Who I Am: A Memoir (4 page)

A few boys looked over at us with interest, curious to see whether Roger still bore me any ill will. He simply informed me that John had told him I played guitar pretty well, and if an opportunity came up to join his band, was I interested? I was stunned. Roger’s band, The Detours, was a party band. They played Country & Western songs, ‘Hava Nagila’, the hokey-cokey, the conga, Cliff Richard songs and whatever was high in the charts at the time. Roger ruled The Detours with a characteristically iron hand. Judging by the faces of those around me, just the fact of Roger speaking to me meant that my life could very well change.

As calmly as I could I told Roger I was interested. He nodded and walked away, but I wouldn’t hear from him again until months later. By that time I had enrolled in Ealing Art College.

5

THE DETOURS

Ealing Art College was a revelation in so many ways: socially, creatively, sexually and musically. The first life-changing event that hit me was the sight of an especially pretty girl across a crowded classroom, and I soon discovered, to my delight, that she adored Ella Fitzgerald and also seemed to like me.

I had very clear musical taste that was more balanced than that of most of those around me. I was impressed by the new trends in commercial music, but not overcome. Elvis was OK, but he was no Sinatra. Connie Francis had an erotic kittenishness but was nothing compared to Ella. Ealing offered lunchtime clubs dedicated to Bebop, Dixieland, orchestral music and opera, played in the lecture theatre on a large, high-quality speaker system. Enthusiasts would make remarks or give short, unpretentious lectures. I attended all of them. But I didn’t just
think
about music. I also had the ability to create alpha-state music in my head, go into a creative trance, have musical visions, and after nearly six years of dormancy this gift was restored by hearing orchestral music again.

Back then I had no idea what all this music was, nor did I have a good working sense of different composers, but listening to Jerry Cass’s radio and growing up with my parents had fed my musical imagination.

I could play a little jazz on guitar, but I told the girl I had a crush on that I sometimes played in a jazz group. This was stretching the truth: I had performed some local sessions, but only with pop bands that played crude jazz to encourage the audience to go home at the end of a long evening.

At one point this girl and her older boyfriend had a tiff, and she sought me out for some intimate time together. When she tilted her head for me to kiss her, I didn’t know what to do. When it came to girls I was still living in a fog of insecurity. When she turned to someone else in our class for comfort, I was crushed. In my imagination she was perfect. Of course, that was the problem. I was living in my imagination, whereas she was real, with a young woman’s needs and desires.

In early 1962, after receiving the call I’d been waiting for, I approached Roger’s house to audition for The Detours. Before I got there, a blonde girl opened the front door and began slowly walking towards me. She was weeping, but when she saw my guitar case she stopped and pulled herself together.

‘Are you going to Roger’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you can tell him this: it’s either me or that bloody guitar of his.’

I knocked on Roger’s door and delivered the message, fully expecting him to break down in tears himself and run after the divine creature, promising never to touch a guitar again.

‘Sod her,’ he said. ‘Come in.’

We went straight upstairs to Roger’s bedroom. He was distracted, and it later turned out that one of the criminals he hung around was hiding from the police under the bed where I sat down to play. The audition was very quick. ‘Can you play E? Can you play B? Can you play “Man of Mystery” by The Shadows? “Hava Nagila”? OK, then. See you for practice at Harry’s.’

The first show I played with The Detours was at a hall next to Chiswick Swimming Baths in early 1962. I was replacing Reg Bowen, a guitarist who wanted to become the band’s road manager. Roger was a sheet-metal worker by day, and had cut his fingers badly that morning, so he disappeared offstage almost as soon as I arrived. I was left to play fumbling lead guitar.

Most of the first gigs I played were arranged by our drummer, Harry Wilson, or his father. We liked Harry. When he made a mistake he’d blush, rage, apologise, analyse, then cheerfully carry on. We rehearsed in his West Acton home, and Harry’s father’s van carried us to our little shows.

I had a single-pickup Harmony solid-body Stratocruiser guitar that Roger had sprayed red for me. We executed fancy choreographed foot movements as we played songs by Cliff and The Shadows (John was especially good at this, Roger especially bad), and we travelled around Greater London and occasionally beyond, performing at weddings, company functions, birthdays and pubs. At one wedding a pianist hired for the intermission laughingly explained that when he was drunk – which was most of the time – he could only manage to control his left hand, the one looking after accompaniment. His right hand took off searching for the melody with a mind of its own. It was one of the funniest things I ever saw, and I worked hard to learn how to do it. At another wedding we received a £50 tip from the bride’s father, and with this astronomical sum we were able to think about buying our own van for the first time.

Although The Detours was Roger’s band, the singer then was Colin Dawson, a handsome young man with a strong conventional pop voice. At an engagement party the bride-to-be tipsily fell for Colin, and there was a moment when the prospective bridegroom threatened a fight. We saw fighting aplenty, and I have Roger to thank for the fact that no one ever laid a hand on me. Even a nasty drunk knew better than to provoke him.

Everyone around me in The Detours drank. Colin’s girlfriend Angela turned eighteen and threw the first teenage party I’d ever attended. People arrived, drank half a bottle of beer and pretended to be drunk so they could spend the rest of the evening snogging whoever they could lay their hands on. It didn’t work for me.

A girl in my class at Ealing took an interest, though, and one day I found myself holding hands with her as we walked through an art gallery. A few days later we went to a party, where she quickly got drunk and started kissing me. This was my first kiss, and I’m not sure it’s fair to say I enjoyed it. I felt more like being eaten alive. A few moments later she kissed another boy from our class, and then disappeared.

It was an excruciating journey home alone on the train; the girl in question was nice enough, but her betrayal didn’t begin to explain the astonishing pain I felt.

Towards the end of my first art-school year The Detours played our first club dance at the Paradise Club in Peckham. We brought in a new drummer, Doug Sandom, and though we were sorry to see Harry go, Doug focused us. He was about ten years older than we were, and he acted like a proper professional musician. One summer evening at Peckham we clustered the equipment closely around his drumkit, turned our overall sound down and achieved a decent balance for the first time. I began to feel we might really have a chance to make some money with The Detours.

Maurice Plaquet, a musician friend of Dad’s, set himself up as agent for our band and got us a date at Acton Town Hall on 1 September 1962, supporting the Ron Cavendish Orchestra. We were billed in the newspaper as The Detours Jazz Group. The accompanying photograph shows us standing close together in suits, ties and professional grins. It was the best photo of me I’d seen thus far and I quickly came to understand the importance of such images: Roger’s pretty younger sister Carol saw it and began to nag him to get us together.

On display in Ealing Art College’s corridors were interactive wooden collages created by our course leader, Roy Ascott, various parts of which the viewer could rearrange. We were to spend a year being disabused of our preconceptions about art, art schools, art teaching and all forms of design. I realised the holes in my education were spectacular.

The school included both the new guard and the old. The latter were tweedy draughtsmen, calligraphers, bookbinders and the like – who tended to be fastidious. The former were denim-clad, in their twenties and thirties, and bohemian. During our first lesson in draughtsmanship the man in charge was old guard. He instructed us how to sharpen our pencils, which hardness to select for which task, how to clip our paper to our boards, how to sit, hold our pencils and measure a set of distant relative scales.

‘Draw a line.’

We each drew a line and were subjected to the harshest possible criticism from the lecturer, who pointed out that the first line should be north-to-south, six inches long, of uniform thickness and drawn with a 3B pencil without a rule; any variation represented self-indulgence unworthy of Ealing Art College students.

The second lesson was conducted by a member of the new guard. It was quite simple, a test to assess the degree of our preconceptions.

‘Draw a line.’

No problem. As if choreographed we each drew a line, north-to-south, six inches long, of uniform thickness, etc. Our lecturer, young Anthony Benjamin, left the room and returned with sculptor Brian Wall. They started to rant around the room, shouting at us. At one point Benjamin produced a small penknife and pricked his finger, dragging blood across a white sheet of paper. ‘
That’s
a line. Do you understand?’ Of course we understood. We were the innocent victims of a struggle between the old and the new.

Another guest lecturer was Larry Rivers, the first gay American junkie sax-playing painter I’d ever met. I felt through him I’d come as close as I ever would to the late Jackson Pollock, some of whose stunning, profoundly chaotic work had actually been exhibited in the corridors of the fine art school for a few weeks. Later I discovered that Peter Blake – my favourite painter – had a studio in Bedford Park, close to my college, which deepened my sense of identification with him.

I experimented with colour and semiotics, and a group of us built a large structure in our classroom, in which we intended to create an Experience Shed. My first attempt at installation sculpture, it felt like a fairground ghost train.

In autumn 1962 none of the people in or around The Detours had much idea what I was up to at art school, and I found it difficult to say much about the band to my art-school friends. Despite starting to make good money with The Detours, I felt they were uncool. I was still living with my parents, but the time was approaching when I’d need to ‘come out’, in both areas of my life – to the band and to my art-school friends. I needed to get myself into perspective.

In the middle of the first term of my second year, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted. On the critical day in October 1962 I walked to college absolutely certain that life was over; why was I even bothering to attend class? When the end didn’t come, I was glad not to have been one of those who had panicked, wept or chattered compulsively until the good news was announced.

Somehow the message I took from this near-apocalyptic event was that I should give the patiently persistent Carol Daltrey a chance. I took Carol for the occasional walk, tried to talk to her about what I was doing at art school, kissed her whenever and for as long as I could in the hallway of the Daltrey homestead, and – through chats with Roger’s older sister Gillian and her sharp boyfriend – heard about a new youth group emerging in West London, the working-class Mods. In the early Sixties in England the teenage Teddy Boy subculture was giving way to two new groups – Mods and Rockers. Mods were into fashion, R&B, motor scooters and showing off the latest dance moves, where Rockers tended towards machismo, exemplified by Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang leader in
The Wild One
.

Gillian’s boyfriend had a black PVC coat and rode a Vespa scooter like a young Italian from Rome. Carol Daltrey said I had a real ‘Modernist’ look, and encouraged me to buy a PVC coat. Sitting with her and kissing her for hours was especially romantic as snow outside ushered in the Christmas holidays. This Mod conspiracy was happening virtually under Roger’s nose, he being more of a Rocker. As I walked home that night, fresh snow falling, I was as happy as I’d ever been, although I knew Carol wasn’t right for me. It wasn’t that she was too young (I was, at seventeen, just two years older), but I was aware that she wouldn’t fit into the art-school part of my life. I wasn’t even sure of my own ability to straddle the two distinctly different worlds of visual arts and music.

Meanwhile The Detours were busy. After Christmas, Leslie Douglas, in whose band Mum had sung in the late Forties, arranged for us to play a lucrative Sunday afternoon slot at the American Officers’ Club in Queensway in London. A number of good local bands played the circuit we were moving into: Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, The Beachcombers and The Bel Airs. I began to play lead guitar when Roger took the microphone to sing his favourite Johnny Cash medley – always a hit with homesick Yanks.

Roger bought a van that I decorated with my Detours logo, using an arrow on the ‘o’. In one photo the four of us are standing by the van looking like dustmen in our black leather collarless jackets. In January 1963 we played five or six shows, but in February the number jumped to eleven or twelve, including our first date at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, which became a mainstay for us. By March we were playing seventeen or eighteen shows per month, and we kept up that busy schedule for quite some time.

In a good week I was taking home nearly £30, which in 1963 was an absurd sum of money. By comparison my art-school grant for the whole year was £140, to be divided over three terms. With money in my pocket I was able to take a trip up to Selmer’s music shop in London’s Charing Cross Road and buy a Fender Pro Amp with a 15-inch speaker. It was loud, trebly and sexy. The salesman who talked me into it was John McLaughlin, who would become a jazz-fusion guitar legend.

Early in spring 1963 I got to know Richard Barnes, whom everyone called Barney. He became a lifelong friend, ally and The Who’s principal authorised biographer. We hit it off quickly and I loved his dry, barbed humour. My awkwardness and self-absorption made me slow to learn from those around me, but Barney was forgiving of this – and every other – defect. I also knew that Barney was aware of my very real musical talent, perhaps even more than I was.

I suffered my first desperate hangover after our drummer Doug introduced me to serial beer drinking at one of our regular gig nights at the White Hart pub. After this I began to show off a little at college, carrying a quarter bottle of whisky around in the back pocket of my Levi’s. Still, I knew that in almost every respect I was lagging behind my peers. The other boys in the band had steady girlfriends, even wives. I had occasional snogs in the back of the band’s van, but my attempts at more serious sexual experiments met with frustration.