Parrot in the Pepper Tree (12 page)

‘He’s a journo,’ explained Andrew. ‘That’s what they do. They can’t help it.’

‘He’ll be in your knicker-drawer in a minute!’ sniggered Eugene.

Sure enough, when William had done his stuff in the bathroom, he wandered out and into the bedroom.

‘You wanted to be a famous writer, said Andrew, ‘well, this is what it’s all about!’

I wasn’t altogether sure that I ever had wanted to be a famous writer, but as we settled down to lunch, William recovered from the traumas of his journey and turned out to be excellent company. We all drank a little more wine than was really good for us and then William got his notebook out and the interview began.

He asked us all sorts of questions — good incisive ones that made Ana and I think a bit — and I warmed to him, and started seeing our life as potentially quite an amusing Sunday newspaper article. I told William everything he asked, cutting short only once when Ana shot me a warning look, and happily spun off into a treatise on the merits of organic farming versus agribusiness, which William politely heard out. Then he turned to me and opened a new page of his notebook.

‘It says on the back of your book,’ he announced, ‘that you were one of the founder members of Genesis. Is there any truth in that?’

‘Well, yes,’ I said, a little sheepishly. ‘But it was a hell of a long time ago, and it lasted less than a year, and to be truthful there’s not a lot I can remember about it.’

‘Then tell me exactly what you do remember about it,’ William insisted…

THE ODD THING — I FOUND MYSELF TELLING WILLIAM — IS THAT IT all began with Cliff Richard. At the age of thirteen I had one great ambition in life: I was going to be Cliff. I don’t mean that I was just going to imitate the man (who, I should stress, was then still a heathen rocker) but I was actually going to become him. It seemed to me that to be Cliff Richard would give you everything life had got to give. Now thirty-five years or so later, I realise that I may have been mistaken, but the arguments would not have cut any ice with my star-struck teenage self. Still, as luck would have it, reality soon caught up. I couldn’t sing — and the dreams were clearly not to be. So I settled instead on a future as Cliff’s guitarist, Hank Marvin.

Of course, being Hank Marvin was no steal, either. God, in his wisdom, had thrown a few obstacles in the way by arranging to have me born tone deaf and by giving me the worst fingernails a guitarist could hope to have. And not just that. These nails extended not from the slender fingers of an aesthete, but from the ham-like mitts of a fitter’s mate.

These factors might have quashed my musical career early on had it not been for my best mate Duncan. He was a cool friend to have — lively and wild and a little shifty — and he stood apart from the rest of us at the boarding school where my parents had despatched me. While we young degenerates would bicycle off to some pub to drink and smoke, Duncan would stay behind and put in his regular three hours a day of guitar practice. He was a prodigy and in the holidays had lessons with John Williams.

One summer, experimenting together at being fifteen, Duncan and I met a couple of girls whose pursuit kept us occupied for the whole holiday. One of them — a tall, willowy blonde who could knock the breath out of you with one glance and a swish of her waist-length hair — really was called Eve. Her friend was, by contrast, dowdy-looking, with a lank brown fringe that she continually checked for split ends. I can’t remember what she was called, though I do recall a rather sweet smile on the rare moments I looked her way. But my attention was entirely taken up with scrambling over Duncan to get the seat beside Eve, or edging him off the dancefloor, or racking my brains for some witty remark that would prompt Eve’s gaze in my direction.

We carried on thus for several gruelling weeks, with sometimes Duncan and sometimes myself gaining a fleeting ascendancy, and Eve playing it for all it was worth. And then one day Duncan brought along his guitar to an evening at Eve’s house, when her parents had gone up to London. As he played a series of pieces cunningly selected to win the heart of a fifteen-year-old girl, he stared deep into Eve’s eyes, and I knew that I had lost.

Eve’s friend knew it was time for both of us to go. In a humane gesture that might well have saved my life, she guided me towards the bus stop, chatting away as the sound of Duncan’s guitar faded, and when her bus came she made me look her in the eye and promise that I’d cycle straight home. I pedalled slowly through the streets of Haywards Heath, past the bowling alley and along by the Rose and Crown, sobbing into the night drizzle, blankly following the path home, hoping for death. It feels pretty bad when you’re fifteen.

Back at school, miraculously still alive, I set about combating a future of celibacy. I bought an old guitar from Duncan, with the promise of a few lessons thrown in. I fingered it with awe —the most potent weapon of seduction I could imagine — and set about trying to tune it. It was then that I realised I was tone deaf. Music teachers will tell you there is no such thing as ‘tone deaf’ but there is, and I was it. Not only was I unable to tune the wretched guitar, but I couldn’t tell when it was way out of tune. I would blithely stumble through ‘House of the Rising Sun’ with no idea why corridors were clearing and study doors slamming.

But I stuck with it. Once a week Duncan would tune the guitar for me and I would practice till my fingers cried. My progress was barely perceptible; I would achieve in three months’ relentless practice what most players would do in a week. However, by the end of term I had achieved mastery over the chords of E minor and A major and the changes between them. That’s not much. There was an ocean of music out there for me to navigate, and I had barely got the boat out of the harbour. Still, I figured that there was a certain seductive pathos to those two chords, and intelligently deployed, who could say what I might not achieve?

The next summer I went on a school trip to Austria to try and learn German. Among our group was a boy called Skinner, an arrogant, spiteful bit of work, who was rich, good looking and could (as we all tried to at the time) sing and strum Beatles songs rather brilliantly. On a long train-ride to Salzburg, Skinner delighted an entire girl’s school contingent with his performance, only to dampen the effect by rolling his eyes and sneering pointedly whenever anyone had the temerity to join in.

Sensing I had nothing to lose I waited until I identified from the position of his fingers an A or an E minor, and then plucked and strummed along, making my tentative display seem more like musical shyness than incompetence. Oddly enough it had the desired effect. Margie, the glittering prize from the girl’s school contingent, egged me on to ever greater two-chord triumphs, before deciding that proficiency with the plectrum was not the whole story. For the next three years, until she left me for a louche and handsome poet, Margie eclipsed my world.

At my boarding school, Charterhouse, it was obligatory to be a member of the Corps — the boys’ army unit — and this involved two afternoons a week, and even the occasional weekend, of the most unmitigated silliness: square-bashing, polishing kit and learning things that were not of the least interest to anyone other than a homicidal half-wit. There were a few ploys, though, by which you could improve your lot. The best was to join the ‘Band and Drums’, for which you either had to play some sort of brass instrument (and polish it) or bang a drum — an occupation for which my musical talent fitted me well.

I signed up and was issued with a little book of drum music, a pair of hickory sticks and a snare drum — rather pretty with braid ropes and coloured hoops. On those dismal afternoons when the rest of the school stood at attention in the rain, yelled at and insulted by a man known as the ‘Quagger’, who took the business of playing soldiers very seriously indeed, we drummers would fool around unsupervised in the Drum Room, smoking, joking and doing our paradiddles, rolls, flams and ratamacues.

Once or twice a term we would have to go out and perform the stuff we had supposedly learned. We would emerge from our Drum Room as disgracefully shabby a bunch of boy-soldiers as you could imagine, apart from Osborne the drum-major who strutted his stuff with the twirly batons at the front, and Hopkins the Welsh oaf who banged the big bass drum. These characters had all the pomp and menace of a two-man Orange Day March but fortunately they were outnumbered. The rest of us would shuffle about sniggering and smirking as the Quagger got more and more apoplectic. We wheeled left when we should have wheeled right; we halted when we should have marked time; we dressed right when we should have dressed left; and we did it all convulsed with suppressed laughter.

Still, the result of it all was that I learned to play the drums. It became a strange sort of obsession. You carried your sticks everywhere and at mealtimes you’d do it with knives and forks, rattling out marches on the refectory tables. And thus my schoolboy military career led me into Genesis.

A year above me at school was a boy called Gabriel, who played the drums for a jazz band, the League of Gentlemen. He had a big old-fashioned drum kit with floppy leather skins that went ‘whomp’ when you hit them. In an idle moment or two he showed me how, using the pedals, cymbals and a little syncopation, I could adapt my military drumming skills to jazz.

Jazz drumming hit me hard. I was hooked, straight off, and began to hang around anybody who was playing — there were at least a half dozen bands at school — and jump onto the stool as soon as they got off. I got in such a state about it that I would feel sick at the sight of a drum kit. I dropped the guitar completely in favour of my new obsession and practised day and night.

My mentor Gabriel, meanwhile, had begun to sing and play flute with his group. For the flute bits, at least, he needed his hands free, so he asked me to take over the drums. It was an invitation to enter Paradise and of course I jumped at it. We played soul and R’n’B, which was what Gabriel loved most: “When a Man Loves a Woman”, “Knock on Wood”, “Dancing in the Street” — Otis Redding, Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett. We played at school functions and at parties in the holidays, and somehow or other got a reputation as the best group in the school. We used to take occasional melodies from the hymnbook, which was perhaps why, along the way, Gabriel re-named us Genesis.

And that would probably have been it, if the enterprising Gabriel hadn’t sent a tape to Jonathan King — a maverick who had been at the school a few years earlier, and had notched up a number one pop hit with an awful song called “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”, Realising, shrewdly, that he was no popstar, King had begun to forge a reputation as a music producer. He listened to the Genesis tape and, for some reason no one to this day seems able to fathom, decided there was something in our songs of adolescent whimsy that might just propel us into the charts.

King arranged a recording session at an eggbox-lined studio off Tottenham Court Road and the group of us trooped up to London in a state of disbelief, to record three or four of our numbers. They were not the most obvious pop hits — nor, to be honest, very good — but a single was released featuring the most memorable song, “Silent Sun”, It sold about a hundred copies. It looked like being a while before we would rival Cliff.

Genesis, however, were a committed bunch, and pressed on with the music business. But my own role in their story was nearly over. I pouted for a few publicity shots and then, at the insistence of my parents, returned to school. The others, whose parents took a more liberal view of pop music as a choice of career, left and set about making an album. They needed a grown-up drummer, so I was given the boot.

It was a good decision on their part — I wasn’t really much of a drummer — and I was never going to become Phil Collins. But at the time I was distraught. It felt almost as bad as missing out on Eve. But then Peter Gabriel showed up with a cheque for the startling sum of £300. Apparently Jonathan King wanted everything neat and tidy, and signing a piece of paper would clear up the question of any future rights in the recordings.

I could hardly believe my luck. This was a lot of money.

The following year I left school — with just the one exam pass for Art. No obvious career beckoned so I decided I might as well have another go at becoming a professional drummer. I took some drumming lessons and put an advert in
Melody Maker,
the musicians’ paper. It ran as follows: ‘Gentleman, 18, seeks position as drummer?