Ain't Bad for a Pink (6 page)

When we eventually got back to Crewe we found that the hire van was as knackered as the JU 250 through carrying so much weight. Absolutely knackered: the brakes were fading with the exertion of the journey. I took the van to the Crewe branch of the national van hire firm, told them it was not fit to drive back to Cheltenham and got my money back. Plum had also disconnected the speedo so we only had to pay the mileage from Cheltenham to Crewe. I felt I could justify some dishonesty with big companies.

This early period of intense musicianship had another strand. I was asked to run a blues night – my own blues night with acts to support me – by the proprietors of The Wayfarer, the night club in Nantwich which later became Gregory’s. I’ve played gigs at this venue in all its manifestations; when I played at The Wayfarer I did solo performances but also played with the bands. As a slide player you could guest with anyone in those days. If, on my musical travels, I came across someone talented, I would book them. Other artists would be booked by the management, who knew somebody in Jimmy Powell’s band. My support acts included Long John Baldry, Jimmy Powell – a man with a gun belt full of harmonicas – Elton John and Rod Stewart. On one occasion I was being supported by Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions when, as often happened, Long John Baldry was the guest singer and Reg Dwight – soon to be known as Elton John
–
was playing the piano. He was just a little piano player then. This seems strange now but it is less surprising when you realise that this particular ensemble was based on harmonica, guitar and two high-profile singers. The Elton John charisma could hardly develop in those circumstances but things would soon change for him.

I’ve met many musicians destined for fame – an autograph book of mine would have been like a bible – but I’ve usually found the famous fairly human and ordinary; besides, with important exceptions, I didn’t usually rate their ability higher than my own. I had come across David Bowie and Marc Bolan when I played a folk club in London in the days before I went to university. It’s strange to think of these mega stars as young teenagers negotiating – as I did – the lonely road of the floor singer. David Bowie is a good singer-songwriter who had concepts that were ahead of his time, combining theatricality with pop music, creating stage personae and extending the range of what was permissible. It’s taken until now for young men to use guyliner! He was at the forefront of the space age with songs like “Major Tom”, which had a futuristic feel of 2001 about it. His songs were cleverly written and original. He was the Dylan of pop music.

In 1970 when I was 21 I played with the Hot Rods (not the same band that had played at The Majestic) who had a residency at The Wayfarer. Roy Tatler – a great whisky lover who eventually settled in the Scilly Isles – was on rhythm guitar and vocals; I played bass guitar and Gary Burgess – alias Spadge, alias Gary B. Goode – was the singer and excellent frontman. Jonty Ellwood was on lead guitar and there were a variety of drummers including Reg Banks. Reg was to manage my Hanley shop and has had a subsequent career in retail, now dealing in vintage instruments. I was with the Hot Rods for about a year. Before then I’d played with Jonty Ellwood in daft duos at private parties for people who seemed to be millionaires. That’s how it seemed to a working class lad.

Pete Johnson played bass – he’d never played bass in his life! He used to wear a long morning coat, a T-shirt and a dickie bow. But the thing you noticed most were these silver wellies. It made sense when you realised he kept a bottle of beer in each one.

Jonty Ellwood.
(17)

From an age that has experienced heavy metal, thrash and punk it’s impossible to imagine what a culture shock the blues was, even as late as the Sixties. It was as if punk happened then, if you want some idea of the impact.

My taste in music didn’t endear me to the folk enthusiasts, who said I had a good folk voice and should stick to sea shanties, nor did it qualify me for a stint in Hamburg. My music was not popular except to a niche audience, generally older than me. Although it is folk music the folkies didn’t embrace it; what I brought was a world away from Jansch, Renbourn, Davey Graham or Martin Carthy. My voice wasn’t liked; my music wasn’t liked. Resonator guitars were another rarity and I had a Dobro; if the majority hadn’t heard the blues I played, they certainly wouldn’t know about slide guitar. In spite of opposition in folk circles I gradually introduced blues songs but it was a lonely field. In those days I was aware of only one good slide player in the UK: Sam Mitchell. He owned a National and I met him once.

These days, since the success of
Brothers In Arms
by Dire Straits everyone knows from the cover what a Dobro looks like and it’s known as a Mark Knopfler guitar, even though he only used it on one track.

My interest in musical instruments
per se
began when I was fifteen. I’ve never been without a resonator guitar since. It was an unconventional choice but resonators have a modern
art deco
appearance, a unique tone and a wider range than either electric or ordinary wooden acoustic guitars. People who love them get dramatic about them; one note from a Dobro “that weird, crude, evocative plunk, full of wonderful echoes and overtones”
(18)
evokes a whole culture. Mike Harding introduced his Dobro as “my Barnsley Fighting Guitar” and it does have an edge of danger.

It’s loud, too, and you seem to be able to get almost the same volume from a single string as you can from a whole chord…when I applied the old brass slide – Lord above, is that my train I hear a-coming? There ought to be a health warning stuck on the side; persons of a nervous disposition should on no account play this instrument anywhere near a crossroads after eleven o’clock at night…there’s something about the things and people are going to keep on buying them…if anybody wants me, I’ll be sitting on the porch with no shoes…

Rick Batey.
(19)

Although resonators were aimed at Hawaiian musicians and guitarists in white dance orchestras, they were taken up by bluesmen, hillbillies, and jazz musicians. I was in good company!

I found my first vintage guitar in a garage belonging to my friend’s father. The garage door was open to reveal piles of stuff and I noticed the edge of something under a pile of paint tins. With some difficulty I managed to extricate it from its grave; the barely-recognizable object was the squashed skeleton of a resonator guitar. I recognized it because I had seen Son House play a National and I’d also seen pictures in blues books. It wasn’t the sort of thing you saw in a shop, unless it was a junk shop. Without knowing something about them you’d think they were a bit of a toy. But this was a Dobro – or the basis of one – and I had known the whole from the tiny part showing from beneath the tins. The resonator was there but squashed; the spider’s web was there but a pencil was holding the strings up; the bridge was missing; a name had been deeply burnt into the wood with a soldering iron.

It was in pretty bad shape.

I swapped my car radio for it, took it home and assembled the bits. I knew that there were still some parts missing so I went back to the garage. Sure enough: there was the brass cover plate – likewise all squashed – and the two eyes. A man who worked in Rolls Royce sorted the cover plate and then the corroded silver work went to Niphos in Hope Street (aptly named) to be re-plated with copper, then nickel. I wanted it to look like a Russell Hobbs kettle: a duller shine than chrome which is a flashy surface thing. Nickel has depth and class. Armed with my intuition and my love of music, I put a veneer over the head stock to cover the burnt-in name and also replaced a part that was missing in the back
.
When asked the price for his work, the man from Niphos said, “Put it all together and play me a tune.”

So I did.

I sold this guitar more than ten years ago to an international bio chemist who kept in touch for ages and brought me a coke spoon from Bolivia. The guitar goes all round the world with him; it could so easily have rotted away in that long-ago garage.

At the beginning of the Seventies I had a residential at a Congleton pub and that’s how I met Des, my life long friend and occasional musical collaborator.

Pete, in those days was a dapper young businessman with a job. When I first heard Pete play all those years ago I’d never seen anyone play like that before. It was quite moving. He was way ahead of his time. Nowadays, perhaps for the past, say, fifteen years, there is more appreciation for that type of music but he was so ahead of his time. There has been a bond between us ever since.

Des Parton.
(20)

There’s a 1901 notice from the London & North Western Railway which states: “It is forbidden for vagrants, beggars, itinerant musicians and females of doubtful reputation to enter these premises. By order”.

You’d think that it had been “by order” of my father. In the opposite corner to my musical passion was my father’s continued disapproval of it. When my mother died the subtle moderating influence she had over my father went, and things became very fraught between us over my yet to be decided future. I wanted to be a musician; I
was
a musician. Every home had a piano in those days but I wanted to play the guitar and this made me a renegade. If my music had been classical then perhaps his antagonism would have been less strong, but this was rock ‘n’ roll and the guitar was already my downfall, seducing me from studying for my O-levels or becoming a committed athlete. My relationship with Nantwich and Acton Grammar School was equally turbulent; I was troubled and rebellious and class-conscious. Aged sixteen, things came to a head and I floored my father – something to do with me not coming up to expectations and his guilt about my troubled home life. Perhaps if we had talked about my mother, things would have been easier but I was too aggressive and strong-willed to fit into school life any longer, and that wasn’t his fault. I was effectively if not officially expelled: refused entry into the Upper Sixth in spite of my remarkable prowess in athletics.

I am sorry to have to advise you that his behaviour here, his aggressive attitude to authority and his influence on his fellows, make it impossible for us to accept him for an Advanced course.
(21)

I was a rebel with a cause: to me the school was riddled with class prejudice. I came from working class Crewe, not rural, well-heeled Nantwich. My school hadn’t caught up with the new spirit of educational equality for all; it was still imbued with the values of privilege and the prejudice of class.

The school spat me out and partly in deference to my father I went to college to do A levels, then joined the Civil Service where even the considerable amount of horseplay and foreplay in the Filing Room could never compensate for the boredom of such a job. This was
Billy Liar
territory and I left after a year
.
I considered joining the Forces: all three invited me for interview; all three accepted me. One of the things we had to do was to give a talk. I suppose they were interested in communication skills and individual interests as well as political beliefs. I talked about the blues and slavery. The reason I didn’t join up was because you had to sign up for sixteen years and that was too long. But it was interesting to see the same hierarchical attitudes in school, in the Civil Service and in the Forces. At one point I was shown into the officers’ mess on my own where it was silver service with half a dozen people waiting on me. In all the services I found the sergeants’ mess level more comfortable socially.

Throughout my white collar days I was playing music but I was trying to find work I liked and which would give me the security my father valued so much. That’s how I ended up at Manchester University enrolled for a B.Ed. following my two brothers who were both teachers. I left within a year after a dispute over leadership styles. My tutor was in favour of ‘progressive’ approaches to education and I had a more authoritarian position with regard to the tough kids at my teaching placement. Subsequently running a business and a band my instinct was reinforced: there has to be a chief and rules and everyone has to be clear where they stand.

Frustrating career-wise, fortunately my time at Manchester flowed musically.

After Manchester, I was getting into that morningless condition that afflicts the unemployed: late nights and up after midday. This offended my father’s sense of the way things should be. He arranged for me to go and work on the bins. I quite enjoyed it; I was physically strong; I enjoyed being out of doors and I had the incentive of finishing by 2.00 and 11.00 on Fridays. All for a fairly decent wage and plenty of time for music. It was not the most pleasant job; the night soil run: I couldn’t hack that. The worst thing was a bloke eating a pork pie after we’d just finished collecting shit! I did the job for two months and then went to work at Calmic as a Works Study Officer. When asked why I should get the job, I answered that I had the “air apparent” for it and I think this witty answer clinched things. I was then made redundant and went to work at Ideal Standard in Middlewich. Theoretically excellent, I failed on the practical side of my Industrial Degree. Why was this? I was hopeless at stopwatching and observing peoples’ work rates. I felt it wasn’t possible to do this unless you’d actually done the job yourself.

By anyone’s standards I was upwardly mobile: a homeowner with a respectable job, married to a teacher. I had conformed, with some difficulty, to my father’s ideals as well as keeping faith with the music.

However, I was again made redundant. Both redundancies were carried out on the last in first out principle and I found myself on the dole. I had failed to fit in with the educational establishment and the economics of management consultancy had also ejected me. It was at this moment that the musical imperative took over and my career went in a more conducive direction. With hindsight it seems obvious that I was always going to spend every waking moment on music and music-related activities: the karma was just so strong. The jerky rhythms of recent times were about to end.