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4 A TEENAGE KIND OF VENGEANCE

I was still playing the harmonica, and getting good at it, but it was clear that the guitar was the instrument that mattered. Jimpy and I had been mesmerised by Rock Around the Clock, and Haley’s band only had a single sax player. They marked their Country & Western heritage with a pedal-steel guitar, and the swing was jaunty and extremely cheerful, bordering on manic. The words were often nonsensical. Today almost every early rock lyric has been interpreted as having some secret meaning to do with sex, but if they did I never noticed.

I only liked Bill Haley for a few months, but Jimpy was totally hooked and bought several Haley and Elvis records. While Jimpy was still with me on the Isle of Man, he and a pretty girl named Elaine – with whom we had both fallen in love – started singing Elvis songs together. They lost me there. To my ear Elvis sounded corny, a drawling dope singing about dogs. I just didn’t get it. Unfortunately I had missed his first masterful releases like ‘That’s Alright Mama’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, and had come in directly on ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Love Me Tender’, a song that made me want to vomit, especially when Jimpy and Elaine crooned it at one another. In his movies (apart from Jailhouse Rock) Elvis confirmed my view of him as a chump.

After the holidays I started my second year at Acton County Grammar School. To my parents’ enormous joy, my mother finally got pregnant, and my brother Paul was born. Mum and Dad made plans to move to a bigger flat, and found one on the same street where Dad’s parents still lived on Uxbridge Road. It seemed good karma all round. In the new flat, on Woodgrange Avenue, I sat on a ladder in the empty dining room, playing my harmonica. I knew this was going to be a lucky place. I had my own room with a door, and Paul was the sibling I’d always wanted.

That autumn Dad got tickets for Jimpy and me to see Bill Haley live at the old Regal cinema at Marble Arch. I went along mostly for Jimpy’s sake. We had seats in the highest gallery, the very back row, where we were surrounded by rowdy older teenagers. The cinema had been structurally weakened by bombs, so when the audience bounced enthusiastically to the beat the gallery literally shook. (The building was demolished a few months later.)

Several boys at school had got the rock ’n’ roll bug, but their interest seemed confined to whistling whatever record was number one at the time. Jimpy got his father to make him a guitar. He stood in front of the mirror, wiggling like Elvis, strumming at the tuneless piano wire with which Fred had strung the homemade instrument. One day I grabbed the wooden box and, not quite knowing what I was doing, picked out a tune. Jimpy was gobsmacked. He ran into the other room where both our dads sat drinking, and brought them in to hear me. Dad didn’t say much, but Fred Beard said, ‘If he can play that thing, he could do really well with a proper guitar.’

Dad wasn’t convinced. I badgered him, but because I’d never followed his advice and learned to read music he wouldn’t take my aspiration seriously. (Without a piano in the house I’m not sure how he thought I would be able to learn.)

Ironically, it was Denny who stepped in. She bought me a guitar that she saw hanging from the wall of a restaurant, whose owner was a friend of hers. It was an awful instrument, almost harder to play than the one Fred had made for Jimpy, but I was delighted. After I got it correctly strung, I started learning a few chords. Within minutes three strings had broken and the neck of the guitar started to bend, but I just reduced the tension and made do with the three remaining strings.

One day I was strumming when Dad’s trumpet player friend Bernie Sharpe heard me in my room and looked in. ‘You’re doing well, Pete,’ he said. ‘Isn’t he, Cliff?’ No response from Dad, but alone in my room picking out notes on my guitar I had visions of leaving him and his glorious musical traditions behind. Deep down, I suspected that my father had had his day.

In 1957 Chas McDevitt had a UK hit with a song called ‘Freight Train’. I first heard the song on BBC TV sung by Nancy Whiskey. Listening to the homespun campfire sound of skiffle I realised that with a guitar and a few chords you could make hit records.

Because of the very real and immediate threat that skiffle music posed to Dad’s recording career – and thus to my family’s security (for now I never seemed to see a saxophone or clarinet player on the TV) – I had a unique window on how society was subtly changing. After decades of dealing with military threats, our parents now faced a danger from within. ‘Youth’ was what it came to be called. I had joined an army of my peers by picking up the guitar, that instrument that threatened my father’s career. Perhaps that’s why I delayed by picking up the banjo for a while, playing Dixieland jazz.

The group of school friends with whom I played music was full of potential Jimpy substitutes. Chris Sherwin was a student drummer, and with Phil Rhodes on clarinet and John Entwistle playing trumpet we met each week to rehearse a quartet in which I played banjo. We called the group The Confederates. In spring 1958, when we began, I was still only twelve years old, but they were already teenagers. I knew John Entwistle a little, and enjoyed his sense of humour. Chris Sherwin acted like the band’s leader, partly because our rehearsals were held at his father’s house on Ealing Green.

Our first gig with The Confederates was at the Congo Club at the Congregational Church in Acton on 6 December 1958. We played for about ten people. I was frozen with nerves as we played a tune we’d made up together, based around a banjo ‘C’ chord I picked out. We went on with ‘Maryland’ and ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’, featuring Chris Sherwin’s explosive drum solo. After we finished I watched in complete amazement as John Entwistle and the other boys jived with girls. One girl tried to teach me the steps, but I just couldn’t hit her marks. I still can’t jive today.

And when the lights went down and the snogging started, I slid away home.

One day, while looking through the junk shop, Miscellanea, that my parents were now running, I found a mandolin, which whetted my interest in the so-called antique trade. Dad enjoyed the simple rhythm and informality of running the shop – it was often ‘closed for lunch’ while he went to the pub. In the summer I stayed with Dad for the few weeks he was playing on the Isle of Man, and when I got home I realised that while I’d been developing my banjo skills other boys also had been getting on with their music.

John Entwistle, Chris Sherwin, Phil Rhodes and Rod Griffiths were rehearsing regularly with Alf Maynard’s jazz band. Alf was a great fellow, but he played banjo, which made me redundant, although I remember playing duelling banjos with Alf at Christmas, when the band of six took in £18. I was briefly part of their brave, grown-up world and could even afford my first decent guitar. Purchased from my parents’ junk shop for £3, it had been built in Czechoslovakia and had a thin but pleasing tone.

I saw less of John Entwistle while he was playing in Alf’s band, and I left music itself behind for a while as Chris tried to help me catch up with the march of adolescence all around me. He took me to my first X film, Peeping Tom (which turned out to be elegant film noir rather than the smut I’d hoped for). He also arranged a doubled paper round for me, earning 30 shillings a week, which seemed a colossal sum of money. It was a difficult round, though, taking in most of the big houses around Ealing Common, and it was awful in winter. One cold wet morning I slept through my alarm and was sacked.

My parents gave me extra pocket money for looking after my brother Paul, but he was a wonderful little boy and I enjoyed it. Denny lurked in the wings like a vampire, but I gave her dark looks, warnings that she wouldn’t get her evil hands on my little brother as long as I was around. Paul’s arrival had made us feel like a real family, and no one was going to take that away from me.

My parents were obviously lovers again. They spent a lot of time at the local pub, which I didn’t understand at the time but I now know that they both had drink problems. Dad needed booze to feel comfortable with his peers, and Mum was trying to deaden the lifelong pain of being abandoned by her mother. She became pregnant again, and my brother Simon was born at home in October 1960, when I was fifteen.

In the last term of grammar school in spring and summer 1961, I continued to count Chris Sherwin as one of my closest friends. He was sweet to my baby brother Simon, and I knew he had a soft heart, but Chris began to harp on my failures with girls. One day, as we headed home from the pool, I lost my temper and said I would fight him. A big fellow, he just laughed and turned away.

I swung my school bag and hit him over the head; to my amazement he dropped to the ground. Assuming he was being silly, I walked off, still angry. Seconds later I felt his fist smash into the side of my head from behind. ‘You knew I had a concussion,’ he shouted. He spread word of my ‘cowardly act’ all over school, which sullied my reputation to the point where John Entwistle seemed the only one who would have anything to do with me.

Then, if possible, my social standing fell even lower. I was cycling home one day, past some boys from my school throwing stones at an old man’s windows, when a policeman showed up. The boys escaped but the copper grabbed me. Incriminated by wearing the same school uniform as the vandals, I was arrested and persuaded with the usual threats of prison to give up the boys’ names.

Next morning the headmaster called out the names I had supplied, and after a pause added my own. We all received the cane, naturally. But this was a new low point for me, as rumours circulated that I had ‘grassed’ on the stone-throwers. Mum remembers seeing me sitting hangdog in a small public park next to the school; it was raining, but still I wouldn’t go in. Dad was so worried he came to speak to me, but I was too ashamed to tell him my problems. My schoolwork slumped, and I locked myself away with my guitar, swearing to go it alone somehow.

By the end of the spring term I had electrified my Czech guitar and bought a small amplifier. John had made his own bass, and we rehearsed together at my house. We would visit a fish-and-chip shop in Acton and walk back to Ealing with our tongues scalded by the hot oil, sharing dreams.

One day Denny burst into my room while John and I were playing music. ‘Turn that bloody row down,’ she shouted.

I looked at her coolly, not replying, but picked up my small blue amplifier and threw it violently against the wall. ‘Fuck off,’ I said, feeling very calm as the amp smashed to the floor.

Denny went pale and left the room.

‘Great,’ John said dryly.

John was playing bass guitar with a group started by our school friend Pete Wilson, a fan of Cliff Richard and The Shadows. Pete’s guitar playing was enthusiastic but clumsy, so when I was invited to join the band I was flattered but ambivalent. Having grown up with the notion that I was going to be an artist of some sort, the idea of playing Shadows songs didn’t set me on fire, but Pete became a friend and he was an encouraging, natural leader.

Mick Brown, our drummer, was a competent musician and one of the most amusing people I’ve ever met. He also had a tape recorder, the first I’d ever come across, and I realised immediately that this was an extraordinary creative tool. He made the first recording of me as I played The Shadows’ ‘Man of Mystery’ solo on my Czech guitar. It sounded good, and I soon got hold of a basic tape machine of my own.

I loved cartooning and drawing – my childhood tour buses had earned praise from Alex Graham, the creator of the famous British cartoon Fred Basset – and I did very well in my art classes at grammar school. The art master encouraged me to take some extramural classes, so in my last term at Acton County in 1961 I became a part-time art student at Ealing Art College. There I began attending Saturday morning introductory lessons with my friend Martin and his next-door neighbour Stuart, hoping to draw nude models and make pots. Martin gave up after a while, but Stuart and I carried our portfolios over the Common together, and tried to dress in what we thought was a bohemian manner.

To make money I worked in Miscellanea. Mum and I often moved furniture together, sometimes entire houses full, and I became strong and wiry. I also began to learn about human nature as it applied to business. Most customers haggled, and some, if they got a bargain, visited regularly to crow about it. The dealers were always quietly looking for a steal.

In the last few weeks of school, exams behind us, the atmosphere changed for the better. It seemed everyone except Chris had forgiven me, and even he had stopped glaring. The Dixieland band I had been excluded from practised as they walked back and forth outside school, and because Alf wasn’t allowed into the school (he was older and had a job) I was invited to step in on banjo. After the months I’d been away from the band one thing became clear: I had progressed faster than the others. At school, for the first time, I felt a part of the human race.

Roger Daltrey had been expelled for smoking, but was still impudently showing up on campus to visit his various cronies. I’d first met him after he won a playground fight with a Chinese boy. I’d witnessed the fight, and I’d thought Roger’s tactics were dirty. When I’d shouted as much, he had come over and forced me to retract. Since then I’d seen Roger around at the foot of Acton Hill, carrying an exotic white electric guitar he’d made himself. He was usually with Reg, a friend I knew from infancy, who carried a 15-watt VOX amplifier. Serious stuff.

I was outside our classroom talking to the form teacher for the final year, the redoubtable Mr Hamlyn, when Roger swaggered up in his Teddy Boy outfit, his hair combed into a grand quiff, trousers so tight they had zips in the seams. Mr Hamlyn welcomed Roger with the weary patience of one who knew there was little point enquiring why Roger had returned to an institution that wanted nothing to do with him. Until he was expelled Roger had been a good pupil, and I think Hamlyn begrudgingly respected him.

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.