Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (12 page)

With dragging bodies and unseeing eyes we made our way to Deptford Park. Southwark Park was nearer, but that would be the first place the hounds would make for. We slumped on to a bench. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. We were still there at five p.m.

Eventually I decided I would go to a phone box and call home. As I listened to the ring tone I wanted to faint. When my mother answered, I could barely summon up the strength to push in the coin and connect.

‘Hello, Mum. It’s me.’

Nothing.

‘I said it’s me. What should I do?’

‘Well,’ she spat with barely suppressed fury, ‘you should get back here. Now. Your father wants to see you. Now.’

‘What about Lulu?’

‘Tell her she can get indoors too. But I haven’t said anything to Rose. I daresn’t!’ Mum always said ‘daresn’t’ rather than daren’t. ‘I daresn’t! If I did, Ronnie would have your guts for garters, and I think y’father’s gonna be doing that in any case. Now – home!’

Leaving the phone box, I told Lulu the good/bad news. She seemed relieved. ‘So I’m all right? Brilliant. Tell you what, I’m never doing anything like that ever again.’

So. More good news.

When we arrived back at the flats Lulu skipped off home a few doors down to have her tea – ‘I’m really starving now,’ she’d said on the way home – while I bent to the letterbox, to nervously call the dog to let me in.
²

I tried to keep my calls to Blackie to a low rasp so as not to trigger the apocalypse immediately. My plan was to creep in, leg it up to my room and, in the few moments that remained to me, put my affairs in order. This I managed, but within a couple of minutes Mum called up the stairs, her voice still in the flinty tones that had barbed her timbre since the morning’s exposure.

‘Danny? Is that you up there? Right, y’father’s coming up. He wants a word with you.’

Well, this was it. Clump, clump clump . . . he seemed to be taking each step up to my room like a thud upon a Roman Legion’s war drum. Until there he stood. I braced myself. My old man had NEVER hit me, but if he did now I thought, y’know, fair enough.

‘Your mother,’ he began at furniture-rattling volume, ‘your mother, has been downstairs – crying all day long – because she fucking tells me . . .’ and into it he went, describing what she’d seen while adding that I’d reduced my own nan’s house to the status of ‘a fucking knocking shop’. But amid all the sound and fury and the raising of the back of his hand as if to strike . . . something was wrong, something was a bit off. After about thirty seconds of the tirade, and expecting the blow to fall any second, I suddenly figured out what it was. I had seen the old man livid many, many times, but this time . . . well, his heart really didn’t seem in it. The expression in his eyes seemed to say,
I’m going through the motions here, boy. This is all for your mother’s benefit.

Sure enough, midway through a rant about how I was only fucking fourteen and who did I think I fucking was, Jimi Hendrix?, he paused and made a move with his hands like a boxing referee does when pronouncing a fight to be over. He then shrugged and on his face appeared an expression of ‘What can you do?’

I was confused. He went on a bit longer with the Sturm und Drang, but then broke cover completely. Quickly, and in a conspiratorial tone, he leaned toward me and growled, ‘Take no notice, son. She’s the one. She can’t fathom it out. I was the same at your age.’ Then he put his hand on my shoulder as if to say, ‘Having it off, eh? That’s my boy!’

There was about two more minutes of the faux thunder even after this and then he turned to leave. ‘And you can go to bed fucking hungry tonight!’ came the explosive finish. ‘Fuck your tea! And fuck you going out for the rest of half-term!’ But before he went he smiled, winked, and hissed in a stage whisper, ‘Just make sure her Ronnie don’t find out.’ And exit. The performance was over. I sat on my bed, completely relieved but totally stunned.

Twenty minutes later, my mum, feeling justice had been properly done but nonetheless now a bit sorry for me, frostily brought up sausages, mash and beans, plus a cup of tea with three biscuits on the side. The next day I went out at ten o’clock as usual. And nothing was ever said about the affair again.

Meantime, should my elder sister have arrived home even ten minutes later than her ten o’clock curfew that night – particularly from a rendezvous with Poor Sod White Plimsolls (as the Navajo might call him) – the pyrotechnics would have been all too real and the ramifications lasting.

Boys, eh?

What Are You Gonna Do?

I
left school in March 1973. The only reason I know this is because I remember taking my copy of Blue Oyster Cult’s
Tyranny and Mutation
– released in late February ’73 – into class 5AE and refusing to lend it to anyone because I wasn’t coming back after the upcoming break. This classic album release date system is, I realize, how I measure most events in my life up until 1982 when, on turning twenty-five, something terrible seemed to happen to music.

I do know the teachers at West Greenwich urged me to stay on a little longer to take my CSE exams – the final hurdle before actual O levels – but recklessly I decided that I didn’t want to do any of the jobs that required I first provide a low-grade generic certificate. The thinking from the school was that, if I hung it out a few months, as the boy traditionally first in year, I could almost guarantee getting a junior job in the local Nat West bank or possibly at the town hall in some lowly capacity. The option of further education was never presented to me and, to be fair, the very idea would’ve given me the creeps. I wanted some non-academic hip(py) action to dive straight into, though Lord knows how that was going to happen. What I do recall is the terrific rush I felt on suddenly deciding to abandon everything early, just to see what would result.

Outrageously, a few days before I was to leave school and dwell in the void, the first in a long line of dream jobs fell into my lap. It was a twist of fate I was going to become strangely used to.

My best friend Tommy Hodges worked at London’s number one coolest record shop for those in the know on the contemporary music scene: One Stop, 97–99 Dean Street, Soho. Then out of the blue, Tom, one year older than me, had accepted a new job in the prop and scenic department at the Old Vic, something he hadn’t told me about when I made my decision to leave. He was going on to another pretty sweet gig, to be sure, though at the time I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to depart the dimly lit, incense-burning, cutting-edge cultural cauldron of One Stop.‘You should have my job,’ he said.

Oh, I should, I should . . .

I could think of no greater work – work! – than getting the number 1 bus up to Soho each day and playing, talking and dealing in records. Rock music was all-absorbing for me throughout the seventies and it embodied who I felt I really was. To a large extent it still does, given that it was such an extraordinary time in musical terms. Even from this distance, it seems staggering to me that the period between Woodstock and the Sex Pistols was a mere seven years. During that time I experienced the birth – not the warping or co-opting of but the
birth
of heavy rock, prog rock, glam rock, country rock, soft rock, Kraut rock, punk rock, dub, funk music, disco music, blue-eyed soul, the second wave of reggae led by Bob Marley, and the resurgence of Motown. All genres that were seemingly pulled from the air. This dizzying fulcrum then was the early to mid-seventies – a period you still hear lazy dolts say punk rescued music from.

Well, thank you, punk, but we were doing just fine. Over there you had James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Randy Newman, The Band, Judee Sill, Zappa and Beefheart, Neil Young, Alice Cooper, Tom Waits and Steely Dan. Over here you had David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Nick Drake, Roxy Music, Black Sabbath, Lennon AND McCartney, Hawkwind, Alex Harvey, Yes, Traffic, John Martyn and King Crimson. And outside of everything there was Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk. In all, there were hundreds upon hundreds of curious young people all creating something exciting, new and important – and all of them completely off the radar of mainstream society. Eighty-five per cent of people you spoke to had never heard of most of the records in your huge, disparate collection boasting exotic, evocative labels like Vertigo, Harvest, Island, Asylum, Deram and Transatlantic. The really happening stuff, which all seems so obvious today, was so rarely on TV as to be invisible, never ever in the daily newspapers and not even in the same universe as advertisers. Also, good luck with buying so much as a T-shirt with your favourite artist’s name on, even if they had a number one album. It was covert, underground, a counterculture – and one that was happening, growing and moving fast. One Stop was one of its key focus points and I was now a heartbeat away from being part of that. And I was fifteen! Yikes.

It’s worth remembering too that these were the days before chain record outlets and mega-stores. Most suburban record shops did not stock the records that One Stop did. Our stock-in-trade was the imported disc, flown in from America weekly, way ahead of the UK release date. It’s hard to believe now, but even albums like Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
and Stevie Wonder’s
Talking Book
were available in America weeks, sometimes months, before officially going on sale here. There were very, very few places in the British Isles where you might get an early copy, but One Stop Records was one such super groovy outlet. The only other comparable store for serious heads was Musicland, which was just around the corner in Berwick Street. It was there that Elton John had worked until a few years previously, scrounging time off to nip out and earn a little cash in hand by recording thin cover versions of current pop hits for the cut-price Top Pops label. During Elton’s time there, Musicland had been managed by two ultra savvy and hip gay guys, Ian Brown and John Gillespie. This same duo now ran One Stop in Dean Street. They were to become my absolute mentors and idols for the next few years.

Actually there
was
one other record shop nearby. To get to it you had to know it was actually there. It was across the road on London’s trashy retail mess of Oxford Street and access to it was via Shelley’s shoe shop, then through a curtain at the back and up some dimly lit stairs. Once on the first floor it was a tiny, fairly ramshackle space with threadbare carpet and covers of deeply underground LPs pinned to the walls as well as the one thing its rivals couldn’t sell: illicit bootleg recordings of groups like Crosby, Stills and Nash (
Wooden Nickel
) Led Zeppelin (
Blueberry Hill
) and Deep Purple (
H-Bomb
). Hirsute old heads sat about under humungous headphones and the air was thick with cigarette smoke of dubious legality. This then was the newly opened Virgin Records; the scruffy runt of the early seventies Hip Vinyl Retail Triangle. Years later Richard Branson purchased the entire block of Oxford Street that his original crusty old emporium had traded from and pointedly opened the gleaming three-storey bootleg-free Virgin flagship on the site. Hey, capitalism works sometimes, kids. I have subsequently talked with Richard about his humble starter shack and its booming black market stock and he remains adamant that Virgin never would have sold bootlegs, no sir, no way. Oh, but it did, Richard, it did. Good ones too.

For my interview at One Stop I wore clothes bought from Miss Selfridge that perfectly suited a kid in the thrall of the then unfolding glam rock boom. All pink satin, sheer nylon and powder blue Oxford bags. I never quite pulled it off, I fancy. To commit totally, you needed to step over the gender line into actual make-up or at least a little nail varnish. I think I might have gone in that direction but for two things: one, my father, no matter from which angle I viewed him, was not Bryan Ferry; and two, I wanted to continue to live.

That said, the old wars over my brother’s Donovan hat were long over and my stack heels and bracelets breezed through the front door at Debnams Road as easily as a pinstripe suit. I may have even got a few laughs from my parents, which was fair enough, this gear was supposed to be preposterous fun.

During the very light grilling to secure the job, I told Ian that I liked Todd Rundgren and John Martyn – two suitably obscure artists at the time whom he seemed unimpressed by – and that I also loved what Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye were doing over at reborn Motown. This really got his attention. Of course it didn’t hurt that I was a pretty-looking thing at the time and that, webbed up with a fairly heavy cockney accent and Miss Selfridge attire, might have made him think I’d be a good ornament to flourish in front of his own crowd who swung by the shop often to stock up on the kind of funky 45s that later exploded into the disco scene. (One Stop was VERY big on US black music.) Whatever it was, I got the job and from that moment on everything in my life turned from warm Technicolor into vibrant dayglo.

The very first day I showed up for work there was a huge queue outside the shop that snaked around the block. They were all waiting for emergency-relief import copies of
Dark Side of the Moon
that were due to arrive from Heathrow. My first duty as a member of staff was to go along this line asking how many copies of the mystical disc each person wanted. When I had ticked off 100 – our incoming allocation – I had to tell all those still in line that they might as well go home. Now some of these shivering heads were big gruff old hippies, very much anti-glam and veterans of many be-ins, sit-ins, occupations of unis and quite possibly hardened throwers of flour bombs on live TV.

I was little more than two weeks out of my comprehensive school uniform.

When I broke the news to two gargantuan long-hairs in greatcoats that they were going to be out of luck, they started accusing several people further up in the queue of pushing in or of holding places for a few giddy old stoners that had been late arriving. ‘
We
should be numbers 92 and 93,
man
, with your glib satin and surface pop-trip bullshit,’ they said. ‘And those slippery bastards there ought to be made to get up the back! So fuck you!’ Suddenly lots of people wanted to know what I intended to do about it with my glib satin and surface pop-trip bullshit. I told them I was new here. Scuffles then started at several points in the line and were getting quite nasty when a fellow in a bowler hat with a feather glued to it ran around the corner and said that Musicland was getting some in too. There was a desperate hammering of clogs on pavement and the angry mob disappeared.