Broken Music: A Memoir (12 page)

Keith has a practical nature. He is apprenticed to an engineering firm in Newcastle and attends night school. He also had the ambition and tenacity to get a good degree and eventually become a leading consultant engineer. Although my convoluted route to success will be far less structured, we must have recognized in each other similar traits, similar desires to escape the confined world of our parents. We walk the beaches together, talking and fantasizing, sometimes until the early hours of the morning. Keith is the first person to hear my early songwriting efforts, and although they are probably awful, he shows just enough interest to encourage me to carry on. (He did remind me recently that one of my earliest efforts concerned a flower in the desert. I had long forgotten this before I came to write a song called “Desert Rose,” which would sell over a million copies thirty-five years later. It still seems fantastic to me that something as private as a song can become public property, but maybe all
it takes is just one person to believe in what you are doing to give you the confidence to keep trying.)

While Keith is my Svengali it is Ken, the younger of the Brigham brothers, who will be my mentor. We learn old Freddie King numbers like “The Stumble” and “Hide Away” note for note, and play these tunes ad nauseam. Brother Pete plods away on the bass while Ken and I wheedle and deedle our way through the blues. We go to see Peter Green in Fleetwood Mac, Stan Webb in Chicken Shack, and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, feeding our fantasies that we too can become bluesmen. When we aren’t playing in the YM we are practicing up in Ken’s bedroom, which is in the attic of a Victorian terraced house near the seafront. One night Pete has a date and won’t be able to do the honors on bass, so I nobly volunteer to take up the support role while Ken wheedles and deedles.

The bass feels strange in your hands when you’ve been used to the smaller instrument with its narrow strings and short neck. The bass has a weight and a heft to it that feels like a weapon, yet there is a quiet beauty to it as well. This instrument is the root of all harmony, the bedrock at the bottom of the stave upon which music is constructed. When I accompanied Ken, I realized that whatever he played was harmonically defined by the notes on the bass. If he were to play the upper partials of a C chord on the guitar, it would only be a C chord if I played C in the bass. So I began to form in my mind what I can only describe as a strategy. A vague one, but nonetheless a strategy that the bass, while being far from flashy, would suit the covert side of my personality much better than the guitar. It would be a quieter heroism I would seek, stoic and grounded like my father’s. My ambitions would become concrete from the ground up, hidden yet effective. I would suppress my desire to shine spectacularly in favor of digging deep and marking time in what I somehow knew would become a long campaign.

* * *

    Did I really imagine that I would somehow become a successful musician? I wasn’t even in a working band, but I sauntered into my A level exams with as cavalier an attitude as I could muster. Academia seemed as much of a fantasy as music, and in my final and crucial year at grammar school, I do very little but mark time. Other than playing and listening to music, I would while away the late afternoons and evenings in the amusement arcades of the “Spanish City” in Whitley Bay. I was not alone in being blasé about my A levels. Two of my fellow cavaliers were Paul Elliott and Hughie McBride.

Paul is a damned good drummer with a great ear for harmony and, like Keith, is one of those people who somehow believe in me, or, at least, in my musical ability. He has an infectious enthusiasm and a lust for life but suffers from being unable to step out from the shadow of his successful and wealthy father. His critics would disregard him as a child of privilege, but he is my friend and I know how hard he has fought to keep the fire in his belly when much of life seems to have been handed to him on a plate. There are no easy childhoods, though, and Paul likes to get drunk as often as possible. I too am self-medicating with alcohol but I don’t have Paul’s constitutional tolerance. I will be retching yellow bile in the street behind the pub while my friend is getting in yet another round.

Hughie is the eldest son of a large Irish family, impossibly handsome, with the blue eyes and chiseled features of a film star. He is charmingly shortsighted, while also being a terrific center back on the football team and the school captain. He can also drink as much as Paul without the slightest change in his agreeable personality.

The day after the exams we are standing on the West Road out of Newcastle, spaced a few hundred yards apart with our thumbs out for a lift. Sleeping bags and a change of clothes are stuffed into our
haversacks. We have agreed to meet up in Stranraer, where we will take a ferry to Northern Ireland.

Three weeks later it is midnight and we are standing together in a bunker on a golf course in County Down. Behind us are our sleeping bags, where we will doss tonight. The Americans are about to land three of their astronauts on the moon, and we can barely stand up. I think “legless” is a suitable term to describe our state, although Hughie and I have managed to carry Paul from the pub to the golf course, and dropped him only once.

We have been hitching everywhere, sleeping on park benches, in farmers’ fields, a couple of uncomfortable nights on Dun Loaghaire Pier. The year before, we three had hitched to Polperro in Cornwall and spent the summer living in an open shelter on a cliff top. We were supposed to be on our way to the Isle of Wight to see Dylan, but somehow we got diverted and had a great time anyway.

We always hitch separately, being “pros” (no one’s going to pick up three guys), and we agree to meet up in the evening in whatever the next big town is. We head west toward Limerick and Kerry. One day a farmer picks me up outside of Tralee. He too is legless drunk and has a sow and a couple of her piglets in the backseat. He tells me that the only thing the English gave the Irish was the pox. I tell him that it takes two to tango as well as make a bargain, which he thinks funny.

Paul, Hughie, and I get as far as Dingle, in the southwest. Every night we get out of our minds on pale ale and Bushmills, and sleep wherever we can. We have successfully avoided being arrested for three weeks. We head back to the north to catch the ferry home at Larne, having scaled the mountains of Mourne, blind drunk.

Here we are roaring on a golf course under a full moon. I swear I can see some activity up there in the Sea of Tranquility A small step for them, a giant step for us.

* * *

    My A level results are waiting in a nondescript brown envelope when I get home from Ireland. I avoid opening it for a whole day. But eventually I succumb. The narrow white slip of paper tells me that I have three passes in English, geography, and economics, but the grades, apart from a quite reasonable mark in English, will not set the academic world alight, nor will they get me into university without at least two resits. I decline the option and set myself adrift.

Over the next six months I will drift in and out of half a dozen jobs. The first is as a bus conductor. I quit, and sign on the dole, and then I get work as a laborer on a building site. Winter is approaching, and we are laying hard-core foundations for a shopping center in Byker. It is hard work, cold and unfulfilling. On my first day my always well-meaning mother will come up trumps again. She had offered the night before to make me some sandwiches for my lunch, which she would wrap and seal in a Tupperware container for me to take to work next day. The first morning has gone pretty well. I know how to use a shovel and a pickax but I covet the dumper truck job. All the driver has to do is wait for us to fill up the waiting bucket while he warms his hands on the running engine, then he’s off, a master of the universe in a noisy blue cloud of petrol fumes, nonchalantly trying to attract the attention of the office girls across the road. I want his job, badly.

It is now lunch break, and there are about twenty of us on the gang stuffed into a wooden hut at the edge of the site. These are tough burly men crammed onto wooden settles. Everyone lights up and starts reading the
Mirror
, the
Sun
, and the
Sporting Life
while tucking into massive doorstep sandwiches and swilling down great mouthfuls with scalding tea and rude laughter. We are surrounded by a fog of cigarette smoke and the steam from a battered metal urn on the table. Being new, I take my place quietly in the corner. Famished, and with frozen fingers, I prize open the Tupperware container
and stare for a brief second with horror at its contents. My darling mum has made me a selection of delicate cucumber sandwiches cut into finger-size fours that would not be out of place at a vicar’s garden party, but exhibiting them here, in this Dante’s Inferno of a builder’s shed, would be tantamount to wearing a pink tutu and pearl earrings. I shut the plastic lid quickly before anyone can see the source of my embarrassment, but maybe too quickly.

“Wozza marra?”

“Not hungry,” I reply, none too convincingly.

I will pack my own lunch from now on.

Weeks pass and I find myself digging a trench in the clay with a lad my age. It’s cold and miserable and my back is sore and the skin on my hands is cracked and broken. When the gaffer’s back is turned we talk and somehow we get onto the subject of education. He’s a secondary mod kid, left at fifteen, and when he hasn’t been on the building sites he’s been on the dole.

“My life’s a fuckin’ joke,” he says, glaring at the shovel and the splits in the palms of his hands. “How about you?”

I’m reluctant to tell him my life story, but as he’s been so candid with me I don’t feel like spinning a yarn.

“I went to a grammar school in town …seven years,” I add, I suppose, to make it sound like a prison term, which in a way it was. But he is having none of it.

“Then what the fuck are you doing here?” he says.

“What do you mean?” I bleat defensively. “Don’t you think I can do the work?”

“Oh no,” he says. “You can do the work all right, it’s just that you don’t fuckin’ need to. You can do better than this.”

I can’t disagree with him, but I carry on digging in the sodden thankless clay. A few days later I get to drive the dumper truck, but
the weather will take a turn for the worse after this, and a lot of us get laid off two days before Christmas. I can’t say that I’m sorry.

On Saturday nights I usually go to the dance at the Plaza on the seafront at Tynemouth, a huge white elephant of a dance hall above the beach. This is where my parents met for the first time some twenty years before. You might think this would put me off, but courtship is not really the first thing on my mind. I’ve really come to see the bands. Three local bands usually take the stage, playing an odd selection of psychedelic anthems, Motown classics, and long indulgent twelve-bar blues encompassing a normally appalling drum solo that only the drummer seems to get off on. I will eventually work up the courage to ask a couple of the pretty girls to dance, just for the sake of form. But it’s usually a waste of time. I ask, they grunt their approval, and then they ignore me for the duration of the song, staring at the ceiling, glaring at the ill-suppressed giggles of their friends, checking the location of their precious handbags, in fact looking anywhere but at me. I’m frustrated, they’re indifferent.

When all else fails there are always the plain girls. They are usually ignored in favor of their prettier sisters and are often happy to be asked. They are much more fun, having been forced to develop personalities, unlike the stuck-up virgins tottering around their handbags in the center of the floor.

That winter I become very friendly with a girl called Mavis who is actually gorgeous but has somehow developed a sense of humor and a sophisticated view of the world that doesn’t revolve around her makeup mirror. Mavis can also open a brown-ale bottle with her teeth. Of course I am smitten. We share some blissful weeks together and then she goes off to live with her sister in London. We exchange letters for a while but then I never hear from her again.

Deborah Anderson is my first real girlfriend. We met on a double
date with a friend of mine from the YM, John Madgin. I went off with her friend, who had a terrible cold and spent most of the night snuffling into her sodden handkerchief Apparently John didn’t have much luck either. We all meet up a week later in a pub and somehow it is Deborah who ends up in my arms, and John will walk home alone.

Deborah is a beautiful girl, tall and shy. She stoops a little, embarrassed because of her height, but she has a wide full mouth and a smile like a toothpaste model’s, skinny legs, and long dark hair. Despite our star-crossed beginning, she and I adore each other from the first moment and it is obvious to everyone who sees us together. We had explored our first intimacies like children making blood promises in the dark, attempting to secure the volatile cargoes of the future in the fumbling, silent exchanges of our lips and hands. These were the tacit contracts of sexual risk, the unspoken bonds of shared danger and novelty and longing. You possess this innocence but once, like a memory of Eden, and that it had come so late in my teenage years made it so much more poignant. My mother, hopeless romantic that she is, recognizes in Deborah and me the idealized picture of love that she had craved and been cheated of. She embraces Deborah like a daughter, and she too makes emotional down payments on a future that can never be. But walking back from Deborah’s house in those early days would eventually become a song, for being in love is to be relieved of gravity.

Deborah works as a secretary in the offices of a legal firm in Newcastle. She doesn’t seem to have many ambitions other than to get married and settle down. Although we’ve never actually discussed this, marriage is the standard subtext that would underlie all relationships between the sexes, for people of our age and class at that time. I will acquiesce in this, while a part of me knows it to be expedient. We will have one false pregnancy scare before I eventually
drift away from her for a headmaster’s daughter, and four years later, she will be dead and I will be haunted by her memory to this day.