The tape came to an abrupt halt just as I was getting interested in R.D.’s revelations about his early sex life. The door opened and the old rocker walked into the room carrying two mugs of piping hot tea.
‘I hope the tape was to your satisfaction,’ he said in a slightly evil way.
‘It was quite interesting.’
‘Crap, really. I was just filling you in with some basic fodder.’
‘No, really, it was very interesting.’ I was becoming a good liar.
‘You’re not a very good liar, son. Still, never mind. You’ll improve with experience. I did.’
I tried to change the subject. I was not going to let him think that he had the ability to tell when I was lying or not.
‘What about Peg’s illegitimate daughter? Where did she live?’
‘With my mother and father. Poor Jackie. She was a pretty kid, but she had to put up with all those jibes from the kids at school. Even the other kids in our family called her Blackie-Jackie. Her cousins Phil and Irene used to mock her openly about her colour, and asked in all innocence if her father lived in the jungle. Mum would scold them and give Jackie a big hug, but it was obvious that the child was deeply hurt. I think it was hard enough for Mike to be accepted, being Irish and all that. To expect him to take in Peg’s illegitimate black daughter was too much. You forget that this was the late fifties. There were very few black families in north London. Mike tried to accept Jackie, but he and Peg fought a lot, and then the subject of black men often came up. One of the first songs I wrote was a little ditty to sing to Jackie whenever she felt sad.
One day I arrived for my guitar session with Mike to discover that Peg had decided to leave him. She couldn’t carry all her belongings because of her bad arm, so I had to help her carry her suitcase up Muswell Hill towards Mum’s house. Tears were pouring down Peg’s face. She suddenly stopped dead in her tracks and looked at her arm.
‘Raymond, I’m a cripple.’ It was as if she had only just realized the fact. ‘Mike. I can’t leave him.’
We immediately turned around and headed straight back to the flat where Mike was waiting. It wasn’t until she was without Mike that Peg realized that she had a crippled arm. You see, loving someone and the knowledge that you are loved in return makes you forget all the faults and hang-ups you might have about yourself. Anyway, I was happy because it meant that I could resume my guitar lessons with Mike. And savour the shabby rooftop decadence of the nudist of Onslow Gardens, N10.
I was sitting in Peg and Mike’s living room watching television one night, and a programme came on which showed clips of films from all over the world. The show was introduced by a film-maker called John Grierson, who had apparently invented the term ‘documentary’. I saw a film clip of the black folksinger Bill Broonzy playing in a jazz club. There was also a clip from The Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa, and another from a documentary by Robert Flaherty called Men of Aran. Suddenly I was not just being entertained, I was being educated and artistically motivated by the images I saw on the screen.
The following week I took an afternoon off and got on a bus which took me to the Classic Cinema at Hendon Central, where The Seven Samurai was showing. I was stunned by everything: the photography, the acting, the story, the heroism. The whole film was such a complete work of art that it rivalled any picture I had seen by Rembrandt or Van Gogh. Its power stirred emotions in me which even rivalled the feeling I had when I stood on the north bank at Highbury with my father and saw Arsenal score a goal. These samurai heroes were as real to me as Roger Byrne, Duncan Edwards and Bobby Charlton of Manchester United. As inspiring as Herb Elliott or Armin Hary. The film led me on to discover other film-makers: Polanski, Truffaut, Fellini and Bergman. Bill Broonzy became my new musical hero.
This was a different kind of art to the one I was being taught at school. The next project I embarked on was a study of the Russian film-maker, Eisenstein. My notebooks were full of thumbnail sketches of faces and camera angles in the style of Eisenstein rather than studies in the style of John Bratby, Mondrian or Piero della Francesca. This annoyed many of my tutors and caused a certain amount of derision from other pupils, except one film buff by the name of Paul O’Dell. He accompanied me to art-house cinemas, in Oxford Street and Soho, and we also started making little 8-millimetre features together. Paul, or Poddle as I called him, had to be the director, because he owned the camera and could afford the film stock. I helped work out directorial moves and contributed to storylines, but my role was as collaborator and occasional actor, but it was still worth while: we were actually putting images that came from our own imagination on to film. Anything else at art school seemed dull in comparison.’
Raymond Douglas was sitting bolt upright as he told me about his love of film. I broke in and asked R.D. what he thought about art and the attitudes of the other pupils at college with him in the early sixties. This turned out to be a big mistake. The pantomime Cockney took the stage. Overture and beginners, please. The house lights dimmed and the performance began. I imagined a pub-style piano to accompany R.D.’s monologue.
‘Artists, whatever their abilities, for the most part, are unreliable, randy buggers. That’s what I remember from art school, anyway. And they are for the most part tit men. Particularly if they are drinkists. They pillage ideas from the world. They seduce unfortunate souls into becoming matter with which to mould their corrupt talent on to a canvas, into a play or a book, or into a song, Show me a great artist and I will show you a conveyor-belt of deceit, seduction and debauchery in the quest of the so-called perfect artistic item. Artists are mean, perverse and wretched examples of humanity and yet, as one gazes in awe-struck humility at the Sistine Chapel, it is easy to forget the self-righteous hypocrisy and religious deception which commissioned it and enabled the artist to turn his poor unsuspecting muse into a work of, for and in the name of almighty God.
And I understand that Bach heave-hoed his missus with such regularity that an abundance of little Bachs were unleashed upon an unsuspecting planet that was already ‘fugued out’ by Johann’s over-active left hand. Ah, but what bass notes …
So, there was I, Raymond Douglas, the seventh child of a seventh child discovering that art for art’s sake was not up my street. Film, my next love to sport, was rapidly taking over as a genuine creative option, but access to film study was somewhat restricted at Hornsey. Then there was music. Song-writing not only gave me an emotional outlet but might even be a means of earning a living. There was just one thing missing: how did a wretched art student living off a Middlesex grant in a suburb of north London find himself a fucking muse? I adored soccer, music and art. But somehow they all got confused. If my creativity had to rely on a winged messenger carrying divine inspiration to me across the mighty universe to my house in north London, he would have found my loyalties so muddled up that he would have probably had me playing outside-right for Manchester United carrying a sketch pad and a set of oil paints.
The main problem was that I was not content to create just for myself. I had to do it for somebody. An audience. A Julie Finkle. I could draw my family and friends and turn them into characters that were not their own. Change their names and put different clothes on them. This was easy. But what and where and how would these people figure in music? Songs until now had been an outlet for my own confused sexuality and confinement in the society in which I lived. These songs were a hobby, a way of passing the time, and yet the songs appeared as if they were a lightning-rod from the Gods, yes, Gods, the entities that floated around in the universe, gave life to animals and created the planet Earth. Sent the spark of humanity down the slopes of Mount Sinai to Moses and gave him the Ten Commandments. The God who made thunder and earthquakes, and made mortals cringe in fear. The Gods that would take as well as give, being merciless as well as kind. I, who at first was born a king, then became a humble working man, had seen through the inconsequential role-playing of the world and the unfortunate misplacement of my existence, this light of hope, and it shone beyond my earthly presence. This wonderful, merciful light was lifting, albeit momentarily, the dark cloud which constantly surrounded me. It had, in an instant, transformed me. I had tried to paint after Michelangelo, Modigliani, John Bratby and Cézanne, but now I was writing a song, and it was from my own experience, my own enlightenment. It was a bad, bad ballad, but it was totally my invention. It was fucking brilliantly bad and all my own work. I had found my muse. Inside. And now all I had to do was to create a monster for myself. I, who was born a king, was not cut out to be a tea-boy or messenger. I laughed when my mother showed me an advertisement for a sign-writer in the Evening Standard. From now on, I would be writing my own signs. That night, I saw the stars for the first time and wrote poems and lyrics until the cold morning air made my lips freeze.
The gods had pulled away a veil and exposed their universe, and my stationary body moved through the galaxy faster than Yuri Gagarin.’
The imaginary honky-tonk piano accompaniment ended suddenly with a gigantic Wagnerian chord. Raymond Douglas stopped talking and moved over to the control panel by the studio console. He hit a switch and the television came on to one of the monitors that were set in the wall. He flicked from channel to channel like a child playing a video game.
‘When did you first realize that you were not born to be a king?’
There was a momentary pause. Then R.D. smiled and turned the video on as he spoke.
‘I finally realized I was not a king the night my dad came home and said that he was out of a job. This happened while I was at art college, and it had a profound effect on me. I had gone to get my grant, and for some reason I had to go to the local labour exchange for some papers. As I left the dole office I saw my father walking away from the building. He had probably been there to collect his unemployment money. I never told him that I had seen him there. Never talked about the incident.’
R.D. started singing in a quiet but deliberate tone, ‘Get back, get back, get right back in the line … Do you know that song? Obviously not. I suppose memory can distort things after a while. My dad, for example. I have no real specific memories of him, I just have visions of him enjoying himself at parties, getting drunk, doing a soft-shoe shuffle or jumping around like a crazy chicken, like a black man. Although I do remember him in a hospital bed once, nobody told me what was really wrong with him. I think he must have had what was in those days called a coronary. He recovered, and led a normal, active life as far as I know. Another memory is of seeing him on his allotment. He was tending his garden, which he rented from the council. We had a long garden at home, Dad had a greenhouse there, and it was always full of tomatoes and flowers, but he needed this allotment, because it was away from the house, I suppose. He talked to me a lot there, confided in me. I think he was a crazy old guy, but in a charming way. He confided in his flowers. All these things are like clear, clean, technicolour images. But going back. It was the image of seeing him leave the social-security office that really stayed in my mind. You must know “Get Back in the Line”. Well, it was inspired by my dad.’
‘Did you ever think that you should have had more training for what you’re doing?’
‘Oh, do leave it out, my dear boy. Shit, no! What do you think I am? If I’d gone to college to learn music and finish my education I would have just been another expert. What I did, what I do, is unique to me. I don’t need no fucking training. Sod that. I did try learning the piano again, learning about music, when I was in my late twenties. I went to this piano teacher in North Finchley. She taught me wonderful things about music I had never even considered, but I found that the more I learned, the less of my instinctive self was in my music. It was other people’s invention, what other people had written, other rules.
‘Anyway, looking back like this is really irritating. It’s difficult to recall every incident in my life in chronological order. The best way to work myself out, is in those flashes and memories that come up during the songs, like a collision between the past and the future. Anyway, I can’t sit down and write songs. I could never tell you how to write a song, I just don’t know where it comes from. It comes from a combination of wanting, fear, hope, feelings – nothing particular. I don’t know. Who gives a shit, anyway? I’m getting tired. I want to get out of this. Have you heard enough yet? I want to go.’
‘Where are you going to go?’ I asked.
Raymond Douglas looked taken aback for a moment, then put on a false grin as he answered:
‘Wherever I bloody well want. I want to go to a party. No. Do you know where I’d like to go? Back to the art school dance. Pull a nice tart, get pissed and go for a bunk-up. Now, those were the days. I remember sitting on the bus travelling down from Muswell Hill to Hornsey Art College with some other students, who were all talking about the Cuban missile crisis. There was a rumour that the call-up was coming back and we would all be enlisted in the army. That didn’t appeal to me much, particularly as I was about to start looking for my first set of gigs.
The dance at Hornsey Art College always had a good band headlining. That year it was going to be the Alexis Korner Blues Band which at the time was setting the standard for would-be R and B bands. I was one of the first to arrive so that I could approach them for work, but Alexis didn’t turn up until the last half of the second set. Even without him the band sounded great. Graham Bond was superb and a pre-Rolling Stone, Charlie Watts, was on good form. When Alexis made his star’s entrance, wearing a cool leather jacket, tight corduroy trousers and cowboy boots, the band seemed to take on a new life. He was the definitive bandleader in the same way Duke Ellington and Count Basie were.
After the gig, I plucked up my courage and went to speak to the man himself while he was packing away his guitar. I explained that I was a guitar player who wanted to get a gig in a blues band, and Alexis nodded and listened and after a while gave me a number to ring the following week. When I called the number, Alexis answered and told me to go to meet a man called Giorgio who ran a club near Piccadilly called the Scene Club. I was astounded to discover that Giorgio was expecting me; he took me to a quiet corner of the club to talk to me. His voice was low and although he spoke in a whisper, I could hear every word he said; he must have acquired the technique from spending most of his life in nightclubs. I couldn’t work out whether Giorgio Gomelski spoke as if he was German, Russian, Greek or French; his accent sounded like he had lived in a lot of different places. He told me to bring my guitar down the following Friday so that I could sit in on an audition with the Dave Hunt Band. He was looking for a young guitar player and if I was any good at all I could land myself a regular gig. The following Friday I arrived with my guitar and my hair combed à la Tal Farlow. Nobody told me what to play so I just followed the tenor player’s riffs. I managed to finish without making too many fluffs and Dave Hunt offered me the gig.
During the interval Hunt offered to take me to the pub. I may have been naïve, but I was not so green as to refuse a drink when the bandleader paid, but there was a support act playing with us called the Rolling Stones and I wanted to stay. When I told Dave Hunt that I wanted to wait and see the Stones’ set, he looked at me and said the Stones were nothing more than a glorified skiffle group. It may have been skiffle to Dave Hunt, but there was energy coming from the stage and they had the audience jumping around.
As the Stones started playing ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ Hunt led me to a pub at the corner of Archer Street where all the out-of-work jazzers picked up any gigs that were going. The pub stank of another age, another music, but my thoughts strayed back across the street where the Rolling Stones were playing to an audience that was turned on to the excitement of the rhythm, rather than standing back with the aloof cool jazz audiences. I found myself playing three nights a week with Dave Hunt’s Band, which was a combination of mainstream jazz and big-band-style blues players. The musicians were older and I learned a great deal from them. Dave Hunt himself was a trombone player and took the occasional vocal lead on songs like ‘The Night Time is the Right Time’. The real lead singer and star attraction was a West Indian guy called Hamilton King. Hamilton was an accomplished harmonica player, and when he sang he turned a quite ordinary bunch of musicians into a group of wild voodoo men. He had large, bloodshot eyes that reminded me of a Mau Mau witch-doctor. The saxophone player was Lol Coxhil. Lol was the coolest looking of all the band. His slightly balding hair was tightly cropped and he wore an immaculate dark Italian-cut suit, which I suspected was actually hand-made. Lol could dovetail his riffs into whatever I was playing, and he made me sound better than I really was.
The Dave Hunt–Hamilton King Band was good, but it was obvious that its music was too purist to go any further than the club gigs we already had. When we had a night off we hung around the pubs in Soho to see if there were any other gigs going.
One night Charlie Watts said he was considering leaving Alexis Korner’s band to join the Rolling Stones. I told him I thought they were really an exciting group, but Charlie had reservations because he was more into jazz and blues and it was obvious that the Stones wanted to make pop records and become as well known as the Beatles. Dave Hunt had described the Stones as a skiffle group simply because they just had a rhythm section with no conventional lead instrument, like a sax or trombone. To me, they sounded just like my favourite Chuck Berry records – the way a modern R and B group should sound. With the exception of Lol, the players in Dave’s band were playing R and B because it was the current fad and they could get work from it. I felt that the Stones were actually turning the Chuck Berry–Muddy Waters standards they were playing into their own music.
The deal I had with Giorgio included 2s. 6d. for my tube fare, and in order not to squander my meagre earnings I got a lift to Soho from Rosie and Arthur before Arthur went on the night shift. Then I would walk back to Highgate at three in the morning when the gig was over. Next morning, I would crawl out of bed just having had enough rest before going to art school. Rosie, my surrogate mother at the time, was appalled by some of the dives I entered once I was deposited on the pavement, but she knew I was happy to be playing, and possibly she was secretly relieved to have me out of her hair for a few hours.
One of the gigs on the weekday run was in a subterranean pit in Gerrard Street, that in days to come would be turned into a pinball arcade. At the time there was a low-life bar-cum-coffee shop upstairs, where local pimps sat and discussed trade. Downstairs, where we played, was the club, a dark pit of a place that hardly ever got more than thirty people in it at a time. The stage, such as it was, was a little raised platform in the corner of the room, and it was so small that the whole band couldn’t fit on it. On these occasions we became known as the Hamilton King Band. Our music become more ska and had a more ethnic blues and Caribbean flavour to it.
Our second set was at eleven-thirty, and was usually attended by some of the pimps, who entertained business associates with their working women. Sometimes the women came in alone, to put their ‘feet up’. One particular lady named Miriam often came and sat with me when I was on a break. She listened to me talk about my trivial suburban normality as well as my dreams and ambitions. I could explain my problems to her, knowing that there was no way that she would ever tell anybody about them.
One night she came in alone and asked me to dance with her. We danced to a slow record called ‘Honky Tonk’ by Bill Doggett, or maybe it was something by Jimmy Reed. She held me tight and danced with her eyes closed. There were just two or three blue and red lights in the basement. When we danced towards these lights I could see that Miriam’s mascara had run, as if she had been crying. She had always seemed so grown-up and matter-of-fact about the world. I had always felt that she was in control and nothing could affect her. That night I saw how sad she must have been all that time. She took me over to a part of the room that was dark and empty. The band were on a break and so everybody was upstairs. For a while, the whole place seemed to be ours. She whispered something to me about me always playing for her, and how when I spoke to her it reminded her of the dreams she had once had, and that now she would do something for me. Then I felt her hands against my skin as she slid them under my shirt to feel my backside. She kissed me on the side of the face with such gentleness and assurance that somehow I could not resist, because I could feel nothing forced in what she was doing. Clumsily I tried to explain that I only had 2s. 6d. on me. I expected her to push me away, to shout at me for being so cheap, but instead she just grabbed me harder and kissed me on the mouth. Any tenseness in my body soon dissolved away. She was indeed a total professional. Her whole body felt relaxed, the complete opposite to any other ladies I had encountered. As she left, she kissed me once more on the cheek and this time she felt like an auntie.
She kissed me goodbye, walked up the stairs and back onto the street. I watched her thin, muscular calves flex into tight balls as her toes squeezed against the tip of her high-heels. I walked to the bottom of the stairs and saw her fully lit by the neon above. She stopped to fix her make-up in a shop window, then lit a cigarette. For the first time I noticed her black, shoulder-length hair and her bright red overcoat. As she walked away and out of sight, her face changed and took on a hard edge to it. She soon disappeared into the crowded street.
The girls from my own world seemed shallow somehow, and never had the same attraction for me after the mysterious woman who called herself Miriam. The girls at art college were either too rich and spoiled, or poor, talented and waiting to get knocked up so that they could be looked after by some man for the rest of their lives. I started to get impatient with the prick-teasers, and disgusted by the inexperienced ravers. In a perverse way, the less I cared for them, the more they went out of the way to ask me out.
I became a challenge, but by this time I was becoming disenchanted with the art-school racket, and was fast losing interest in its pretentious airs and graces and self-satisfied opinions on colour, dimension and perspective. Art school had been taken over by the graphic arts and commerce. Perhaps I was foolish not to know that it had never been any other way. All the artists I truly admired had died poor, and now their pictures were owned by the rich and famous. And the fake socialism of student life was beginning to appal me. It was such a charade. While women like Miriam were lying on their backs or kneeling down in front of strangers to scrape a living, the students were smoking dope and drinking beer, quoting Karl Marx and complaining about the plight of the poor artist. My sketches became full of empty motorways with lost people walking around the perimeter. Human beings scrambled around unable to find a place to live in a concrete post-war world of high-rise dwellings and second-rate luxury, pretend silk and fake fur. There were no expressions on the faces of the people in my pictures because my people, the people that I cared about, were being given the arse-end of the universe. The war was over, but the system had remained the same. Art was supposed to hold a mirror up to the world. Now the government was telling the schools to show society a pretty picture of itself. Pop art was emerging. Bright colours and crazy angles. Pretty pretty and petty. In the bistros of Belgravia and Chelsea the bright young things were partying as if a dazzling upper-class new age was about to emerge. The working class was still in its place in the coal mines of Yorkshire, Wales and the north. The mill towns were still employing cloth-capped workers who lived in terraced back-to-backs next to these dark Satanic mills, and although there was still a certain amount of poverty, the artist L. S. Lowry was attaining a fashionable following for his colourful paintings of matchstick men in these northern working-class towns. The toffs and debutantes of Kensington and Knightsbridge were beginning to acknowledge that something was changing, and instead of suffering the same fate as their aristocratic forefathers in the French Revolution, they decided to join the fray. The wine flowed freely in the exclusive clubs, only this time the well-to-do were going with the flow.
At the Scene Club in Soho audiences were beginning to dwindle so much that during solos members of the Dave Hunt Band would take it in turns to go into the audience in order to applaud. One night as Lol and I sat on a break, the DJ in the club put on ‘Da-Doo-Ron-Ron’ by the Crystals. Lol and I sat against the wall staring at the empty club. As the record played at maximum volume, I watched Lol finger the notes of the song on his saxophone as if to play along. I was amazed to see that he was attempting to play every instrumental line on the record except the melody. He started playing a part of the song and then, once he had learned it, he seemed to immediately lose interest in it and move on to another phrase. It came to the sax solo on the record. That famous dry, fat solo that was being heard on every jukebox around the world. Instead of copying it note for note the way I would have done, Lol fitted his own subtle harmonics around it and turned it into an avant-garde jazz solo. It was purely instinctive. He didn’t even know he was doing it. During the next record, which was ‘Madness’ by Prince Buster, Lol leaned over and suggested that I form my own group and play simple music that young people could relate to. He said it in such a way that it had a hidden code in the words. The word ‘young’ made me think that he was happy just learning to master his own instrument, playing in clubs like the one we were in. I had wanted to form a group with Lol, to find an audience for what he wanted to play, but it seemed that Lol didn’t need it, Lol’s audience was in his head. I, on the other hand, needed a different experience, because I was coming into the music from another curve. I had been listening for the melody but this particular melody had not interested him enough to want to play it.
Lol missed a couple of gigs after that. Someone in the band said it was because Lol, who came from Aylesbury, had been delayed because of the Great Train Robbery (which had taken place there at about that time). Somebody else said that they had heard that he had gone to play in Denmark, which still had an audience for jazz. Somebody else said that he had thrown away his immaculate Italian suit from Austins of Piccadilly, grown his hair long and was last seen playing solo on the street outside Tottenham Court Road tube station dressed as a beatnik. Although it was most unlikely, I preferred to believe this. He was cool enough to carry that off.
For a while whenever I heard the sound of a busker playing the saxophone in the underground, I followed the sound, but I always came to a dead end. The source was always lost in an echo and I ended up walking in the wrong direction until the sound was gone. After a while, I stopped looking.’