Читать книгу What Does This Button Do? - Bruce Dickinson - Страница 15

I was in London, with an agenda, an aim but no plan, and a Government grant putting actual money in my pocket. My first problem was surviving the day I arrived. I was immediately summoned to the head of the history department, Professor Leslie. He held up the piece of paper with my A level grades.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ he demanded.

‘Ah, well. I did have a little problem.’

‘What … problem?’

‘Well, you see, I was chucked out of school and had to home study.’

‘Why? Why were you thrown out?’

‘Er … drinking,’ I offered.

He pointed at me, and his eyes looked like giant gobstoppers behind the twin television screens that were his glasses. He also had an alarming resemblance to Mr Toad.

‘I have got my eye on you,’ he declared. ‘My spies will be watching you. A student needs only a bed, a chair, a desk and a suitably illuminated light.’

‘Well, thank you very much,’ I replied and, breathing a sigh of relief, I headed directly to the student union bar, where a fantastic pint of Bass lay in wait, priced at a quarter of the cost of beer in a pub. Happy days.

I had a plan cunningly concealed from my parents, and in truth even from myself. They were puzzled by my choice of a history degree.

‘What use is that?’ they asked.

‘Useful in the army,’ I replied. But the thought bubbles around my head told a different story.

I had a plot: anything to get out of here, and if I am going to be a rock singer, it must be London – but I can still join the army if it all falls apart. And here I was, almost out as soon as I’d arrived. I sipped my pint. Priorities, I thought. Number one, virginity. Must lose it, and fast.

I put an end to my military ambitions once and for all by joining the London University Officers’ Training Corps. I won’t dwell on the subject. I turned up to the drill nights and they were dreary affairs compared to running around the Northumbrian desolation of Otterburn with machine guns and steelworkers. It was more a gathering of chinless wonders intent on dressing up in ill-fitting uniforms and boots that had never seen mud.

I soon fell in with a lot of drunks, a very mixed crowd, and discovered they were called medical students. This, I thought, was the beginning of the end for virginity. So I began a career washing coffee cups late at night after the pubs shut, in the mistaken belief that doing useful things might make a 19-year-old dental student swoon. Eventually she did swoon, but not before I discovered that she was a virgin too, and worse, could recite chapter and verse the pharmacology of birth control. This removed the frisson of pure lust, but replaced it with a comforting reliability based on sound clinical practice. Practise we did, though.

That taken care of, I set off in search of rock ’n’ roll and the secret of the universe. And it was only Friday afternoon.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to spot musicians, especially rock musicians. Either wandering around in a daydream or driven by a burning ambition, they are often given away by guitar cases, drumsticks or a copy of Melody Maker turned to the classified adverts in the back. As quaint and faintly ridiculous as it sounds now, Melody Maker was the only serious magazine for adverts of musicians wanted, gear for sale, studios available, van for hire and all things rock and musical.

It was a broadsheet, and basically black and white. Interlopers like Sounds magazine had colour centrefolds of newspaper-grade quality – large sheets of toilet paper in order to try to make inroads into Melody Maker’s circulation.

So I just spotted a Gibson SG being carried, out of its case, by a slight, curly haired guy.

‘Hiya. Nice guitar. What kind of stuff you into?’ I asked.

‘Priest, Sabbath, Purple.’

So in the space of 30 seconds we had a band. Martin Freshwater was his name and he knew a bass player called Adam. Then we unearthed Southend’s very own Jon Lord, Noddy White.

Bits of Noddy looked like Noddy Holder of Slade, hence the name, and I never found out if he had been born with another one. Noddy taught guitar, had a double-neck bass and six-string combo, and an organ that didn’t sound nearly as impressive as it looked. All we lacked was a drummer.

Steve was the only non-student, and I have utterly forgotten how we found him, but he lived in Catford and had more drums than I had ever seen in my life.

We found a large room in the disused kitchens of the halls of residence, set up some kit and made a noise. The walls were tiled and the stainless-steel sinks created a natural tinny reverb, so the whole experience was like playing inside a biscuit tin.

I asked Noddy to show me how to play guitar, and I slowly crabbed and clawed and contorted my stubby fingers into the requisite shapes. Immediately I started to write, and the first thrill of creation soon turned to frustration without the ability to create form and structure.

I never forgot the initial joy, the thrill of that moment of inception, of meaning. Even if it only meant something to myself, and even if it ultimately was deemed rubbish. There was a purity in the art of creation. By now, we had worked up a small repertoire, and all the material was our own. We were basically ready, or so we thought, to get some gigs.

But we needed a name.

Names are vexatious things. They can unwittingly define and doom a band to perdition, or, even worse, to be damned by faint praise.

A name creates the tightrope that every band walks. Rock music walks that tightrope for eternity: too pomp, too punk, too serious, too laughable, too out of tune, too technical – none of it matters as long as you stay on the tightrope. In fact, it’s exciting to watch as you wobble.

But it’s hell if you fall off.

In 1977 punk was in full flow, and Queen Mary College, Mile End, the East End, was smack-bang in the middle of it. The Pistols’ secret gigs, the Jam, Bethnal – a punk band with a violinist. What’s in a name?

We played way too fast, and the more excited we got, the faster we played.

‘Speed?’ Noddy suggested.

‘Speed?’ I queried.

‘Yeah. Cos we play too fucking fast.’

None of us, and I mean NONE of us, had any idea that speed was a drug, and a rather popular one for a culture that hadn’t discovered – and anyway couldn’t yet afford – cocaine. Beer was the only drug in town. In the student union after 5 p.m. there was a gaggle of music fiends who stood by the jukebox and fiercely disagreed every day about the same things. They shouted at each other and remained friendly at the end of it. Future world leaders and football supporters, take note.

The union bar contained all shades of red, from light pink in high heels to communist scarlet, with blood-stained hatchets to bury in the heads of the filthy capitalist oppressors. As an avowed contrarian, I stood up and opposed a few of the more silly motions in public debates. It was worth it, just to wind up these po-faced and self-important arbiters of student political opinion.

The Socialist Workers Party rep was always polite but intense – a duffel-clad class warrior. We would have entertaining arguments before he decamped to plot the coming apocalypse, leaving me with the thought that I was on the list.

‘The Titanic,’ ‘I reminded him, ‘also had a list, and look what happened there.’

There were, however, departments in the student union that actually did things, as opposed to talking about doing things. Entertainment seemed absolutely the place to go. The entertainment officer was elected by students, along with his or her deputy, and essentially became a student-union-funded concert promoter.

Queen Mary had, and still does have, an extraordinary facility, the Great Hall. Built in the 1930s as the People’s Palace, it had one of the largest proscenium stages in London. Now it has been modified as more of a multi-purpose space, but back in 1977 it was still a theatre with a seated balcony and a large floor, which, for gigs, was devoid of chairs.

I started out as a volunteer by pushing boxes around and loading in and out for various bands. I assembled the ‘Atomhenge’ for Hawkwind, and these days I drink in my local pub with the drummer, who is now one of the UK’s leading authorities on waste recycling. At the same show were the reformed Pirates, minus Johnny Kidd himself, of course, who had been killed in a car crash some years before. The guitarist, sadly now deceased, was called Mick Green, and he is pretty essential listening for any guitar player.

Variously, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Lone Star, Racing Cars and Supertramp all adorned the People’s Palace stage. The BBC used it for a series of Sight and Sound in Concert broadcasts, and all the shows were open to the public. I did a bit of everything, from front of house to backstage and security – and a lot of truck loading.

From the sold-out psychedelia of Hawkwind to the smell of dirty old cookers and musty carpet was a reality check, but in our little rehearsal biscuit-tin Speed built up a repertoire that was an interesting but very odd mix. If we were a garden of sound, we would have been a mangled tornado of dead leaves and twigs, with the occasional daffodil visible through the browned gale-force fugue.

My two self-penned, very primitive guitar riffs were called ‘FBI’ and ‘Snoopy’. I possessed a large stuffed version of the cartoon character created by Charles Schulz. Snoopy abuse was a prominent feature of the show. I wish I could tell you why.

Our first gig was at the Green Man in Plumstead, where we played to not a lot of people. Snoopy was disembowelled and we played extremely fast and largely out of tune.

It went down a storm and the promoter gave us a residency once a month.

To get to and from gigs, we stole – er, borrowed – the college minibus. It had seats and windows, so the seats had to be removed and the bus loaded up out of sight, then rapidly driven through the gates before somebody realised that the windows were full of Mr Fender, Mr Marshall and a big stuffed white dog with a black nose.

After all the gear was in, there was no room for people, so we had to travel by train. We would then sneak back after the gig and replace the seats before dawn.

My first year at university wasn’t half bad. I saw a lot of bands and played in a band. I learnt to play bad guitar, wrote my first songs and did gigs. Time to move on, up and in – or maybe that should be down and out.