At the end of school I’m faced with the problem of ‘how to become a professional actor or international rock god’. There are no signposts at all – not even one to crash into.
There isn’t a desk for either at the sixth form careers fair. Potential engineers, doctors, lawyers and vets are very well served; the armed forces each have a stand; and I think briefly about becoming a spy in the Diplomatic Service (a form of acting); but there’s nothing for aspiring stars of stage and screen or rock gods.
The careers master is decidedly unhelpful, I ask him about drama schools and he tells me that the Rowntree’s factory in York has a very good amateur dramatics society. I tell him that I want to be a professional actor, I’ve just played Hamlet, for Christ’s sake, and my plan is to work at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He gives me the look that says, ‘You’re a time waster.’
He’s right in one way – it takes me forty-two years to get to the RSC.
In the days before the internet, finding out about anything is limited to what’s in the school library. From scant reference material, some of it dating back to between the wars, I learn that there are no rock god schools and that drama schools hold frightening auditions that practically nobody gets through. The funding isn’t clear cut either, so I apply to do drama at university instead. Manchester will let me in with relatively easy grades.
I get shockingly bad grades – but they let me in anyway. Rik gets in through clearing – his grades are even worse than mine. 1975 must have been a thin year.
Gap years are not a thing in 1975 so I don’t go around the world getting off with girls, getting pissed on moon-kissed beaches, swimming with dolphins, and making friends for life. Typically Tropical are top of the charts with ‘Barbados’ but I’m not going there either, I’m going to work the summer in an iron foundry in Bradford with a guy who keeps threatening to wrestle me to the ground. He’s the under-eighteen wrestling champion of West Yorkshire or some such, and I’m glad when a splash of molten iron lands on his crotch and he disappears for a while. I build up some cash and arrive at university with dirty hands and a clean slate: unattached and unfettered – ready to make new friends.
Trouble is, half the people in my department are girls. I’ve grown up at an all-boys school and I don’t really know how to talk to girls, so that cuts out half the department at a stroke. Though I have been in a band – perhaps that will count as some way of starting a conversation?
Accompanying yourself on electric bass is not much fun so I trade it in and use some of my iron foundry cash to buy a fairly decent new six string. There is good news – I’m virtually the only guitarist in my year, which makes me the best guitarist in my year by default.
I’m hoping that girls might be impressed by someone who can sing songs and play guitar, so I set about being that someone.
Learning songs in 1975 is difficult because you have to do it all by ear. TAB or tablature – the bluffer’s way to read music in which the six guitar strings are drawn like a music stave and numbers tell you where to put your fingers – hasn’t become mainstream yet. There are books of song transcriptions in some music shops but bizarrely they’re mostly written for ‘Organ and Vocals’.
Who’s playing the organ?
Exactly! There must be a massive secret society of organ players sitting at home with their Bontempi organs rocking along to Bob Dylan or Fleetwood Mac with a bossanova accompaniment. In these ‘Organ and Vocals’ books all the songs seem to be written in Bb – a difficult key for guitarists. And, it turns out, quite a difficult key for organ players. But cornet players must be having a field day – if only I’d stuck with it!
The new guitar is brilliant. The action is good, I can fret the chords properly and I start to sound like the real thing. It’s not quite the babe magnet I was hoping for but the songs I play start to give me pleasure. After some serious application I learn to play the intro to ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Unfortunately I accomplish this feat at exactly the same moment punk arrives and my local guitar shop puts up a sign in the try-out area saying NO Stairway to Heaven! NO Smoke on the Water!
My two best numbers . . .
In the Student Union building there are a couple of piano practice rooms. I think you’re supposed to book them, but there’s never anyone in them, so I just go in, close the door, and start figuring out chords.
And this begins the pattern of my life. Autodidact sounds rather grand, but self-taught sounds slightly pejorative. Whichever, over the next forty years I become relatively competent at banging out chords and tunes on the piano, the guitar, the bass, the tenor guitar and the mandolin, with a less-practised but OK-ish ability on the drums, the trumpet, the banjo, the ukulele, the banjolele, the autoharp and various recorders. With a fair wind I can scrape a tune out of a fiddle, and squeeze an accompaniment out of a melodeon. And I can play the coconuts and the triangle. I’ve played all these things on stage when people have been paying to listen.
But I still can’t read music. If I take an inordinate amount of time I can pick things out from written music, but it’s not fluent. Why? It would take no less application than learning ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or teaching myself the shape of chords on a piano from scratch. I think it’s a mental antipathy to the kind of authority written music represents. All right, let’s be honest, an antipathy to my dad, the man who wanted classical music to remain lofty and unattainable, a symbol of his class and intellect.
It’s as if I’m shouting at him (even though he’s dead): ‘Look at me! Look at how I’m playing all these things! AND I DIDN’T DO IT YOUR WAY!’
Like the line in the Neil Innes song ‘How Sweet to Be an Idiot’ when he sings: ‘But Mother I play so beautifully, listen. Ha ha!’