Ain't Bad for a Pink (2 page)

In spite of bouts of illness caused by heart problems, my mother was fabulous – full of positivity, pulling her business together every time she came out of hospital. Sometimes, I would help by shampooing hair and I often created chaos in this feminine world. During my travels I caught a grass snake; I drank the milk from my flask and put it in, cycled home, handed the flask to my mother for rinsing and out it slithered in a flash of caught light. You can imagine her reaction!

I’ve always been a practical joker; it’s a good safety valve and became part of my entertainer’s resources. I developed a few of these survival techniques negotiating the precisely defined territories of Crewe. You had to run like hell when you saw the Black Backs Gang – their coarse kneelength trousers exposing red-raw fighting knees. If you were cornered the best technique was to create a spectacular and noisy diversion; I’ve spent my life fighting The Black Backs Gang in one guise or another.

People ask about my musical genes: my mother was a reasonable pianist but I can’t find any other musical aptitude in previous generations. From my infancy I was encouraged to enter talent contests in Rhyl, winning prizes for my singing. My mother had a freer, more liberal attitude than my father had; for her it was about achieving what you wanted to do – even being a musician! She didn’t actively oppose my father – they were totally in love – but her influence at a more subtle level modified the tension between father and son, and she was always fully behind my ambitions.

But in spite of the many good times, my mother’s illness gnawed at my childhood years. She was in and out of hospital for more than a decade but I can recall no one specific occasion. All visits were one generic visit: or, rather, a feeling, an overwhelming feeling, of the impossibility of communication, such was the dominating force of the hospital and the emotional power of unspoken thoughts. Out of hospital my mother was unstoppable – demanding that I push her up the bank at Queen’s Park. Quite a challenge for a child.

Albina Betsy Boswell Billington, my mother, was the first woman in the UK to have open heart surgery. She had two problems which had to be dealt with sequentially. Stenosis is the narrowing of the artery so this had to be opened up in order to fix a breech in the mitral valve. This was when I was about eleven. The first operation was not successful; the periods in hospital got longer until she was permanently there. The journeys – an hour each way – to the hospital in Wythenshaw were horrendous and made worse by other events. My father had knocked a child over and although it was not his fault, he never got over it and wouldn’t drive a car. So we went by scooter. In addition to this my eldest brother Ralph had been seriously injured in a motorcycle accident and was simultaneously in hospital in Oswestry. The memory of the danger and glacial misery of those winter visits: my father’s worry about his wife and son, my lack of clothing and the ill-fitting crash helmet I borrowed, the icy conditions when we would repeatedly fall off, still makes me cry. One night it was so cold I couldn’t hold the coins when we stopped at a petrol station for fuel we couldn’t afford.

My mother died when I was fifteen. She died on the operating table during her second heart operation. I was in bed; Ralph told me. Although we had lived with the possibility of her death for so long, that was and still is the worst, emptiest, moment in my life. Your mind can’t accept the finality of death. My father had such an unreserved faith in medicine that his optimism must have given me hope. Besides: she had survived other operations and this one might have changed things for the better.

When I saw my mother at the mortuary I didn’t want to touch her. I knew her organs had been removed – even her eyes would have gone to research – and the mortician had created false colour in her face and an unnatural smile. I was offended because she looked too happy and because it was a con. My mother was an eyeless, hollow carcass. How could she smile?

I became a recluse, playing guitar in my bedroom so the empty feeling wouldn’t kick in. I’d played a guitar since the age of eight; it was like meditation. People – relatives – came and offered help. We hadn’t seen them in ages then they sat there smoking in that way people do when they don’t know what to do or say. I have no visual memories of the funeral; I was very emotionally disturbed and that was the time I stopped singing hymns. If you’re not religious the service holds no meaning for you and no comfort. My mother wasn’t a poor sinner needing forgiveness; she hadn’t slipped away into the next room; we wouldn’t meet again in any bright land.

She had gone.

They told me off after the funeral for going to my bedroom to play guitar but I carried on. Mum used to love it. The blues became my bereavement counsellor – I needed one. I was fifteen years old, falling out with my father – we were both on short fuses, neither of us mentioning my mother or her death – and in trouble at school for not singing hymns and wearing odd socks. Oh – and a few other things like being disruptive and not doing enough work. The elitist grammar school I attended had no interest in my emotional state. I wasn’t being eccentric or difficult; we weren’t too poor to own socks but no-one considered sock pairing in our mourning household. I told my teachers that if I ever met God I’d headbutt him and then ask the questions – their hymns had no comfort for me and neither had they. I sank my fury into playing music I could most identify with as my only means of expression.

So, I would sit in my bedroom: eleven and a half stone, muscular, needing to shave, my mousey hair growing longer than school allowed, wearing blue jeans, a loose sweater and Cuban heeled shoes, playing an almost unplayable twelve string. The action was very hard. Linda bought it because I thought it was a Martin and therefore a bargain. Wrong. I’d never seen one, of course, or any other quality guitar and there had been no musical advice forthcoming from the blonde salesgirl from Bossons and Doig either. They sold tellies and all sorts of stuff as well as instruments.

Or I would plug in a budget priced Broadway into a Watkins Dominator: early Sixties blue and cream, with flecks in the blue and gold bars. There was a V front with angled speakers for a better spread of sound. Classic, rare and collectible these days. Or I would haul my gear onto the handlebars of my bike and cycle to Wrinehill to rehearse my band. Or I would thump any kid who spoke badly about his mother. That was how I survived.

The blonde bombshell who sold me the twelve string eventually specialised in music: she went to sell records in Breeden and Middleton: from Hightown to High Street.

Believing that we would all be reunited, Mum didn’t want us to be unhappy about her death or for there to be a sad place for us to visit. She left generous, uplifting letters full of love and containing no self pity – to be opened posthumously – and she wanted her ashes thrown to the winds.

Darling,

Goodbye dear don’t worry I shall be waiting for you and I want you to know that this 25 yrs have been the happiest in my life.

What happens today is what has got to be, but I have plenty to look after me until you come.

Dearest heart I am with you wherever you go and whatever you do so you are not alone. We have good children Norman and give them my love won’t you, tell them not to worry after all it was my own choice.

The only regret is that I cannot spend a few more happy happy years with you. But dearest carry on, put the carpet down and so on it will help to keep us together and me happy.

In a few years maybe you will be able to find someone else to keep you company during the latter years.

Well dearest Goodbye for now, but if it is predicted that I am not to come back to you I will say Goodbye till I see you again. I have always loved you. I shall go on loving you they say until Eternity but it will be beyond that. Our happy married life has been so wonderful. Sweetheart Goodbye.

Your Loving and Devoted Wife

xxxxxx

PS.
Ralph x
Roger x
Peter x.

There were only two preoccupations in my early years: my mother’s illness and playing the guitar. When she died, the music occupied the centre. I was fortunate enough to have had the redemptive power of music in my life for a long time. The blues resonated with my emotions in a positive way and the song that best expressed my sense of loss was Sleepy John Estes’ “I’d Been Well Warned”: a song about losing your best friend – in his case, his eyesight.

A musician is more likely to remember his first guitar than his first lover. When I was eight I bought a handmade guitar from a friend of my brother for a pound. It lasted twelve months: long enough for me to learn all the major chords from a book. Then, as if overstimulated from the intensive learning, it split asunder!

Six months later I persuaded my two brothers to buy me a guitar for Christmas. This was a Spanish guitar which I played at my first gig: a concert at Edleston Road School when I was nine, in front of my class. I played “I Believe” – Frankie Laine’s hit – noting that it went down very well with the girls. I always had an ear for a big song and you can’t imagine a mid-twentieth century western without his voice on the soundtrack. Interestingly, Tex Ritter sang the soundtrack song for High Noon but Frankie’s version was the bigger hit.

Aged twelve I bought an electric guitar from someone from Willaston who played in The Four Falcons. I remember the name because I just couldn’t get rid of it off the case. I started my own band – can’t remember the name – with school friends who all lived at Wrinehill, rehearsing in Bridget’s Barn on a smallholding there. By now my band had developed a style of music derived from Chuck Berry, doing blues and slide in a rocky style at the school garden party, Betley Village Hall and Wistaston Memorial Hall. And the girls would jive and when they twirled round you could see stocking tops if your eyes caught the moment.

About this time, on my paper round, I was immobilised by the sound of loud, unfamiliar music coming from one of the suburban houses. It caught me in the solar plexus and in the balls; it took me out of my time and out of my place. This wasn’t anything from the
Top Twenty
; it was a raw, uncompromising sound from the edge of the world.

Leadbelly.

From that Damascene moment when I heard the powerful voice and the twelve string guitar on “Black Girl”, the course of my life was fixed. I became a blues musician and Huddie accompanied me through the early turbulent times.

By this age I had been listening to music by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Josh White and Leadbelly available – bizarrely – in a series for sale at Woolworth’s for pocket money. But this was blues music directed at a white audience; it hadn’t prepared me for the heart-stopping sounds coming from that British window. None of my peers knew this music although the currently popular Lonnie Donegan did sing Leadbelly numbers. As far as authentic blues music was concerned there was virtually a desert. Fortunately for me it turned out that Bert Bellamy, whose window it was, had hundreds of blues records, many bought from Pete Russell’s record shop. The address is burnt into my brain: 24 Market Avenue, Plymouth. I began to buy all my records from this shop; I still play this rare and precious collection.

Like many people from Crewe, Bert, originally from Liverpool, worked on the railway, where he had a clerical job. He looked like a white black man and favoured the early blues music that I so admired and like his friend Fred Watts, he was interested in big band jazz as well. I would go to Bert’s house regularly on Tuesday and Thursday evenings to listen to blues records and get information. It became a social event when my girlfriend Linda came – though she was more into jazz – and Bert’s wife joined us. A nourishing time and occasionally, blues musicians stopped at Bert’s house.

Bert Bellamy and Fred Watts
–
also the owner of a fine record collection – both wrote articles about music: Fred for a small magazine attached to a jazz shop in London and Bert for
Blues Unlimited,
a magazine reputed to be “the daddy of all blues magazines
”
(4)
founded in 1963 and edited by Mike Leadbitter, an authority on post-war blues. Leadbitter also edited a collection of the magazine’s articles in a book:
Nothing but the Blues
published in 1971. They knew everyone in the business and took me to gigs in Manchester at the Guild Hall, Club 43, and the Free Trade Hall where they had backstage passes. Through this connection, I was not only able to hear live blues – I could actually meet the American bluesmen who were enjoying fame because of the currently awakened interest in their music. Big stars like Jimmy Witherspoon: a great big black man who smoked dope and drank with Bert, with whom he stayed. Everything about him was big – what an amazing, booming jazz voice he had! A big, big voice. We saw him in Club 43 in 1962/63 and I had the privilege of cooking him a full English. Fred Watts also got to know Jimmy Witherspoon very well.

My musical awakening began during World War II in my childhood home in Goostrey, Cheshire. This was the age of radio and we relied on it for news of the war. It was always on and I could hear it in bed. But one particular night I found myself halfway down the stairs listening intently to what turned out to be a Jelly Roll Morton number: “The Naked Dance”. Although from a respectable Creole family whose business was timber, Jelly Roll Morton played music in brothels and the reference is to the way the whores danced for their clients. This was heady stuff for a twelve year old and after that I listened to every jazz programme on the radio and started collecting records.

Jazz led me to country music: Jimmie Rodgers was a particular favourite and country music led to blues, especially Leadbelly, together with Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Josh White was a softer-voiced singer who used to guide blind performers about. That’s how he learnt guitar.