Raymond Douglas turned towards the control panel in the studio, pushed up a fader and ‘Fancy’, from his LP Face to Face, started playing. He clearly thought the lyrics to the song were appropriate to this particular phase of his life.
Fancy, if you believe in what I believe in
Then we will be the same. Always.
No one can penetrate me.
They only see what’s in their own fancy. Always.
I thought these words were non-specific, and this just confused me further, although that may have been R.D.’s aim. Even so, I sat and listened. The song did have a whimsical charm. R.D. sensed the way I was feeling and, after turning the volume down, he began to speak over the music. I prepared myself for another of his maniacal rants: an inner darkness that he was inventing for my own rapidly increasing confusion and his pleasure. I was completely unprepared for what came next.
‘I gradually withdrew from the real world. I sustained a severe kicking on my shins during a soccer match when I forgot to wear shin pads. The bruises went down, but I tried to toughen up my resistance to any further injuries by tapping away at my legs with a hammer I had found in my father’s tool shed. The blue marks faded to yellow and I returned to the tool shed and tapped away again, until the blood came to the surface. I told my parents I had been hurt playing football, but one day my mother found me with the hammer. I said that I wanted to see what pain looked like instead of just feeling it. Thinking back now, it was, apart from being a reckless and stupid act, a horrible attempt to manipulate my parents’ emotions. My mother took me to see Dr Aubrey. He said that the bruises would soon heal, but after hearing me talk about my dissatisfaction with the world he realized something was troubling me deeply, and it was clear to him I needed special help.
It was obvious to all concerned that I had not been my usual self since Rene had died. People commented on how glum I looked. I rarely smiled, never laughed, and when I did manage to lift my eyes from the floor, I stared at people as if they didn’t exist. This later became known as my silent period, and it culminated in my Uncle Frank referring to me as ‘the miserable little bleeder with the long face’. Once Uncle Sonny, who worked on the railway, sat down and drew me a picture of a train. For some reason this made me laugh. Uncle Son was a kind man who couldn’t draw to save his life, but his efforts both amused and touched me. But apart from this rare moment, my presence alone resulted in the most festive party turning solemn simply by my sitting in the corner looking downcast. A dark cloud appeared before me more and more frequently, and ‘the miserable bleeder’ was becoming a liability to family and friends alike. I was not the same happy child who in earlier years had stopped the show at family gatherings with my stirring rendition of ‘Temptation’. My back ache had turned into a face ache, and when I told people about the pain they shrugged it off – because they couldn’t see it.
Mum and Dad were referred to a counsellor in Crouch End who, being too overworked, had given me a brief interview which concluded with me being given some square pegs to fit into round holes. That was the extent of my evaluation.
Only my mother waited outside. She listened attentively as the child therapist reassured her that I was, not going to be put into a straitjacket. Dad was too busy to come along. He had nothing particularly pressing to do, but the poor old boy couldn’t face the possibility that his eldest son might be slightly odd. So he dismissed the whole thing as a load of balls. He could see nothing wrong with me. After all, I might have become a Spurs supporter, which to an Arsenal devotee like my dad meant automatic incarceration in the local asylum.
I had been brought up an Arsenal supporter like my father before me, but I had a secret admiration for Bobby Charlton, Duncan Edwards and the whole Manchester United team – the Busby Babes. However, the greatest captain in the land at this time was Danny Blanchflower, of the dreaded Tottenham Hotspurs, Arsenal’s historic deadly rivals. Spurs’ away kit was sometimes all-white, the same as the mighty Real Madrid wore. The Spanish champions were the greatest club side in the world. Dad wouldn’t have minded me wearing a white polo-necked shirt if I were going to Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath to be around all the woofters, but if it meant I supported Tottenham, that would have been the final humiliation. He would probably have put me in Colney Hatch – the home for the emotionally disturbed.
But I still followed Arsenal as avidly as before, and every Saturday at five o’clock I ran to the paper shop to get the Evening News so that Dad could check his pools results. So in Dad’s eyes there was nothing strange about me whatsoever. Mum, on the other hand, studied me while I rocked to and fro restlessly every time the television was on. She saw me cry for no apparent reason when I read the newspapers. (This happened even when Arsenal won.) She watched me stutter and try to drag out words when talking to schoolmates and relatives.
My ‘problem’ was discussed in the same shameful whispers as that of the ‘queers’ who hung around the toilets at the Quadrant bus terminal at the top of Muswell Hill. The same as the black couple from Kentish Town whose son smoked drugged cigarettes. The same as the middle-aged man with such an enormous penis that his wife was not able to satisfy him. (He was discovered by the milkman in the act of making love to a cow at the back of the Express Dairy next to the Ritz Cinema at the top of Muswell Hill.)
I had joined the ranks of these so-called weirdos, and even though it made me unsuitable for the conventional world, this uniqueness gave me a certain status among peers and adults alike. People spoke to me as if I were from another galaxy and did not fully understand the strange beings from Planet Earth. Kind and thoughtful relatives offered me extra pieces of cake and continually reassured me that everything would be all right. According to one frustrated teacher at William Grimshaw secondary modern, there must definitely be something wrong with me, because I felt so normal. It was just that my perception of the real world had changed. My loneliness was complete, and any comfort received from the outside was superficial only, because inside the safe world of my own invention, my soul could not be touched. And even though I was never told what was wrong with me, it didn’t seem relevant. What mattered was that I was not like ‘them’, whoever ‘they’ were. Life had become a reproduction: it was not the real thing.
My parents were referred to a special children’s clinic for educational therapy in Pembridge Villas, Notting Hill Gate. My unwillingness to communicate with others had given the assessors the idea that I was backward and could only communicate with Planet North 10 via a therapist.
Miss Blair was my counsellor at Pembridge Villas. She asked me to draw pictures. For some reason I always drew a lone figure carrying a small bag heading down a long stretch of road towards distant mountains.
‘You’ve never seen real mountains, have you?’ she asked.
‘Only in my dreams,’ I replied.
‘What are your dreams?’
I remembered many of my dreams, but said I would not answer her. She had once told me some of her dreams, and indicated that she could help me solve my problems by interpreting mine. I told her my guitar would fulfil all my dreams for me. My sister Rene had said so. Miss Blair asked me how the guitar was going to achieve this, and I explained how versatile the guitar was; how it was my ambition to have an orchestra of guitars to interpret my dreams for me because my thoughts could not be put into words. Miss Blair sat back in her chair and studied me. She said that the guitar was not versatile enough to do this, but she would be interested to hear what ideas I had. It was almost as if she was daring me to communicate with her, but I would not be drawn so easily.
Miss Blair and I often sat and studied one another in silence. She was in her mid to late thirties. Dark hair hung over her shoulders in an unkempt sort of way. I was not sure then whether she was attractive or not, but as an adult I am sure she would have intrigued me. Perhaps I would even make a pass at her now.
We sat and played word association games. Sometimes she got a medicine ball and threw it at me just when I was responding to a word. Eventually I got wise to this and started to say nothing at all. She became frustrated and threatened to give me a short, sharp shock, to put me in a group where there were children with real mental disorders. Still I said nothing. One day, after a long silence, she jumped up and shouted that she had left an egg boiling on the stove and she had to go home to prevent a fire. I never saw her again. The next day I saw the principal, a wizened old lady, who said that there were many boys with my problem. I asked what my problem was, but the old lady just smiled and patted my hand. She never told me what was wrong. They never do, because they don’t really know. Perhaps I was simply suffering from terminal normality.
The result of my twice-weekly visits to Pembridge Villas meant that I fell behind with my normal studies. This made me even more of a stranger to my schoolmates. I had a strange double identity: an average schoolboy one day, and a troubled misfit the next. Some catching up was easier than others. For example, I had no problems with sports and art. Even English studies were just within my grasp. Maths, a subject which did not come naturally to me, soon became totally beyond my comprehension.
My natural talent at art was encouraged by my art teacher, Mr Bond, who gave me extra tuition after school. This presented yet another problem to my friends, who were sports fanatics. Anyone carrying a paintbrush who was not an interior decorator was clearly a homosexual. Splashing around in a muddy bathtub with naked men at Finchley FC was one thing – it was manly and normal, even if some of the older men sometimes came out of the tub with hard-ons – but art lessons outside school hours implied that there was something unnatural going on. Once my mother arrived at around five o’clock, long after the other students had left, to find Mr Bond standing over me while I tried to mix colours. She ranted on and on in no uncertain terms: ‘You have no bloody right to keep my boy behind after hours!’ I explained that Mr Bond was merely trying to push me towards an A level certificate; there was no other motive. The following day Mr Bond, after complimenting me on my work, whispered that he thought my mother was ‘a woman of outstanding character’.
I never asked my mother why she had interrupted what was clearly an innocent attempt on my teacher’s part to push me through an exam, particularly as my school absences were making it perfectly clear that I would not stand an earthly chance of passing anything else.
At the same time, I had kept up my sports. The sports master, Mr Wardle, had seen me win a few races. When it came to representing the school in the-relay, three runners and I were chosen: Griffin and Ebberson were both members of athletics clubs, and had special training; Stacey was another very fast runner. When we came to practise, Mr Wardle announced that Griffin would lead off, Stacey would run second, the tall, elegant Ebberson would be third, and, to my surprise, I was to be the anchor man. He said that he hadn’t picked me to run the final leg because I was the fastest, but because he felt that if I was in front when I received the baton I would let no one pass me. Maybe he saw the hunger inside me. Whatever his motives, he knew I would not let him down.
On the day of the race we won convincingly, beating the best from all over the district. I was particularly proud as both my parents were there to cheer me on, and it was even more gratifying as they rarely attended events together any more.
Our team was just celebrating the victory when one of the other teams made an appeal, and the judges ordered the race re-run. We had won so convincingly – a full ten yards ahead of the next team – that out of bravado we decided to run dressed in our tracksuits, both as a protest at the judges’ decision and to underline our confidence in our abilities.
The starter’s gun went off a second time. I took up my position and soon felt the thumping of the on-coming runners. I quickly checked my red spikes to see if all the mud was cleaned off, and then heard, ‘Run! Go now!’ Quick flashes of colours from the shirts of the other runners, which I had not seen in the first race, indicated that we might not be in the lead and so I went. I thought of my parents; that they were there, how proud they were; then about the stupid tracksuit I was wearing, and what a complete prat I would look if we lost. I could see the finishing tape clearly; victory was in our grasp again. Then my foot hit a slight bump on the track. A dull pain went up my spine and down my legs. Somehow I kept running. A pain went through my chest and squeezed the muscles there. My body was telling me to stop but I kept running, and we finished first for the second time that day. The pain made it impossible to bend down and untie my shoelaces, so I pretended I was so proud of our victory that I wanted to wear my running gear for the rest of the day.
I concealed my injury well enough to be picked for the soccer team that winter, and to bowl in the cricket team the following summer.
The day before my A level painting exam I was practising my leg spin in the prefect’s room, throwing an imaginary ball to another boy, who I thought held an imaginary bat. However this time the boy swung around brandishing a brand new Stuart Surridge cricket bat, and, as he was only feet from me, my right index finger crashed down on the end of the willow bat just as he was attempting an imaginary cover drive. I stared at the finger, which had been dislocated at the second joint, and for a moment it looked comical as it dangled back to front on the end of my hand. It was only when I realized what had happened that I fainted.
The following day I took the art exam with the first finger of my painting hand held rigid in a splint. Mr Bond came in to the room. He said nothing, but I knew he was furious with me. Afterwards he looked at my work and commented that while I would be able to run like a greyhound for a few years, my art would sustain me for the rest of my life – if I allowed it to.’
R.D. stopped talking and cleared a cough by thumping his chest a few times. He looked up at the small beam of reflected light. He grunted disapprovingly, then sighed.
‘What’s it like out there? Is the air still like soup?’
‘It is,’ I replied.
‘I predicted this,’ he muttered, ‘in my Preservation Trilogy. Did you study it at school?’
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was considered a minor subject.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Classics, I suppose,’ he growled.
The syllabus had hardly mentioned the Kinks.
I also couldn’t let him realize how I knew so much about him, so I pretended my introduction to his work came as a result of finding a whole pile of gramophone records in my father’s attic, alongside an assortment of Penthouse magazines and Roy of the Rover comics. R.D. didn’t know I had not known my parents. I was becoming as cagey as the person I was interviewing. I was supposed to be the one doing the interrogation, but R.D. seemed to have such an insight into my character it was as if he had known me when I was young.
I continued, feeling embarrassed about what came out of my mouth: ‘My father was a disciple as well as being a great admirer of your work, sir. He was a student and a fan.’
‘A fan?’
‘He saw you perform when there were live concerts.’
R.D. saw through my pitiful subterfuge. ‘Don’t patronize me, lad. You talk about so-called live concerts as if they died out centuries ago. Great Scott, lad, we’re only talking about a decade or two! Anyway, nothing has really changed. There must still be illegal gatherings at so-called live entertainments.’
R.D. obviously wanted to comment on the state of modern pop music, but it was completely over my head. He suddenly changed the subject. ‘Society hasn’t changed that much. You call the children of the empire your brothers, but believe me there is still a social pecking order. A higher echelon still runs the country from a position of privilege. The only thing that has changed since I was your age is that then we were conned into believing that there was a future full of equal opportunities, when the class system broke down. Now everyone has reverted to type.
‘The age of indifference parodied us on television and forced us to accept ourselves as stereotypes, to be manipulated by the corporations into being reduced to mere commodities. To see a product, buy it, then become it. That’s when I decided I would never become part of that system. That’s when I withdrew from public life.’
‘But you continued to write in isolation.’
This brought forth a bellow which nearly shattered my eardrums.
‘I have always written in isolation, you stupid little bastard!’
‘Even in the sixties?’ I answered politely. What a boring old fart the man was!
‘Even in the sixties. I was never fooled by the “swinging sixties”.’
‘Why didn’t you say something about society then, when you had the opportunity to be heard by millions?’
‘I did for a while. Then I realized that I would have to stand with other so-called celebrities and turn my concern into a showbiz spectacular. I chose to be an outsider. These were concerts for the starving, charity records for the bereaved, sing in harmony for disaster and national mourning. It was fine for a while, until every catastrophe became a cue for some do-gooder entertainment figure to start a crusade for a worthy cause simply to prolong a career.’
I felt that R.D. genuinely believed what he was saying, even though he sounded bitter. I mentioned some of his work, and how humorous it was.
‘They, the critics, would say “wry wit, sarcastic humour, tongue in cheek”. All that sort of crap. I’m bitter. I always have been, and I’ve learned to accept it and be proud of it. The secret is to lighten the bitterness with a little humour.’
I could not believe this was Raymond Douglas Davies speaking, the man who had grown up in what was referred to as the era of optimism. He just sat there, bitter and sad, still writing letters and songs of protest about society, which had begun to treat him with disrespect and suspicion. I needed to get away from this topic and back to his schooldays. Even though he had told me most of the story, I felt something was missing.
I had heard his Schoolboys in Disgrace album from the mid-1970s. In it the headmaster, symbol of the establishment, sends his disgraced schoolboy down the road to ruin after he has been humiliated in front of the school, punished for a crime he didn’t commit. Later, when the schoolboy resorts to crime to survive, the same establishment that put him on the downward spiral in the first place comes back to punish him in adulthood. This theme had been carried on into the Preservation section of the Trilogy, when the disgraced boy returns as the evil dictator Mr Flash. After a military coup the rebel armies, financed by the superpowers, invade, and Mr Flash is overthrown by his old schoolboy enemy, Mr Black. Again the establishment returns to haunt him.
It was clear to me that this theme had been important throughout Raymond Douglas’ life, and in order to draw him out I told him about my own unhappy childhood, and my attempts to find an answer to the nightmares that had haunted me. How the Corporation had taken me in, educated me and even gave me employment.
I apologized to him for lying about the parents I had never known, but I explained that that was how I had imagined them to be. I was prepared for him to throw me out. I was starting to make my way to the door when the strangest thing happened. He stood up and walked straight into the beam of light. I saw his eyes for the first time; they were full of emotion.
‘You poor kid. I think I understand. I would like to help you, if you will allow me. I have never really helped anybody in my life, and you seem as troubled as I was at your age. Perhaps this is my opportunity.
‘How old are you? No – let me guess. You soon know when the person is the same age. You have experienced many of the same events, gone down the same road, fallen in love with the same movies, books and music. Without realizing it, we have paralleled each other’s lives. It is nothing to do with the way we speak, the topic of conversation, or even how old we look. I am often amazed to discover how varied in age my contemporaries look, and how diverse their range of occupations are. You can spend years with a person and think that you have a bond with them: personal jokes, little knowing habits and gestures. Then, all of a sudden, somebody else arrives and the two of them start talking in front of you as if you never existed. They are not cutting you out deliberately, it’s just that they have that magic connection because they’re from the same generation.
‘I feel no gap between you and me, although I’m old enough to be your father, or your grandfather, even. I somehow think that you are capable of grasping my whole theory about society, and that the Preservation Trilogy has obviously had a profound effect on you. I am touched that my writing has inspired you so. You have grasped that my music has never been for young people alone, because we are all young and old at the same time.’
R.D. sat me down in his chair. I felt honoured, but tired at the same time, and I was desperate to get home. Unfortunately, Raymond Douglas had a different idea. He obviously felt that he could at last confide in me.
‘During my time at school in Pembridge Villas, it had been decided that it would be in everybody’s interest if I moved out of my parents’ house and stayed in Highgate with my eldest sister, Rosie, and her husband Arthur.
Arthur’s brother Stuart had been a fighter pilot; he had died in the Second World War. Arthur kept a picture of him on the living-room wall, with poppies decorating the frame. Stuart, like Arthur, was handsome in the true 1950s matinée-idol tradition. It was as if they both had a sort of diffusion around their features. They both looked like film stars, which is probably why Rosie fell for Arthur. That and the uniform. The only uncomfortable part of Arthur was his tendency towards bitterness. His father had been a strict disciplinarian, and Arthur often told us how he and his brother were made to chew their food forty-two times before swallowing, a tradition Arthur tried to pass on to his son Terry and me. However, I was in a rather odd position, in that I was actually Arthur’s brother-in-law, even though he was old enough to be my father. While my unfortunate nephew Terry had to eat his meal with his father silently counting, I could swallow my meat and potatoes whole. My rebellious eating habits often led to days of stomach pain and bouts of chronic constipation.
Terry and I slept in an upstairs room in Rosie’s house in Highgate Hill. I was so happy there that I found sleep to be a terrible inconvenience. The world seemed too wonderful to actually ‘die’ for all those hours. My life in Yeatman Road was a mixture of the beautiful and the tragic. I watched Terry while he slept, and I gazed in wonder as his beautiful half-open mouth drew air in and out, emitting the faintest whistle as his lungs blew it back into the universe. I admired his perfect features, soft olive skin, silky chestnut eyebrows poised just beneath a proud, long forehead; then a chopped, parted fringe which unfortunately often resembled that of Adolf Hitler.
By now my bowel problems had spread to the unfortunate Terry who, encouraged by me, ate masses of chocolates and starch-filled cakes in order to redress the imbalance caused by Arthur’s traditional table manners. Thus another rebellion was born. Not against Arthur, because in a strange way I understood him. My fear or dread was that one day I would feel as unhappy and as unfulfilled as he did. His search for another life seemed to me to be as futile as my wish to break the four-minute mile or climb Mount Everest.
At that time Arthur’s whole life seemed to be one of overwhelming frustration and unhappiness. His brother Stuart had, in many respects, done everything that Arthur had hoped to do himself. Stuart had even died for his country. Arthur had survived and he must have cringed as successive governments squandered what was left of what Arthur’s generation called the ‘Empire’. The world Stuart had died to protect had turned its back on Arthur, making him seem a tormented, empty person.
Poor Arthur was so tense, unrelaxed and so reliably pessimistic, and yet Rosie loved him. Terry both feared and loved him, as I did. It was difficult to understand then, but in Arthur we saw our futures. As he walked out of the house dressed in his waterproof mackintosh and his correctly buttoned jacket, Arthur was a signpost to my own life and, for a while, my muse. So were Terry and Rosie, eventually. With all of them I treasured the moments of merriment and optimism, on the occasions when Arthur forgot his all-consuming sadness.
On a late Sunday afternoon in winter I decided that I had to move further, fly the nest and visit the big bad world of the city. I walked across to St James’s Church, which looks down above north London. I caught the 134 bus and sat upstairs, looking down as the bus took me into the West End. I got off at Leicester Square and walked through the narrow streets of Soho. This was my first solo venture – at the age of fifteen – into the dark, seedy world of sleaze.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that bus journey was my entrée into my adult life. I was on the road for the first time on a red 134 London Transport bus. Before this journey the bounds of my musical world had been marked out by watching Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals; listening to Country and Western music on the radio; hearing my sisters’ be-bop records and early rock and roll; and family gatherings around the piano, singing popular hits of the time, and hits of my parents’ youth, music-hall songs. This time I was out by myself, experiencing a new world, a dark world of neon lights and nightclubs, cafés, street-walkers, small-time underworld crime characters. I spoke to no one, I just walked and observed. My walks around Soho made some impression on my subconscious, and even began to influence the way I played the guitar. My attitudes towards the world changed at this impressionable age. Experience changes the way you think about chords and the notes you play. You bend the notes differently: I decided that I was an adult and I would leave school as soon as I could. I secured a job in the layout department of an engineering magazine in Rosebery Avenue, Holborn. I soon discovered that even though I had my own office, I was really nothing more than a glorified office boy. My lunch-breaks were usually spent walking around the Gray’s Inn Road, looking for a cheap restaurant where I could get a meal in exchange for the luncheon vouchers provided by my employers. I could have stayed and had lunch in the printing shop with the other workers, but they were all militant unionists, and spent their time playing cards and complaining about the firm, discussing how they could bring about the next confrontation with the management.
There was an old balding man who wore blue overalls and never did anything but play cards. They called him ‘bastard’, because that’s all he ever called anybody else. He used to pick his nose a lot, and fart. Sometimes, when the supervisor came to check up, he pretended to clean the printing presses, but as soon as the super left, Bastard whispered under his breath, ‘Bastard.’ I suppose he was my introduction to the down-tools school of trade unionism. Bastard totally perverted the meaning of the word ‘union’, and the way he and his cronies took the piss out of me for working in my tea-break started to depress me. It got to the stage where I pretended not to work so that they wouldn’t give me a hard time.
Every Thursday I went to the design and layout office in Threadneedle Street. The reason I had taken the job in the first place was to do some design and the advertisement in the Evening Standard had particularly mentioned ‘opportunities for artistic youth’. Well, this was my chance to show that I was indeed youthful and very artistic. To my disappointment, I spent most of my time making tea. On the odd occasion when I was allowed to prove myself as an artist, the head of the department gave me lavatory paper to sketch on, so that if the work was sub-standard, they could always use the paper in the toilet. Even for an early school-leaver, I did not consider this experience was stretching my talents as a designer.
I left the magazine and, after a series of equally dead-end jobs, I decided that at fifteen I was still young enough to go back to school.
The brief period away from school had left me considerably behind the others, but I still kept up with all my sporting activities. This time I entered the district school boxing championships. I won my preliminary bouts, but in the final I was unfortunate to find myself matched against Ronnie Brooks from Stroud Green. I was a reasonable boxer, but young Brooks was the reigning school boxing champion of Great Britain. I was undeterred, and took extra lessons in the art of counter-punching from my brother-in-law Joe, who had been a fighter of some repute in his day. I hyped myself up into thinking that I might win, but sadly, on the night of the fight, Brooks tore through my defences, and though I managed to land several hard blows to his already battered face, the referee intervened to prevent what little brain I had from being spilled all over the floor. My head ached for days afterwards, and I had nightmares about those flashing white lights that had appeared every time Ronnie had hit me. I began to associate those flashing lights with defeat, and I was determined to avoid defeat in the future. I felt like a leader but I was not a winner yet. But it was the sort of luck I had – I couldn’t just fight anybody. It had to be the schools champion of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.’
R.D.’s account of his continual fight against injuries, combined with his need to achieve a victory of some description, resounded inside me, bringing fresh concerns about my own confused adolescence. But I was beginning to treat most of what R.D. said with cautious sceptism; particularly the shin-tapping incident.
I did understand his somewhat distorted reasoning for wanting to see pain on the outside as well as just feeling it inside. Nevertheless, I was not sure whether to believe him or not. It was obvious that he felt he had been wounded by the world, but was he covering up the real cause for this period of emotional imbalance?
That night I tried to read some old clippings to find a clue of some sort; I even browsed through the other biographies about the Kinks, but in the end I threw them aside and went back to the music. I played Lola Versus Powerman and The Money-go-round. Also ‘Wish I Could Fly Like Superman’, an American hit from the early 1980s. It was clear that R.D. was at war with some altar ego whom he felt was trying to suppress him all his life and, as well as conducting his normal life, he was at the same time having an inner struggle with this, mysterious dark figure who was always looming in his subconscious, looking for an opportunity to knock him from his pedestal. There was a track on Lola called ‘The Contender’. The lyrics alluded to life being like a boxing match. R.D.’s inner life was both like a battlefield and a bizarre pantomime at the same time. I somehow managed to appreciate the way he felt, even though he was trying to baffle me whenever possible. At times he really was funny – a cross between an old queen and a vaudeville clown.
That night my dreams were vivid and terrifying. I was on an operating table being tormented by a large dark figure. I was flat on my back and could see a reflection of a person, probably me. Every time the dark figure tore pieces of skin from my body, I could see the helpless reflection cry out with pain, but because I was numb I could not respond in the same way. The more I resisted, the more the reflection cried out in agony. Even though I tried to scream, knowing that was the only way to stop pain being inflicted on him, it was impossible for me to make a sound. It was as if I were the equivalent of R.D.’s inner pain, and the reflection in the mirror was what must have been going on inside him. As I woke, I felt a pain shoot up the side of my face. I crawled across the room and looked in the mirror. I saw that I had a cut lip and a bruise on my cheek.
When I arrived at his studio later that day, I continued to ask R.D. about his schooldays: I felt I was on to something. I was hoping he would let it slip out because, even though his childhood had been unhappy, he could not resist talking about it. He picked up where he had left off.
‘For some reason the four houses at William Grimshaw secondary modern were all named after scientists, inventors and a writer: Stephenson, Faraday, Kipling and, lastly, my own house, Harvey. At the last house meeting of my secondary-school career I was, surprisingly, voted in as both house and sports captain. This was, according to Mr Lill, my housemaster and maths teacher, a unique honour. He made a short congratulatory speech, saying that he hoped that my new obligations would not interfere with my chronic absenteeism and out-of-school activities. The laughter soon turned to applause and cheers. As it subsided, I assured him that I could find time for both.
It was only when I ran on to the soccer pitch as the new captain of Harvey that I realized it was possibly a put-up job. While most of the members of Harvey were capable scholars, the sporting element consisted mainly of fatties and hideously unathletic stick-insects. It was difficult to muster eleven boys who could walk properly, let alone form a soccer team.
And then, while captaining Harvey house against Faraday, my leadership abilities received a further blow when I was almost reduced to a hobbling cripple. I went up for a high ball which came over from a corner kick and was immediately pushed to the ground by two large Faraday defenders. As I fell, my lower back struck the base of a goalpost, which in those days was square. The pain numbed my entire system as my old injury was aggravated, which resulted in me being carried from the field. I was determined not to let the team down, however, and I scrambled to my feet and managed to finish the game.
The pain in my back lasted for weeks, but I was afraid to tell anyone in case it meant I would have to give up my position as house captain. Eventually, though, I had to see a doctor. I soon found myself sitting outside the specialist’s room at the Middlesex Hospital, dressed only in a flimsy gown tied behind me, waiting while the specialist showed my X-rays to his students. I was both the centre of attention and the side-show. The door opened and I was summoned into a large hall full of young students and doctors. I was asked by the specialist to touch my toes. When I found this difficult he stood squarely in front of me, took hold of my shoulders, then asked me to bend from side to side as far as I could. I was obviously in pain.
He asked whether I enjoyed sports. I announced proudly for all to hear that I hoped one day to play for England. The specialist walked over, smiling as he spoke, ‘You’ll never be able to play sports again, my lad. Just look after your health and be thankful you can still walk. If you’d been in a car crash, it would have been called a broken back.’ When I asked what had caused my sudden disability, he merely waved his hand and said I had a bad back. Bad back? I had just been told by this pompous old toad I was a cripple!
As soon as the pain of my immediate injury made it possible for me to look convincing on the field, I persevered with my sporting endeavours. One thing was certain; where I could, whenever I could, I needed to win.’
At this point I broke in and interrupted R.D. ‘Why was winning so important to you? Your music gives me the impression that you were not in competition with anyone else – that’s what gives it its uniqueness.’
R.D. nodded. ‘I was younger, and I was inspired by the chase, the conquest. Good against evil. It helped me through my own difficult childhood, where I needed a role model to help me through my insecurities. In order to guard my self-confidence and keep some self-esteem I had to win at something.’
He drew back, and returned to the facts.
‘My next big race was against Griffin, whom I had run the relay race with earlier. I was going to have to pull off something spectacular in order to beat him. I had watched the 1960 summer Olympics on television as Herb Elliott smashed the 1,500 metre record. Because I was a sprinter, my attention was also drawn to the 100-metre dash and a German runner called Armin Hary. I had watched Armin Hary ‘beat the gun’ – basically, an incredible reflex action to the sound of the starter’s gun. He appeared to stand almost upright on his blocks waiting for the start. All the other athletes had a traditional slow rise for the first six or seven strides, but Hary was up and running before them. I was encouraged by this, as the slow rise was difficult for me with my back problems. I badgered my parents to buy me a pair of white lightweight Adidas spikes, the same as Hary wore. That summer, with my white spikes and faster, more upright start, I defeated Griffin in both the 100 and 220 yard sprints. In the longer race I felt him catching up to me in the final few yards and I threw myself at the tape to win by a few feet.
Dave ran over and said what a great victory it was. He knew how important it was for me to leave school a winner. Griffin came over and shook my hand, and as he spoke I realized that the poor fellow had the most debilitating stutter.
There were two more sporting events before I left school, the first the district inter-school sports, which included grammar schools, as well as secondary moderns. These meets were always extremely competitive, as grammar-school kids were considered superior in every way: they were the bright ones who had passed the Eleven Plus exams. I was established as champion in both 100 and 220 yards, but I nearly lost the 220 before I ever ran it. A friend told me that another school had a runner named Brander who was half a second faster than me. The thought came into my head: ‘I may not win this!’
The following day I watched Brander as he limbered up and got down into the classic crouch start. I settled into my normal upright start position, then at the last minute decided maybe I should assume the classic crouch position. As the starter shouted ‘Get set’ I lowered myself, wanting to run in the most orthodox manner possible. As soon as the pistol went, I realized this was a grave mistake. A shooting pain went across my back, but I forced myself on. I watched Brander tear away in the outside lane. He seemed miles away. But once I was upright it was obvious that I had beaten myself by breaking my own individual style. As we entered the final fifty I started to catch him, and finished just a stride behind him. He shook hands with me with a tremendous look of relief on his face. He had obviously heard about me, and for all I know someone had told him I was half a second faster than him. In any event, I had mentally brought about my own defeat; I had tried to be orthodox, just like everybody else.
By the time we had won the 4 × 100 relay, the pain in my back was so extreme that once again I could not bend down to take off my spikes. A girl whom I had a slight crush on at the time but had never dared to speak to came over and asked if I needed help. As she untied my laces, she looked up and whispered that, even though my face was not up to much, the girls had voted me the boy with the best arse in the school.’
‘What was the girl’s name?’ I inquired.
R.D. scratched his chin and looked up at the skylight. ‘Julie,’ he said, ‘Julie Finkle.’
I laughed out loud. ‘Julie Finkle. That must be a joke name. Nobody was ever called Julie Finkle. Not in Muswell Hill, anyway.’
R.D. looked over at me, spread out his arms and shrugged his shoulders, like a spiv trying to sell a stolen car. ‘I kid you not, old son. Trust me. It was Julie Finkle.’
R.D. leaned back and continued his tale.
‘Two days before I left school for good, there was one last meet. I wanted revenge. I used my normal starting stance – and I also had the knowledge that I was the boy with the ‘best arse’ in the school. With my small female fan club, I won the 100 and the 200 yard dash. Then the meeting was to be decided by the 4 × 110 yard relay. Plaistow Grammar, our rivals, had a fine team, but as I was handed the baton I could already see the kids spilling on to the track near the finishing line. Mr Wardle’s assessment had been astute: once I was in front no one could catch me.
I breasted the tape and threw the baton in the air. Mr Lill, the maths teacher, tried to bring me down to earth by pointing out that if I had given the same commitment to my academic work, I would have gone to a grammar school and been running for the other side. I replied that if I had gone to a grammar school, possibly I would not have had such a will to win.’
The will to win. The phrase kept going through my head as I walked home after another day with R.D. I was wasted, but the sound of R.D.’s voice talking about the will to win echoed in my head. And that mystery girl, Julie whatever her name was. Could she have been the Julie in ‘Waterloo Sunset’? It’s often said that first love can have the most impact on a person’s life.
I started to think about my own life. About sex, even. About the researcher at the office with that name. Julie.
I phoned her and got her answering-machine. Her voice sounded husky and dark, in total contrast to the way she looked. I telephoned several times just to receive the message before leaving a message of my own: ‘I want to know everything about the Preservation albums. See all the clippings and reviews. Find out about a school for disturbed children in Pembridge Villas, Westbourne Grove. Look up the records at the old Middlesex Hospital and track down X-rays of R.D.’s back. I’d like anything at all you can find out about a girl called Julie Finkle.’
I sat in a hot bath. Afterwards I put on Face to Face and listened to ‘Fancy’. I took a pill. Went to bed. I slept, but did not dream.
The next day I stopped off at my office to see the editor-in-chief, but he was out. His secretary, a large blonde Amazon of a woman with a thick Australian accent, told me that my project had been pushed forward and the Corporation wanted me to hand in my work at the end of every week. Damn. I hadn’t actually started to put any of the pieces together yet, and already I was being hassled.
I arrived at my rendezvous with Raymond Douglas to find him more perky than usual. The old chap was evidently enjoying the collaboration so much that he had even put some of his life on cassette for me to play while he went to make the tea.
I pressed the start button and found that he had resumed where he had left off the night before.
I had been living at Rosie and Arthur’s house in Highgate, where Rosie had an old Grundig tape-recorder, and it was on that tape-recorder that my earliest attempts at song-writing were documented. There was an instrumental called ‘So Tired’, written in finger-picking Country-Western style, which conjured up southern plantation songs with images of black slaves toiling away in the cotton fields. There was also a two-chord shuffle with the same phrase repeating over and over. This turned out to be my first stab at writing ‘You Really Got Me’.
Later on, back at my parents’ house, I sat down in the front room one day and started to write a song on the old upright. I thumped out these crude fifths with my left hand, and Little Richard-style eighth note chops with my right. I thought of a melody to go with the phrase I’d come up with at Rosie’s house: ‘Yeah, you really got me going, you got me so I don’t know what I’m doing.’
Then I called Dave in from the kitchen where he was having dinner with the rest of the family, and he picked up his guitar and plugged into the green amp. He started playing along with the riff I was punching out with my left hand. As the amp warmed up I heard that wonderful distorted sound. It was a perfect representation of my anger, and yet beautiful at the same time.
As I taught Dave the song some of our sisters came in to listen. Peg sat on the settee next to her daughter Jackie, Mum hovered by the door, half afraid the neighbours would call the police again. When we got through the song for the first time, our small audience applauded.
I had written ‘You Really Got Me’, and it had happened in the front room because all important things happened there. All the family parties and singsongs had contributed in some mysterious way. It was as if the idea had been in the air.
I took the entrance exam at Hornsey Art College and passed with no difficulty. It was simple enough to get a grant from the local education authority, mainly because my father had been ill, and unemployed for a while. Partly because I had talent. Partly because working-class kids were now being given a chance to prove themselves.
I went to college and became absorbed in the social life there. This consisted of parties, pubs, dances and excursions to museums and art galleries, on the pretext of furthering our artistic studies. These days out were usually spent in cafeterias and pubs, trying to chat up girls and being given the cold shoulder. On nights off, I trained twice a week at the local soccer club, where I played as an outside right. On weekends I took a course at a theatre school and covered all the basics, including improvisation, fencing and what can only be described as mind projection.
I was told by my tutor to stand at the top of Crouch End Hill and project my mind down to the bottom by the traffic lights and focus on some unsuspecting passer-by in order to ‘will’ the subject to turn around. I tried for a couple of days and eventually somebody responded. I am not sure whether or not it was because his will had submitted to mine or whether he had his own reasons for turning. Perhaps he wanted to see if that nutter was still at the top of the hill. What mattered was that I believed that I had done it. I had only been with the theatre company for a brief time, and yet I had already grasped the fundamentals of acting. Fundamentally, I couldn’t.
By this time my sister Peg had married an Irishman named Mike Picker. He had come over to England, joined the British Army and fought in Korea. But because he was from the Republic, he was considered by my parents to be a foreigner, and was treated with suspicion. Mike gave me access to learning about the technique of guitar playing. He also introduced me to classical guitar music through jam sessions at his small flat in Muswell Hill. Mike and I listened to records, usually Buddy Holly and early pop and blues. He concentrated on the guitar solos and I imitated the vocals, which Mike then recorded. Mike and I were fond of Country players like Merle Haggard and Chet Atkins. Hank Williams became my favourite combination of singing and playing. His songs had a crying quality to them that seemed to sum up some of my own darker doubts about the world. I had never experienced what it was like to have a ‘Cheating Heart’, but I was certainly a ‘Lonesome Cowboy’.
Mike, who as a guitarist was far superior to me, went to classical guitar lessons with Louis Gallo, a teacher in Finsbury Park. What was learned there was then passed on to me by Mike, who played with me the duets he had been taught by Gallo. This hand-me-down style of learning was probably the best way for me to be taught. At school I had always rejected any direct tuition. I improvised: my method of spelling sometimes led to rather inventive variations on the English language. The same applied to music. If I didn’t know how to play a certain phrase, or I didn’t understand the way it was written, I invented my own way of performing so that I could fudge my way through the piece. This was not considered acceptable in the days when ‘real’ musicians sat down in front of a sheet of music and played exactly what was written. I had attempted piano lessons some years earlier, with a local retired army major who had taught my sister Gwen. He said that I had piano player’s hands. Unfortunately, the major passed away after only a few lessons, so Mike took over, and my player’s hands gave me a fast finger-picking style.
I went back home and sang duets with my brother Dave. We played Hank Williams’ records and tried to learn the harmonies. We didn’t know – or care – that they were simple two-part harmonies, we just wanted to get the emotion in Hank’s passionate performance across.
One Saturday afternoon I was waiting for Mike to come back from work so that I could have another guitar lesson. It was a beautiful, sunny, crisp summer day. Peg and Mike’s flat was in the attic, so I could see out over the semis and their gardens. It was then I had my first taste of anything resembling a sexual encounter. A woman was sunbathing naked on her roof. She must have known that people could see her, but she didn’t seem to care. It wasn’t that she was naked, it wasn’t that she was beautiful, it was the fact that she obviously didn’t care. That was the first time I was even remotely ‘turned on’, and it was not by what I had seen, but rather by what I felt due to a complete lack of inhibition on the woman’s part. From that day on I tried to organize my lessons with Mike so that I could coordinate them with my rooftop goddess. And when the weather was fine, sure enough, she was there.
After a while, she realized I was there, glimpsing her from the little attic window. She knew that I could see her – that was even more thrilling to me. And in some way my musical activities became more sensual as a result. My little guitar exercises became infused with eroticism. The book I was working on was by Ferdinando Carulli, and his music, combined with the vision of my bare beauty, turned the exercises into something I’d never before encountered. Music had suddenly taken on an extra meaning for me. Subsequently, when Mike and I imitated a Buddy Holly song – for example, ‘Every Day’, ‘Rave On’, ‘Oh Boy’ – I sang not just to imitate the record, but to my secret audience. In my mind, I was singing to that woman across the rooftops.’