in front of me. This was what most people nowadays cite as the single most important television moment, but I just thought the picture was rubbish.
Also in the mix was my Aunt Josie. She was a vital conduit to the teenage culture of the day. She and her mates Lynn and Helen would spin Motown and Trojan records and ensure that the kitchen wireless was tuned to the new Radio 1 whenever they were around. The sounds of Detroit and Jamaica were now a fundamental part of my childhood in suburban Essex. The turbulent sixties ended in just that fashion, with Sid running off with Peggy the barmaid. Nan’s seemingly unassailable rule had been broken along with her heart and her spirit, and she was never the same again. Those of us left in the wake of this disaster left the Tap and Barking behind us and carried on. Nan and Josie went to live with Auntie Pat in Suffolk. Uncle Gerald went to work overseas as a diving engineer, and we went back to Bob who had left the shack for a new home.
We moved to Stanford Le Hope in summer 1969 and, as I was growing older, so music and radio were becoming more and more a part of my life. Our house was a former manse and conveniently situated next door to Stanford Junior School where I would be a pupil for the next four years. It was here that I met up with people who had older brothers. And older brothers had record collections. Children are slavishly populist by nature so it takes an outsider to show you what kind of alternatives might be available to mainstream culture.
Mark Tindale’s brother David was a guitar-playing hipster deep into his Lou Reed and David Bowie. The record player in his room was on a plywood board suspended from the ceiling on wires. I remember going round to his house and picking up the guitar and swinging the neck round and accidentally hitting the record player, sending the stylus skidding noisily across the surface of his brand new copy of Transformer. I was never allowed into his room again. Brian Gooden’s brother John worked for a record label in London so we had all kinds of unknown white label treats available to listen to at Brian’s. Every Thursday I watched Top of the Pops religiously. It came on immediately after Tomorrow’s World. Now I could see those bands who were playing the great songs I was listening to on the radio: Slade, Marc Bolan, David Bowie and my own favourites, The Sweet.
For Christmas one year I got my own small transistor radio. It was a black plastic model with a volume dial, a tuning dial and a socket for an earpiece. My nights were often spent cruising the ether looking for more strange sounds. Every Sunday I would listen to the chart countdown show for what new entries had arrived and how the bands had fared since last week. Some of my friends were so clued in that they recorded their favourite tracks with the condenser microphones that came with their cassette decks. Listening to Radio 1 on medium wave on a Sunday night, however, meant that your enjoyment of the show was usually marred by the repetitive call signal of Radio Prague, a sonorous brass and woodwind jingle that would play for five seconds, then a ten second pause, then it would play again. This would annoyingly go on for the entire hour of the chart countdown no matter how much you tried to fine-tune your receiver.
Mum always had the radio on during the day, so whenever I came home at lunchtime I’d hear what was on. She can’t have been listening to Radio 1 because I often heard comedy shows like I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, Hello Cheeky and I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. Years later I appeared as a panellist on Clue alongside Tim Brooke-Taylor, who didn’t seem that happy as I told him that I used to listen to him when I was at junior school.
Radio started to fall out of favour with me when I got my first record player, a beige boxy Ferguson model with a lid and four speed settings. Now I could pick exactly what I listened to, who needed radio? I had access to music or comedy on my own now and whenever it suited me. Mates would come round with boxes of 7″ singles or comedy albums and we would sit around and listen. The Goons and Peter Sellers were the frontrunners in the comedy stakes. Judge Dredd was a popular musical choice because his songs were all so filthy.
In 1973 I was taken out of Hassenbrook School because I was bombing academically, and sent to a place called Woolverstone Hall. Renowned at the time as ‘the poor man’s Eton’, it was a former manor house located on the Shotley Peninsula just east of Ipswich. The school came under the control of the Inner London Education Authority, so its diverse intake ranged from the sons of the military to those of well-to-do green-grocers and scholarship cases, which was where I came in. Although my cousins were there, I never liked it from the moment I arrived. The second my parents drove away on my first day, I knew I’d made a colossal mistake. I was terrifically homesick and basically spent two years crying myself to sleep. Eventually, though, you get used to anything and more through boredom than resilience the tears diminished, and the only way I could show my displeasure at being sent there was by sucking at all of my subjects.
I was at Woolverstone from September 1974 until June 1978, a time when British pop music was going through one of its most radical upheavals. On my arrival, the sixth form dorms were forbidden to us juniors. But I did occasionally get a pass to go and visit cousin Stuart. There were few ways to denote one’s coolness and sophistication in a boys’ boarding school. Smokers had a certain bad boy cachet, but were ludicrously easy to expose as their blazers would always reek of the stuff when they came back from their hiding places. Cheesecloth shirts were the garment of choice for the sixth form Lotharios whose beautifully parted and feathered hair and icy stares concealed the fact that the constant chafing of their nipples must have been agonising. Then there were of course the mad bastards. These boys would be avoided by staff and pupils alike, and had a propensity for sudden explosions of irrational behaviour. Going to lessons in dressing gowns, openly smoking pipes, joining the gun club and on occasion fighting teachers, the fact that these ordinary seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys seemed like grown men to me only added to their cool mystique.
The greatest weapon most possessed, however, was their collection of long-playing albums. In 1974 progressive rock was the music of choice for your average hipster teen rebel about town, and the biggest band of the day was Pink Floyd. Nowhere was immune to the music of Dark Side of the Moon. Every single study boomed with the chords of ‘Money’ or ‘Great Gig in the Sky’. As a fan of chart pop music, I was intrigued. I’d never heard anything like this stuff. Songs rambled on for over ten minutes, with lengthy instrumental passages and lyrics that were vague, elliptical and full of mystic imagery. Being twelve, rootless and emotionally frail, I was of course drawn to these strange new sounds and inexorably in the winter of 1974 I tragically entered my musical wilderness years.
It turned out that Pink Floyd were just a gateway band. Oh sure, the Floyd sound really cool, man, but if you like them then you’ll bloody love Genesis! Or Greenslade, or King Crimson, or Curved Air, or Steve Hillage, or Van Der Graaf Generator! Rather than studying, my free time at school was spent in pursuit of ever more obscure bands. And with every new study that you were allowed into, there was yet another wild-eyed advocate of some new and unheard-of band. In order to ingratiate myself with these spotty, brushed-denim-clad arbiters of taste, I would always wax lyrical about how right they were and how brilliant the music was. But it was a false dawn. I was a teenager, and teenagers aren’t supposed to sit around listening to music and nodding sagely. We’re supposed to throw ourselves around like dervishes, uttering primal howls of delight, rage and lust. We should be drinking too much cheap cider and scrawling gory Quink ink tattoos into our arms with a compass. We should be completely frustrated and enraged by both everything and nothing all at the same time. In short we should be listening to The Sex Pistols.
Just before Christmas 1976 the nation was rent asunder when a slightly podgy guitarist from Shepherd’s Bush called an even podgier local news television presenter a ‘dirty fucking rotter’. The whole country was outraged, the media went crazy and punk rock was delivered mewling and bloody onto the dingy sheets of mid-seventies Britain. As the eye of punk rock’s storm was in London where most of Woolverstone’s pupils came from, so it made its way on to dormitory record players faster than the rest of the country. Chief among the proto punks were Lance and James Jowers. Hailing from West London, they came back to school after holidays with tales of the Roxy in Covent Garden and brilliant singles
