Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (7 page)

In terms of their musical choices, once we were at the library Mum would gravitate toward the soundtracks and show tunes, Dad the comedy records. For the next few days on our player albums like
South Pacific
,
The King and I
and
Oliver!
would alternate with the Goons, Hancock and Peter Sellers’ solo stuff. The one record they both adored was a beautiful EMI compilation of Ivor Novello’s greatest hits; Mum chiefly for Vanessa Lee singing ‘I Can Give You the Starlight’, Dad because Novello’s narration of the lyrics to ‘My Dearest Dear’ struck him as the campest thing he’d ever heard. It wasn’t that the old man had no ear for music, just that he didn’t care for anything too new and stylized, preferring instead the full-on sound of a rough pub trio hammering out ‘Red Roses for a Blue Lady’. Live music was his thing and, conveniently, there was only one type of venue he knew that could offer that, preferably with him leading the charge.

By 1962, however, other music had begun infiltrating the house. For me, this aural revolution first announced itself visually. My sister, then twelve, one day asked for the Sellotape and her tiny bedroom was henceforth dominated by a large colour poster of Cliff Richard. Swiftly my brother Michael, ten, got in on this giddy self-expression by gluing a small black-and-white picture of Brenda Lee to his bedhead. We shared a bedroom, and I would stare nervously as, before sleep, he would flamboyantly kiss Brenda goodnight. I remember feeling that if Mum caught him doing such a thing she would throw him out. Being only five years old, my icons were TV puppets Rag, Tag and Bobtail, and so I cut out a picture of them and put it up.

Then certain new records started turning up that had to be played sparingly, almost dangerously, and most importantly when Dad wasn’t in the room. When he did hear them he would pronounce both their sound and our wild gyrating to them as ‘batchy’ – a word I have not heard anyone else employ, but one he regularly used to describe anything he found crass or ludicrous. These batchy discs – again mostly hand-me-downs from Aunt Pat – were meaty beaty bounces like Johnny Preston’s ‘Cradle of Love’, Tony Newley’s ‘Anything You Wanna Do’ and Adam Faith’s terrifically snotty howl, ‘Big Time’.

Over the years I have noted many other people’s rock awakening seems to have been sparked by the far more credible and rootsy noises as made by Elvis, Gene Vincent or even John Lee Hooker, but our flats were a long way from the nearest US Air Force base and so the culture that was later to dominate my own life crept in via these rather tame, ersatz, seemingly square grooves. Today I thoroughly stand by each and every one of them though, and genuinely believe that entering the rocking new world through such a poppy portal saved me a lifetime of dry musical snobbery, forever fussing about the authenticity of this basically boss-eyed art. In fact, whenever I do read that somebody’s life was turned around at the age of eight by chancing across a wax cylinder of Mississippi John Hurt, I find it hopelessly pretentious and not a little tragic – they seem to have missed out on whole chunks of innocent goofy fun from home-grown peppy warblers like Helen Shapiro and Johnny Leyton. Possibly, like Steve Martin’s character in
The Jerk
, they yearn to be a poor black child from deep down Mississippi. Not me. This early sixties world seemed full of joyous, jumping new music and I was in clover just where I was. And then, one day, like a Technicolor piano falling from the sky, like an electric choral earthquake, came the Beatles.

The day my sister brought a copy of the
Please Please Me
LP into our house things seemed to get faster, sharper, headed in a new direction. She had bought it with some birthday money she still had in her Post Office book from Starr’s, in the parade opposite Surrey Docks – the only record shop near us. Starr’s was, in truth, only a semi-record shop. It mainly sold balls of wool and knitting patterns, but had a couple of racks of albums by the door as well as a shelf with some chart singles to one side. Quite how this woollen/vinyl hybrid ever came into being is anybody’s guess but I later learned that, as a radio phone-in, the subject of shops that sell disparate items never fails to engage. The best call I ever took told of a place in Suffolk that sold shellfish and suits of armour.

In my lifetime I estimate I have owned around fifty thousand records. It may be ten million, I don’t know, but I don’t regret a single purchase and feel warmly about each and every one of them.
¹

Many, I admit, were out-and-out caterwauling turkeys. Hurray! So what? A substantial core though became my most trusted loyal companions and remain so. The first record I bought with free independent choice and with my own money – via a freshly cashed postal order from Aunt Pat – was in the spring of 1964: the single of ‘Can’t You See That She’s Mine’ by the Dave Clark Five. I became deeply enamoured of its B-side, a mid-tempo ballad called ‘Because’ and would mime to it, imagining our round, wall-mounted living-room mirror was a TV camera and I was breaking the hearts of all the adoring young girls viewing my show from their boring, non-pop star homes. This was when I was being Mike Smith, the handsome keyboardist and singer in the DC5. When I was being drummer Dave Clark himself, I would form a fantasy kit by arranging the two smallest pieces from Mum’s nest of tables as snare and tom-tom along with a leatherette pouffe turned on its side for a bass drum. Once this crackpot roadying was complete I would then energetically keep the beat with invisible sticks. To their credit, my parents never actually laughed out loud when they saw me doing this but Mum, as she hoovered around my commotion, would often caution me, ‘They’ll come and cart you off one of these days – ’salright, there’ll be room in the van for all of us.’

My alternate life as Britain’s latest pop sensation extended beyond the music. Sitting on the toilet, I would visualize myself being interviewed and mouth silent replies to such hard-hitting probes as: ‘Won’t you tell us, Danny, what you have planned for your immediate future?’ In response I would give my fans a few hints as to what might be in store without ever giving the sensible answer, which was of course, ‘Well, first I intend pulling my trousers back up.’ I also developed a most blazing passion for Dusty Springfield, and these same phantom interviewers would often enquire as to how our marriage was coming along.

The truly exhilarating thing about the first awakenings to pop is that not a single record strikes you as anything other than a friendly shining masterpiece. Everything is good and everybody knows exactly what they’re doing. This sense of genius everywhere was particularly acute during the early sixties because the whole world was on the same new page – apart from the Beatles, who were somehow writing the next chapter.

Lord, we were all so
keen
and I saw no difference in quality between a hokey old stomp like the Migil Five’s ‘Mockingbird Hill’ and the Kinks’ blistering ‘You Really Got Me’. As far as I was concerned, they were of a piece and both groups probably lived in the same house dreaming up fresh hits. So immersed was I in this burgeoning dawn of pop creation that, like most of Britain, I even found Freddie and the Dreamers credible.

While the jangling sounds confidently rained down like Rainbow Drops at Debnams Road, the changing fashions saw our house on shakier ground. Put succinctly, while Dad ‘put up with’ the music, he ‘wasn’t having’ the clothes. My sister bore the brunt of that embargo and some of the more swinging extremes that caught her teenage eye simply weren’t going to fly with the old man. Then there was my brother’s Donovan cap. Donovan, that quasi-spiritual Celtic imp whose winsome vocal meanderings were perfectly matched by his wandering minstrel style, was never really going to have much of a fan base among dockers called Spud. I don’t recall my brother having that much of a thing for him either – Michael’s overwhelming passion was for the Beach Boys – and yet one day he came downstairs wearing this peculiar Breton cap. The following dialogue ensued:

Dad: What the fucking hell you got on your head?

Mike: It’s a Donovan cap. The singer Donovan wears it.

Dad: Yeah? Well, you can fucking well give it back to him then, because you’re not going out in it.

Mike: Why not?

Dad: Because you look like a fucking ginger beer, that’s why not.

Mike: But it cost me fifteen and six.

Dad: Did it? Well you might as well have tossed that straight down the drain, because the only place you’re wearing that is in fucking bed.

Mike: Aw, Dad! Can’t I just wear it round Mickey Ball’s house?

Dad: No. Joycie Ball will think I’ve gone round the twist, letting you go out like that. Toss it in the bin or give it to your mother to dry up with – and that’s the fucking end of it.

And Michael sloped back upstairs again.

Exchanges like this were very common – and not only in our home – throughout the 1960s. I don’t remember too much lingering resentment, let alone rebellion, from we kids. The fact was that anytime we chanced anything outré we positively knew we were going to have to run the gauntlet of the old man’s approval, and the best you could hope for there would be a withering look and an ominous silence as you bolted for the front door. If you got a broadside like the one described – a ‘volley’, he called it – you just accepted it. He ran things and that was that. He always knew what he was doing and we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We therefore acquiesced.

One of his strictest rules was that, throughout her teens, my sister absolutely had to be in by 10 p.m. Many of these nights I would go up earlier with either my mum or dad to be read to prior to sleep. As they spoke the words, their eyes would flit back and forth to the bedside clock while the minutes ticked away from 9.50. Then, almost on the dot of ten, from outside and through the darkened square with the concrete boat, the sound of Sharon’s high heels clattering ever closer, gathering speed as she flew past the odd numbers in our block with seconds to spare. Even arrival at five past ten warranted a breathless excuse. (Some may wonder if ten o’clock wasn’t late for a small boy to still be awake to witness all this, but bedtime was never that regimented in our house. And my own, now grown, children never had any kind of lights-out curfew – to absolutely no detriment, as far as I can see.)

A curious thing connected to this nocturnal memory is the fantastic array of names my mum would call me by when lifting me from their bed, where I usually floated off, and into the room I shared with Mike. Hauling my dead weight up on to her, she would say, ‘Come on, Trub Trubshaw, let’s be having you.’ Trub Trubshaw? Jumbo Dray I knew of – but Trub Trubshaw? Even more obtuse would be, ‘Time for your own bed, Loot McDoot.’ Loot McDoot! At no other time did I hear these endearments, nor was Mum really in the habit of speaking with such soft invention. Other nights I would be Tack Tompkins or Barney Crackers. I have asked Mum many times over the years where these magnificent epithets came from, but she refuses to engage with the oddity of it all, simply replying, ‘Oh, I dunno – just something to say, I suppose.’ She never realized the dashing of her stage-struck ambitions may have also robbed the world of the subsequent, obligatory string of vanity children’s books – and rather good they might have been.

Though 1967 is the year traditionally credited as being the Summer of Love, to my memory the psychedelic sun first rose a full two years prior to that when, in 1965, the unstoppable bleeding into society of the counterculture’s earliest colour-washes arrived quite literally with the release of the Beatles’ second film,
Help!.
The future did not announce itself in an obvious manner, but
Help!
featured some key visuals and subtext of the imminent warp – though what enlightenment it did hold had to be gleaned at a very high price.

When
Help!
finally arrived on what used to be called ‘general release’ – that is, torn from the exclusive home of its Piccadilly premiere and hurled out into the teeming national fleapits – it was coupled with, indeed spot-welded to, one of the most torpid and verbose B-movies that has ever slunk onscreen. This leaden outrage was a moribund espionage caper called
Mozambique
and it went to agonizing lengths to ensure that Britain’s pop-crazy teenagers might at last get a glimpse into the tangled world of rogue oil trading in Africa. Over its tortuous two-hour duration we hepped-up devotees to Beatlemania were forced to sit through more drawn-out business meetings than the Prime Minister’s PA. It was apparent that the director of this claustrophobic abomination wanted extreme close-ups of sweaty, cigar-chewing businessmen to become his signature-shot in the same way Busby Berkeley had his showgirls.

But, of course, that was the point. In 1965 it was understood that the admission price into the cinema allowed you to sit tight all day and watch the main feature as many times as you liked. People wanting your seat simply had to wait in line. So had the distributors not reached for so radically toxic a vehicle as
Mozambique
with which to scatter the Beatle kids back out into the daylight, many of the original ticket holders would still be there even today, avidly watching Paul shrink, John bait the jeweller, George discover the sitar and Ringo’s giant Technicolor knuckle get eaten by Eleanor Bron.

I suspect my sister would. In its opening fortnight she saw
Help!
thirty-two times.
Thirty-two times
. And she took me along to seventeen of those madly agitated, scream-drenched screenings, which, doing the
Mozambique
calculations alone, makes me now realize I must have spent almost one and a half days of my ninth year grimly eavesdropping on an actor called Steve Cochran trying to outfox a thinly veiled BP.

Fair play to us all, I say. Baby boomers did not win the Cultural Revolution without toughing out such typical wars of attrition. The rewards would be big, noisy and luscious.

I can actually pinpoint one moment during the mid-sixties when I convinced myself I had achieved a mental state approaching what I believe Buddhists call bodhisattva, that near-ecstatic realm of realization as the penny drops you have a perfect place in the unfolding universe.