, a ‘long john’ white shirt and Chelsea boots.
It was the first occasion I remember drinking alcohol, but it wasn’t the small quantity of beer that heightened my emotions: it was the perfumed thrill of being close to the voluptuous Susan at a gathering of elders where we were treated as young adults rather than kids. Halfway through the evening the DJ announced that he had a copy of the newly released Beatles single ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. It turned a good evening into a perfect one.
Susan had the short bobbed haircut I liked and was very attractive. I remember one of her relatives saying we made a lovely couple, and that night, we did. However, the truth was that I always hankered after Colin’s girlfriend. I even fantasised about becoming a soldier and going away, returning years later to sweep my secret love off her feet (Colin having, with luck, conveniently deserted Christine by then). Don’t ask me why the soldier bit was in there. I spent my infant years dreading being called up for National Service and, after its abolition, the rest of my childhood fearing another world war in which I’d be expected to fight. Perhaps my imagination was caught by the classic recruiting enticement to join the army and see the world. It was quite probably the only career I could think of that would provide the absence necessary to the narrative of my daydreams. In fact, I did briefly explore the prospect of joining the army when I left Sloane, but that was only because I was at a loss to know what else to do.
Christine’s elfin face, framed by her mass of black curls, had stolen my heart from the moment I first laid eyes on her, but there wasn’t the slightest sign that the feeling was reciprocated. We didn’t last long, Susan Kelly and me. Apart from my unrequited affection for her friend, there was something about Susan’s theatrical behaviour that irritated me. I ‘packed her in’ before the summer had ended. Susan reacted melodramatically, buying Cilla Black’s ‘You’re My World’ and delivering it to Colin’s house as a present for me, together with a note quoting some of the words.
I suppose I was mean to Susan, but she did get her revenge. A few months after our paths diverged one of her subsequent boyfriends, a big lad from Henry Compton School, challenged me to a fight on the questionable grounds that I’d besmirched Susan Kelly’s honour in the way I’d deserted her. He came all the way to the Sloane school gates to throw down his gauntlet.
Rather like the duels fought by aristocrats in the Regency era, such a challenge, once issued, couldn’t be ignored. Susan’s boyfriend and I met on a damp night on a patch of grass at the end of Colin’s street. There were no ‘seconds’ and, thankfully, no witnesses as he threw at least three punches to every one of mine, extracting an early submission.
It was all rather noble, really: his defence of his sweetheart’s honour, the discretion with which the fight was arranged and his acceptance of my surrender. We even shook hands before parting. No doubt he received a hero’s welcome when he returned to Susan.
My increasing interest in girls never distracted me from my passion for music. On the contrary, I was convinced that being in a group, even one as substandard as the Vampires, would make me irresistible to the opposite sex. One morning in the summer holidays, walking to Colin’s house from the bus stop for a much-needed Vampires practice session, I saw a crowd of girls congregating outside Pauline Bright’s house just along the street.
Colin had a new record that he was desperate for the rest of us to hear. So, at my suggestion, we opened the front-room window, stood around the record-player with our motley collection of instruments and tried to impress the girls outside by pretending it was us playing ‘You Really Got Me’ by the Kinks. As those fat power chords fizzed from Dave Davies’s guitar, it was obvious that we were fooling nobody.
We were as yet unaware that Dave’s unique guitar riff had been achieved not only by vastly superior musical skills but with the help of an incision in the speaker cone of his amplifier, technology that the Vampires sadly lacked. Eventually one of Colin’s neighbours knocked on the door to complain about the noise. We doubted that ever happened to the Kinks.
By September, ‘You Really Got Me’ had swept to the top of the charts, boosted by the Kinks’ appearance on Ready, Steady, Go! and extensive coverage on pirate radio. It also made the US Top 10. The band had been launched only that year, evolving from the Ray Davies Quartet, a group of north London secondary modern schoolboys. There was hope for the Vampires yet.