Apathy for the Devil (2 page)

At the outset of the fifties he was a staff engineer at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios - George Martin was another new recruit at this juncture - but the pay was so abysmal that when I appeared, he was immediately forced to look for more financially advantageous avenues of employment. This he found in 1952 at Radio Luxembourg, whose London-based recording studios he basically ran for several years. The outlet then required a daily cavalcade of live entertainment to fill its airwaves - its transformation to a DJ-centric pop music format was still some years off - and so my father spent his days setting up the sessions and then recording everyone from George Formby to Vera Lynn.

Vera Lynn and him became first-name pals: she always had a good word for my dad. But he didn’t like her music. In fact, he couldn’t stand his job. He didn’t like ‘light entertainment’ - he found it all offensively simplistic. And as a devout Christian, he was thoroughly appalled by the loose moral conduct he often encountered in the industry: the sexual favours and rampant alcoholism, the fly-by-night agents and managers with their predatory ways, the shrill-voiced, pill-addled post-war prima donnas careening from one private catastrophe to the next. When I’d become a teenager, he told me just how flawed these people were in his eyes. His most unforgettable reminiscence involved a much-loved actress of the era who’d become something of an English institution for her sympathetic, matronly portrayal of a farmer’s wife on a popular radio broadcast. According to him, she’d once bitten a man’s penis off whilst performing oral sex on him when the car they were both travelling in was involved in a sudden head-on collision with a wall. He
tried to instil in me early his belief that most popular entertainment was - at best - smoke and mirrors and that behind its bejewelled curtain lurked a tainted and predatory kingdom.

Both my parents viewed what passed for popular culture in the fifties with a ferocious disdain. Elvis Presley they considered like some degenerate hillbilly sex maniac, the musical equivalent of Robert Mitchum in
Cape Fear
. Frank Sinatra they called a ‘smarmy little gangster’: my father already knew all the insider scuttlebutt (gossip) on his Mafia affiliations and leg-breaking routines. When I suddenly fell under pop’s giddy spell, it was a shock to both of them.

The first time was when I heard Elmer Bernstein’s ‘Theme from
The Magnificent Seven
’ on the car radio during a family outing when I was nine going on ten. Staccato violins suddenly stabbed out a turbulent mariachi rhythm over which a hauntingly exuberant melody was being articulated and every atom of my being was suddenly activated by its impact on my ears. I’d never before heard or felt anything as thrilling as this. Every detail is still vivid in my mind: my grandmother’s fierce eyes looking at me from the front seat, my father’s aching back as he drove, the rank odour of cheap petrol that permeated the back of the family car. From that moment on, I was plugged into a new form of rapture that my parents could never understand.

The world of pop that I found myself suddenly enthralled with was not one that bristled with danger and raw excitement. The early sixties were a slack time for musical daredevilry. Elvis had been neutered by the army and his hoodlum peers were publicly disgraced and slouching snake-eyed through their wilderness years. Their places had been taken by a markedly less disruptive breed of young entertainer - bland crooners with dimpled cheeks
and puppy-dog eyes forever voicing their feelings of undying love to some sulky beehived harpy. It was mostly cloying stuff - musical Brylcreem that left you feeling sticky and light-headed.

But then, in October of 1962, I was listening to popular disc jockey Alan Freeman enthusiastically address the nation’s ‘pop-pickers’ on the kitchen radio one Sunday afternoon when he introduced the debut single by ‘a young combo from down Liverpool way’ that he referred to as the Beatles. The song itself, ‘Love Me Do’, wasn’t particularly groundbreaking - the harmonica refrain dominating the arrangement had been clearly inspired by Bruce Channel’s recent mega-hit ‘Hey! Baby’ - but the robust blend of plaintive guitar strumming and playful Scouser vocalising made it infectiously easy on the ear nonetheless. No one could sense in that innocent moment that a musical and cultural revolution was about to blow up and that the Beatles would be its central motivating core, its leaders and all-purpose Pied Pipers.

How sweet it was to be ten years old when they kicked off: my whole teenaged experience was illuminated by their output and very existence. They never disappointed and each new musical plateau they ascended to left their audience delirious with a joy so contagious that it came to define the very spirit of the decade itself. The better world their songs aspired to was a universe that everyone was welcome to inhabit, one where notions of class and racial disharmony simply melted away, where being kind was infinitely more virtuous a pursuit than simply being cool and where the sophistication of high art could effortlessly be fused with the visceral impact of lowbrow pop. It was them and Dylan who kicked open the door that had formerly kept twentieth-century bohemian culture trapped in suffocatingly smoky nightclubs on the outskirts of town and let it come pouring
into the high streets where young people were gathering to define a new sort of commercial mainstream for their own consumer urges.

Not forgetting the Rolling Stones of course. You can never overestimate their role in detonating the rebel instincts of my bright-eyed baby boomer generation. I should know. I was there in the front row when the deal went down. I felt the explosion full in the face. The force of it hot-wired my imagination, invaded my dreams and taught me everything I needed to know about the realities of youthful self-empowerment.

In 1959, my father - always on the lookout for better-paying employment - was offered a senior position in a fledgling TV company known as Harlech that was then poised to become the Welsh branch of the ITV network. He took the job even though it involved immediately uprooting his family from our relatively blissful North London home and hearth and relocating in Llandaff, a sleepy little village on the outskirts of Cardiff that was remarkable only for its lofty-spired cathedral, one of the largest centres of worship in all of the British Isles. I would come to know its interior well: my parents were weekly attendees and they obliged me to accompany them every Sunday morning until I reached the age of fourteen.

None of us were happy in our new surroundings. My father soon found himself in daily conflict with the higher-ups at the studio and the accumulated stress caused his various physical ailments to further flare up. My mother felt out of place, and I became lonely and withdrawn, uncertain of how and where to fit in with everyone around me.

The hearty ‘welcome in the hillsides’ that the Welsh were always promising to shower on all foreigners entering their
borders had been mysteriously withheld from me. At school, I was mocked for my English accent, which I refused to modulate in order to blend in with the blocked-sinus cadences of the South Wales resident. I was useless at sports too - apart from cross-country running - and as soon as I’d entered grammar school at eleven, I found my place amongst the stragglers and the underdeveloped lurking in the shadow-dimmed corners of the playground.

One of my fellow outsiders at school was a youth with a facial defect who seemed at first glance to be ever so slightly mentally challenged. We got to talking one day and he mentioned that his father was a leading promoter of wrestling events and pop concerts in the South Wales area. I then talked up my dad’s role as TV studio controller and the boy became excited. He immediately proposed a deal: if I could get my father to agree to take him for a guided tour around his studio, he’d coerce his dad to let me attend one of his pop concerts. He’d even take me backstage to meet the acts.

A few days later, I was formally invited to witness a concert that was booked into Cardiff’s Sophia Gardens on February 28th 1964. It was a package tour of recent UK hit pop acts, headlined by an actor called John Leyton then renowned for his role as ‘Ginger’ in the TV series
Biggles
who’d also scored a no. 1 hit of late with his overwrought rendition of ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’. The rest of the bill were similarly old-school Tin Pan Alley chancers and prancers with one marked exception: nestled well below Leyton’s name and likeness on the marquee poster were five hirsute faces belonging to a Richmond-based quintet of young white R & B purists who called themselves the Rolling Stones. They’d already started getting publicity for themselves
and had so far released two singles - the second, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, being a Lennon-McCartney composition - but neither had penetrated the top 10. They were still something of an unknown quantity outside of the South of England as a concert attraction and had been placed low on the bill in case their act failed to take off in the British provinces.

At around 5 p.m. on the evening in question, I entered the premises and was duly introduced to the acts that were already secluded in the backstage area. They were all surprisingly cordial with me, considering the fact that I was a pre-pubescent twelve-year-old dressed up like the quintessential spare prick at a wedding. Harold Wilson’s Labour government had recently been brought into power after years of Conservative misrule and my parents being good socialist thinkers had celebrated by buying their only child an overcoat made in a material called ‘Gannex’ that one of Wilson’s closest supporters and business cronies had begun manufacturing. It was supposed to be the fabric of the future but it looked and felt like a cheap bath mat with sleeves. It was a hideous material and was doomed to become extinct just as soon as Wilson had left power, but not before I’d been rendered sartorially challenged at this landmark occasion in my life.

Still, no one said anything untoward about my catastrophic fashion sense. The early-sixties UK pop breed were an approachable bunch if nothing else. They knew all about the devious nature of pop success and were fastidious about always presenting a smiling face and friendly word or two to any potential fan crossing their paths. Jet Harris-a hopeless alcoholic and one of UK rock’s first-ever bona fide casualties who’d been booked on the tour even though he was so plastered all the time someone else had to play his guitar parts behind a curtain - was even nice
to me. His girlfriend-a singer named Billie Davis - let me play with her dog. I felt accepted by all of them and liked being in their company. But as soon as the lights dimmed and each of them slipped under the spotlight to reveal their stagecraft, I could sense that they were all living in the past and only a few heartbeats away from becoming instant entertainment-industry relics.

All these acts basically looked the same. Thin lips, prominent cheekbones, pompadoured Everly Brothers hair, shark-white teeth clenched in winning smiles, tight shiny suits with spaghetti stains on the lapels, loud shirts and skinny little ties. They sounded identical also. Twanging guitars played at docile, non-feedback-inducing volumes, drumming you could gently tap your foot along with, singers clumsily attempting to reproduce the husky-voiced drama of Elvis Presley’s recent recordings. In fact what we the audience were seeing that night was the timely ending of an era - the dreary watershed years separating the fifties from this new decade we were now living in and the beginning of true sixties culture as an oasis of unbridled hedonism. It occurred at the very moment the Rolling Stones entered the building.

The group had been delayed on the motorway and had arrived just in time to literally walk on stage for their spot. Suddenly the mood in the hall became more charged and disruptive. The predominantly female audience had been polite in their reception of the other acts but now they were becoming distinctly agitated. Screams started erupting in the hall followed by a succession of adolescent females leaving their seats and rampaging around the building in fierce packs.

I was seated in the front row just as the lights went down to herald the group’s onstage arrival and was suddenly confronted by a demented young woman who angrily demanded that I
vacate my place for her. When I refused, she took off one of her shoes and positioned the stiletto heel against my neck like a shiv forcing me to acquiesce to her demand. One of the bouncers saw what was going on and pulled her off me, but by that time complete pandemonium had set in everywhere I looked. I was surrounded on all sides by young women in a collective state of extremely heightened sexual psychosis. They were touching themselves in inappropriate places and letting forth primeval howls. My eyes were popping out of my head.

This was the first time I’d ever come face to face with ‘sex’ - never mind raging mass sexual hysteria - so you can understand that the moment had more than a lingering impact on my naive little psyche. They were scary broads too but I instinctively understood the root cause of their dementia because the Rolling Stones’ presence in the room had also sucked me into something equally life-scrambling. The Rolling Stones never smiled and physically they were the polar opposite of everyone else on the bill. No ties, no Brylcreemed hair slicked back to better define the young male forehead. The Rolling Stones didn’t have foreheads. Just hair, big lips and a collective aura of rampaging insolence.

They slouched onto the stage and stared witheringly at the crowd before them as they donned their instruments. The house compère hastily announced them only to have his utterances drowned in screams. Then they began playing. It could have been ‘Not Fade Away’, the Buddy Holly song they’d release a week later, thus securing their first top-10 placing and their full-on ascension to the status of rebel-prince youth phenomenon.

All I can recall in my mind now is a vibrant, irresistibly all-embracing sonic churn - ‘the very churn of sedition itself’, I’d later come to call it. It was raucous and primordial and it sent
young women into an instant state of full-on demonic possession. Something that had previously been forbidden in white culture was being let loose here: a kind of raw tribal abandoning of all inhibitions that held the key to a new consciousness still emerging. Within the space of their twenty-minute-long performance, my childhood’s end was preordained and the door to adulthood held tantalisingly ajar. I remember it now like someone reaching into my brain and turning a switch that suddenly changed my fundamental vision of life from grainy black and white into glorious Technicolor.