Educating Peter (11 page)

WHEN I WAS
at secondary school, during the late Eighties, I had a friend called Richard Bush, who would play a game with his older sister called Pass The Cake. Fairly self-explanatory, the game involved the ongoing distribution of a dog-eared slice of chocolate cake, baked by Richard's mum in August 1988, between the two siblings' bedrooms. Neither would take responsibility for the cake, and both would rather set fire to their own limbs than admit defeat and take it downstairs. However, what started as a point of pride became something altogether weightier, reminiscent in its strategic planning of the most complex and clandestine war manoeuvre. As the months went by and it decomposed, the cake was secreted in more and more outlandish places – a shoe, a Trivial Pursuit box – often with a long-neglected toy soldier or Lego fireman protruding from it. Once, at the beginning of a Geography lesson, Richard found the cake waiting for him in his pencil case, decked out
with rubbers for eyes, a Sellotape mouth and a pencil sharpener nose. Yet he refused to back down, despite the fact that by now, after all its manhandling, the cake had been reduced to a quarter of its original size. The following day, it was back in his sister's room, squashed between the pages of the latest issue of
Look-In
magazine.

‘Who's on cake duty this morning?' was always the first thing I would say to Richard, when I called for him before school. Richard was a late riser, and it was my job to make sure he got up in time for our five past nine form meeting. This would normally involve me knocking at the door a dozen times, then amusing myself with Richard's sheepdog, Bracken, while Richard – one of the first kids in our school year to get stubble – shaved expansively, put a Move record on and thought up a new, ingenious place to hide the cake. On and off, I considered Richard my best friend, but I never quite sensed that the sentiment was reciprocated. Richard seemed above a concept like ‘best friends' and, while popular at school, was generally considered an enigma: an astute classroom commentator whose sophisticated, mordant wit and taste in ‘weird music from the old days' contradicted his callow years and made him, at heart, something of a loner. Still, it remains one of my bigger regrets in life that we lost touch, especially since now I listen to the exact same ‘weird music from the old days' that our friends mocked him for listening to as a schoolboy. The last time I'd seen him had been in 1992, a year or so after leaving school, during a repugnantly worthy ‘political scuzz-rock' fad in my musical development.
By that time, the cake survived merely as a hardened blue-ish crumb, the rest of it having been devoured by Bracken.

The more time I spent with Peter, the more I thought of Richard – partly because Peter, in his frequent bursts of age-belying perspicacity, often reminded me of him, but also because Peter and I were involved in our own ongoing version of Pass The Cake. In its lines of attack and resourcefulness, our adaptation of the game lived up to the one played by Richard and his sister in every way. There was only one difference: it wasn't a cake we were passing; it was a Blue Oyster Cult CD. Specifically, the one I'd advised Peter to buy in the Music And Video Exchange in Soho.

Somehow, the CD kept finding its way back into my possession. First, upon returning from Hastings, I'd found it stuffed beneath the back seat of the Ford Focus. I had to admit it seemed in some way significant that Peter had left this particular CD behind, rather than the nu-metal albums he'd purchased alongside it, but I'd given him the benefit of the doubt and politely returned it to him. But then, in the aftermath of Brian Wilson, I'd found it abandoned mysteriously in the glove compartment of the transit van. So now, recalling the rules of Pass The Cake, I'd decided to play dirty. As I sat in Peter's kitchen, watching Jenny (who'd been remarkably forgiving about our eighty-minute late arrival last night) pack Peter's lunchbox in the prelude to our next adventure together, I began to develop a plan. Today, I would suggest that we ate at Burger King, knowing that Peter would be powerless to resist. From there, implementing
the different components of my killer strategy would be easy. It would be unfair to Jenny, and I'd feel guilty, but it would be worth it, and I had to suppress a sly little smile as I thought of tomorrow, when Peter would arrive home, unload his rucksack, open his lunchbox to throw away his uneaten organic lunch, and find one of the classic rock albums of 1976 positioned neatly between two slabs of wholemeal bread.

The day involved an early start for all of us. Edie and I were creaky and slow-witted from a night sleeping on the futon in Jenny's living room (although not slow-witted enough for me not to quickly switch the
Agents Of Fortune
CD with some Parma ham while Peter cleaned his teeth). Peter, meanwhile, was acting sheepishly. For lengthy periods of last night, at the Royal Festival Hall, it had slipped my mind that he was anything less than an adult, but this morning he was a fourteen-year-old again, being brashly instructed by his mother to take a bath, wrap up warm and remember to eat his cucumber with hummus dip.

We were on our way, in a convoluted fashion, to Cambridge, to hunt for the reclusive former Pink Floyd singer Syd Barrett in the second leg of what I was thinking of as the Mavericks section of Peter's training (in other words: very much like the Loose Cannons section, but with a different name). First, we'd make the two-hour drive to my house, dropping Edie off and fetching for Peter what I was referring to as his first ‘homework pack': a selection of background material that I thought would aid him in his musical studies. Then we'd head back down the All to one of my
favourite British cities and go cult hero-hunting, with a stop for fast food along the way. All in all, I had a positive feeling about what the day held in store.

I'd had the idea about ‘homework packs' the previous afternoon. It was no good, I'd decided, simply taking Peter out on trips, then returning him home and letting his capricious teenage mind forget about them. If I was going to give him something even remotely approaching a proper musical education, I had to get him thinking on my wavelength. He needed to be utterly consumed by our adventures; he also needed to be prepared, and in order to do that he needed homework and background revision. Rock and pop were, after all, scholarly subjects these days. Their finest achievements had aged too well to be written off as ephemeral trash.

Each time I met up with Peter, I decided, I would provide him with ‘texts' which he would be expected to report back on. Would they all be actual texts? No – some of them would be records, some would be books, some would be films or documentaries – but I would call them all ‘texts' anyway because it made me feel learned and important. I couldn't expect Peter to understand the natural gifts of Brian Wilson, coming in cold, having never listened to
Pet Sounds
or
Holland
– just as he couldn't expect me to understand
The Crow
, having never worn an enormous black jacket. From now on, he would be adequately prepared for our trips. His homework packs, though, wouldn't be limited to material that was relevant to our adventures; I would provide him with an entire didactic spectrum of rock and roll experience from the
last four decades – good and bad, bizarre and straightforward. A ‘text' could be a brilliant film, like
This Is Spinal Tap
, or it could be a rotten one, like
Sweetwater: A True Rock Story
. It could be a great album, like Big Star's
Radio City
, or it could be one composed entirely of what I deemed to be drab, scum-sucking brainrot, like The Stereophonics'
Performance And Cocktails
. It could be an eye-opening book of tales from Rock Babylon, like Nick Kent's
The Dark Stuff
, or it could be an impenetrable one of rambling egghead essays, like Greil Marcus's
Lipstick Traces
. It didn't matter – it would all help. More importantly, it would make me feel like I was a proper academic, and not just someone spending the best part of a year hanging around listening to music with a fourteen-year-old goth.

Two of Peter's first ‘texts' were the cassettes I'd made for him of
The Madcap Laughs
and
Barrett
, the two undernourished solo albums that Syd Barrett had recorded during the early Seventies, following his exodus from Pink Floyd. My intention had been for Peter to take these home and spend some serious time pontificating over them, but since we were on our way to follow Barrett's trail, and they were the sort of albums you didn't want to be alone in a room with, I'd decided to play them in the van.

‘Did they not have proper studios in those days, then?' said Peter, as the opening track of
The Madcap Laughs
wobbled into earshot.

Earlier, the transit had developed a fresh rattle in the region of the undercarriage directly beneath my left foot. Now it was impossible to distinguish rattle from
lo-fi sonic experiment. I glanced across at Peter. The look on his face seemed to reflect all my uncertainty about what I was putting him through. Did he think I liked this music? I hoped not. Being careful not to steer the van into a fat-necked man's BMW, but not too careful, I strained to find the melody of the song over the grunt of the diesel engine, feeling certain it had involved a guitar at some point. It was the sort of album that gave you an involuntary squint.

I'd often wondered, during my time writing about rock music, if there was a mandatory contract that someone had forgotten to give me at the beginning of my career, stipulating that I should worship the ground Syd Barrett teetered on. The relationship between music writers – cynical, slouched men not given to gratuitous displays of enthusiasm – and Barrett reminded me of something the rapper Ice-T had once said about the relationship between the toughest hip-hop stars and the work of Michael Jackson, an assessment which, though now dim in my mind in its complete form, almost certainly ended with the phrase ‘jumping up and down like little bitches'. But while I would quite happily do just that, and several considerably more embarrassing things, in the vicinity of
Thriller
or
Off The Wall
, I couldn't see the appeal of
The Madcap Laughs
or
Barrett
at all.

The hype surrounding Barrett seemed to me a classic case of confusing the legend with the music. For a brief, glittering moment, Syd (real name: Roger) was in possession of one of the psychedelic movement's most productive, kaleidoscopic minds. However, at some point between 1967 and 1969,
something (some say Mandrax, some say acid, some say sherbet lemons) had gone very seriously wrong, leaving him an uncommunicative wreck with an inclination to freeze up on stage and rub drugs in his hair. Barrett hadn't just been Pink Floyd's tousle-haired, sylphlike pin-up, he'd been their main songwriter too, and his bandmates had shown immense patience with him, but in 1969 he'd finally edged himself out of the band, going on to make a couple of solo albums and then retreat on a near-permanent basis to the cellar of his mother's house in Cambridge.

Little had been seen of him since, besides a few paparazzi shots, and by the time Peter and I arrived in Cambridge, Barrett's only real competitors for the title of Most Intriguing Rock Recluse were Sly Stone and Brian Wilson – both of whom had also had breakdowns in rock's big breakdown era (1967–75), but neither of whom had quite shown the self-discipline of the bona fide hermit. No other living musician generated quite so many rumours: ‘Syd hasn't seen daylight for thirty years'; ‘Syd is a painter, a gardener'; ‘Syd has secret parties with Brian Eno'; ‘Syd is diabetic'; ‘Syd hangs around my local pub'; ‘Syd still thinks he's leader of Pink Floyd'; ‘Syd can't spell his first name properly'.

‘Over the years, vague bits of information would filter back to me via my mum, who still lives in Cambridge,' Barrett's former bandmate Roger Waters had told me in an interview a few months before my visit to Cambridge. ‘That Syd had moved house, or that he had moved back in with his mum, or that he
was in the local sanatorium. But I haven't actually spoken to him since 1975.'

During the Seventies, Waters, who'd formed Pink Floyd with Barrett when they were still schoolboys, had gone on with Barrett's replacement Dave Gilmour to turn the band into the prog rock colossus that the majority of the general public knew it as – something which seemed to many an innate contradiction of Barrett's original vision. In 1975, the new, slicker Floyd had made a concept album about their former leader, and, during its conception, Barrett had turned up at the studio, uninvited, eating a bag of boiled sweets and looking virtually unrecognisable. ‘He'd put on about four stone and shaved all his body hair,' Waters told me. ‘He'd changed from this beautiful curly-haired youth into something resembling the bloke who keeps the scores on that Vic Reeves show.'

There was no denying that the Barrett story was a fascinating one, and you could see why journalists held it close to their heart – for one thing, it allowed the more sharp-minded among them, like Nick Kent, to use witty wordplay such as ‘First came the Floyd, then came the void'. But, much as it troubled me to admit it to Peter, the albums quite plainly didn't back it up. If I was honest with myself, I only liked three Barrett songs – ‘See Emily Play', ‘Interstellar Overdrive' and ‘Arnold Layne' – the latter two of which could genuinely piss me off if I had anything even resembling the beginnings of a stress headache. The solo albums, meanwhile, were virtually unlistenable: scrappy, wretched things that I wouldn't feed to my dog if it was starving. For years, having been told in
hushed tones by acquaintances that they were ‘albums that you just have to have in your collection', I'd pretended to like them, to hear some kind of cracked charm in their meagre fidelity. But then the truth of what I was doing had hit me: I was trying to force some enjoyment out of the sound of a man sitting in an empty room mumbling incoherently about sea creatures while a tape player whirred somewhere in the middle distance. There was nothing musical or endearing about this, just like there would be nothing musical or endearing about me making a Dictaphone recording of my own digestive system.