‘Can I be in your band, Helmer?’
‘How do you know I’ve got a band?’
‘Doggo told me. He’s telling everybody. Raw Guts. Great name. What sort of music do you play?’
‘Blues-based rock. You know, like Zep.’
‘What’s “Zep”?
I roll my eyes. ‘Fucking hell, Regan; haven’t you heard of Led Zeppelin?’
It’s breaktime and we’re in the bushes behind the school, where all the cool kids go to smoke. Only Michael Regan isn’t a cool kid and doesn’t smoke; he just comes to the bushes to hang around and annoy people like me who actually are smoking.
‘If I listen to Led Zeppelin,’ says Regan; ‘can I be in your band?’
‘What do you play?’
‘Guitar.’
‘Do you even have a guitar?’
‘I’ve got a Fender Stratocaster.’
‘You haven’t got a Fender Stratocaster.’ I know this because he’s Michael Regan, who is not at all cool and whose only claim to notability is that he can do freaky things with his body like breathing through his eyes.
‘Would you like me if I did have a Fender Stratocaster?’
‘Not even then. Anyway, you can’t be in our band because we’ve already got a lead guitarist and that’s me.’
‘I could play the other guitar: what’s it called—?’
‘—Rhythm guitar. Led Zeppelin haven’t got a rhythm guitarist.’
‘Have you got a guitar—I mean, an electric guitar?’
‘Just fuck off, Regan.’
Despite my lack of an electric guitar, Raw Guts is a concept at an advanced stage of visualisation. Apart from the name and the style of music we’ll play we have already decided the clothes and how we’ll stand on stage. Doggo has drawn a picture of this in his rough book; Doggo in the middle—he’s the lead singer, being the tallest and the most popular—wearing a suede jacket with fringes along the arms like Roger Daltrey’s, me on his right-hand side in loon pants blazing out guitar riffs and looking mean. We’re growing our hair. We don’t have a drummer or a bassist as yet, however that’s only a matter of time: as my encounter with Michael Regan in the bushes shows, word is getting round.
We’re also working on our attitude. ‘It’s important how you look at people on stage,’ says Doggo.
‘Yeah,’ I agree.
‘I want to look at everyone really mean, like that prefect in the dinner hall who used to stare at you like he wanted to pull your arms and legs off.’
‘Which prefect?’ I scour my memory for an older boy fitting this description, and bring to mind an image of two prefects who together used to police the lunchtime queue. They would stand together at the end of the hall like the figures on the Trumpton clock. One had a pretty, painted-doll face, while the other had the lantern-jawed, scowling demeanour of a psychopathic grave-digger in a Hammer Horror movie. I decide that it is the latter of these two Doggo is talking about.
‘I don’t know his name,’ says Doggo; He left last year. ‘—But really scary looking: that’s how I’m going to look at people when I’m on stage.’
We need to cultivate this attitude because we are into ‘heavy’ music. Doggo lent me his Led Zeppelin album (we call them ‘albums’ now, not ‘LPs’), which came out this year and which is very heavy. I carried it around at school a bit to impress people, then took it home and listened to it on the record player in my bedroom, slowing it down from 33 RPM to 16 RPM so I could work out the guitar parts on my starter guitar. Even at that slower speed this is not easy, since Jimmy Page is a genius and plays blindingly fast.
In the course of this research I discover that my grandfather, who has come to live with us, does not like Led Zeppelin either at 33 RPM or at 16 RPM. He objects to them very strongly, in fact. He says that Led Zeppelin is not music at all. But then the only music he seems to like is military band music—and even then, not when it is over the credits to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which Dad and I both like a lot, but which he does not care for as it features just the kind of long haired lefty piss-takers he feels the BBC employs too many of anyway.
If I am to be ruthlessly honest, I have to say there are parts of the Led Zeppelin album I myself find difficult to listen to, not that I would admit this to Doggo, my grandfather or anyone else. I’m fine with the straight-ahead rockers like Communication Breakdown or Good Times Bad Times which, let’s face it, are hard not to love (unless you are my grandfather and grew up in the First World War), but just occasionally, in the slower bits …
You see, I come from a family where wallowing in emotion is strictly forbidden, along with expressing, talking about or even alluding to emotions unless they provide the occasion for some curly-lipped sarcasm that will demonstrate how not-in-their-thrall you are. But on tracks like Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, I meet wallowing of the first order. Give Robert Plant a microphone and he will go straight for wallow. His extraordinary voice swoops and moans like some banished weather-god stirring currents in a dark pool where lustful and hateful impulses mix and coalesce. Creatures of id rear, driving me relentlessly to a place of strong but unnameable emotion that I find just overwhelming. They make me anxious, these dirge-like sections; fearful, even. I worry about what would happen were I to get stuck in this dark place: who would ever pull me out again?
This is the heaviness, I decide, of heavy music. A thing to be stuck with and endured. And at this age, 12 about to turn 13, I’m secretly not sure whether I have the psychic equipment for it.
* * * * * * *
The truth about Raw Guts is that it was a rough book band, nothing more, and never likely to progress beyond the page. Doggo and I were fantasists, as we and probably all the people we gassed on to about the project, knew. But we were OK with that, because the object of our desires, the material reality from which these fantasies emanated, seemed so remote. We had neither of us ever played or sung in public, or even been to a proper rock gig (we weren’t allowed by law onto most of the premises where they took place). People like Plant and Page were hardly even people: they were gods—or at least demiurges. The world in which you could stand on a stage and exert a similar emotional power over fellow human beings was, for us, completely out of reach. Or so we thought.
A visit from my glamorous older sister that year brought it all just that little bit closer. Five years older than me, she was living the life, working in an office in Savile Row which was, coincidentally, next door to the building in which The Beatles had their Apple offices and studio. One Friday in January she got back to work after a day off sick to hear that the road had been closed and police called the previous day because the mop-tops had performed a rooftop concert next door. She had a French boyfriend at the time who worked for Apple in some rather nebulous role and was a friend of George Harrison’s. George had gifted him a guitar, a white Stratocaster (so far as I could make out from her description) which she had not only seen but touched. I stared, awestruck, at her fingers. The fingers that had touched the neck, that had touched the hand …
If I’d only known it at the time, rock fame was always much closer at hand than I imagined. That scary-looking prefect in the dinner hall was John Wilkinson, who became better known as Wilko Johnson of Dr. Feelgood. The cello I was learning to play sat next to another in the music room at school which was pointed out to me years later as having been loaned to Gary Brooker of Procul Harum. Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Band attended a school just up the road from ours, Southend High School for Boys, though I didn’t know it. I learned to swim in the same outdoor swimming pool in Westcliff where Ian Dury contracted polio. And yet figures like this, passing close to me in space (if not always in time) seemed hardly part of the same reality.
The boundaries of reality were shifting in 1969 however. Holidaying in Somerset, we watched people from our own world set foot for the first time on another world in live TV coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. We were staying at a Pontins holiday camp called Brean Sands. I spent most of my time on that holiday in the slot machine arcade, fishing lodged pennies out of jammed machines with a lolly stick and learning to play pinball. I would gaze in silent worship at the arcade’s local pinball wizard (an approachable, domestic-scale god), at his sun-tanned wrists and convulsively twitching fingers. Falling out of the arcade after dark, my pockets bulging with pennies, I looked up at the moon and found it almost inconceivable that there were human beings up there at that very moment, tramping and bouncing around on its surface. Everywhere, people were doing things now that only gods were supposed to do.
A less successful space mission was the subject of a single I bought later that year, Space Oddity. I always loved story songs: I’d been listening to them all my short life, starting with comedy records like Charlie Drake’s ‘Mr Custer’ and Bernard Cribbins’ ‘Right Said Fred’, progressing to darker themes with Tom Jones’s Delilah and—probably the apogee of the genre—’Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town’, by Kenny Rogers. But with this new disc I’d got a twofor; Space Oddity on one side and on the obverse another story song that made an even more powerful impression on me, perhaps the strongest impression of any record issued in 1969, The Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud.
I was struck by this story of the young outsider misunderstood and abused by small-minded villagers—they probably didn’t appreciate Led Zeppelin any more than my grandfather—but it’s relatability rolled over into triple score with one particular line: ‘… As he breaks the night to cry:/ It’s really me / Really you and really me…’
Ever since I was little there has been this game I played in my head—or rather, a game that my head played on me. At first it would start with me repeating the word ‘really’ over and over to myself. With each repetition, the word seemed to get more loaded and more onerous—‘really …? really ..? REALLY?’—until the panic it gave rise to mushroomed out of control.
Each repetition peeled away a layer of comfort and artifice. This is real life, not television. Not a film, not a book. This drab wallpaper, this lino, this is it. My one life, my one-way life; this is it. Really. There is nothing else. Really …’ The sting of it, the sense of swiftly accelerating fear, made me decide never to play the Really Game again. But after the first couple of times I found that it would start up on its own. Science fiction TV programmes like Doomwatch could trigger it. The odd story in The Pan Book of Horror Stories series could set me off. The Mickey Mouse section of Fantasia. The sight of an unshaded light bulb a in bare room, glimpsed from the top of a bus after dark …. But more often the game would just begin spontaneously with no obvious cause, when I was alone in the bathroom or late at night in bed. When it happened, I would have to sing or whistle or beat myself about the head, or find any sort of distraction to make it stop.
I tried once describing it to my little brother Paul, the human I was closest to, to see if he’d ever experienced anything similar, but I could see that he didn’t really understand what I was getting at. I tried mentioning it to a couple of friends at school, but they just gave me funny looks. And I never, ever felt that I could bring it up with either of my parents. Clearly, this was not a general thing, I realised; just something uniquely wrong with me. So I shut up about it. Never said a word to anyone, not even in therapy years later. Never even tried to describe it in words (until now).
So this was my David Bowie moment, the moment every fan can describe when they imagine that their favoured artist is singing exclusively for, to and about them; a phenomenon different for everybody in its circumstances, but qualitatively similar. Listening to The Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud, I felt at first a deep sense of paranoia—had this Bowie person been surveilling me from his starry capsule?—which quickly gave way to an uneasy gratitude. One other person, at least, seemed to understand what I was experiencing. Someone else knew the deepest terror of my soul. And that alone made my periodic contacts with the abject feelings inspired by The Really Game just that tiny bit less terrifying.