The Living Years (12 page)

Around the time Ant left the band, the bread van passed its sell-by date and we began to rent a transit van from an East End guy named Reg King, who had a link with Strat. The good thing about Reg’s vans was that if anything went wrong with them – which it always would – you could drop them back at Reg’s base where a burly mechanic would come out with a sledgehammer, take a swing at whichever part you thought wasn’t right, charge you £20, and send you on our way. The bad part about Reg King’s vans was dealing with Reg King, which was Rich’s job.

Reg was Andrew Loog Oldham’s chauffeur – Andrew Loog Oldham as in the Stones’ manager and ‘chauffeur’ as in minder. The first time Rich met Reg was in Reg’s office in Soho Square. There was a trail of blood up the stairs, the result of Reg’s previous appointment. Reg rang Gail Colson, Strat’s assistant at Charisma, afterwards: ‘Rich has just left. He’s a bit freaked out. He saw the claret.’

We never knew if we were going to make it to a gig in a Reg King van. There was one show in Aberystwyth when the van broke down four times on the way from London. We got there so late we missed our booking, and had to turn round and start the drive straight back home. Whereupon the van instantly broke down again. This was in the middle of nowhere and the middle of the night: we managed to call for help from an AA box but then everyone fell asleep waiting.

I woke up to this strange whine – a kind of ‘Neoooeeeooo’ sound. The funny thing was, it seemed to be coming from the AA box. I got out of the van, went over to the box and opened it up nervously, not sure what I was going to find inside. What I found was Pete. He was sitting inside on a shelf, wrapped in a towel to keep warm, playing his oboe.

If we weren’t in one of Reg’s vans then we were piled into someone’s car, which wasn’t much better. Driving anywhere was always a source of friction: as a driver Tony was so slow that journeys would go on forever but Pete was too erratic. He’d be talking away and completely forget about changing gear – you’d end up shaking so much you felt like you were leaving body parts in the road. When he suddenly remembered that there was such a thing as fourth, you’d feel the car breathe a sigh of relief.

This meant that I would make a dash for the driving role, but Tony didn’t like that because he didn’t trust me not to fall asleep. He’d start by singing Beatles songs to keep everyone awake and then, when they’d all tailed off, he’d just keep on prodding me. The flaw in his plan was that sometimes he couldn’t stay awake either, and when that happened I did occasionally rest my eyes in the shut position.

When I fell asleep and went over a large roundabout, I could pass it off as a just a large bump in the road. It was more difficult when I fell asleep on the M4 and drove over an oil drum that was marking some roadworks. Sparks were flying everywhere – it was like a rocket re-entering orbit – and the noise alone was enough to convince me that we were going to die. Even worse, we weren’t in one of our vans at the time. We had borrowed Lindisfarne’s vehicle, which was a brand-new transit and had smart airplane seats with headphone sockets. It wasn’t quite as brand-new when Lindisfarne got it back.

Naturally all this driving meant that service stations were an important part of our lives. We’re probably the only people ever to have looked forward to getting to the Blue Boar on the M1 at Watford Gap. It’d be 3 a.m., you’d be cold and shivery, and your body would almost go into shock at those horrible fluorescent service station lights – but God, the taste of a greasy full English breakfast would be great.

* * *

It was after we left The Maltings that we found our next guitarist: Mick Barnard of Princes Risborough.

Mick had a Binson Echo – a great delay sound, very novel at the time – and was a really nice guy. We really weren’t very nice to him.

To get to gigs, Mick would always drive part of the way from Princes Risborough to meet us, park his car somewhere convenient such as a service station, and then wait for us to pick him up in the van; on the way home, we’d do the same thing in reverse. The incident that really sticks in my mind was when we were driving home on a horrible, cold, wet winter’s night when there was no one around and Mick had been having problems with his car. We were on the opposite side of the motorway from the service station car park so Mick asked us to wait until he’d crossed over the footbridge and made sure his car would start before we drove off.

‘Course we will, Mick.’

We didn’t exactly bugger off the minute his back was turned, it was more that we sort of instantly forgot about him. And then the next thing we knew, we were a mile down the road. It turned out to be a long night for Mick.

Maybe we were so awful to him because we felt he wasn’t quite the one, but I still feel guilty about that night now.

In truth, I was too set on finding ‘the son of Ant’. I still missed him, although it wasn’t as though he’d vanished from my life completely. He came to a couple of shows – it was a bit frosty, but not that bad. There was a great sadness for me, though, because I knew it’d never be the same between us. He would never be able to share the memories and the jokes that the rest of the band were going to share.

For Pete and Tony, however, it was much less complicated: we needed a new guitarist, simple as that. And so when I fell ill with a stomach ulcer, they simply went and got another one to replace Mick.

* * *

You don’t usually get a stomach ulcer at twenty but the Blue Boar 3 a.m. fry-ups and lack of sleep had taken their toll. Having now finally split up with Josie after several unhappy attempts I went home to Hill Cottage to recover.

I’d worried and fretted about breaking up with Josie so much in advance but when it came to it, it wasn’t as terrible as I’d feared. It was just a relief to both of us to finally acknowledge that it wasn’t working. Meanwhile, Mum loved having me back. ‘You should stay in bed till you’re right,’ she’d say, and then I would hear her go downstairs to Dad. ‘I don’t think he should leave till he’s better.’

But while I was laid up in my old teenage bedroom – still with the same green bedcover, the same orange lampshade, the same psychedelic UFO club poster on the wall – Pete had seen an advert in
Melody Maker
: ‘Imaginative guitarist/writer seeks involvement with receptive musicians determined to strive beyond existing stagnant forms.’ This was Steve Hackett, who was then living in Pimlico.

By the time Pete and Tony brought Steve down to Hill Cottage I think they’d already decided he was in the band but were still a bit worried about getting it past me. I sensed it was a slight ambush: ‘Catch him while he’s weak and in bed, he’s bound to say yes.’ In any case they waited downstairs while Steve came up to my bedroom to meet me. This time I was definitely wearing a dressing gown.

Steve didn’t look like us. He looked like an art student. Black corduroy jacket, black jeans, black scarf, black shirt. And black hair and a black moustache. For years Steve was all black. ‘He’s very quiet, isn’t he?’ Mum said when he’d gone. But he wasn’t quiet or shy on the guitar. Mick had a lovely, warm sound but he wasn’t brave sonically, whereas Steve had lots of weird effects boxes. But what was unusual about Steve was that he liked acoustic guitar too – until now, all the replacement guitarists I’d found were either electric or acoustic, not both. Straightaway I felt as though we understood each other – although I’m not sure Steve, seeing me in my dressing gown, felt the same.

As we found over the years, Phil had a huge capacity for taking alcohol and not showing it. Steve’s first gig, at University College London in January 1971, was one of the exceptions. We’d been for a few pints beforehand but no one realized that Phil had drunk a few more pints than everyone else and was pissed. Phil was such a good drummer that he could pull most things off, but that night he went for his big fill and nothing happened. Silence. He’d played it perfectly but he was just six inches to the side of every drum.

Poor Steve: it was his first gig, he was nervous and we’d got a drunk drummer. Tony and I gave Phil such a hard time afterwards, which didn’t bother Phil but Steve unfortunately thought that we were arguing about him: we hated him and wanted him out. As usual, it never occurred to anyone to tell the newcomer what was really going on.

Soon after this we set off on the Charisma Records Six Bob Tour. It was like a little Charisma hurrah cruise and one of Strat’s best ideas: take a musical package tour around the country, introduce people to three different Charisma acts and charge them virtually nothing (six bob was peanuts) for a ticket. The other two bands on the bill, Lindisfarne and Van der Graaf Generator, took it in turns to headline, but we were the junior partners so would go on first and get the seats warm for when everyone arrived.

Van der Graaf were dark, heavy and moody: a thinking man’s type of band. Peter Hammill was a bit like a wild poet, punching the air during songs. The trouble was they had no idea how to put a set together. They’d put all the up songs in a row and then all the heavy, ponderous ones together, and by the end it’d be so dark and you’d be so depressed you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself. I learned how not to structure a set from them.

Van der Graaf had been the biggest act on Charisma for a while but then Lindisfarne had a huge hit with ‘Fog on the Tyne’, a really quirky, stompy, clap-along song. They were all characters and would sit in the back of the tour bus with their Newcastle Brown (they could be really drunk but still perform). When we got to Newcastle it was like turning up with the Beatles. I can remember wanting to go on stage and say: ‘Hello Newcastle! We’re friends of Lindisfarne! They like us!’

This was before we’d borrowed their brand new van.

One of the nicest things about the Six Bob Tour was staying in hotels. We didn’t have to drive back home after each gig. The thought of getting to Newcastle and not driving back was unbelievable: a bed! Not a very nice bed, but a bed! For us, even B & Bs were financially out of the question at this stage. If the gig was really too far to drive there and back in a night, we’d sometimes be allowed to sleep on the headlining band’s floor. Caravan, who had a house in Canterbury, put us up several times.

It was purely because I needed to stay awake to drive that I started taking cocaine: it wasn’t recreational, it was just better at keeping me awake than Tony singing Beatles songs while I drove us to Cornwall and back.

Drugs were not something that Tony or Pete ever did. Phil, Rich and I could always enjoy a spliff but although everyone always thought Pete was completely out of his head, he never even drank much. He used to have one beer and get smashed. One glass of wine and it was all over. And Tony couldn’t bear the thought of being out of control so he never took anything, but that didn’t mean he was safe. There’d been one weekend at the cottage when Rich had invited some of his friends down so that they could all take acid together while the rest of us, including Tony, went off home. When one of Rich’s friends, Bill, offered to drive Tony to the station in Dorking, Tony accepted, completely unaware of the fact that Bill had dropped some acid first. He must have been a bit surprised by how lovely Bill thought Dorking high street was: ‘Man, look at the lovely lamppost!’

* * *

In the summer of 1971 Strat rented an old country house in Crowborough in East Sussex for us to use while we wrote our next album,
Nursery Cryme
. We didn’t see him much, but at the weekends he’d come down and get in the bath at 10 a.m. and stay there till lunchtime, reading the papers. So we still didn’t see him much.

We didn’t take criticism very well in the early years of our career. We were probably quite overbearing in our knowledge of how good we thought we were. We’d hand Strat the tape of an album when we’d finished recording and that would be it – we’d never ask, ‘What do you think?’ There were times when I’m sure we would have benefited from a second opinion but Strat believed in us, too, which rubbed off. When we saw him for meetings at the Charisma offices we’d come out feeling great: uplifted, confident. ‘Dear boy, it’s tremendous!’

As individuals we weren’t very confident but we had confidence in our music being strong and different. Plus you had to be a bit cocky: it was the only attitude you could have if you wanted to succeed. Without Strat, however, I don’t think we would have got anywhere. Our first three albums with Charisma were basically an apprenticeship. We learned how to play our instruments properly, how to play live, how to record, and creatively we were given a completely free rein to an extent that you couldn’t imagine today. We would never have A & R men or record company execs coming in from outside and commenting on what we were doing: people knew that they shouldn’t ask to hear a record until it was finished.

Nursery Cryme
wasn’t an easy album to write. Maybe it was just the new dynamics that made it feel so difficult by comparison. If Ant had been around I’m sure it wouldn’t have been so slow but we needed to find our feet without him to get to the next stage. This was especially true for me: I wrote one song, ‘Harlequin’, where I tried to play both my guitar part and Ant’s on a single twelve-string guitar by tuning the pairs of strings to harmonies. It was pretty dodgy. Not my finest moment lyrically, either: ‘There once was a harvest in this land / Reap from the turquoise sky, harlequin, harlequin’. ‘Harvest’ is a word I’ve learned not to use in songs.

Besides ‘Musical Box’ we had one other song already up and running before we got to Crowborough. ‘Return of the Giant Hogweed’ had something for everybody in the band: fast drumming for Phil, triplet stuff with Tony and Steve playing harmonies together, and a quirky lyric from Pete about a plant that’d escaped from Kew Gardens.

‘Seven Stones’ was very much Tony’s song. It was a great example of what I’ve come to call Tony’s cabaret chords: his big, schmaltzy, music-hall chords which Phil and I struggled with but he loved. In the end we had to make a rule: Tony could have three or four per album and no more. (We always wondered what happened to the ones we’d turned down. Then in 2011 Tony released a wonderful classical album and we found out.)