This could have been my autobiography, the one about me as a rock star.
I did have one number one hit in 1984 – ‘Living Doll’ with Cliff Richard and The Young Ones. And in 1988 my own composition ‘Cashing in on Christmas’ with Bad News – the spoof metal band I create as a strand for The Comic Strip Presents . . . – stalled just outside the official top forty.
If . . .
There are many forks in the road and sometimes I feel I’ve blithely turned left when I could just as easily have turned right. And sometimes I feel like I crashed into the signpost.
The first instrument I’m ever given to play, at the age of seven, is a big bass drum at Swain House Junior School in Bradford. It sits rather precariously on a fold-up stool and I stand beside it and bang out the first beat in every bar.
The rest of the class are playing recorders, a little group of three are playing new-fangled melodicas, there’s someone on triangle, and one child is gamely blowing into a harmonica. Although he’s not always blowing, I can see his sheet music – under each note he has written either suck or blow.
Our repertoire is not large. We play the theme from Z-Cars, ‘The Blaydon Races’ and ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.
It’s an inauspicious start to my musical career. To be frank it stalls completely after our first end of year concert – because Dad drags us all off to Bahrain and some other kid gets the big drum.
It doesn’t resume until I return from Bahrain a couple of years later and spend a year at Hutton Junior High in Bradford where they have a brass band (this is Yorkshire). The school has a brilliant scheme to encourage potential new members of the band: they own all the instruments and will happily lend them to anyone who’s interested. I’m allowed to choose one and learn how to play it. I can even take it home.
I don’t know why I choose the euphonium. Maybe it was chosen for me. Maybe there’s a euphonium pusher at the school? Taking its name from the Greek euphōnos ‘having a pleasing sound,’ it seems someone made a mistake, unless they find the sound of raspberries being blown down a long fat tunnel pleasing. It’s also enormous, it weighs a ton, and as I live just inside the 1.5-mile limit before a free bus pass kicks in, I have to lug it the 1.4 miles to school and back on foot. After a week I swap it for a cornet, the smallest instrument in the band.
Being smaller doesn’t make it any easier to play. I can only dream of joining the rest of the school band to play ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘The British Grenadiers’. I get stuck on book one, page one. I can’t read music, I can’t make my mouth into the right shape, and the sounds come out like high-pitched farts. It’s all very unsatisfying. If occasionally amusing.
To make things harder, Dad banishes me to the garage because he can’t stand the ‘noise’. I tell him it’s music, but even I don’t believe me. It’s the middle of winter, the garage is unheated, my fingers are too cold to operate the valves, and I give up.
It’s odd that my dad doesn’t encourage me more. I’d have thought he’d want me to play an instrument. Perhaps he regards brass bands as inferior.
Sir Thomas Beecham, the renowned conductor, once said; ‘Brass bands are all very well in their place – outdoors and several miles away.’ So apart from conducting four of the leading orchestras of the day he was also a pompous oaf. But perhaps my dad agrees with him. Perhaps Dad is a pompous oaf too.
Rumour has it that Mum could play the piano, but we don’t have one, so I never hear her play.
No, that’s not quite true, I do hear her play once, but only for precisely thirty seconds. She’s visiting my house in the 1990s. My house by then is full of musical instruments: several guitars, ukuleles, penny whistles, recorders, an autoharp, harmonicas, a full drum kit, and . . . a piano. She again makes the boast that she can play the piano.
‘Go on then,’ I say.
‘Oh no,’ she replies.
‘Then I simply don’t believe you,’ I say, rather pointedly.
She looks me in the eye then suddenly sits at the piano and starts pumping out something like ‘Roll out the Barrel’. She could be one of those characters in a war film, cheering up the pilots in a good old-fashioned pub before they fly out the next day on an obvious suicide mission. Her left hand is brilliant, jumping up and down the keyboard thumping out a bass line, and her right hand bashes out the tune mixed with the occasional passing chord. It could be Winifred Atwell, or Russ Conway – I’m trying to decide which when she abruptly stops playing, and stands up.
‘That’s enough of that,’ she says, closing the lid.
And I never hear her play again.
Thirty seconds. That’s all I ever got from her. She won’t even talk about it. Who taught her? Where and when did she play? For how long? Why did she stop? The brief snippet sounds like she enjoyed a really good knees up, but I never see that in her, I’ve never seen her dance.
I’m beginning to wonder if I dance like a lunatic because I’m making up for all the dancing my parents never did.
And why didn’t she encourage me to play an instrument? Why didn’t either of them encourage me to play an instrument. I’m not bragging but I have what’s called a ‘good ear’ for music, I’m self-taught on every instrument I play, but think how good I might have been if I’d ever had lessons! If someone had taught me to read music!
And it’s not that they don’t like music, it’s just that Dad sees classical music as a mark of civilization, a mark of class, as something more or less unattainable – this is Bradford, we know our place – and he makes music into an intellectual chore. As a child I’m forced to endure an hour of ‘high culture’ every Sunday morning. Dad believes exposure to this sort of thing will increase my IQ. Dad is very keen on IQ.
The seatbelts in our car are peculiarly complicated and when someone new gets into the passenger seat he counts back from 160 slowly in tens – once the newbie has managed to fasten the belt Dad stops counting and is fairly confident that the number he has reached is that person’s IQ.
Our house is full of popular IQ test books. I am forever deciding whether a box with a triangle, a circle and a parallelogram in it is the mirror image of another box with a parallelogram, a circle and a triangle in it. These tests measure cognitive ability; they have more to do with the way people learn and solve problems than with actual knowledge. They don’t measure creativity, or imagination, or emotional intelligence. Or thinking outside the box.
To improve my ability to recognize what comes next in a sequence of geometric shapes, every Sunday we have to sit and play chess whilst listening to classical music for at least an hour. Some of which is probably conducted by the musical snob Sir Thomas Beecham.
Dad’s classical record collection is fairly small, about fifteen records: we have a few Beethoven symphonies, some Mozart, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave, Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, and, slightly out of step with the rest of the collection, Bizet’s Carmen.
The indoctrination works at first. In 1964, aged seven, I’m in the back of the car as Uncle Douglas takes me, Hilary and my cousins, Janet and Liz, on a trip to see the lights get switched on in Blackpool. Janet and Liz are in their early teens and are as cool as fuck.
Janet and Liz start banging on about The Beatles. They are obsessed and know the words to every song. They ask Hilary who she likes. Hilary is a couple of years younger and a little out of step in the coolness stakes because we’ve been in Cyprus for the last six years – not only are we the country mice, we are mice from a different country altogether – but she professes to like Nana Mouskouri, the Greek chanteuse who was a hit in the recent Eurovision Song Contest. And she gets away with it.
Janet and Liz then turn to me and ask me who I like. Perhaps they’re expecting me to say some child-friendly act like Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, or The Seekers, or Freddie & The Dreamers, but I say:
‘Beethoven.’
They laugh hysterically for the rest of the journey there.
They laugh hysterically for the whole journey back. Even Uncle Douglas is laughing – the big wheezy laugh of a sixty-a-day man. He has tears rolling down his cheeks.
Janet and Liz bring it up ever after, and indeed they will still bring it up at any opportunity. It is one of the great family jokes.
One of my favourite episodes of Bottom is ‘Bottom Culture’, the one where Richie and Eddie are without a telly and decide to make a virtue of the situation by having an evening of ‘culture’. It is based directly on those Sunday mornings with Dad.
Richie and Eddie sit down to play chess, though they only have five regular pieces and make up the rest with various stand-ins, including a bottle of brown sauce, a small cactus with a paper crown on it, and sixteen frozen prawns. And just as they are about to start playing Richie pipes up:
Richie: Wait! I know what we need! Music! Of course! What shall we have? Ohhh, James Last, Burt Bacharatch (mispronounced on purpose). No – Molière! Molière! He could bash out a tune or two! (He hums the main theme from Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’.) Tum tum tiddly tum tum tum tum, tum (he forgets the repeated refrain) . . . And the other twiddly bits. He was Scottish, you know.
Eddie: Who? Vivaldi?
Richie: I’m talking about composers! It’s football, football, football with you!
It gets big laughs as people recognize someone desperately trying to seem cultured whilst obviously not having a clue.
I’m sure Dad isn’t clueless, but his view of classical composers is that they’re all gentlemen of tried and tested virtue. Paragons. They are the living embodiment of those little busts that people have on their mantelpieces – upright, noble, brim-full of integrity, and always staring into the middle distance in an important sort of way. Despite all having long hair, Dad believes they are people who would have loathed electric guitars and the long-haired degenerates he’s caught glimpses of on Top of the Pops.
I wonder if Dad knew that Vivaldi, aged forty-eight, took up with a seventeen-year-old soprano. That Jimi Hendrix lived in the same apartment that Handel once occupied on Brook Street, in London. That Mozart’s music was so revolutionary at the time that it upset people exactly like him. And I’m not sure how good Dad’s French is or whether the orchestral instrumentation papers over the subject matter, and makes him think that it’s all very wholesome and intellectual as we hum along to Carmen, but does he know it’s about cigarettes, smuggling, sex and violence? I doubt it.
On a day trip to Haworth, Dad refuses an ice cream from the Mr Whippy van because the bloke behind the counter has nicotine stains on his fingers. It must be hard being right all the time.