That’ll be the day

That same summer, at the impressionable age of sixteen, I see the film That’ll Be the Day, in which David Essex plays Jim MacLaine, a disillusioned schoolboy. There’s a brilliant scene where Jim’s in his school uniform on a bridge and he throws his schoolbooks and his satchel into the river shouting: ‘Sod the Congress of Vienna, and bloody Napoleon, and the War of Jenkins’s bloody Ear,’ and rides off on his bicycle to live another kind of life.

Buying the bass guitar fills me with the same feeling. This could be my ticket to the fantasy world I see in the pages of Melody Maker. But first I’ve got to get into the band.

Returning to school I present myself to Ian and Iain, show them my new pride and joy, and ask if they’d like to have me in the band.

‘Can you play it?’ they ask.

‘Yes,’ I say . . .

I put myself through a crash course: luckily our common room has recently acquired a new-fangled ‘stereo’ record player – I stick my head next to whichever speaker has got most bass in the mix, and painstakingly work out bass lines to the songs I’ve heard them playing. The action on this new guitar is quite low, and the strings are so thick there’s no danger of them cutting into my fingers like the egg slicer, but after a few days I have blisters the size of ping-pong balls. My hand looks like an alien’s.

Nothing a little popping, salt and Elastoplast won’t sort out – if I’m going to be the bass player in the best rock ’n’ roll band in the world I’ve got to pay my dues. By the time the weekend and the first proper rehearsal comes around I’m feeling pretty confident.

Every budding rock star wants a Marshall stack – a black Marshall amp sitting proudly atop a black Marshall speaker. Years later when I go on tour with Bad News the stage set is simply a twenty-foot-high wall of Marshall stacks, and I play through my very own – one I’ve still got sitting in the cellar.

I can’t afford a Marshall stack as a schoolboy. I pick up a cheap amp with the bass but the budget is so tight that all I’ve got for a speaker is a loose one bought from the pages of Exchange & Mart – the eBay of the seventies. I nab a chipboard box from the prop store beneath the assembly hall – nobody’ll miss it, it’s just a battered old wooden box – I cut a hole in it, and screw in my speaker. I paint eyes, a nose and a moustache on it so that the speaker itself looks like a wide-open mouth. Ta dah! I look bloody great, and I sound bloody great. Well, I look, and I sound. And that’s something. If it wasn’t for the blood leaking from the plasters on my fingertips I’d say I was as close as it gets to being a sixteen-year-old rock god. I’ve even got loons and a tie-dyed singlet. Unfortunately I have to wear my National Health spectacles or I can’t see where I’m putting my fingers – but look out, world, here I come.

Two years later, in my final week at the school, I’m presented with a bill for the chipboard box. It’s not a joke presentation, they want actual money, and quite a lot of it. I might as well have bought a Marshall stack on the never-never.

We call our band Peace of Thorn, and someone a bit arty does an Aubrey Beardsley-type illustration on Ian’s bass drum. This is considered quite cool in the early seventies. At least by us. I’m doing history and the Peace of Thorn was a peace treaty signed in the city of Thorn in 1411 between the Poles, the Lithuanians and the Teutonic Knights. To be honest, we simply chose the name out of the index of my history book because we liked the sound of it. It’s Peace, OK? But it’s a bit ‘thorny’? There’s like a problem? Isn’t peace always a bit problematic? Isn’t there always tension? Yeah, deep. Though we could also have been called The Concordat of Worms or The Polish-Bohemian Alliance.

It’s a good name for a prog rock band, which we are not, even though we co-opt future playwright Martin Crimp to play keyboard on our version of Deep Purple’s ‘Flight of the Rat’ – on a keyboard he’s made himself.

Iain relinquishes the singing duties and I take over because I’m more of a show-off, but I have trouble singing and playing at the same time so I persuade our friend Dave into playing my bass while I go full Freddie Mercury at the front.

See how I do that? I inveigle my way into the back line of the band with little discernible talent and within a few weeks I’m front and centre. This is a disease.

Dave is almost as good as me on bass, i.e. not very good. I am not as good as Freddie Mercury either, though I’m not aware of this at the time. But I do give it some welly: throwing the mic stand around like Freddie; doing the Mick Jagger ‘electrocuted chicken’ dance; throwing in some of the sensational Alex Harvey’s frightening stares; some of Ozzy Osbourne’s stupidity; some David Johansen preening and gay abandon. Nobody in the band is trying harder than me, though they’re probably achieving more.

I haven’t seen any of these people live on stage because Pocklington is in the back of beyond. I’m getting nearly all my references from appearances on Top of the Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test.

In the early seventies bands make their money from record sales. They only tour as a promotional event to support new albums. In the UK this tour is generally twelve dates long and never comes anywhere near Pocklington. De Montfort Hall in Leicester is the nearest and most prestigious, it’s played by every major band on every tour but it’s over a hundred miles away. Sheffield City Hall is half the distance but still hard to get to, and not everyone plays it. York is closer still, but they never have anyone good on.

I see Procol Harum in York and wish I hadn’t. They play only the new stuff, which is boring, and I have to wait for the third encore to get ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’. It’s a horrible trick to pull – forcing people to shout for you to come back three times. We know they have to play it, it’s their only hit, so we keep on shouting, but by the third time it’s more of a snarl than a cheer.

I see Lou Reed at Sheffield City Hall on the Rock ’n’ Roll Animal tour, but make the mistake of buying my merchandise before the gig. And it’s a poster. I roll it up tight and manage to fight my way to somewhere near the front. He occasionally bends down to anoint us with his sweat or touch hands. I’m three or four people back and I can’t reach him so I use the rolled-up poster as an extension of my arm, stretching it out in the hope that he’ll touch it, whence it will become a holy relic. He’s doing the song ‘Heroin’ and he’s singing to us kids right at the front. ‘I’m going to try to nullify my life’, he sings. Does he look me in the eye? Does he look straight at me? He’s reaching forward, he takes hold of my poster . . . and he wrenches it from my grasp and throws it into the crowd.

I hate him.

And no one plays Hull.

Except, on 29 October 1971, The Who play it. The Who. In Hull.

I don’t know why I’m surprised, I’ve always been under the impression that The Who are a Leeds-based band, so it’s not very far to go. I think they live in Leeds because their 1970 album is called The Who Live at Leeds. If only I’d got to grips with grammar sooner I’d have understood the difference between live as an adjective and live as a verb, and the difference between the prepositions at and in.

I don’t get a ticket for The Who gig because in 1971 I’m not in with the in crowd enough to be included. But I feel like I was there because Iain went and he never stops bloody talking about it until we leave school in 1975. Perhaps he goes on talking about it after that, but I’m not there to hear it. I know the set list; they start off with ‘I Can’t Explain’, ‘Substitute’ and ‘Summertime Blues’ – a triple whammy; I know the stage set-up; I know what everyone was wearing; I know that Pete Townshend didn’t smash a guitar that night but ‘looked like he might’; and I know that they played ‘My Generation’ as the first encore – something Rik, Nigel Planer and I do when we tour together in 1983.

As time progresses our tastes stray more towards Bad Company and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and we change our name to The Rancid Polecats. Which sounds like a really good punk name.

We play almost entirely at school arts festivals but manage to get one proper paid gig during our two-year existence – at the Pocklington Town Rugby Football Club. It’s the end of the season and the burly savages of old Pocklington Town are in a drinky and boisterous mood. In typical berserker fashion I get steaming drunk to ramp myself up for the gig and through my provocative stage performance somehow turn these muscle-bound mouth-breathers against us. Ian gets badly beaten up in the toilets. That’s the trouble with being a drummer – it’s so hard to make a quick getaway.

We do make one single. It’s a 7" Flexi Disc of Humble Pie’s ‘Four Day Creep’. It’s not quite the same recording process Glyn Johns would use. We take one of those small oblong cassette recorders into the rehearsal room, we press play and record at the same time, and we express ourselves. We then get on the bus to York and go to the railway station where they have a Flexi Disc machine. It’s little more than a novelty – you can record a message on it and post it to your loved one, that kind of thing. We put in our money, press play on the cassette recorder and hold it up to the mic. Three minutes later a Flexi Disc falls out of the machine. A Flexi Disc looks like a regular 7" single but is made of ultra-thin plastic which is very floppy. We just get the one copy. We get back on the bus to Pocklington, run to the common room and bung it on the stereo. It’s a decidedly lo-fi experience, but through the crackle of the thin plastic you can just hear me screaming the repeated refrain at the top of my voice: ‘I want you to lo-ve me!’

Nothing much has changed in the fifty years since.

Bizarrely, despite not been cool enough to see The Who in Hull with the cool gang in 1971, about twenty-five years later I go on stage with The Who, in Hyde Park, in front of a quarter of a million people.

What? Do you?

Yes, I do, Iain.

How does that happen, Ted?

Well it happens a bit like this: For a little while in the early eighties, Pete Townshend stops making music and becomes an acquisitions editor at the book publishers Faber & Faber. It’s at a time when the Comic Strip group is in its pomp. We’re considered ‘groovy’ and we’re brimming over with ideas, and Pete Townshend comes to see if we have any groovy ideas for books. The talk moves to the pub. We all have a jolly good time, and at the end of the evening we part, slightly inebriated, without an idea for a groovy book, but sort of ‘chummy’. It was a convivial evening and we enjoyed each other’s company. Who wouldn’t? It’s Pete ruddy Townshend!

When I did even worse than expected in my O-levels I stuck the official record of my results onto my bedroom wall and affixed a cut-out of Pete Townshend, from a photo in Melody Maker, smashing them to pieces with his guitar. That’ll teach the forces that be, I thought.

Though it didn’t.

Some years later his youngest kid ends up going to the same nursery school as my youngest. So Pete and I occasionally meet when we’re picking up our children. And he still knows who I am, because, like a lot of old rockers, he’s fond of the Comic Strip episode ‘Bad News Tour’ which follows the ignominious career of a young rock band on the road, and whilst it was meant as a scurrilous piss-take, he, like many others, sees it for the love letter it really is.

One day, at the school gate, Pete tells me that The Who are going to perform Quadrophenia in Hyde Park as a fundraiser for a charity that helps disadvantaged young people. Having heard me as the lead singer of Bad News he wonders if I might like to play the part of Ace Face/Bellboy. Ace Face is the leader of the mods though he works as a lowly bellboy for a big hotel to earn his crust. The bits I’m given to sing were sung by Pete Townshend and Keith Moon on the original record and the part was played by Sting in the film version. I’m not sure I have the required looks or indeed vocal cords but my initials are A.C.E. (Adrian Charles Edmondson), so I feel some kind of weird synchronicity.

He tells me that the actor Phil Daniels is going to reprise his role as the narrator/hero of the piece, that Gary Glitter (pre court case and jail obviously) will be playing the king of the rockers, and that Stephen Fry will be giving his hotel manager. It all sounds rather jolly and of course I agree.

I go to a rehearsal on a soundstage at Shepperton where I discover why the three surviving members of the band are so profoundly deaf – they play far too loud. I happen to walk in front of John Entwistle’s bass rig during my big number and the sound waves have such a physical presence that I become unbalanced and almost fall off the stage. It’s like moving through a vortex. I have a drink with John in the Shepperton bar afterwards and have the most surreal conversation I’ve had in my life. He cannot hear a single word I say, nor can he be bothered to lip read, but he avoids any kind of social awkwardness by simply presuming everything I’ve said. Half an hour of complete non-sequiturs ensues before he leaves with an attractive young woman.

There’s another rehearsal on stage in Hyde Park scheduled for the morning before the show itself. I turn up and I’m directed to a backstage area. And this is where things change. I thought we were all here for a good time. I mean it’s a charity gig, we’re all there to raise money, obviously, but we’re also there for the fun of it, so let’s all have a jolly good time together.

But no – the three remaining members of the band have walled themselves off from the rest of the performers, and a burly security guard mans the tiny entrance to this inner sanctum. A bouncer inside the backstage area. I’m in another portacabin with Phil, Gary and Stephen. It’s probably exactly the same as the band’s portacabin but it doesn’t have a wall round it or armed guards.

All right, I’m exaggerating, they’re not armed.

Backing singers and the other musicians needed for the show – the horn section etc. – mill around, and the atmosphere outside the inner sanctum is very jovial, very positive. But to my mind this seclusion, this division, comes as a big surprise. It feels like a definite ‘Know your place.’ I could be back in Bradford.

The plan is to run the show in the morning before they let in the crowds in the afternoon. We take our positions as asked and are graciously joined by their majesties Pete, Roger and John. Things get underway and it’s all sounding quite good actually. I make a decent stab at my bits as they crop up.

Gary’s got one of those old-fashioned mic stands – one with a tripod of long legs attached to the base – and he’s swinging it round for all it’s worth, really enjoying himself, when at a point of particularly high excitement, he swings one of the aforesaid tripod legs straight into Roger Daltrey’s eye.

It’s a big moment. Roger drops to the floor like a sack of spuds. The band stops playing. And everything goes quiet, and very still.

And I’m thinking, ‘I should go and help him and make sure he’s all right,’ but I’m also thinking, ‘But I can’t – because I’m not in his social set! I should leave this to his friends and close companions of the last thirty-odd years.’

I look at his friends and close companions of the last thirty-odd years – neither of them seems about to move forward and tend to their stricken comrade. And it strikes me that everyone else on stage is paralysed by the same social divide that the band so effortlessly put in place earlier in the day.

It feels like a week goes by before anyone moves, and that person is the old St John’s Ambulance man who’s been appointed the official first aider for the rehearsal. He clambers up onto the stage, he must be roughly 117. He reminds me of Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army.

St John’s Ambulance use a handy mnemonic when dealing with any situation – DR ABC; Danger, Response, Airway, Breathing, Circulation. Private Godfrey assesses the danger and moves swiftly on to part two: ‘As you approach them, introduce yourself and ask them questions to see if you can get a response,’ it says in their handbook.

‘Hello,’ he says to Roger, who’s lying inert on the stage. ‘I’m Private Godfrey. Do you know who you are?’

Roger’s body suddenly snaps round and he barks at the man, ‘Of course I know who I am, I’m Roger fucking Daltrey!’

Of course we all make our own social divides.

Roughly thirty years after we leave school Ian, Iain and I meet up, to ‘get the band back together again’. It’s an odd reunion, prompted by the lure of Friends Reunited – the older you get the stronger the pull of the past becomes (some people even write books about it). In between murdering ‘All Right Now’ by Free and the Peter Frampton version of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ we talk about what happened after school and why nobody kept in touch. Iain says something quite telling. He says he packed his stuff into his dad’s car on the last day at school and was getting into the passenger seat when his dad stopped him.

‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye to all your mates?’ his dad asked.

And apparently Iain looked back at the boarding house we’d all shared for the most formative years of our lives and just said ‘Nah.’

‘I thought about the seven years I’d been cooped up there with all those other boys, and just said “Nah”, and got in the car.’

It turns out we each have a similar tale to tell. There was no swapping of addresses, no vowing to be friends forever, there was nothing. It just ended. After midnight on the last night of school myself and a guy called Hamlet (his surname) got a pair of stencils and painted some monster footprints all the way along the short road from the main school building to our boarding house. The footsteps disappeared into a shrubbery. And we did pretty much the same thing.

I feel I left my family when I joined the school, and when I left the school I did so entirely alone, again. Not unhappily, just without emotion. Those relationships I’d fought so hard to create turned out to be ephemeral. A mirage? There’s no doubt they happened, and that we thought they were real at the time, but it turns out they had no substance, that they were unimportant. It was about survival. Like prison. For a long time I thought it was only me that had ducked out in this way, but it’s strangely heartening to find that Ian and Iain had done the same. It makes me oddly normal. ‘Strangely Strange But Oddly Normal’ as Dr Strangely Strange would sing.

Unless it’s just the three of us that are fucked up?