Disappointments

There were a lot of high points and brilliant gigs. There were a lot of alright gigs too. But it wasn’t all brilliant.

Some of the disappointments really stand out.

I loved the West Coast sound and one of my favourite bands was Country Joe and the Fish. Their first album ‘Electric music for the body and mind’ was one of the outstanding albums. Barry Melton had a distinctive guitar sound and I rated Joe’s voice as the best in the business. The songs were straight out of sixties freakdom. We were in the same tribe.

They didn’t get to England much so I was delighted in 1969 that they were coming. I got my tickets for the Royal Albert Hall. We got the cheap ones and were up in the Gods. The concert started well when Country Joe invited us all down to the main section because it was only half full. We rushed down. The RAH is lousy for sound and that didn’t help. However, it was going quite well. I was really in to West Coast Acid Rock sound. Then for some inexplicable reason, Country Joe came out with this stuff about Country music being big in England. As far as I was concerned country music was about as straight, redneck as you could get. Then he launched into a couple of country songs including ‘I’ve got a tiger by the tail’. We were bemused. Was it a piss-take? It seemed it wasn’t a piss-take and that rather sullied the rest of the evening for me. I was looking for some Freak Acid music. I think I’d be a bit more sanguine about it now. But I left feeling a bit let down by my heroes.

Another of my West Coast Acid Rock heroes was Jefferson Airplane and I got to see them twice but each time I found the sound a bit thin and ragged. In hindsight, I suppose that was probably due to the crappy sound systems back then. You couldn’t really expect a great deal from an outdoor concert. Yet Hendrix, Cream and Taste had managed it.

A similar thing happened with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. I went to this festival in Bath in 1969 particularly to see Frank and came away hugely disappointed. The band didn’t seem to have any life in them and went through their set like well rehearsed clockwork.

I also saw Johnny Winter at the Bath festival. I’d been looking forward to it as Johnny was a guitar virtuoso but I found his playing intricate and a bit boring.

Another disappointment was Davey Graham. I finally got to see him in this hall in 1970. The chairs were all laid out in lines. Davey came on and sat on his chair and played. The only words spoken were the name of each song. There was no emotion or enthusiasm. He played the numbers faultlessly and it was like watching a robot. I told Roy Harper about this later, he used to be a good friend of Davey’s, indeed they’d talked about becoming a duo, and he was bemused. He’d remembered Davey as an animated, lively player.

I believe I’ve talked about Jimi Hendrix’s rather lacklustre last farewell concert and the flat New Traffic elsewhere.

So I suppose the biggest disappointment of all has to be reserved for Blind Faith. I went to the free concert in Hyde Park with huge expectations. Cream were amazing live and remain one of the most exciting bands I have seen. Traffic were another favourite. I’d loved them on record and live. Rick Grech I considered to be immense and a huge factor in the Family sound. To bring all those elements together in one super-band sounded perfect. I could not wait to hear their hard driving Rock sound. Except that what we got was a dreary uninspiring wash-out. What a letdown.

It seems to me that the main reasons for these disappointments are twofold: Firstly – the expectations were so high that they were impossible to meet and Secondly – the sound systems back then did not do justice to the performance. If you were too far away or in the wrong place it sounded thin, distorted and crap.

I have heard recordings of many of the concerts I did not rate at the time and have found that a number of them sounded quite alright – so it was just me then!

Mirrors and Venom

Now we are in the heady days of 1967 and I am seventeen and eighteen and amid the huge experimentations and excitement of the times the quest gathers force. I am intoxicated by the hunt and buzzing with energy. It is driving me on to search in the clubs and second-hand record stores. I am always searching for something that will provide me with all the answers and sate my appetite.

All thoughts of education and careers are relegated to the box marked ‘incidental’. Life’s too full of life to waste. There is so much to be learnt, investigated, found out, appreciated, loved, experienced and enjoyed and you can’t find it in schools, answer it in exams or read about it in textbooks. There were too many people to meet, sights to see and mad conversations to be had. I was a madman. I scorched through life absorbing and burning up energy. It was like a chocoholic being let loose in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory!

My hair has grown and is bleached with peroxide. It looks like straw and contrasts with my dark beard. I never went in for hippy beads, keeping myself simple with shirt and jeans. I had met Liz and dragged her around with me. We enjoy dancing and one of our gigs is usually soul based, but we bounce around to Mayall, Floyd and Fleetwood Mac just as happily. We are to be found frolicking in the Marquee, Middle Earth, Toby Jug, Klooks Kleek, UFO or Eel Pie Island and are just as happy with the Psychedelic, Blues or Progressive scene.

I have already discovered Dylan and Guthrie and have gorged myself on their inebriating offerings. They will both continue to inform and sustain me. But still I am not content. I want more. The Underground is a glut that provides me with a happy hunting ground. I am a student and free in London and am about to launch myself headfirst into five years of musical gluttony.

But today is special. This is no ordinary faire but I had no inkling of what was in store for me.

I had made a new friend at college by the name of Mike. He was quiet and shy but extremely cool in his white plastic jacket with long corkscrew black hair. He tells me of this guy he has seen who he thinks I would be mad over. He tells how he is insane and full of energy just like me and that I have to go to see him.

I made a mental note. I stash it away. I forget about it.

I am heading for Soho, for Les Cousins on Greek Street. It is a small club in the basement. You go down these steep steps into an underground cellar where you are packed in among the crowds, seated and focussed towards a small stage in the middle. It was dark and intimate.

Les Cousins was no ordinary folk club in the traditional sense. There were no sing-alongs, no traditional songs with hands behind the ear. It was really a place that showcased the work of the new acoustic singer-songwriters of the day who were loosely termed contemporary folk singers. These included the wondrous Jackson C Frank, Paul Simon and even Dylan had made an appearance. I had gone along to catch Bert Jansch and John Renbourn.

They played and I enjoyed it. I can’t remember too much about it because those memories were blown out of my mind.

In the intermission there was a twenty minute slot and they put this new up-and-coming singer-songwriter on. He played three numbers and talked a lot about the songs and what was in his head.

It was the guy that Mike had been telling me about.

What he was saying was intelligent, sharp, funny and illuminating. More importantly was that it was like I was holding up a mirror and seeing my thoughts projected. There was immediate empathy. It felt to me like I was listening to my own self – except, of course, that this one could actually sing and play an instrument.

I was blown away.

I felt like I had found what I didn’t know I had been looking for. I had stumbled across Roy Harper the greatest British song-writer, social commentator, poet and auto-career sabotager of all time.

That was a meeting that altered my life. Opher 1969

Bobbing around

The discovery of another hero took time. It was like discovering a heap of dirty gold ore. You don’t know what you’ve got until you’ve teased it all out.

If the Beatles were the driving force for Rock then Bob Dylan was the Fulcrum that turned it on its head. The Beatles provided the musical genius but Dylan provided the poetry and substance that enabled it to reach its apotheosis.

I came to Dylan late. It wasn’t until his electric period that I really began to appreciate what a genius he was. For me it was a slow burner.

I was not one of the guys who might have shouted ‘Judas’ in the Albert Hall or Manchester Trade Hall. I loved his electric period and none better than the driving, searing quality that Mike Bloomfield brought to it at Newport.

My friend Mutt first introduced me to Dylan. He played me his first album but it left me cold. I still find that first album a bit of a non-entity. Mutt assured me that if Dylan released singles he’d be in the charts. I pooh-poohed that but sure enough, shortly after Mutt’s prophetic words, Dylan released ‘The times are a changing’, it made the charts and I had to eat my words.

I am sorry to say that I was one of those people who could not get on with his voice. I liked the songs but I preferred them by other people like the Byrds and Manfred Mann. It makes me squirm to say that now because I have got so much into Dylan that I know his voice is just ideal for his songs and everyone else’s arrangements tend to sound Poppy and lightweight in comparison and you don’t get much more unhip than Poppy.

My subconscious quest for Dylan overlooked him for a couple of years. I was aware of his music but I never really listened to it. Then I bought ‘Bringing it all home’ in Kingston arcade and it blew me away. The good thing about this was that it meant that I could now go back and retrospectively absorb three genius albums all at once – ‘The times are a changing’, ‘Another side of’ and ‘Freewheelin’’. What a mind expanding time I had! There was everything! – The anti-war stuff, the civil rights, the songs for the oppressed and down and out. It made you think; it raised your sensitivities; it made you question everything; it was so clever and poetic. I read the poetry on the liner notes and checked out everything I could. Dylan was just what I needed. He’d taken Guthrie’s type songs a stage further into a new dimension. He was singing about the world I lived in and the society we were grappling with and trying to get to change. No wonder everyone was feeding off him!

I adored the snarling Dylan on ‘Positively Fourth Street’ which became my favourite song of all time for a while. But there was also the exceptional ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘It’s alright Ma I’m only bleeding’.

Then there was ‘Highway 61 revisited’ and ‘Blonde on Blonde’ and the poetry exploded with Beat Poet surrealism, like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Rimbaud were recording Rock songs. At the time I was reading Ginsberg’s Howl and Kerouac’s ‘Dharma Bums’ and it just seemed to sit in there.

Unfortunately I’d missed Dylan’s performances at the Albert Hall and around. If only…………..

I did get to see him four times at various gigs. Two were brilliant, one was mediocre and one was absolute shit.

He was a difficult, complex hero to have with a veritable mine of mind expanding concepts to be unearthed. He was also full of contradictions and obfuscations designed to throw you off the scent. But the reward for perseverance was immense.

Dylan’s fabled motorcycle accident in which he supposedly broke his neck was the end of what was an incredible run of six of the universe’s best albums (I am making an assumption here – I am not yet fully conversant with musical input from other regions of our galaxy or any distant Galaxies. Maybe they have even better albums out there? – Far out, man!). But I suppose that had to be. Dylan was freaking out on speed and stress. He looked so jumpy. I guess if he had gone on he would have gone under. Maybe he did go under? Who knows? Perhaps it was just a ploy to break away from the pressure and that tag of being ‘The Voice of a Generation’.

Anyway, the post accident Dylan was very unhip.

I bought ‘John Wesley Harding’ and it was OK. We’d all thought he was easing his way back in. The Underground was going and we needed Dylan’s spark. He was the guy. The next album would be great, right? No, not right. The next album was ‘Nashville Skyline’. I was so disgusted with it, having bought it with such high expectations on the day of release, that I smashed it and threw it in the dustbin (I only ever did that with one other album and that was Neil Young’s ‘Hawks and Doves’). After that there were two more dreadful albums – ‘Dylan’ and ‘Self Portrait’. It looked like he was a brain-dead spent force. The snarling hipster who spat bullets and was the scourge of the establishment was now an awkward geeky country singer.

It was so bad that when Dylan was due to perform at the Isle of Wight I shunned it as I really didn’t want to see someone so good reduced to a sham. I’m glad I didn’t go.

I wish I hadn’t gone to the Earl’s Court in 1981. I did it against my better judgement. I was persuaded by people who’d seen him in 1978 and found him in top form so I decided to chance my arm. They assured me that the real Dylan was back. The trouble was that Dylan in the intervening time had got religion; he was backed by a gospel choir and was utterly dismal. I hated every minute of it. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it is American saccharin evangelical nutcases. The country is full of indoctrination and shoves it down your throat before you can think. I hate primitive medieval superstition. I could not believe Dylan had succumbed. It was embarrassing – from ‘It’s alright ma’ to the trite ‘God gave names to all the animals’. Seemingly he’d burned his brains out and lost his balls at the same time. Ho hum.

Fortunately he worked his way back again and I got to see him a couple more times when he was good and rockin’. But he never hit the heights of that purple patch in the 1960s when he set the pace for both lyrics and musical innovation. He set the trend for everything that followed.

I’m still mining his lyrics, reading his books, listening to his concerts and radio shows and marvelling at the scope of the guy. If only ………

But Dylan helped me grow and develop as a man. He raised my consciousness. Without him I would not have become as good. We all need people who question what society is about. We need people who question our leaders. That is because people who seek power are often the paranoid sociopaths. We are often being led by people who are mentally ill. Time after time we put the Pol Pot’s, Stalin’s, Mao’s, Thatcher’s and Nixon’s in charge and think they have our best interests at heart. It takes a Dylan to point out the absurdities. That’s what he did for me; he helped opened my eyes.  Pointing the way to go!!!

Nowt so weird as Folk – From the Dust bowl to the Thames Delta

1965 was a hell of a year. Ready Stead Go ruled the TV and a non-ending stream of Beat bands took over the charts and the world.

It was the year I turned 16 and got a motorbike which meant I could finally get around and get to gigs.

Donovan appeared as a resident on Ready Steady go complete with his cap and sign on his guitar that said – THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS – both of which he nicked from Woody Guthrie. I liked Donovan and I had this girlfriend Viv who had his album which she later gave to me. I used to go round her place and play the Donovan album.

Viv had an older brother who was in to Big Bill Broonzy and Woody Guthrie. I’d never heard of Woody Guthrie but I was soon getting in to him more than the Donovan. The albums that Viv’s brother liked were Folkways things where Woody is playing fairly safe songs like ‘Springfield Mountain’ with Sonny Terry Brownie McGhee and Leadbelly. There was something about them I liked and I started seeking out other Guthrie stuff and soon found some Guthrie songs that were meatier – ‘The Dustbowl Ballads’

I loved the lyrics they weren’t love songs. Woody Guthrie was writing songs that meant something, that were poetic with an intellectual and political importance. They told stories. They were about people and disasters, organising and putting things right. I loved it. My mind buzzed with them. I soaked them up.

I had discovered someone who I felt sang real songs about real injustice. He was immediately one of my heroes and has never ceased to be.

I bought all his Folkways albums – his ‘Dust Bowl Ballads’ and ‘Columbia River Collection’.

Guthrie was the poet that put balls into the Folk movement. He not only inspired people like Seeger in the 1950s but was the whole basis behind the emergence of Dylan and later influenced Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg and a host of others.

Billy Bragg was straight out of the Guthrie mould and burst upon the scene with his rousing political anthems such as Leon Rosselson’s (another singer-songwriter I love) ‘World turned upside down’ and Seeger’s ‘Which side are you on?’ lapsed into more Poppy stuff but re-emerged when he’d been asked to put some Woody Guthrie lyrics to music and record them. He and Wilco recorded the memorable Mermaid Avenue.

Fairly recently I went on pilgrimage to Mermaid Ave in Coney Island New York. The house was no longer there but you could still walk around and pick up the feel of it with its Funfair Park and tackiness. I could feel him there and I breathed his air.

 Coney island 2010

Back in 1965 I’d discovered Woody and I’m still investigating to this day. I always go back to Guthrie. He is a legend.

For Rock to come of age it had to grow out of the love songs and teenage focus of early Rock ‘n’ Roll and start dealing with real issues in a sophisticated manner. The music had to become more sophisticated and complex and the lyrics had to expand. That’s where Woody came in. Almost single-handedly he raised the art of song writing and added humour and a social dimension through a poetry that was insufficiently rewarded.

Woody was a genius. I had found him and been moved by him but my quest was not over.

Woody got me into Folk and Folk, post Dylan, was undergoing a resurgence of interest.

There were two ways it could go. There was the contemporary field with singer songwriters like Bert Jansch and John Renbourn or there was the traditional with the Young Tradition.

It seemed to me that traditional Folk was stilted and set in the past while contemporary Folk was of the moment. Inspired from the roots of Guthrie and then Dylan they were creatively writing songs about the world I was living in. They were telling my stories.

Viv had got me into early Donovan and then two other people got me going into contemporary acoustic Singer-songwriters who were largely masquerading as Folk singers just because they played acoustic guitar.

Firstly Robert Ede leant me the wonderful Jack C Frank album. I immediately bought it and played it to death. It is one of those rare albums that are just perfect with beautifully crafted songs.

I loved Jackson he was a lovely gentle man with a great mind and welcoming smile. I got to meet him in 1969 in Ilford High Road at the Angel pub. It was a great little gig although there were only about twenty people there. Jackson stayed back and we sat and talked with him and told him how great he was.

Jackson had a really tough life. He’d been badly burnt when his school caught fire. Many of his friends had been killed. He’d come to England with the compensation looking to buy classic cars. He’d recorded the one fabled album, performed some gigs, got together with Sandy Denny and then was gone. He later ended up on the streets in New York, got his eye shot out and died penniless of pneumonia.

He didn’t deserve that. He was a lovely talented man.

Supposedly Jackson was meant to be performing with Roy Harper as a guest at Roy’s big break-through gig. He never showed up, never did another concert and faded away.

Then Neil Furby introduced me to Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. I loved Bert’s first and second albums with all the political stuff like ‘Antiapartheid’, ‘Do you hear me now?’ and ‘Needle of Death’. I liked the stuff I could get my teeth into. Folk brought that social bite.

It was the liking of Bert and John that led me to Les Cousins on Greek Street in Soho. Having a motorbike enabled me to get there. It was there that my quest took me to Roy Harper but that’s another story altogether.

Folk changed Rock by adding substance to it. You can see its influence in the Beatles later work. By the end of 1965 I was listening to Beat music that had begun to get more experimental and was getting into Blues and now Folk. The mid 1960s was a nascent period that was about to explode again and I was poised to become more active in my quest. A number of goals were about to be achieved.

The Beat goes on

By 1964 we had all grown. Our hair, in particular had grown. I was fourteen and fifteen which was a good if difficult age to be. I was full of hormones, frustration and increasing angst which was beginning to bring me into conflict with authority. Rock Music was much more important than school. The commercial chirpiness of Merseybeat had been replaced by a harder, more individualistic and aggressive sound. Seemingly every week a new band burst upon the scene complete with a new sound, image and style.

Our TV programme ‘Ready Steady Go’ (A little bit of ‘Thank your lucky Stars’ and ‘Juke Box Jury’) featured them live. The Beeb was still too matronly to put on anything so we tuned in to Radio Luxembourg. Its sound kept phasing in and out but at least you could hear the stuff you wanted. Then it was the pirate radio stations with ‘Caroline’, ‘Atlantis’ and ‘London’.

Music was our life. We lived it.

The Stones burst upon the scene, closely followed by the Animals, Them, Yardbirds, Who, Smallfaces, Kinks, and Downliners Sect. Hardly a week went by without another one showing up. These were the days of the Mods and Rockers, scooters, Parkas and layered hair.

The toilets were always crowded with boys preening their hair and moulding it into shape. I went for a distinctive look. My hair was combed back at the sides and carefully arranged to cover my forehead with a long quiff. I tried to get it to create a unique wave. That was really difficult with only greasy brylcream and none of these modern day styling waxes. But I had the longest hair in school. It hung down to my shoulders. Hat was one of the coolest kids. He had a greasy rockers hairstyle with a quiff that he could pull down to his chin.

Hat and I were into motorbikes and that made us Rockers. We liked leather jackets, jeans and motorcycle boots. Hat wore really tight jeans and long winkle-picker boots.

  Opher & Liz on my first motorbike 1967

I idolised Phil May. He had the longest hair of any of the guys in the bands. My appearance caused some consternation among some staff. My Physics teacher affectionately called me ‘Squirrel’ but the Deputy Head took me on as a project. She was determined to get me to toe the line. I was even more determined to do the opposite. We had fun and games.

I also came into conflict with the prefects. They were worse than the teachers. They tried to intimidate and control you. I developed a nice line in smart repartee and sarcasm. It infuriated them even more which was the whole point. Bowyer was a particularly snooty prat who swanned around the school like some bantam pretending to be a peacock. He gave me a four sided essay to do because I refused to pick some milk bottles out of a puddle when ordered. He was a pretentious sod who thought he was at Eton complete with quilted waistcoat. The title of the essay he set me (bear in mind I was fourteen at the time) was ‘Should psychoanalysis be used as evidence in courts’. I wrote in big letters – ‘No! But those in positions of authority should be psychoanalysed before being put in that position!’ He was incensed and wanted to take me under the school and have me caned – prefects were allowed to give three lashes. I explained to him that he could try but either then or later I would beat him to a pulp. I was always a quiet, peaceful young lad. It was out of character – but he was a smarmy geek (reminds me of Cameron) who got right up my nose. He took me to the Head. I exceedingly calmly explained to our illustrious Headmaster that the next time Mr Bowyer asked me to pick up dirty milk bottles out of a muddy puddle would be the day he would be operated on to have them de-inserted. The Head was a wise man and figured out what was going on here. He put oil on the troubled water.

I wasn’t interested in school; I was only interested in girls and music.

One week there’d be the Kinks bursting on the scene with ‘You Really got me’ and then the next it’d be the Who with ‘I can’t Explain’ and Them with ‘Baby please don’t go’, the Prettythings with ‘Don’t bring me down’, the Yardbirds with ‘Good morning little school girl’ the Animals with ‘Baby let me take you down’ and the Small Faces with ‘What you gonna do about it’. It seemed inexhaustible.

We used to watch them on TV and marvel at the length of their hair. Ray Davies’ hair flicked up, Brian Jones’ fringe hung over his eyes and Phil May’s hair was down to his shoulders. We used to comment on the size of the zits on display. Eric Burdon had loads but Phil May came out tops again because he had a particularly big one on his forehead.

At the time the newspapers were trying to create a story by describing the nice cuddly mop-top Beatles as the good guys and the scruffy disgusting Stones who peed against garage walls as the bad guys. Ho hum. We didn’t fall for it.

At half term I used to go round my friend Mutt’s. His mum was out at work and he lived next to a school that had a different half term. We took it on ourselves to entertain the girls by playing music at full volume out of the window. We got quite a fan club. I can remember the two tracks we played endlessly as being ‘Everything’s alright’ by the Mojos and ‘Tobacco Road’ by the Nashville Teens.

I never got to see a lot of these bands play. I was fourteen and fifteen and the Yardbirds and Stones both had residencies in Richmond which was really just down the road but when you are that age without transport that might as well have been on the moon.

The first live gig I ever got to was the British Birds at the Walton Hop. The Walton Palais was supposedly where Jonathan King used to groom and pick up young boys. He never tried to pick me up I was much too ugly.

The Birds featured Ron Wood, later of the Stones, and were incredible.

I can’t remember who I went with. I was too boggled by the whole experience. It was another world.

As I arrived there was a whole bunch of jeering Teddy Boys in the car park. They were all shouting and pushing and the girls, still in bee-hive hair-dos and full long flouncy skirts were shrieking encouragement. I sidled up and looked in and there were two Teds slashing at each other with long vicious stiletto flick-knives.

That was quite a start.

Inside the big hall was dark with a big staircase leading off to the sides. There were a group of Teds on the landing taking turns to shag a rather large, blousy bee-hived girl. Her skirt and petticoats were up round her chest and her legs were up in the air as she was held up by the supporting cast. The boys were all around offering encouragement and jeered as they took turns and a bunch of girls, all similarly attired stood and watched looking bored, chewing gum and smoking.

When the band came on I got to the front. See – I was there right from the off! They looked the part in their waistcoats, beat boots, skin tight trousers and mod haircuts. They played this heavy riffed beat music, stamping in time with their Cuban heeled Chelsea boots. Someone was flicking the lights on and off in time to the beat. It was undoubtedly the most exciting thing I had ever seen.

In July 1964 I went off to France and spent the summer hitch hiking round with my mate Foss. I was just fifteen and he was sixteen so he had to look after me. We had big rucksacks with all our clothes (both lots of underwear – we were only away six weeks) and a tent which did not have a front. By this time I had really long hair and a beard. Wherever we went the local kids, who seemed to be dressed in jeans with leather jackets and short hair, all stepped aside yelling after us – ‘Les Beatles’ and ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’. We loved the adulation.

Somehow I had just bought the Stones first album and the ‘It’s all over now’ single and took it with me. I had them in a bag that dangled from the back. Miraculously they didn’t get wrecked and I still have them.

We didn’t get many lifts but got quite fit walking around with big rucksacks on our backs. In fact I got very fit. We stayed in Youth Hostels camping in the back gardens with the rats. Our tent had no front and the rats scampered over us in the night. Foss lay awake one night waiting for one of the rats to come into the tent holding a big knife aloft so that he could stab it. He must have dozed off though and found the razor sharp knife in his sleeping bag the next morning.

The other youth hostellers either loved us or hated us. I got fed by these Romania girls who decided I was much too skinny. They introduced me to French cheese, bread and yoghourt. Bread for me had been either sliced white or a white bloomer and cheese was either cheddar or gorgonzola (gorgonzola was still a rarity in England but was a regular with us because Dad had been stationed in Italy in the war) and I’d never tasted yoghourt. I started with the chocolate flavour but was soon working my way through them all. I couldn’t believe the bread and cheese. There was black bread, brown bread and French sticks. It came in all shapes and sizes. There was cheese with holes in, bits in and all different flavours. England was so bland compared to the continent but that was about to change.

All the Youth Hostels had record players and I played my Stones album and single to mixed reaction. There was this huge German kid called Hans who must have been six foot eight and built with it. He would make a sandwich by cutting a whole loaf in half, stuffing it with cheese and sausage and eating it all. He loved the Stones. Whenever he came in he demanded we put the album on and played it loud.

There were these two Viennese girls who, rather stereotypically used to timidly sit around the record player and listen to Strauss. Hans would stride over to the record player, bang his fist on the table so that the needle jumped across the record and say ‘Walking the dog!’ which was his favourite track. The girls gathered up their things and scuttled for cover. Hans loved us. He was always giving us big hugs.

What a summer. That album is etched into my brain.

I later played rugby for the University Vandals team in Walton. I was the hooker and my prop was none other than Ian Stewart the Rolling Stones pianist. He was a big angular guy and Andrew Loog Oldham had decided that his image did not fit in with the rest of the band so he had him side-lined. Image was everything! Ian played on the albums and actually played in live concerts in the wings but was not photoed with the band. He seemed happy with the arrangement. At least he had a life and didn’t get mobbed all the time. I spent my Saturday afternoons with my arm round him.

In later years Ian put a band together called Rocket 88. They played Hull a few times and I always wanted to go along and say hello and see if he remembered his old happy hooker. Something always came up and I never did – I always thought I’d catch him later. Then he went and died! It’s amazing how often later never happens.

The Kinks were one of my favourite bands and in particular the numbers ‘Well respected man’ which seemed to sum up everything I felt about the society I had been born into with its class structure and inbuilt unfairness and disparity, and ‘I’m not like everybody else’ which summed up how I perceived myself. I would sit in my bedroom with the arm raised on the Dansette and let it play endlessly. It fed my mood – music to feed your angst with. I was nurturing my rebelliousness from the beginning.

 The second band I got to see live was Them with Van Morrison. ‘Baby please don’t go’ was still in the charts and ‘Here comes the night’ had just been released. They were brilliant but I was a bit disappointed that Van didn’t jump about more. I’d been a little spoilt by the Birds lively act. All Van did was stand there and belt out the songs. His voice was amazing and the band was great and they did all the songs with a brilliant ‘Gloria’ but only once did Van jump in the air.

After the show I went backstage and the band all signed these postcard size photos of themselves. I got two of them and got to talk to the band. I wish I still had those signed photos. They’d be worth a bob or two. I gave one away to Phil when I worked as a Lab Tech in the early 70s. He was a big Van fan. The other one my mum threw away when she had a clear out of my room.

The Nashville Teens were a local band and I got to see them play. They had an amazing dual vocal attack that made them very powerful.

My favourite Beat band was the Downliners Sect. I found their first album in a rack in Rumbelows – a department store on Walton High Street. They were more of an electrical goods/hardware shop with a small rack of albums at the back. I loved the cover. There was no way I could play it as the shop had no listening booth  but the image of the guys looked just up my street and the track listing with Jimmy Reed, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters looked spot on. I took a chance. It sounded exactly how I knew it would. They were the best R&B Beat band of the time. I caught them live and they were brilliant. They thrashed and wailed better than anyone. What a shame that they then tried to jump every trend going and produced their ‘sick’ songs EP, Country album and Rock album instead of sticking to what they were so good at which was raw R&B. But hey – I’m still a Sect maniac!

I remember an old girlfriend of mine (she will, like me, be old by now!) sending me a valentine with a little poem in it. 

Little lad with long fair hair

I’ve got you on the brain

Becoming Sectomaniac

Is driving me insane

See I still remember it. At the time I was trying to decide whether to go out with her or this other girl. She’d already sent me the Kinks single ‘Tired of waiting’. The poem made up my mind for me. Anyone who was into the Sect was OK with me!

By the end of 1964 the quest had thrown up all sorts but none of my heroes. They were still in the future waiting for me. I was trying to assimilate the music that was coming at me, cope with girlfriends and always looking for new musical developments. You never knew what was going to turn up next – all I knew was that it was already one hell of an exciting journey.

My personality was interacting with the music I was listening to. It’s debatable as to whether I listened to the stuff that reflected me or whether it was changing me to mirror it?

We are products of our environment. I chose to be different. Yet I epitomised the era I lived through.

I wasn’t like everybody else and I knew I was going to resist leaving the house at six thirty every morning like my old man. The Kinks summed it up so well.

I learnt a lot from my school days which I later took into my teaching career – mostly about how not to do things! The education system was very good at demonstrating how not to do things.

I learnt that corporal punish certainly warms the backside but it heats the heart more. The internalised fury and rage will find its way out in violence, insolence and aggression.

I learnt that you can say ‘sir’ in a number of ways some of which are worse than telling someone to go fuck themselves.

I learnt that stuffing facts in kids’ heads for them to regurgitate for examinations is not education.

I was one madly rebellious child.