Runaway (5 page)

My mother, by contrast, was devout Church of Scotland. And although she never admitted it, I always suspected she was a closet Tory. Her favourite rag was the Scottish
Daily Express
, so I suppose it was only to be expected.

I always felt sorry for my mum, though. She had a marvellous talent for drawing and painting. But her father refused to let her go to art school, despite the impassioned pleas of her art teacher. It simply wasn’t the done thing in those days for a woman to pursue a career in art.

So she applied instead to join the civil service. In the entry examination she came out top for the whole of Glasgow. But naturally, since she was a woman, was rewarded with a job as a telephonist. As if that wasn’t frustrating enough for her, when she married my dad she was handed her jotters. Married women were not allowed to work in the civil service.

She continued to draw and paint, of course, wonderful shaded portraits and watercolour landscapes. But less and less as the years went by. I always perceived in her a feeling that life had somehow passed her by. And while much was passed on to me by my father, perhaps a sense of failure was the one thing I inherited from her. If she had hoped for success vicariously, through me, then I must have been a source of further disappointment.

In 1965, of course, there was no hint of any of that. I was just exploring my talents and, like my contemporaries, being swept along by the sea of change that was washing over the whole country. And music was what drove it, like the moon and the tides. The Stones, the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks. Exciting, violent, romantic, ground-breaking music that fired the imagination and made everything seem possible.

All remnants of the war were swept away by it, too. Rationing, national service (although the draft was still in force across the Atlantic), the stuffy old BBC Light Programme, short hair, collars and ties. There were pirates out in the North Sea playing rock and roll. Anyone with any spark of musical talent wanted to pick up a guitar and play.

I was desperate to be in a group. To stand up onstage and play guitar and sing about love and loss, and this world that shifted beneath my feet. I had music in my head all the time, and it wasn’t long before I found like minds and like talents among my peers.

But I hadn’t always been in love with music. When I was six my parents sent me to piano lessons, taught by a spinster lady called Miss Hale who lived in a semi near Tinker’s Field, just five minutes from our house. I hated it. I remember sitting in her semi-darkened front room, playing scales on an upright piano, the sound of kids on the swings coming from across the road. C, D, E, F. And now chromatics. And if I made a mistake, having my knuckles rapped with a twelve-inch ruler, even as I was still playing.

I didn’t last long there.

Next, I was sent to the Ommer School of Music in Dixon Avenue, which was a good twenty-five-minute bus ride into town. Such was my parents’ determination that I should play. I spent four years travelling back and forth every Tuesday night for lessons. In the dark, in all weathers, and on my own. Kids would never be allowed to do that, these days. I remember very clearly sitting in a café in Victoria Road waiting for my bus home one winter’s night, drinking an American Cream Soda ice-cream float and watching
Mr Magoo
on a black and white TV set high up on the wall. A man came to sit beside me, and when I told him my bus wasn’t due for a while he suggested that he might give me a lift home. But I had been well warned. So I told the owner of the café, an Italian gentleman, who informed the man in no uncertain terms that he should sling his hook. And that Italian stood at the door of his café and watched me on to the bus that night, and every Tuesday night from then on.

But years of Saturday morning theory classes, of practising in winter-cold rooms, or on warm summer nights when other kids in the street were out playing rounders, eventually took their toll. I hated music, I told my folks. I was stopping lessons and never going back.

Then came the Beatles. I remember that first hit single. ‘Love Me Do’. It got to Number 17 in the chart in October 1962, and it changed my life. I can only imagine my parents’ consternation when, six months after giving up the piano, I sold my kilt and my train set to buy a guitar, and was playing it till my fingers bled.

And it’s amazing how like minds are drawn to one another. By midway through 1963 I was playing in a group. All of us at the same secondary school, and just fifteen years old. A couple of the boys I had known from primary school, completely unaware of their musical talents. The others were friends of Maurie.

Maurie was one of those two childhood friends. Luke Sharp was the other (I know! I don’t know what his parents were thinking).

They could hardly have come from more different backgrounds. Maurie’s father was a successful businessman. His great-grandfather had arrived in Glasgow at the turn of the century in a wave of Jewish immigration from the continent. His family settled in the Gorbals, establishing a thriving business in the rag trade, and within two generations had gone from running barefoot in the street to buying a detached home in the wealthy south-side suburb of Williamwood.

Luke’s parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and when I think back on it now it seems a miracle to me that he was ever able to join the group. He was one of those individuals blessed with an extraordinary ear for music. He could listen to anything once, then just sit down at the piano and play it. He had been sent to piano lessons so that he could play the Kingdom songs sung by the Jehovah’s Witnesses at their meetings. Although, in truth, he didn’t need lessons. And when he wasn’t playing or practising, most evenings and weekends he would be dragged round the doors by his parents. Something, I was to learn, that he hated with a vengeance.

It was only at school that he could play the music he liked. And he haunted the music department, playing jazz and blues, and astounding the head of music by being able to perform some of Bach’s most complex fugues by ear.

It is also worth mentioning that Luke was little short of a genius. He had been top of his year three years running and, had he completed his final year, would certainly have been Dux. Today they would probably claim he was autistic.

I first heard him playing one lunch hour. A Scott Joplin ragtime piece. I’d never heard anything like it. An amazing left-hand rhythm punctuated by a complex, jangling, right-hand melody. It drew me along the corridor to the practice room at the end, where he sat playing. I watched, mesmerized by his fingers dancing across the keys. When he had finished, he turned, startled, to see me standing in the doorway.

‘I never knew you played the piano,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘You’ve never been to the Kingdom Hall.’

I had no idea what he meant then, but on an impulse I said, ‘Want to be in a group?’

I’ve heard it said that a face can light up. Well, Luke’s positively shone.

‘Yes.’ He had no hesitation. Then, ‘What do you play?’

‘Guitar.’

‘Sing?’

I pulled a face. ‘Not very well.’

He laughed. ‘Me neither. Why don’t we ask Maurie?’

‘Maurie? Maurie Cohen?’ I couldn’t believe he meant the plump Jewish boy who’d been in our class all through primary.

‘He’s got an amazing voice,’ Luke said. ‘He just auditioned for Scottish Opera, and they want him to train with them.’

‘Then he won’t want to sing with us.’

‘He might. His parents won’t let him do the Scottish Opera thing. They think it’ll distract him from his studies. And they have plans for him, you know?’

Maurie just about bit our hands off when we asked him. And he was much more interested in singing pop than opera, anyway. He thought his parents would be more inclined to indulge him if they saw it as a hobby rather than a career path. And in the end, it was his father who bought most of our equipment.

Our first practice was scheduled a week later in one of the music department rehearsal rooms after school. Me on acoustic guitar, Luke on piano, and Maurie on vocal. We had a list of songs that we’d been learning. Maurie had all the words scribbled down in a notepad. But he turned up with a boy I didn’t know, though I’d seen him around the playground and the corridors. A lad from the downmarket end of Thornliebank. He was kind of tall, and good-looking, with a mop of curly brown hair.

‘This is Dave Jackson,’ Maurie said. ‘Good guitarist, but he wants to play bass.’ He turned to the boy, who stood sheepishly clutching his guitar in its soft carry-case. ‘Tell them why, Dave.’ He grinned. ‘Go on.’

Dave looked embarrassed. He said, ‘I read somewhere that it’s the low frequency of the bass guitar that makes the girls scream.’

We all burst out laughing.

Except for Luke, who said, ‘Well, no, it’s entirely possible that the speed and pressure of a low frequency could have that kind of effect. Although it’s not the sound that has the frequency, it’s the means of making it that does. Sound is a pressure wave through the air –’

And we all threw things at him. A duster, bits of chalk, Maurie’s notepad.

Our laughter was interrupted by the arrival of a good-looking boy with thick, dark hair that tumbled over his forehead, like he was a Beatle himself. Even in his school uniform you could tell that he was powerfully built. And you knew at a glance that he was the kind of boy that the girls would just follow around like little puppy dogs. He was hefting a bass drum, and he set it down in the middle of the room.

‘I’ve got a snare drum, hi-hat, stands and pedals at the end of the hall if you want to come and give me a hand.’

I didn’t know him at all. But Maurie said, ‘This is Jeff.’

Jeff, it turned out, had never played the drums in his life, but had borrowed a basic kit so that he could be in the band with Maurie. Jeff had come from a different feeder primary, but the south-side Jewish community was a small one, and it turned out that he and Maurie had been best friends all through childhood, gone to shul together and even shared their bar mitzvah.

After he had figured out how to put all the bits and pieces of the skeleton drum kit together, Jeff sat down and gave it a thrashing while we stood and watched. Impressive for a first go.

When he finished, he looked at us with gleaming eyes. ‘My dad says if I’m any good, he’ll buy me a kit.’

And so we had our first rehearsal that day. ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ by the Four Seasons; ‘Crying in the Rain’ by the Everly Brothers; Del Shannon’s ‘Hey Little Girl’; ‘Return to Sender’ by Elvis Presley; and a whole bunch of songs from the Beatles’
Please Please Me
album that had been released in March that year.

I wish I had a tape of that first session, to hear what we sounded like. We must have been pretty awful. But it seemed great to us at the time. I was John Lennon, and Maurie definitely fancied himself as Elvis. We discovered very quickly that you don’t have to have a great voice to sing harmonies, and right from that first day we established ourselves as a vocal group, more than anything else. Serendipity, I suppose, but our voices just blended.

As for Jeff, we had to keep telling him to play more quietly. A waste of breath, as we discovered during the next year and a half, as he regularly broke drumsticks. But by the end of that first practice he had decided that a drummer he was going to be. And a full kit wasn’t long in coming thereafter.

_II

Within eighteen months we were fully electric, with individual amps and a PA system, and performing a lot of Tamla Motown stuff for dancing. I had a Fender, and Dave was playing a Höfner violin bass, just like McCartney’s. The music department loaned Luke their Farfisa organ. We were gigging at dances all over the city, and had grown a reputation for being the best group on the south side. We called ourselves The Shuffle, after the Bob & Earl song ‘Harlem Shuffle’.

I had no idea, then, that 1965 was going to be our seminal year, although not in a good way.

It was a year that began with the death of Winston Churchill in January. I have to confess that his passing meant very little to me but, having lived through the war, my mum and dad were glued to his funeral on TV. My mum was in tears. ‘You have no idea what those speeches meant to us in 1940,’ she said, ‘when we half expected to see German tanks rolling down our street at any moment.’

And she was right. I had no idea then. It was only listening to that voice in later years, and hearing the gravelly determination that we would fight them on the beaches, that I realized just how influential those speeches must have been.

But I was preoccupied with other things. The
Beatles for Sale
album had come out the previous month. We knew there was a new single due out that spring, and there were rumours that they were making another film.