Читать книгу I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau - Gary Kemp - Страница 14

Like a fickle lover, the young fan of music thinks nothing of switching his allegiances and changes heart at the drop of a 45. As I browse through what is left of my record collection from the first half of the seventies, it flits capriciously from the glam pop of Bolan, Sweet and Gary Glitter, through the art-school histrionics of Bowie, Roxy Music andMott, to the lad-rock of theWho, Humble Pie and the Faces, with a few Trojan Chartbusters and Motown compilations thrown in. What no longer exists in my dusty record cases are the ones that I covertly sold at Cheapo Cheapo’s record store in Soho that summer of ’76 when the Sex Pistols happened, the ones that if discovered would steam up the Ray-Bans of any discerning punk. These included the public-school bands Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Genesis, ELP and, of course, Yes; or basically anything with a Roger Dean cover.

Roger Dean painted the fantasy landscapes of floating grassy islands that so visually suited the dreams of young, sex-shy, middle-class boys soaked in Tolkien and real ale. It also suited progressive bands—photographs of the pale hairy musos themselves could potentially threaten sales. Roger’s topographic panoramas were all the appetiser I needed before the needle hit the record and the sound of either Bachian or wistful prog filled my bedroom.

Dad had upgraded the front room’s entertainment to a ‘music centre’, making Mum’s ornaments suddenly homeless. I asked if I could have the old radiogram, and he pulled it apart and rebuilt the turntable, amp and a movable mono speaker into the gap in the wall behind the headboard of my bed. In 1971, when Arsenal won the double and the outside of our house became decorated like a battleship, in red and white bunting, my brother and I placed the speaker on the window ledge to blare out the raucous ‘Good Old Arsenal’ to the entire street. But now, lying on my bed, immersed in folk-styled fantasy lyrics of namby-pamby desire, I’m leaving my humdrum Islington reality on a floating hillock of Roger Dean’s design, and probably passing some ‘Watchers Of The Sky’, or even a ‘Siberian Khatru’. From here I can see the remnants of my discarded bands spread out below me like fallen idols, while I gloat from above, aloft on my own smug superiority.

What had caused this levitation in musical taste was grammar school. Dame Alice Owen’s had brought together the working-class and the middle-class kids of Islington and the battle played itself out in the quad of cultural choice. Bowie boys lined up against prog rockers; lager drinkers foamed at the mouth against the anti-fizz brigade of the Campaign for Real Ale; while tartan-scarfed geezers, with their war cry of ‘Rod is Guv’nor’, fought tooth and nail with the yeomen manquÉs of the English folk revival. Intellectually—and technically—prog felt superior to pop and embraced my desire for something more challenging. But my journey on that floating tuffet said more about my aspirations within the playground than any real musical taste. Somehow, with skilled diplomacy and a lot of hot air, I managed to hover disgracefully between all camps.

When I arrived at Owen’s, the school still had one foot in its public school past of classics, fagging and gowned teachers, some of whom were permanently lost in their own brown studies. The other foot, platform-shod, stomped its way forward into the comprehensive future that was planned to happen in 1976. This schizophrenia seemed to embody itself in the architecture: two buildings, one Victorian and musty with cloisters and ghosts for the boys; the other—keeping the girls tantalisingly separate from us—was a sixties vision of the future, all glass and sexy steel geometry. We were to be the final intake on this site, whose foundations in Islington went back to 1613 and the charitable dream of the eponymous Tudor lady. The school was to relinquish its grammar status and move to Potters Bar.

Over the years, Owen’s had spawned some famous names, the ancient actress Jessica Tandy being the earliest that people knew of, followed by the actor Joss Ackland and, the one we were most proud of, the legend of Owen’s reviews, the film director Alan Parker. There must have been great politicians, judges and curers of fatal illnesses, but frankly the media names impressed us the most. Three years above me, Steve Woolley would play a part in the making of Spandau Ballet before going on to run Palace Pictures and produce the hit movies Mona Lisa, Scandal, The Company of Wolves and Absolute Beginners. In his year a chirpy cockney kid called Chris Foreman would leave at sixteen and, with his mates from Camden, form a ska band calledMadness. It was this frisson of clashing cultures and class that led to its rampant creativity. The working-class boys would be there on creative merit and charm, and the arts, not the bar, were where we saw ourselves as potential champions.

Those first moments in a new playground are a feverish jostling for status that can brand a boy for life, and I was terrified on my first day there. My mother had bought me a pair of trousers big enough to give me as much wear as possible, and so the turn-up inside went up to my knee. They looked ridiculously wide and my fear was I would be confused for a ‘wally’ and they would condemn me to the infamous and terrifying ‘Fag Cage’. The Fag Cage was a tall gate in the quad that when pushed back against the wall would create a tight little medieval prison for the poor first-year boy chosen as torture victim. Thankful that it wasn’t me, I stood, hands in pockets, desperately pulling my flapping trousers in as tightly as I could, while the chosen quarry was dragged screaming from a group of new boys and placed between the wrought-iron gate and the wall. His back scraped the red brick as he slumped inside the cage, while large, acned lads prodded and abused him until a bored member of staff strolled over and set the blubbing, permanently scarred creature free. Unfortunately, being the last year’s intake at the school, we never got the chance to pass that particular baton of cruelty on.

There were six of us working-class lads who’d made the grade at Rotherfield and every one of us was named Gary. My name gives a lot away: middle-class kids are just not called Gary; neither, it seems, is anyone born later than about 1965. However aspirational I would try to be, no matter how much I would smarten my accent, ‘Gary’ is always the giveaway and has me bang to rights when among the Simons and Julians.

I was probably very lucky not to make the Fag Cage, given that I took time off to make films and occasionally carried a guitar to school. For a moment there was a rumble of discontent about it in the year above, but being in films was something that seemed to give me an aura of protection, a veneer of something otherworldly—they weren’t sure how to despise it as it was way off their map of things to hate—and playing guitar was generally considered a lot cooler than swotting at schoolwork, being too fat to do sport or playing the violin. A friend of mine, Neil Barnes, who fearlessly brought his violin to school, took some terrible lashings for what was considered to be a symbol of great queerness. Neil would have the last laugh, though. Small, glasses-wearing Neil would eventually grow to stand tall in contact lenses, and become extremely successful in an electronic band called Leftfield.

Blessed were we that the school’s trustees happened to be the guild of brewers. From the first year we were given what was called ‘Beer Money’, a subsidy and stamp of approval for our drinking.We boys were taken to Brewers Hall in the City and, with Masonic-like ritual, silently lined up to approach the Master of the Worshipful Company of Brewers and receive an old crown coin in return for a silent and respectful nod.

‘Boys, you must promise to save this money,’ the Master said piously, surrounded by grand heraldic ornamentation, ‘until you are old enough to spend it on beer.’

At Owen’s this was about thirteen and a half. At that point we were allowed to spend our annually increasing payment in the Crown and Woolpack, a pub that adjoined the school building like a classroom for extracurricular studies. Here, certain members of staff openly encouraged our loyalty towards the ancient livery of brewers that owned our school. This dedication was visually borne out by the crest emblazoned proudly upon our blazers: a shield containing six sheaves of barley and three barrels of beer.

If I were to blame anyone for my journey into prog rock then it would be Ian Bailey. Ian was three years above me but we both took guitar lessons in the music room of the girls’ building and I befriended him immediately, looking up to his musical talent and superior knowledge. Slight, with thick, curly black hair, glasses and a soft-spoken voice, he played rock keyboards like a professional and we soon started playing together around the piano in the music room.

Once a week we had open assembly and pupils could contribute to that morning’s events in the musty, oak-panelled hall. Ian and I, along with a drummer from my class called Chris ‘Ossie’ Ostrowski, decided to perform two songs in front of this yawning, captive audience, one of which was ‘Light My Fire’. I sung while Ian took the opportunity to go for the full Keith Emerson, his hero at the time, and placed his Bontempi organ at right angles to the piano for full prog-rock simultaneous double-keyboard playing. To excite the audience even more—and probably himself—he wore a denim jacket slashed to the waist with nothing else but a gold medallion underneath. Being but measly third-formers, Ossie and I had to put up with wearing our school uniforms, and were bitterly envious of Ian’s real rock chic. The assembled boys, used to sermons from our begowned headmaster, Puddyfat, lapped it up.

After our triumph in the school hall, I’d visit Ian’s house in Stoke Newington, where we would jam around the sitting room’s upright piano while his tiny Jewish mother served us tea and encouragement. Here, we would write songs together for what would soon become my first proper band. Ian had started working Saturdays at Howarth’s Music in Camden Passage, a middle-class area dominated by antique shops where I’d witnessed the hippy commune in 1968. By the early seventies the London hippies had moved their spiritual home from San Francisco to LA and accordingly had swapped sandals for cowboy boots, Afghans for jean jackets and Love for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The Western front had arrived in London and chilled-out desperados with tight denims and pasty faces roamed the knick-knack stores of the Passage. A few of these lonestars, when they weren’t drinking over rollups in the Camden Head, centred themselves around Paul Howarth’s shop. Two of them, Ian Fox and Mickey Ball, were looking to form a band and both fell upon Ian Bailey. Of course, Ian wanted to include his schoolmates, and within a few days, Ian, Ossie and I were rehearsing with these guys in the cramped basement of the shop.

Mickey, with Zapata moustache, played bass. He was an old mod turned urban cowboy who loved soul, while Ian Fox, on second guitar and whole-earth beard, was strictly a country cockney, and being the most organised, became leader. He introduced me to Little Feat and the Doobie Brothers, Southern-fried funk that I loved to play on my guitar. Actually, the confusion between the two Ians I’m experiencing as I write was the same for us in rehearsals and led to Ian Bailey’s renaming. At that time Jess Yates (whose daughter Paula I would meet in just a few years) was a household name for his Sunday evening religious programme, where he sat smiling behind his organ. Ian Fox took to calling Ian Bailey ‘Jess’ as a tease, and, sounding more cowboy, it stuck.

Our first public performance was on the pavement in front of the music shop during the Camden Passage festival in October 1974. Our set included a Beatles song, a Herbie Hancock instrumental and an Average White Band number; it lasted half an hour and when we finished we started again. But what made that cold night particularly auspicious was the appearance of two guys from school who’d come down to watch, hang out and help us with the gear. Both were called Steve.

Steve Norman was a good-looking blond boy that I vaguely knew from my class at school. He was learning to play guitar and I’d spotted him in the music room watching me once as I sang ‘The Highwayman’, an Alfred Noyes poem that I’d set to music. The other Steve, Steve Dagger, was in Jess’s year. He was obsessed with music and its history, especially Motown and the Small Faces, and was the first mod-revivalist I knew. Along with his Chelsea boots, Sta-Press and matelot top, he sported a blond, mod haircut that made him stand out from the crowd. An only child and a fellow son of a printer, he lived in a high-rise in Holborn. Fervently left wing, Steve had views upon everything musical and political, and although he was subdued and thoughtful, his company would become inspirational.

The gig was a local success and after some additions of Kemp/ Bailey numbers to the set, Ian was out looking for gigs. The Same Band was typical of Ian’s dry sense of humour and given that we were anything but unique, the name he chose suited us. Pub rock was happening, and the pubs were full of bands wanting to be the Band—Ducks Deluxe, Brinsley Schwarz, BeesMakeHoney—all playing American-style boogie. So we added ourselves to the list and the Pied Bull near Chapel Street market and the King’s Head in Upper Street became our usual stages. But most of all, we rehearsed. And made our way through drummers.

Ossie could never turn up on time and after grander and grander excuses culminating in a lie about a burst blood vessel in his arse, we relieved him permanently of his drum stool. The next drummer seemed to be Camden Passage’s main drug dealer, which kept him busy between sets but left him a little vague about arrangements. And then Mickey retired at thirty—at twice my age he must have been feeling the strain. Ian took over on bass and I became the only guitarist. Still hovering on Roger Dean’s floating mountain, I wrote a Tolkien-inspired ballad called ‘Lothlorien’. It was born out of my latest inspiration—folk.

With Steve Norman I’d started visiting a folk club at the Florence pub near Upper Street, a real finger-in-the-ear, knit-your-own-beer sort of place. The English folk scene was going strong, and although it was a home for nervous, intellectual introverts, I had a deep feeling for the music, even getting up one night to sing my ‘Highwayman’. The early seventies folk revival seemed to come from a general desire to return to the loyalties of a simple past, a reaction to the sixties op-art future and Wilson’s ‘white heat’ utopia that never came. And by early 1975 it definitely hadn’t arrived in our street.

The Kemps were still in their rooms in Rotherfield, with no bathroom and one outside loo shared between three families. My parents, far from interested in middle-class folk nostalgia, were desperate to get the luxury that their friends in high-rise places had, and they quite rightly craved an avocado bathroom suite, a warm, dry loo seat, and maybe even a small area outside for greenfly to gather. When my memory is lit by the candlelight of Ted Heath’s Three-Day Week, the place takes on a certain Dickensian nostalgia, but in reality the enforced Victorian living conditions only added to the coldness and grimness of our situation. In any case, my brother and I were getting a little too old to share a bedroom, and had to satisfy our daily desire for teenage privacy in the damp shed of that smelly yard toilet.

The opposing walls above our beds reflected our separate interests in a kind of face-off of passion.While mine was hung with a growing collection of stringed instruments, Martin’s was a riposte of kung fu posters. Martin, who played football for Islington and had had a trial for Arsenal, was much sportier than I was, and he invariably beat me in our occasional fisticuffs. And so his burgeoning showmanship found its stage on the football pitch, with his deft attacking touches enhanced by a customised pair of football boots that he’d painted sky blue and lined with fake fur from Mum’s sewing bag. He balanced this with some wonderfully intelligent acting—being given the chance to co-star in Glittering Prizes, a drama for television starring Tom Conti—and being offered a place at the other Islington grammar school, Central Foundation.

Although 138 Rotherfield Street meant a sparse and cramped existence, it was a rock of love for my brother and me to venture from and return to, a place of safety where we found confidence and therefore a growing success in our lives. My parents, on the other hand, deserved better.

My acting career with Anna had fallen away, owing mostly to my growing lack of attendance because of my obsession with the band and music, although I did keep my thespian leanings going at school. A teacher called Roger Digby, a large bearded bear of a man who played a squeezebox and Morris-danced in his spare time, had the inclination to pull together some ambitious school productions. The first was The Boy Friend, where I charlestoned as Bobby Van Husen, and the second was an even camper musical, Salad Days, in which I was given the lead.

Things weren’t going so well with the Same Band, though. Flicking through the music papers one day, we saw a gig listed for none other than the Same Band. But it wasn’t us. A trip to meet them was made. The confrontation went something like this:

‘How long have you been the Same Band?’

‘We’ve been the same band since school.’

‘No, how long have you been the Same Band?

‘I’m sorry, but we’ve been the Same Band longer than you have. I’ve never heard of the other Same Band.’

‘But we are the Same Band. We’ve done lots of gigs. You can’t have the same name as us—people will think we’re the same band!’

‘What?’

‘We can’t have the same name. One of us has to be another band.’

‘Another Band? That sounds awful.’

Pause.

‘Oh, whatever…Shall we toss a coin for it?’

We lost.

In 1975 Islington Council were in the process of renovating the houses in our area, and with great excitement we were suddenly relocated two blocks east to Elmore Street and a ‘modernised’ Victorian terrace with our own front door and all the amenities we’d craved. My room was small, but at least after a hot bath I had my privacy. Mum got her avocado suite, and Dad finally had a garden to play in. To us, it was a mansion. In the summer evenings I would sit alone with my guitar on the little six-by-six square of grass, and watch the sun dancing upon our washing line. But my meditative little tuffet was about to crash against an accelerating new wave.