Educating Peter (18 page)

The problem with Jim, from Peter's point of view, wasn't that he wasn't a nice bloke. He was. The problem wasn't that he didn't have a sense of humour. Anyone who tried to reinterpret ‘bangin'' drum'n'bass with a fiddle had to have some sense of the ridiculous. The problem was that when you got close to his life, there was a very adult intensity to it – an intensity speckled with humour, certainly, but a very intense, complex humour that a teenage brain might refuse to administer. Peter had described Ed The Troubadour to his mates as ‘the Hobbit bloke with the axe', but it was doubtful Jim could be reduced to such a simple
soundbite, and ‘the bloke with the dyed hair, the loud shirt, the air of hardship and the strangely hesitant and stiff way of speaking' didn't have the same ring to it. ‘During adolescence, children are starting to think for themselves and make their own judgements,' I'd read the previous night in
Adolescence: The Survival Guide
. I got the feeling, however, that Peter wouldn't make a judgement about Jim at all; he'd simply block the whole experience out – even the sparse, juddering rendition of ‘Jailhouse Rock' that Jim had performed to herald our departure. Later, though – maybe many, many years later – he'd remember it. Already, a back engine room of his brain had probably fed it into its hard drive. It was, after all, a unique experience. I certainly wasn't going to forget it in a hurry, and, as I headed back towards The Deep, I attempted to sort my emotions into some semblance of order:

Crisps weren't The Deep's strong point, but it did sell a heck of a lot of cod. On the radio, everyone was talking about it. Well, not everyone: Steve Wright, on Radio Two, was following an ironic aside about the
dress sense of someone who used to be in Sad Café with an even more ironic aside about the facial hair of someone who used to be in Foreigner, while John Humphries, on Radio Four, was rudely interrupting a politician. But in and around Hull, the big topic was cod, and whether the world's biggest submarium had the right to sell it in its restaurant when it was virtually an endangered species. Kevin from North Hull felt that it was ‘a bit weird admiring fish, then eating them in the same place', but Linda from Grimsby was more philosophical, suggesting, ‘It's not a proper fish, is it? Not like them pretty ones.' I had to say, overall, I was with Kevin on this one.

To be fair, Peter and I didn't see any live cod at The Deep. We did, however, see a hammerhead shark that looked like former England striker Alan Shearer. The Deep might have thrived in the middle of the day, but forty minutes before closing time it was a ghost town, strewn with empty Solero wrappers and tired-looking computer screens that were supposed to tell you the origins of the sea but didn't. At one point we were excited to see a small pool advertising fish you could touch. At another point, two seconds later, we were slightly less excited to see a sign below it announcing that the touching fish were ‘tired' and had been given an ‘early bedtime'. How exactly did you make a fish ‘tired'? I wondered, my head filling with images of aquatic badminton, inter-tank volleyball and games of fetch involving driftwood and particularly obedient koi carp. More to the point, how did you give it an early bedtime? Did you read to it for twenty minutes and hope it nodded off under one of those ornamental
underwater caves? You had to hand it to The Deep: it was deep. It also had some great features. Today, though, something monumental had passed through it – if not a shoal of rioting cod, then at least a party of very unruly schoolchildren – and left its mark.

‘It's like a town in one of those old Westerns, just after Clint Eastwood or someone has gone through it,' observed Peter. ‘Except with fish.'

Once again, I was enjoying talking to Peter about random rubbish surrounding music (or fish, in this case) more than I was enjoying talking to him about music itself. It was slightly alarming how quickly our pupil–teacher relationship had accelerated, with rock and roll becoming just another academic subject, albeit one taught slightly more haphazardly. Sometimes, when I related a well-known anecdote about a television going through a hotel room window or a heavy metal hellraiser defiling a national monument, it could feel worrying, like I was talking about Third World debt or the ins and outs of the private sector. It didn't matter that what I was lecturing about was wild and rebellious; what mattered – and what was responsible for the occasional absent look in Peter's eyes – was that I was an older person setting the agenda, trying to make too much sense of the world on Peter's behalf. I tried to stay conscious of keeping a fun, freewheeling element to proceedings, of encouraging Peter to learn in the direction that he wanted to learn, just like the teachers at his strangely laid-back school did. Whatever Peter had thought about today's meeting with Jim, though, I could be pretty sure he hadn't seen it as anything to do with
flexible learning. Whatever hidden riches the experience had held, you couldn't say it had a lot of
bend
. I'd hoped that forcing Peter to interact with Jim would give me an insight into Peter's thinking, but now it was over, his brain remained a mystery, and one that was just a little further from my grasp than it had been a couple of weeks before.

Now I wanted to atone for our misadventure with an activity that was impulsive and loose. The only problem was, we were on the Yorkshire–Lincolnshire border, a place more renowned for its high rate of road casualties than its musical legends and landmarks. I quickly ransacked my brain, but could only really come up with Mick Ronson, David Bowie's old guitarist, who was dead. There was always the Beautiful South, but I had a dim recollection that their lead singer was busy working in a petrol station in a TV soap opera. I also had a less dim recollection that I didn't care. In desperation, I turned on the radio and manual-tuned to 828 medium wave, the frequency that (usually) played host to my favourite European radio station, AERO CLASSICROCK. Immediately, I felt calmer.

Being able to tune in to AERO CLASSICROCK is, to me, one of the chief joys of living near one of the outer points of the East Coast of England. For those unfamiliar with it, AERO CLASSICROCK is a Dutch station whose name tells you everything you need to know about its modus operandi: wall-to-wall, in your face, unashamedly fashion-free rock music around the clock. Since AERO CLASSICROCK isn't even supposed to be broadcast in the British Isles, I've never
seen it advertised or listed, yet you can just tell that its name is capitalised, in the same way that you can just tell that the man who does the horror movie trailer voiceovers at the cinema is over six feet tall and owns a drinks cabinet. AERO CLASSICROCK doesn't have disc jockeys, just occasional goofy between-song voices that say things like, ‘LUNCHBOX!', ‘ROADRUNNER!' and ‘ROCK OF AGES!' for no sensible reason. In fact, it's quite feasible that AERO CLASSICROCK is not a radio station at all, just one big randomly shuffled mix tape, yet somehow this matters not a jot. For any man honest enough to get in touch with his inner Homer Simpson, the station remains a full-throttle, life-affirming experience. The fact that it can descend into painful sizzling noises in bad weather and that on a Saturday afternoon, in the ten-mile area directly north of my house, it mysteriously shares half its bandwidth with a farming programme just makes it all the more special.

Now, listening to U2's ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday' back-to-back with Todd Rundgren's ‘I Saw The Light' back-to-back with Styx's ‘Renegade', I marvelled at my stupidity. Over the past few weeks I'd laboured over such home-mix tapes as ‘Mystic Britain, 1968–73', ‘Fuzz Pedal Guerillas, 1971–75' and ‘Families With Beards, August 1972–June 1973', trying to tailor my pupil's musical exposure to perfection, when the answer was right in front of me all along. Here, in hissy yet vital form, was everything you could ever want to know about real, good-time music – the kind that transcends fashion and adolescence and, well, everything, apart from life itself. Here were
Foreigner, singing about how the woman in their woman brought out the man in their man. Here were The Faces, smelling of booze, fags and neglected hair on ‘Stay With Me', building, building, building to the show-off guitar hook of the century, then talking sexist crap, but doing it brilliantly. Here was Rod Stewart in his prime: a black 1930s blues singer disguised as a vertically challenged scarecrow posing as the ultimate sex slob. This was Man's Music, and we were both Men – or at least we both soon would be – in the middle of a Man's Trip, and this was what we needed to make us both believe in it, to make it stop feeling like work. If I'd been stopped at a traffic light, I would probably have run off into nearby woodland.
This
was the essence! Sod ‘ammunition'.
This
was what Peter had to get in touch with at any cost! Isn't this just the most awesome thing? I thought.

‘Isn't this just the most awesome thing?' I asked Peter.

But he was asleep.

TOM
:‘THE EARLY
Seventies was a time of musical symbiosis, with black and white, folk and rock, soul and country, funk and blues feeding off one another like never before and never since. Pentangle were the quintessential folk band for the time, catching the tail end of the psychedelic movement and mixing a spiritual Led Zeppelin-type aura with a knack for very traditional, very English melody.

‘
Basket Of Light
is their most bewitching album, largely because of the production, which conjures up the image of a group of hirsute angels composing hymns to the starving earth in an enormous wooden auditorium with moss on its eaves. Here, the group mix traditional tunes with original ones, and it's hard to tell one from the other. Songs like “I Once Had A Sweetheart” and “Springtime Promises” are richer than the parallel work of Fairport Convention, more attuned to the land than the equivalent warblings of Mellow Candle. Vocalist Jacqui McShee is a seraph in clogs, and if Bert Jansch's co-vocals are occasionally weedy, it's less in
an effete way and more in a way redolent of the things that grow in the ground. Normally, you'd have to roll around in the mud beneath an agricultural museum for weeks to make a record this at one with the great old outdoors; Pentangle, apparently, did it in a recording studio. Their songs are tinted with acid, but, as with all the best folk, ultimately you get the sense that they could have been written and recorded at any point during the last thousand years.'

Peter:
‘I'm sorry. This annoys the piss out of me.'

IT'S HARD TO
pinpoint the exact moment that I decided youth culture was dead. Looking back, I could possibly narrow it down to the moment I initially became aware of The Stereophonics, or a day in 1994 when I first saw a bootleg screen print of Kurt Cobain with a shotgun in his mouth, or the first time I felt the urge to strangle a skate kid. Or perhaps, on a more general level, I could posthumously attach some sort of ominous significance to Blur beating Oasis to number one in the singles chart in the summer of 1995. But that would probably be a little too neat. Much as I'd like to think there was a pivotal event that gave definition to my change of heart, it's far more likely that comprehension crept up on me gradually, until finally the all-consuming young person's pursuit of Keeping Up felt hollow and pointless.

Of course, there was the possibility that youth culture hadn't gone off at all; that it was me who was stale. But, in the end, that was immaterial. The
important thing was that
my
youth culture was dead: the bands that I had loved as a teenager had either disintegrated or gone out of fashion, the clothes that I'd worn had vanished from the high street, the arthouse movie icons I'd worshipped had gone bald or blockbuster, and the mutual beliefs that had helped hold my network of friends together had fragmented into something more complex. If these intrinsic elements of coming-of-age had been replaced by others that seemed just as important to the generation that followed me, then I wasn't going to waste my time trying to understand why. Attempting to comprehend why anyone would want to listen to Papa Roach or watch
Dawson's Creek
seemed far too difficult a proposition. It was far easier – and a lot more fun – to take the view that youth culture had been hijacked and transformed into something meaningless and corporate.

The question that interested me was: would Peter feel the same in thirteen years' time? It was hard to imagine that something even more meaningless and quasi-alternative than Slipknot would arrive a few years from now, hoodwink a new generation and leave my fresh-faced companion feeling as world-weary as I felt. But fifty years of pop culture evolution told me it was perfectly possible. And the more time I spent with Peter, the more I understood why.

Spending time with Peter didn't change the way I felt about youth culture; it just changed the way I thought about it. Three months into our curriculum, I still let out an involuntary Sideshow Bob shiver in the vicinity of Puddle Of Mudd albums, couldn't
understand why anyone would want to give Heath Ledger a starring role in a movie, and had absolutely no desire to attach a long, purposeless piece of metal to my trousers. Yet, at the same time, I clocked a flaw in my gloomy philosophising. In believing that youth culture was sour and jaded, I'd made the mistake of believing that the people who consumed it were sour and jaded as well. I'd forgotten that, due to their singular lack of perspective, teenagers would always be teenagers.
They
didn't know that the generations preceding them had reserved all the good clothes and tunes, and even if they did, why should they care? They had other, more important matters to worry about, like finding an effective brand of spot-remover or getting Denise Jones in 8D to notice them in the quadrangle at breaktime.