ON 10 JANUARY 1971, Judy gave birth to a plump baby boy. We’d been hoping for a son but decided we didn’t want to know the sex of the baby in advance. The information was available to parents-to-be by then, though there were as yet no ultrasound photographs of the foetus to drool over.
So we had no idea whether we were to be blessed with a son or a daughter until Jamie emerged in our upstairs bedroom at Long Furlong Drive at 2.30 on a slate-grey winter morning. Both Natalie and Emma had been born in hospital, but by the early 1970s home births were being encouraged by the National Health Service and Judy was a willing volunteer, despite the potential risks of giving birth some distance away from hospital facilities. Fortunately, she had a very experienced midwife as one of the two in attendance that night.
The senior midwife was not a convert to the rapidly growing conviction that a father had every right, some would say a duty, to be present at the birth of his child. Unmoved by my attempts to charm her with tea and sycophancy, she opined in a soft Irish accent: ‘We’ll all be better off, for sure, if you managed to keep a grip on your curiosity until after Baby has been born, washed and placed in its mother’s arms. You wouldn’t want to be getting in the way, now, would you?’
And so I was downstairs, sitting on our little two-seater sofa, as my wife and son struggled through a life-and-death drama in the room above my head. The senior midwife had, I learned later, saved the life our son had only just embarked upon when he was born with the umbilical cord wrapped tightly round his neck. It seemed he was following in my footsteps right from the start, as exactly the same thing had happened during my own birth twenty years earlier.
We’d had the name Jamie ready when Emma was born, in case she had been a boy. It was now given flesh by the crying bundle of snot presented to me by the midwives when I was finally allowed to enter the room.
Jamie was to become a terrific musician, playing guitar better than I ever could, writing songs of genuine quality and recording albums with the likes of Paul Weller, Robert Wyatt, David Gilmour and Razorlight. I feel that in some weird, primitive way I might have encouraged him down this path by writing a song for him in the hour or so after he was born.
During the period when I probably should have been doing more to help upstairs, I took down my Spanish guitar from the snow-white wall of our living room and wrote a little three-verse song entitled ‘Your First Day’.
I was playing quietly, to ensure I didn’t wake Natalie and Emma, who were sleeping above me – though given that they managed to sleep through the event taking place in the next room, I probably needn’t have worried – but still I wonder whether perhaps this musical tribute may have been one of Jamie’s first impressions of the world he’d entered. The Irish midwife who’d saved his life certainly heard me in the process of composition. When I next went upstairs with a cup of tea for Judy I was taken to one side. ‘Now, haven’t you got more useful things to be doing rather than plonking on that guitar, Mr Johnson?’ she asked.
Some people have no sense of priorities.
Although paternity leave was unheard of in 1971, I was to find myself being granted seven weeks of it, thanks to an all-out strike in the Post Office. Unfortunately it was unpaid, which made this a very difficult period in most respects, but on the plus side, as well as placing me at the disposal of my wife and baby, it allowed me to spend time with Natalie and Emma, aged four and two, when I would normally have been at work.
I’d already learned a whole repertoire of children’s songs from Judy who, as a nursery nurse, had an entire back catalogue of them committed to memory. I had two favourites that the girls were obliged to sing whether they wanted to or not.
The first was ‘In a Cottage in a Wood’, complete with dramatic gestures and theatrical effects. (‘“Help me! Help me! Help me!” he said, “Before the hunter shoots me dead. Come little rabbit, come inside, happy we shall be.”’) The other was ‘The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round’ which, again, was more of a performance than a song.
It was these ditties that were most important to me now, not the hit records I used to try to recreate with the Area and the In-Betweens. Sometimes I’d take down the guitar from the wall for a rendition of ‘Papa’s Taking Us to the Zoo Tomorrow’ or ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, to which the girls would sing along. My next-door neighbour, Martin, had a sweet voice and a passion for Simon and Garfunkel, and occasionally we’d sing one of their songs from Bridge Over Troubled Water as a duet, with me on guitar, as a party piece for the entertainment of our neighbours. It was as close as I got to a return to public performance.
We had entered the era of the singer-songwriter: a simpler, post-Beatles period in which I felt my own songs could flourish – when I had time to focus on them. Meanwhile, throughout 1971 a warm musical breeze flowed into our Slough council house from the west coast of America, on whose currents you could almost smell the marijuana. I loved the album Déjà Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, released the previous year, and followed all four artists individually as well as collectively. Already a fan of Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, I discovered Stephen Stills’s ‘Love the One You’re With’ and a solo album by Graham Nash, a British transplant to the west coast, packed with gorgeous tunes. I also liked James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Sly and the Family Stone. But if there was one artist who made an indelible impression on me as the Post Office strike dragged on, Britain converted to decimal currency and protests against the Vietnam War intensified, and whose songs still remind me most of that time, it was Joni Mitchell.
After hearing bits of her album Ladies of the Canyon and seeing a TV clip of her playing ‘Clouds’, I was hooked. Here was somebody capable of painting vivid pictures with her lyrics and a songwriter who never lapsed into lazy self-indulgence. She was as much poet as performer and that amazing voice soared above everything, pure and crystalline.
Fortunately, the Incredible String Band experience hadn’t discouraged Judy from buying albums for me and that Christmas, with the postal dispute, thankfully, long settled and Jamie approaching his first birthday, she presented me with Blue, Joni Mitchell’s latest LP, and an album I regard as one of the finest ever made. Listening to ‘A Case of You’, my favourite track on this superlative record, as the year faded into memory, I felt more uxorious, more optimistic for my family’s future and more convinced than ever that music was as critical to my life as the air in my lungs and the blood in my veins.