Broken Music: A Memoir (13 page)

    After my time on the building sites and my spell as a bus conductor, I decide I will try for an office job; at least I won’t be cold, it will please my mother, and I can pretend that I’m using what I cynically call my “brilliant mind.” I see an ad in the
Evening Chronicle:
USE YOUR A LEVELS, JOIN THE CIVIL SERVICE, and I apply in my best handwriting for a job with the Inland Revenue. I dig out my old school tie, my herringbone suit, my most sensible shoes, comb my hair and get the train to Manchester for a twenty-minute interview in front of a board of disinterested middle-aged men who ask me questions like, “Do you have any hobbies?”

I’m tempted to lie and say I like fly-fishing, but that will probably get me into trouble if he asks me if I tie my own flies, or what’s the best trout stream in Northumberland. Of course I could have said music, but I would resent calling it a hobby—an obsession, yes, but hardly a hobby. So I decide on walking as my hobby.

“And where exactly do you walk?”

“Oh, I’ll walk anywhere” is my less-than-inspired answer.

“Well, there won’t be much walking in this job, Mr. Sumner.”

“No, I don’t suppose there is.”

“And what newspapers do you read?”

As I am now in Manchester: “The
Guardian?”
I say, which raises a few eyebrows, and I wonder if they think that that’s too left wing, “And the, er,
Telegraph.”

“Very balanced, Mr. Sumner.” They know I’m lying.

Frankly, I reckon I would have gotten the job if all they’d done was put a mirror in front of my mouth and checked it for condensation—that’s how challenging the interview was.

“So this is the civil service,” I say to myself.

So I drift into a desk job as a tax officer in much the way that I’ve drifted in and out of the others. It is a miserable job for which I have absolutely no aptitude and even less interest. While it is virtually impossible to be fired from government employment, my position as a tax officer quickly becomes untenable. My in-tray becomes a towering steeple of abandoned files, while sad dog-eared folders containing the tax histories of thousands upon thousands of employees line the walls in oppressive ranks of clerical misery. That those whose tax affairs I’m supposed to supervise have jobs just as desperate and unfulfilling as my own is absolutely no consolation. I will often arrive at my desk as much as an hour late. My lunch breaks begin to telescope into the afternoons and I’m always the first out of the door at 5 P.M. after which my real life begins: dragging Deborah to see bands in pubs and clubs and dance halls. Rod Stewart and the Faces at the Mayfair, Fleetwood Mac, Julie Driscoll, and Brian Auger at the Go-Go. She patiently indulges my fantasy of being able to break into this charmed circle of working musicians, and listens to my prattling on the bus home, on and on about the merits and demerits of this band and that band. And then it’s back to reality and work the next day.

One Mr. Wilson, who has worked in this office for over twenty years, tells me that Alan Price, the keyboard player in the Animals, sat in the very desk where I’m sitting now before he found fame and fortune. Mr. Wilson, as well as being custodian of office lore and history, is also the wry office rake: he watches slyly as the girls retrieve bare armfuls of brown and pink files to distribute to the designated work stations in the long room. He will invariably turn in his chair to sharpen a pencil and stare absently in the direction of the shelves whenever the lovely creatures have to reach up in their miniskirts and heels for the highest folders. As there is little else to relieve the boredom of these fruitless days I begin to mimic this artful
choreography of swivel chairs, pencil sharpeners, and absent stares. We move together effortlessly like synchronized swimmers in a sea of longing. Not that the girls seem to mind, they’re as bored as we are. A couple of these office sirens are disarmingly pretty, but I suspect that if I succumb to their easy charms, I will be trapped here forever and dwindle into a Mr. Wilson, tied to his work station like a sad Priapus in the temple of the senses.

This soul-destroying day job actually catalyzes me. I realize I must find a way to nurture my musical ambitions within some kind of institutional framework. In the seventies, a student grant, while hardly allowing one to wallow in the lap of luxury, at least provides a subsistence level of financial support to keep a roof over your head, a couple of eggs in the frying pan, and maybe a quid or two left over for a pint in the union bar. I may also find some people of like mind.

After six wretched months I will be gone from the Tax Office and enrolled in Northern Counties Teachers’ Training College. And it is there, in the fall of 1972, that I will meet a brusque and bluntly spoken Yorkshireman who, in the years that follow, will become my mentor, musical guide, partner, and rival.

GERRY RICHARDSON IS IN THE YEAR AHEAD OF ME AT COLLEGE. We have a lot in common. Like me, he has been adrift since leaving grammar school, bouncing from one dead-end job to another, just as desperate to break into music, but needing some sort of institution that would allow him the time to figure out how it’s done. Born and raised in Leeds, he’d played the piano from an early age, and both of his parents are musicians. As a musician he is streets ahead of me, but when we meet our friendship will be grounded in two things: that music is our singular passion and that neither of us has the slightest desire to become teachers. That said, in a teacher’s training college it is possible (or it was then), with only a minimum amount of academic work, to keep your head above water and off the chopping block, which of course leaves plenty of time and energy to “gig.”

Gigging is all we really want to do. To make a living playing music seems, if not the noblest of ambitions, then something pretty close. To gig night after night had an honorable and romantic tradition, at least it appeared so to us. It is Gerry who is the pioneer, the pathfinder into the fabled realm of clubs and cabaret, where if you can play well and are versatile enough, you might be able to join that
illustrious brotherhood, that select band of musicians, who provide the backing behind crooners, jugglers, strippers, magicians, and singing comedians. To be a professional musician, a journeyman able to sight-read sufficiently to hold down a job, to play in whatever style was required—this was the ultimate goal, and Gerry, with his prodigious skills, could do all of it. I was in awe of him.

Today, becoming a better musician is still an all-consuming ambition: to practice daily, to read better, to be intrigued by the ever receding mystery of music, and to be chasing this elusive knowledge until your last breath. It was my friend Gerry who initiated and inspired me in these ideals, though he’d be unlikely, in his modest and down-to-earth way, to admit it, even now.

    The teaching course would give us a three-year period in which to set ourselves up not as teachers, of course, but as musicians in some form or other, and if we should fail to “make it” within that period, then teaching would be the fallback, nothing more. However, even as a fallback, with its short hours and long holidays, teaching would provide, so we thought, a nominal financial safety net as well as a respectable front for more gigging until a lucky break would, as the fantasy went, propel us out of semi-pro-dom and into what we imagined was the big time.

We met at the college folk club one wintry Sunday night in my first term. The folk club repertoire was normally limited to reasonably close if uninspired interpretations of songs by Ralph McTell or Cat Stevens, or some doleful renditions of Leonard Cohen’s oeuvre, performed without much skill, or any of the original irony.

I decide one night that I will get up and perform, and I spice things up a bit with a song from the film
M*A*S*H
, called “Suicide Is Painless.” From there I take a nifty segue into “King of the Swingers” from Disney’s
The Jungle Book
, then add a couple of my
own improvised lines with the odd Anglo-Saxon expletive thrown in for good measure. This eccentric choice of songs and their ironic juxtaposition attracts the attention of Mr. Richardson. Being a Yorkshireman, he finds it difficult not to vent his feelings, especially when he feels that his musical sophistication is being insulted by the hapless innocents who normally grace the folk club’s stage. As a result, he has developed a reputation as a harsh and abrasive critic.

With a pint in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Gerry makes his way over to me at the end of my performance. He has a fine beard, like an art teacher’s, and is squinting at me through a bohemian swag of dirty brown hair as I put my precious guitar into its case.

“Well, that was slightly more intriguing than the usual shite that gets served up here on a Sunday night,” he says.

“Er, thanks,” I say, not sure whether to be flattered or relieved.

“Gerry’s the name, piano player. Come over to the bar, I’ll buy you a pint.”

“Thanks.”

I follow in his wake, guitar case in hand, maintaining a respectful distance behind him.

“Nice chords in that song from
M*A*S*H,”
he says, turning to see how far behind I am. “Been playing long?”

“Yeah, a while now, but I’m really a bass player.”

We’ve now made our way through the throng to the front of the bar.

“Really, who do you play with? Two pints of special, please, Ken.”

“Nobody really, some friends from school, that kind of thing.”

“That’ll be 40p, gentlemen,” says Ken the barman.

“Do ye know any drummers?” says Gerry, feigning to have mislaid his cash.

“Yeah,” I say, reaching for my own and unwilling to risk reminding my new friend that it was he who invited me for a drink.

“There’s this guy I play with, Paul Elliott, plays a Slingerland kit.”

Gerry nods sagely as we both begin sipping the warm beer from our pint glasses.

“He’s got his own van,” I say, trying to give my situation a professional gloss, and Gerry, who has been Mr. Fucking Cool up to this point, is now spluttering beer.

“A van, really? Does he wanna join a band?”

“What band?”

“The college band, we need a drummer.”

“I’m sure he’d be happy to, but how do you know if he’s any good?”

“He’s got a van, hasn’t he?”

“Oh, I see.”

This guy is clearly an operator, and aware that he may have seemed a little too venal, he softens a little. “Oh yeah, I’m, er, looking for another bass player.”

“What’s wrong with the old one?”

“Oh, nothing, it’s just that he doesn’t have a friend who’s a drummer with his own van.”

We both crack up.

Ensconced in the union bar we talk music—what we like, what we don’t like—until they throw us out around midnight. We continue to talk music all the way back to Gerry’s flat in Jesmond, a bohemian enclave of student digs and quaint pubs in the northeast of the city. Gerry shared the flat with a fiddle player named Brian, who was the brother of local folk legend Johnny Handle, who would become a founding member of the Killingworth Sword Dancers. Brian would refer to Gerry as “the jazzer,” in an affectionate, mildly insulting way.

The flat, situated in a leafy Victorian terrace, is strewn with unwashed plates and coffee cups, cigarette ends, empty beer bottles,
dirty laundry, dog-eared paperbacks, and old album sleeves. It is, in short, a student garret, a wild profusion of half-finished meals, half-scribbled essays, half-read newspapers, and is halfway between a slum and an encampment, as if an unruly army had suddenly been called away to do battle.

Gerry pulls an old Dansette record player from underneath a pile of books and papers, then leafs deftly through the pile of record sleeves and removes Miles Davis’s
Bitches Brew
from its protective sheath. In all of this untidiness I recognize the ritual slowness and care with which he places the needle on the edge of the turning disc and then lies back indulgently on a pile of cushions to observe its effect on me, as if he’s just administered a powerful drug. I was familiar with Miles’s previous incarnations as the arch-high priest of “cool,” and his masterly interpretation of Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess
was a personal favorite, but I am not familiar with this new recording, which shows the great trumpeter embarking on an innovative path that would come to be known as fusion music—I suppose because it would fuse together primitive rock elements with jazz improvisation and virtuosity—but indeed its effect on me is immediate and profound, and during the next hour I fall under its narcotic spell.

Many years later I meet Miles Davis for the first time. I am invited into his studio in New York City. Sometime before this I had stolen one of his excellent musicians for a project of my own and it was this musician, Daryl Jones, by then a member of my Blue Turtles band, who brought me to face the music.

The great man fixes me with his eye.

“Sting, huh?”

“Yes sir,” I reply.

“Sting,” he says again, savoring the word in his mouth like a gob
of spit, “you got the biggest fuckin’ head in the world.” His voice is no more than a malevolent whisper.

I’m a little shaken by this, to say the least. “What exactly do you mean, er, Miles?”

“Saw ya in a fuckin’ movie, man, and your head filled the whole fuckin’ screen.”

I don’t know which of my movies Miles is referring to, but his comment provokes a wicked cackle that infects the whole of the room. Everybody’s laughing but me. I must look a little uncomfortable, not to say hurt, so Miles, I suppose in an attempt to make amends, says, “So, Sting”—he rolls another gob of spit around that famous embouchure—“speak French?”

“Yes,” I answer, a little warily now.

“Okay, translate this.”

He hands me a copy of the Miranda rights. “Anything you say can and will be used against you …”

I gulp at the task in hand, my French being only rudimentary and just good enough to get me into trouble and nowhere near good enough to get me out of trouble. At the same time, the great Miles Davis has set me a task, and I desperately want to please him.