Verse, Chorus, Monster! (eBook)

A
DODGY
PAIR
OF
BROGUES

The first time Damon spoke to me was to point out the crapness of my shoes. The most sought-after footwear at the time was a pair of black, leather-soled brogues like the ska boys wore. Ideally you wore your trouser hem quite high, with white socks and black brogues visible underneath. I aspired to that look, plus my parka on top, and asked for some brogues for my birthday. We weren’t a very well-off or fashion-conscious family, so what I received was a pair of oil-resistant, industrial black clogs with a rubbery plastic insole. Shoes tended to be purchased right after the Family Allowance came in, and we couldn’t afford the top-notch sixty-quid jobs. These were barely passable.

This outrageously confident thirteen-year-old whom I had seen singing songs from West Side Story, and whom I thought was the epitome of hipness, approached me unprompted and made a snide comment about my ugly shoes. Then he flounced off, adjusting his hair and leaving me feeling humiliated, which was certainly a familiar sensation by then. Damon, on the other hand, possessed a really nice pair of brogues, which he wore with a black raincoat ensemble and his bleached blond hair. My footwear might not have passed muster, but when he found out I was the only boy at school who could play sax, he came looking for me.

‘You play sax, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, I need a solo on this song I’ve written. We’re going to record it round Michael Morris’s house – he’s got a four-track. Bring your sax.’

Michael Morris was a mutual schoolfriend who played bass and lived in a cool, modern 1970s house on a groovy estate in Stanway Green. He was also a bit of a hard nut who once gave me a nosebleed during one of our many mock fights. Michael’s front room was all set up with microphones and – praise be! – a portastudio, and it was there we recorded Damon’s song ‘Beautiful Lady’. It was a mid-tempo, piano-driven ballad, with a drum machine providing the rhythm. I blew a little sax solo on it, to which Michael added a weird phaser or flanger effect. Damon was delighted with the results, and we would be friends for ever after. The name of the band at that time was Real Lives. As well as the sax, I also sometimes played the drums. Having graduated from my junior Keith Moon impersonation, I now scraped together enough money to buy a simple Maxwin kit, and played it pretty intuitively. On other songs we recorded, I would lay down a drum line on track one of the cassette, then play it back over Michael’s trebly speakers while adding a saxophone part. It was primitive, but to me the process of capturing each element of a song on multiple tracks was absolutely miraculous. People who heard it seemed to dig what we were doing, including my parents and sister.

Damon was very different to me, a cocky Londoner who didn’t give a shit what people thought of him. He was a hugely compelling personality, an arrogant oddment who was extremely good-looking and not only knew it, but knew what to do with it. For that reason, people at our school didn’t take kindly to him at all. A lot of the fourth- and fifth-year lads were predatory skinheads, and you had to watch yourself. They used to hide behind one of the Portakabins and round us up like border collies herding sheep. They would make us run round one side of the Portakabin, where these two other skinheads were waiting to kick our legs out from under us as we scurried past. Damon frequently got chased into the loos, where he was booted up the arse and had ‘666’ scrawled on his forehead.

Luckily – and mysteriously – I didn’t really have much of a problem with bullying. I spent most of my time out of harm’s way in the ivory towers of the school’s art and music blocks. I tended to keep my head down, move forward and try to stay invisible. Damon, by contrast, deliberately dressed in a way that got him noticed and was constantly messing around with his hair. By the time I was fourteen and had reached the second or third year, being a skinhead was less of a fashion statement – that gang had left school and the atmosphere had eased. Damon and I were now free to sit in the Portakabins, which were near the music block, and listen to music and mess about on guitars. By this time I was reasonably competent on the instrument, so I strummed away while Damon played the piano.

That earliest band, Real Lives, was a ballady mixture of Heaven 17, King Crimson and Lionel Richie – a very 1980s concoction, in other words. Damon eventually bought a portastudio of his own, and I got into a routine of dropping round on Friday nights so that the two of us could concentrate on writing new material. Real Lives eventually played a few gigs at assemblies in the school hall, charity shows and other small local events.

At the time, Damon was into chart material by Elton John, Madness and Heaven 17, but together we took a slightly deeper dive into more unfamiliar musical waters. We got into Talk Talk, who were having hits with singles like ‘Life’s What You Make It’ and ‘Living in Another World’ but seemed uncomfortable in the role of new romantic pop heroes and would gradually head off in more experimental directions. I had a twelve-inch of ‘Stephen’ by Gene Loves Jezebel, and I loved that. James Hibbins was really into Marillion. He was a fan of progressive rock, and it was around then that I started listening to King Crimson, led by the extraordinary guitarist Robert Fripp. Crimson’s ‘Ladies of the Road’ was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. It disguised itself as a traditional song, but it concealed some wigged-out guitar and sax solos. There was an album Fripp and Andy Summers (of the Police) made together called Bewitched, which I thought was fantastic, especially a track called ‘What Kind of Man Reads Playboy?’ It features a drum machine, with Summers and Fripp going berserk on their guitars and a guy called Chris Winter going nuts on a saxophone. Despite still loving the mod sounds, I had no trouble getting into the more proggy stuff, like Matching Mole, Robert Wyatt, Gong, Caravan, Van der Graaf Generator and Soft Machine, which was the scene Damon’s dad had been involved in (he briefly managed Soft Machine in the late 1960s). I was being hit on all sides by so many eclectic sounds and inspiring ideas of what music could be.

———

I generally enjoyed my time at school – at least, I wasn’t one of the ones trying to bunk off and was reasonably well liked by my fellow pupils. I was good at English, occasionally startling my English teacher, Miss Wraite, with the range of my vocabulary. She was impressed, for instance, that I knew what ‘surmise’ meant. She was less impressed when I brought in Paolo Hewitt’s The Jam: A Beat Concerto, after she encouraged us to analyse a text of our choice. It described the inspiration behind Paul Weller’s song ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’ and included the word ‘neurosis’, which I speculated came from the narrator’s own fear of getting beaten up in the Underground. She pulled a face at that one, mainly because she didn’t consider a book about pop suitable for an English Literature class.

I’m not entirely sure where my appreciation of words came from, as I didn’t read a huge number of books in my teens, apart from Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund and the uncanny fiction of Alan Garner. I was struck by a piece of dialogue between a boy and a girl at the start of the latter’s novel Red Shift, which, in its mixture of the tragic and the romantic – the incredible odds against meeting a soulmate, given the size of the universe, and the inevitability of being torn apart by circumstances – pretty much crystallised the shape of most of my future relationships. Otherwise, as often as not I would daydream my way through school lessons, only half engaged in what was going on in the classroom. I didn’t make much of an effort, to be honest, but I kept myself interested enough to get four O-levels: English, Art, Music and Human Biology.

I also searched out other creative avenues. I began to get seriously interested in art during Mick Knight’s art classes at Stanway Comprehensive. I went into the art room one day, and there on the wall was a poster for an exhibition at the Royal Academy by Marc Chagall, a French artist born in pre-Soviet Russia who did amazing work in parallel to the cubists and expressionists. The poster featured one of his lovely series of paintings of him and his wife hovering in mid-air. He’s wearing brown trousers and a green jumper, his wife is in a black dress with a white collar, they’re both floating upwards off the floor of their kitchen, and he’s bending around in front of her face to give her a kiss. The sheer romanticism of this image bowled me over. I’d never heard of Chagall before, but that was it. It made total sense – drawing is not always about reproducing an apple accurately. It was similar to some of my own pictures, but now I realised it was actually possible to get this kind of work exhibited in public.

This encouraged me to look into the artistic scene of early-1900s Paris, around the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse districts – the messy painters like Chaïm Soutine and Modigliani. I loved them – and Picasso, of course. They made me feel better about my own stuff. I wasn’t bad at conventional drawing, but...