Читать книгу I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau - Gary Kemp - Страница 12

The guitar was awkward to carry. I held it by the neck, my skinny arms aching as I fought to keep it from hitting the pavement. I had its body tied in a plastic shopping bag, probably from some peculiar idea of decency—it felt wrong to parade the thing exposed through the street, especially its two mournful ‘F’ holes. A late spring sun was starting to warm the air as I walked the few hundred yards to school. Apart from where Bentham Court now stood, our street had survived the Blitz—and the developers—and the little front gardens of the more privileged tenants blossomed with roses and hydrangeas, their morning scent reassuring. Being so close, school felt part of my home, my little universe of four blocks that included the swings, shops, family and friends.

Every lunch break I would come home with Martin for ‘dinner’. Dinner was always at one o’clock—the evening meal at six being ‘tea’ and usually something like Spam or fish fingers (sometimesMum would boil a pig’s trotter as a ‘treat’—a pink and often hairy amputation in a bowl of broth that you’d tug at with your teeth until it was mutilated). But dinner meant chops, sausages or mincemeat, and Dad would come back from work for that hour and we’d sit together as a family. It was wonderful but, with some sadness, I was already anticipating its loss. In September I would begin at the local grammar school, Dame Alice Owen’s, and today Rotherfield leavers were to receive their end-of-school prizes. The headmistress, Miss Bannatyne, would make a little speech, hand out the books and then, at some unrehearsed point, I was to provide the entertainment by performing two songs that I’d written.

I’d had a choice that Christmas: to ignore the guitar and sulk until it was returned to the music shop in Holloway Road for the five pounds it cost, or make an attempt at learning it. I soon found myself becoming obsessed with the thing. I loved it most of all for the privacy it gave me. This was different to the solitary wonder of books and comics; here I could create the atmosphere I wanted and the sound of it soon became a close friend.

BertWeedon was a London guitarist who’d had some success in the fifties. A smiling, unassuming celebrity, he based his style on Les Paul and enjoyed a hit with ‘Guitar Boogie Shuffle’. Play in a Day was his successful tutorial book for the guitar. Its red cover with black-and-white photo of the smiling, freckled Bert looked dated even in 1970, but inside was a method based around chords and rhythm that was simple for the novice. Hours were spent with Bert attempting to get my fingers into the correct positions, which wasn’t easy as my guitar’s steel strings were like cheesewire on my young fingertips. The usual guitar for beginners was the nylon-stringed Spanish version; however, the sound and style of my guitar, picked by my father by chance and from budget, were much more rock‘n’roll. And it also looked damn good in a mirror.

And then something odd happened. I’m not sure what inspired it or why I did it as I had no concept of writing a song, but once comfortable with some prosaic chord changes on the cheese-cutter, I began to sing my own melody over them. It was thrilling and I couldn’t stop lalaring it.Mr Allison, my class teacher at Rotherfield, was a guitar player too. Young and geeky, in Buddy Holly glasses and tweed jacket, he offered to help me with my playing during break times and I showed him what I’d come up with. A friend, Gary Jefferies, was present, and Mr Allison suggested that we both try writing some words to go with the tune. As it was the end of March, he thought that it might have an Easter theme.

My mother had deep beliefs, but like alcohol, church was only for weddings, and though within a year or so I was, precociously, to dump all spiritual belief, Religious Knowledge was at that time one of my better subjects. Equipped with the story the lyrics for the song came easily and the first verse still remains firmly in my head.With soft rhymes and bad grammar, I was obviously made for pop music.

Jesus rode through Jericho on his way to the cross

He met blind Bartimaeus, who his sight had lost

Jesus touched his eyes and Bartimaeus could see again

So Jesus rode on safely to Jeru-oo-oo-salem.

Probably under the influence of a recent Roger Whittaker single, I decided to intersperse the verses with an annoyingly whistled phrase, but Mr Allison was impressed, and within the week we had a group of children from my class singing it. We performed my first song in front of the school just before Easter—whistling included. My parents were thrilled; their gift was worth more than they’d thought.

That weekend Dad drove me and my guitar to Waterloo. In the novel Brighton Rock the anti-hero, Pinkie, records a nasty message for the innocent Rose in an acetate-booth at a railway station. The booths were the size of telephone boxes and once inside you’d pop a coin in a slot and through a window you’d watch a smooth acetate disc being lowered on to a turntable. A needle landed and as you spoke your voice would be etched into the disc’s soft blankness. When finished the disc would slide out, equipped with an envelope for you to post it to a loved one or, as in Pinkie’s case, not so loved. In 1971 on the concourse at Waterloo Station stood what must have been the last booth in London, the telephone now being ubiquitous, except of course in our house, where we’d have to wait another four years for that modern pleasure.

I slipped the plastic bag off my guitar and, holding it ready to play, stepped into the booth.

‘Dad, my guitar won’t fit in.’

‘Go on, I’ve got to shut the door, you’ll be all right.’

He lifted the guitar gently and I bent sideways about ninety degrees. The guitar’s arm was now facing downwards. Dad carefully closed the door and I shuffled farther in.

‘Hang on,’ he said, opening it again, ‘I’ve got to put the money in.’ His arm reached through and the door banged against the front of my guitar as I pressed tighter against the opposite wall. ‘OK, it’s ready. Wait for the light. It lasts a minute.’

A minute? How long was my song? He closed the airlock and it went silent. I saw the fresh, black disc drop and the needle approach its edge. The red light went on and I looked outside at Dad, who was mouthing ‘Go on’ through the glass. I began strumming.

‘Jesus rode through Jericho on his way to the cross…’

The station was busy with Easter trippers and I was aware of people glancing at us while I sang and Dad proudly guarded his young artist’s recording studio. I reached the final verse and saw that the needle was only a few revolutions away from the end of the disc. I sped up, trying to fit it all in. The final bars were now frantic as I began racing towards the end; and then the light went off. The needle lifted and the disc whirred and started its sedate little journey towards the exit hole. I hadn’t quite finished.

Nevertheless, I’d made my first record. It felt warm and smelt of summer pavements. I clutched it all the way home in the car, staring at its grooves and wondering at the fine impression my song had made. I played it over and over on my parents’ gramophone until its tiny trenches, ploughed that Easter weekend onWaterloo Station, wore into each other and my voice became a soft shadow, receding into the distance, until eventually I was gone.

The school hall was abuzz with excited pupils. No classes made it too thrilling to behave in any way other than berserk, and the staff were struggling to get everyone quiet and seated in class rows. I settled at the side, my guitar on my lap, plastic bag removed.

At the end of the little hall, thin Miss Bannatyne stood next to a tall, grey, stately-looking man in a long maroon robe. His huge chin supported a wide friendly grin. Around his neck hung a heavy plain cross. ‘Good morning, everyone. I’d like to welcome the Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, who has kindly agreed to hand out the prizes today.’

There would have been some singing and some recorder playing, and a long-drawn-out giving of prizes to the leavers. At some point during the proceedings, I was called up and sat on a chair in front of the school. My now minuscule shorts rode up tight into my crotch and the guitar felt cold on my bulging, naked legs that were being drained of blood by the second. Uncomfortably, and unseasonably, it being midsummer, I played and sang ‘Jesus Rode Through Jericho’—an encore from Easter that my headmistress had insisted upon—followed by a new song. The record-buying and private listening having influenced my playing, I’d written a more contemporary follow-up to the now dissolved first acetate.

My mother was upset about the title. ‘“Alone”? You can’t call it that! They’ll start to worry about you.’ She already had.

Writing songs was a lonely process, it seemed. Although a dark, maudlin number in a minor key, it still somehow managed to contain a whistling refrain. But a pattern, thank God, was not forming, and it was to be my last in the whistling genre.

Strangely, and with some measure of foresight, my headmistress recorded the performance on reel-to-reel and I still have it. Listening to it now, what fascinates me most of all is not my child’s voice, surprising lack of nerves or dreadful whistling, but the noises of the children in the background, children I knew, shuffling, coughing, talking as though it were yesterday, and yet now into the final half of their lives. It’s a distant moment of sublime naivety that I want to reach into and pull out. And somewhere, just off to the side of the singing boy, silent, but to me very present upon the tape, the bishop, making a decision that would help create the man now listening.

In the January of 1971, my brother and I decided to buy our first records.We both had money saved from our paper rounds and together we walked the Essex Road towards a little record shop in Cross Street, painfully called Pop Inn. For such an important event we needed to be attired correctly, and Martin and I were both dressed de rigueur in Brutus shirts with buttoned-down collars.

I had begged my mother for this essential fashion item the summer before, knowing exactly where to purchase it. At the Angel a shop run by some tasty ex-mods was a windowless little grotto of working-class style. Oh, that giddy sensation when I first saw the Brutuses and Ben Shermans, as one of the shop’s oh-so-fashionable owners slipped them off the shelves and laid them out for my delectation. Folded oblong in shape and protected inside their crisp polythene wrappings, they were like perfect portraits of what shirts should be like, all stiff and pleading to be bought. Some were gingham, others a confectionery of ice-cream colours, and all impossible to choose from. I wanted to own every one of them, collect them with the same eagerness that I’d collected World Cup coins the year before, but I had to make a choice and my eyes kept returning to a pale yellow one. I pictured myself in it; I pictured Tony Bayliss and Stephen Brassett looking at me in it; I pictured myself walking into Anna’s in it. The power of making that choice left me light headed, almost a little nauseous with excitement, and then the owner was slipping it into a brown paper bag and I was desperate to get back home.

The smell of the fresh cotton as its lemon folds fell open and caught the light had me falling further in love. Little vents and buttons flawlessly set off its short sleeves, and, as I slipped it on, my skin had never felt such bliss. Leaving its straight-bottomed tails hanging out over my trousers, I would be À la mode that winter, but what terrible trousers they now looked next to my new shirt. These were awful. They had to go. More begging ensued.

Dad took me to a little Jewish tailor he knew of in the East End, and I picked out the electric blue-and-green mohair myself. By the following weekend, the bespectacled cutter had made me the sharpest parallels I could imagine, and although they were unlined, the roughness against my legs was worth suffering. As well as getting a few cast-offs, my brother was quick at catching me up with his own begging, and so there we were, a couple of real tasty geezers in two-tone tonic strides, marching up Cross Street in search of our musical identity.

Two pairs of mini-brogues with Blakies hammered on to the heels clipped their way into Pop Inn. Presented with a large tray of 45s, the baby suedeheads were bewildered as to what they should pick as their first buy. The bearded shop assistant indulged them by languidly playing a few. Martin heard the double-tracked vocals of the Tremeloes’ ‘Me And My Life’ and made his choice. For Gary, the minute the car horn sounded and the singer’s lazy London drawl spoke to him, he knew what he wanted.

‘I think I’m so-phisticated…’

The Kinks’ ‘Apeman’ was my first record on a consumerist journey that would not only shape my life, but would eventually pay me back in spades.

Thursday night was Top of the Pops; it had been since ‘Hot Love’ reached number one in March. Marc Bolan’s T.Rex was now being scrawled over my exercise books, and my second single was soon bought. As Marc flicked his corkscrew locks from his glitter tears, I knew the button-down collars had to go. I grew my hair, had it ‘feather-cut’ in a new ‘unisex’ salon called Stanley Kays, and graduated to a turquoise-patterned tulip collar—probably worn under a knitted black tank top with rainbow hoops—and the ultimate playground desirable, a suede Budgie jacket. Adam Faith’s eponymous TV character, Budgie, became a clothes peg for the West End store Mr Freedom, and we all wanted what Budgie wore.My Budgie jacket was cream with a green yoke. I can still smell its urban opulence, although mine was almost certainly tainted with the pungent smell of burgers from Brick Lane, where my cheaper version was bought. I never extended to the white clogs Budgie also made fashionable, although the star of our playground, a boy called Chris Lambert, certainly did. Captain of the football team, and a magnet for girls, he had everything, and so long before you did that by the time you’d realised you wanted them, his were already worn out. Toppers, Selatios, Wedges, whatever shoe it was, he’d kicked them to bits while you were still begging your mum for them. He laid down the playground’s sumptuary rules of clothing and we followed them as best our parents’ pockets could afford.

T.Rex’s follow-up to ‘Hot Love’ was all pouty plosives and hissy breathing, with a dark, feline groove that crawled all over me the minute I first heard Tony Blackburn play it on Radio 1 while I was getting ready for school one morning. After watching them do it on Top of the Pops, I pestered my mother into buying ‘Get It On’ while we were out shopping the following Saturday. The bearded hippy from Pop Inn looked unimpressed as he dropped it into a paper bag and handed it over. I was dying to get back and bang-a-gong with the Puck-like Marc, but on the way home we had, frustratingly, to stop and buy saveloys and chips. As soon as we were in the house I dived into the shopping bag and lifted the record out from underneath the hot chip bag; but it didn’t feel like a record any more. ‘Get It On’ had warped into something resembling a piecrust or a small fruit bowl with crimped edges, the kind Nan would own. The hot chips had destroyed it. There was no way I was going to get another one so I put it on the turntable anyway. As the needle bobbed like a boat on the high sea the sound left everyone in earshot feeling nauseous. I suffered the indignity on behalf ofMarc, and in between gobfuls of the now cold, shameful saveloy, I sang along anyway. Oddly enough, as with that familiar vinyl scratch we all know and love, I now miss the wow and flutter of an unwarped ‘Get It On’.

It was on a Thursday that the bishop came round. I can say that with some certainty because Top of the Pops was on telly.My mother and father were packing as we were going off to a holiday camp in Westward Ho! at the weekend. The doorbell went and I ran to the window. Below on the doorstep stood the tall man in the maroon robe from prize day. Local kids on bikes wheeled around, staring at him. Someone must have died.

‘It’s the bishop.’

‘What? For us?’ Mum sounded a little frantic.

‘The one from prize day.’

I’d already told her that he’d spoken to me after I played that day, and that Miss Bannatyne was very excited by it, but I wasn’t sure she’d listened.

‘Well, go down, then, and see what he wants.’

I went downstairs and opened the door. The kids tried to look into our passage, probably for signs of grief. On top of all the maroon material the bishop’s grin sat high on his jutting chin.

‘Hello, Gary.’ He was holding a large plastic bag. I stared at him. ‘Are your mother and father in?’

‘Er…Yeah.’

He seemed huge in our little place as he went up the stairs in front of me. His shoes looked worn and dusty underneath the richness of the cloth, as well as a bit odd, as if he were a man in a dress. It seemed a bizarre outfit to be wearing in the street, especially around here, but I assumed he must have come straight from work. I could hear my mother plumping the sofa as we climbed the stairs. I pushed open the front-room door and went in.

‘Hello.Mrs Kemp? I’m Trevor Huddleston. I saw your son perform his songs at Rotherfield. The headmistress gave me your address. I hope that’s all right.’

‘Oh, right. Come in. Sit down. Would you like a cup of tea?’ She had a different voice on. Oh God, not that voice.

‘Yes please.’ She vanished. ‘No sugar. Thank you.’ He took Dad’s chair, putting his bag next to his feet, and I returned to my place on the sofa. ‘I thought you were wonderful at the prize-giving, Gary,’ he said, giving his fist a little shove into the air in front of him. ‘I loved your songs, especially the one about being alone.’

I could feel my mother flinch. ‘We like the Easter one, don’t we, Frank?’ she shouted from the kitchen.

My father came in from the bedroom. He brushed his palms together and shook the bishop’s hand. ‘Nice to meet you. Yeah, we have a record of it we made at Waterloo Station.’

‘It doesn’t work any more, Dad. You can’t hear me.’

The bishop seized his moment. ‘Well, that’s exactly why I’m here,’ he said. I wondered if I’d done something illegal.Maybe even immoral. ‘A few years ago I worked in Africa.’ It occurred to me that that was why his shoes looked so dusty. ‘While I was there I met a young black African boy. A wonderful trumpet player. Still is a wonderful trumpet player.’ His two large hands came out like paddles. For a moment I thought he was going to pray. ‘I gave him a trumpet, to help encourage him. And it has.’ He stopped. Was that it?

Mum came back in with the tea. ‘Turn the telly down, Frank.’ She put the steaming mug on the mantelpiece above the flickering fake coals. ‘Would you like a biscuit?’

Top of the Pops was being ruined.

‘No, thank you, this is lovely.’

They’re clapping on the telly and Jimmy Savile is back on introducing the next band. Except for the blond hair, he looks like a younger version of the bishop.

Dad leant across to lower the volume a little and I shuffled to the end of the sofa, closer to the telly. The singer seemed to be impersonating Mick Jagger, but I loved his feathery haircut.

‘Don’t look at the telly!’ my mother snapped. ‘Look at the bishop!’

‘Eh?’

‘He’s come to see you.’

The bishop smiled. ‘I bought this for you, Gary. If that’s all right with your parents?’

Out of the plastic bag he pulled a box with a photograph of what I thought was a radio, but my peripheral vision was still half-concentrating on the telly and the guitarist and bass player, who were running around like a couple of cheeky schoolmates.

‘It’s called a cassette recorder. Easier than reel-to-reel. I’d like you to have it.’

I wasn’t sure what this meant and stared at the box as he handed it to me. Philips, it said.

‘Every time you write a song I’d like you to record it on to a cassette, write down the lyrics and send them to my house in Stepney.’ I didn’t know what to say and carried on staring at the gift in my hand. ‘Would that be all right?’

I looked up to see he was asking my father the question and took the opportunity to glance once more at what was too fascinating to ignore. They had a football out on stage now, and their skinny legs and high platforms lazily kicked it around while the mandolin player, or whatever he was, did a solo.

‘That’s brilliant,’ said Dad. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much. What d’ya say, Gary?’

‘Thank you very much.’

The singer was singing something about finding a rock‘n’roll band. The bishop could see that I was distracted and a little taken aback by the gift. ‘Do you like pop music, Gary?’

‘Er, yeah.’

‘I’ve just been helping to put on a charity pop concert with a famous guitarist called Pete Townshend. It’s going to be at the Oval cricket ground. We’re helping to raise money for Bangladesh.’ To my pleasure and relief he turned to the telly. ‘He’ll be playing,’ he said, nodding at the screen, ‘Rod Stewart. With the Faces. And the Who.’

He knew them!

‘That’s nice,’ said Mum.

Clapping announced the end of the song and the band looked relaxed and pleased with themselves, tousling their funny hair and shuffling around on stage as if they were too full of energy to stop. It looked like the kind of gang you’d want to be in. And suddenly it came to me: that’s what I’m doing. I play guitar; I write songs; I could do that. I will do that. It was a moment of clarity, an epiphany, delivered by a bishop.

I turned back to him, sitting there in Dad’s chair, swathed in cloth, a heavy cross resting like a sleeping bird on his belly. ‘Thank you,’ I said, glancing down at the box. ‘I’ll do that. I’ve got another song already.’

I will meet Trevor Huddleston, Bishop of Stepney, for a third and final time, but not for another fifteen years. By then he will be an archbishop and the president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. It will also be an extraordinary coming together of his two protÉgÉs: the boy with a guitar from Islington, and the boy with a trumpet from Africa.