Viewed From a Mountain…

Photographed from the carriage window on our train journey to Inverness

Arthur's Seat When we had just entered our twenties my brother, Rhys and I went to Scotland. The mother of a friend of ours had decided that he needed a holiday and booked a cheap, out of term student residence on campus at St Andrews University. She told him to take some friends so, along with one other of his friends that neither of us knew, he asked Rhys and me. It was a strange sort of holiday. We were completely alone on the campus, it felt like wandering the ruins of an abandoned civilisation, a hidden world built not for us but for others more important and looking back it feels sort of weirdly symbolic of my relationship with academia. We spent our days roaming the beach and climbing the craggy rocks. We wanted to explore more of Scotland but the other two didn’t really want to do anything. In the end, Rhys and I bought train tickets to Inverness and traveled there and back in a day just to see the mountains. In Inverness I bought Nausea by Sartre in a bookshop and we tried to walk to Loch Ness (we’d always, always, always wanted to see Loch Ness) but it was far too far to walk there in the time and we had to turn back. Back at St Andrews we did manage to persuade the others to go to Edinburgh for the day. We didn’t have any money so we spent the day exploring the streets and the National Gallery. In the afternoon we parted company and left the other two to it because there was one thing in Edinburgh that Rhys and I were desperate to visit, especially Rhys, and that was Arthur’s Seat. It was something that we’d always wanted to visit since we were tiny children on the Isle of Wight, since the time we found out that it was an extinct volcano (I mean, what could possibly be more exciting than that?!) So, the two of us walked across town until we found it and I remember laughing because somehow it wasn’t how I’d imagined it: it looked like a monstrous wild thing had sprouted up from a respectable civic park and it grew from the manicured lawn so invitingly that without saying a word we both just ran at it, not even stopping to wonder if there was a path up, and hurled ourselves at its shaggy flank. I remember distinctly that when we were about two thirds of the way up we had to stop for breath and it was only then in pausing that we came to look down for the first time and became aware of how high we’d climbed and how steep the slope was and it began to feel like perhaps we’d been a bit reckless. The view made me feel dizzy and a bit unsettled. The benign grassy slope very quickly had become a wild and inscrutable monster. The ground had fallen away and with it, my confidence.

The darkest times

The past two years have been truly, truly awful for everyone. I managed to crown 2021 in style by spending Christmas alone in bed with Covid-19. A weird side-effect of flu viruses seems to be horrendous black thoughts and overwhelming nostalgic despair. On top of two years of enforced solitude and with that, an intense period of self-reflection and of grief from the loss of my partner’s mother, the end of last year became a strange, melancholy period of revisiting, contemplation and ghosts. The pandemic immediately made everything feel irrelevant. Overnight nothing seemed to matter any more in comparison to the calamity overtaking everything. One by one every aspect of life was cancelled and the world around us shrank. Now, in the middle of writing this, just when I thought that we were at a point of reflection, a horrible and terrifying war has begun in Ukraine which has made everything irrelevant all over again. How do you concentrate on anything else when this terrible event is unfolding? For the first time in many years too, people are discussing the possibility of nuclear war and nothing seems to matter but that. Weirdly, I feel the horrible nostalgia return in waves for nothing reminds me of my childhood more than the spectre of nuclear war, it haunted us constantly. Every night I went to bed as a child I had the fear of it. Teachers at school showed us the ‘Protect and Survive’ leaflets that were available in public spaces like libraries. They told us what nonsense they were, that we would never survive a nuclear war. They gave us all the impression that it wasn’t a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when’. I remember one teacher pointing out to me the air raid siren on the fire station roof one day and I felt like I'd been slapped by a bat; somehow seeing that siren made everything real and that horror has stayed with me through all these years. Now the spectre has returned like a dreadful old acquaintance, one that I had assumed was dead, haunting me every moment, gnawing away at my stomach.

So once more I’m mired in the past, woozy with memories, I find my self looking backwards, contemplating and whenever I look back at the past I think of Rhys and I charging up Arthur’s Seat; the feeling is the same: dizziness, bewilderment and unease. The past is like something viewed from a mountain and the higher you climb and the further away it gets, the more the clouds swirl, the fainter the ground and the worse the vertigo becomes…

During the pandemic playing music ceased. It was the longest period that I had gone not playing music with other people since I was fifteen years old. It felt like I’d died, it felt so, so strange. Inevitably, I started to think about music and evaluate what it means to me and how I came to play music in the first place. It was a bit like this...

In the Beginning

My friend Paul and I were inseparable. I met him on my first day of school in London. Mrs Lavender’s Class, Peckham Rye Primary School (a monstrous woman, the least said the better). I remember it so clearly. I was seated at a table opposite Paul and his friend Martin and he introduced them both to me in a very friendly manner. I had just moved from the Isle of Wight, everything was strange and rough and scary. I was really pleased to make new friends.

We went through so much shit together Paul and I. When I think of how badly served we were by the world it makes me feel a cold bitter grit in my heart. I’ve heard so many people reminisce about tough childhoods and how they had nothing but they didn’t think anything of it, they didn’t know what they didn’t have, they picked themselves up by the bootlaces and on and on. It’s all bullshit. People don’t live in a vacuum, you fucking know when you’re deprived.

Right from the start the two of us were thick as thieves and straight to plotting. We made up our own games in the playground with impenetrable rules like Ghosts Around the Toilet and Death by Pink Lady. It still makes me laugh to think of them. We were always planning projects, drawing cartoons, writing nonsense stories, recording fake radio shows on a primitive tape recorder (we set up a recording studio with a desk made from an old door in the filthy, musty cellar beneath my house), we wrote comedy sketches and funny books about ghosts and death. None of it was hobby or pastime; all of it was important no matter how frivolous.

We had our own language for things and our vocabulary expanded every day. We didn’t wait to learn the real name of anything, we would give it our own name and keep that name.

He was always so funny, Paul, always. I sometimes think of things that he did and said when we were ten years old, eight years old and they still make me laugh. Oh man, we laughed so much. In amongst the damp, rotten box backs and dumped mattresses, between the broken tombstones and derelict angels, in mould covered practice rooms and nestled between amplifiers and drums in the back of rattling panel vans we talked nonsense and laughed until our lungs hurt. It may be a cliché but humour was all that we had to protect us. It was our shield and it could turn spiteful without warning and often cascade out of control. I am still that way now really (though much less spiteful).

Big School Our secondary school, Thomas Calton was a huge Victorian labyrinth of Colditz walls and dark, stone staircases. Menace seemed to lurk in every dingy corner. Almost from the start the teachers began to tell us not to bother, that there was nothing for us, that we didn’t have a hope, didn’t stand a chance. There was a sort of cynical smile they shared, a sort of ‘oh, you have no idea just how fucked you are’ look. In Careers lessons they would virtually spit at you if you mentioned a job in the arts, not that we described it that way, we said that we wanted to write, that we wanted to make films. I remember once that Paul was told to write down what it was that he wanted to do and he said that he wanted to work in films or TV (he really wanted to write comedy) and he had it thrown back at him and was told to write something realistic and not to waste their time (or something like that). At the next attempt he wrote at length and in great detail about how he would like to be a toilet attendant and how he envisaged his working day and then they decided that he was disturbed. It was so confusing to me because my parents were both stage designers and I’d grown up surrounded by that world. I didn’t know it wasn’t ‘normal’ I hadn’t known anything else, so I knew that what they were telling us wasn’t true but when my Father left us that world seemed to disappear overnight, so I suppose I must have thought that none of that was possible for me any more. Yet life hadn’t really prepared me for anything else. On the outside I got angrier, on the inside I felt that I must just really be… nothing.

Some of the teachers, in their way, might have been doing this to help… I think. To make sure we knew the lay of the land or something like that, to make us wake up to how 'the man' had rigged the system and written us out. To make sure that we didn’t get our hopes up and aim too high (to avoid disappointment I suppose) I don’t know what they thought to be honest. They told us that the jobs that people like us were supposed to do, the things that we were supposed to aim for, no longer existed. I think now, looking back, some of those teachers may have been bitter at being sent to a no hope, dead-end school in London’s forgotten underbelly to waste their time trying to teach a load of kids that society had given up on and they took that bitterness out on us out of spite.

There was never any mention of further education. University was something on TV.

You’re not supposed to be sensitive in the situation we found ourselves in, you’re supposed to be hard. Being hard is valued above all else, everything is about how hard you are. Hard like the dead rats you see in the gutter or the dead pigeons fused to the broken paving slabs, hard like the acres of knee high debris and rubbish that litter and rot in every patch of ‘wasteland’ or impenetrable alleyway, hard like the diesel smoke and Victorian soot that blacks every brick and strip of chipped render, hard like the constant roar of the trucks and buses or the sodium orange of the night. Hard like the youths who frisk you on the way to school, who go through your pockets and your bag and ‘tax’ your belongings, your pen, your money or anything else they might fancy.

Repeat after me:

‘I’m hard’

‘He’s hard’

‘They’re hard’

Hard, hard, hard.

But we weren’t hard, no matter how we might try and pretend. We were crushed by it all. Nowhere was there any kindness, not at school, or in the street, or in the shops. Everybody was cold and mean, cruel and hard.

Hard, hard, hard.

Environments like that can affect people in different ways. I turned it mostly inwards, Paul turned it mostly outwards. Both of us got angrier and more marginalised as time went on. I began to spend less and less time at school. I just couldn’t bear the brutality of it. Truancy seemed the best option for me so that’s what I opted for but of course that route has its own troubles.

Safety amongst the dead

Our safe places became the then derelict cemeteries of Nunhead and Camberwell. There we could go at any time and be away from everybody, from all the bullying gangs and cops. There, or Peckham Rye Park out of hours, we could squeeze through the railings and be left completely alone. No pen-tax, no mugging, no cops, no pat down. It always struck me as funny later on when we got labelled as goths that we’d actually spent all that time in graveyards for purely practical reasons.

Thomas Calton started to be wound down as it was due to be merged with two other schools: Peckham Girls and Peckham Manor and our year was the second to last ever, we were phased out. The buildings had begun to feel emptier as time went on as the upper years finished and left and no new students arrived to replace them. When it came time to choose what we were going to study for exams we were told (after a talk about how this was one of the most important moments of our lives) that they were very sorry but because of the changes we would only be offered a very limited choice. There was no music option but there was never any music at school, not really. We had music ‘lessons’ in the first two years but that just consisted of singing along as the teacher played the piano. We sang from song books. We didn’t do any theory, we didn’t learn any instruments. I do remember listening to Ravel’s Bolero on a record player and discussing the story of it but not the arrangement or voicing or anything like that. I do remember that there was a clarinet at the school because Rhys was allowed to borrow it for a time, he loved the clarinet, he really wanted to learn it. I don’t remember anybody teaching it though, not to us anyway.

Pity

Occasionally a teacher would take pity on us and shake their heads sadly, tell us how hard done by we were. One day our form teacher, Miss Griffiths said to us ‘This is so awful, nobody ever takes you anywhere, you never get to see anything, you live in this incredible city with all its wonderful museums and galleries and you never get to see any of it!’ She bought us all a Red Bus Rover each (a one day bus pass) and gave us the day off to explore our city and discover some culture. It was very sweet of her… and a bit naive I suppose. One of the ‘hard’ kids pointed out that we didn’t have any money to buy lunch and negotiated £2 spending money for everybody. I don’t know how many of the other kids used their Red Bus Rovers but my friends and I got the bus up west and went shop-lifting in Hamleys (not me, I was always too well behaved to steal anything) then we spent the afternoon up to all kinds of mischief in Hyde Park and elsewhere. It might not have been exactly what Miss Griffiths had intended but it was a lovely day out for us anyway and such a kindness and I’ve never forgotten it.

Hostile environment

When the three schools merged it meant that we had to start attending lessons in the middle of Peckham. Some of the buildings were in the roughest parts, hidden amongst the monstrous labyrinth of the Peckham Hill Estate which had a horrible reputation as a no go area. Once, Paul and some of my other friends watched as police broke the door down of a flat opposite the physics class and brought out shotguns and bags of evidence. It's very hard to overstate what years of unrelenting, constant threat and fear can do to the psychology of a child. It takes years to process.

In the end I couldn’t bear the brutalism any longer and I just stopped going. I picked four lessons that I was going to carry on with and dumped the rest. I stuck with Art, Photography (it’s a miracle that we got to do photography, we were so excited about that), English and Maths. I had no interest in Maths but I liked the teacher so I went to his lessons. He was young, enthusiastic and posh and we used to discuss French cinema. The English teacher banned me in the end (he said I was a disruptive influence I think) so I had to enter myself for the English exam and just had to turn up on the day without any prep or any idea what to expect… it was all so confusing and humiliating. So terrifying to walk into that room alone with no idea what I was doing or what was going to happen.

Strikes

At the same time that all of this was happening, the three main teaching unions were at war with the government which resulted in a seemingly endless period of strikes. These meant that we would come in to school and be sent away with a slip (photocopied on whatever paper was available I guess, so they were all different colours: pink, yellow, white, grey) to say that we’d been sent home due to industrial action but it might just be for one lesson because not all the teachers were members of the same union and not all the unions would be striking at the same time, so we were expected to miss one lesson and come back for the next. It didn’t give us time to go home and it certainly didn’t give us time to go to any of our safe spaces. It meant we were open to the perils of inner city life; marauding older kids or police who would never let us alone. We would be searched by the police every day, often more than once. We would wave our strike slips at them: yellow ones, white ones, pink ones but they weren’t impressed with those. They’d chuckle and tell us to form a line then they would make us turn our pockets out, pat us down, search our bags. They didn’t tax our pens but they taxed our dignity and our confidence. They let us know that we were nothing, that we would always be nothing. They let us know what society thought of us.

The low wall

We wandered all over Peckham looking for somewhere safe to hang out, somewhere just to be. In the end, the place that we found was such an eccentric choice: a sort of low wall on top of a little raised platform on the side of a strip of parkway which was derelict and fly-tipped. This low wall was at the edge of a car-park on Peckham Hill Street where a path ran up from the strip of park (Behind where the architectural wonder of the library is now). There was a timber yard by the car park with a wooden fence and we would play downball against the fence (this is a south London game also known as ‘Patball’ where you hit a tennis ball against the wall with the side of your hand but different to other games in the same vein because you bounce the ball from the ground first, I still think of it as the king of sports). What we didn’t know then, is that the strip of park was actually a filled in canal. It now forms part of Burgess park and you can walk all along it and under the original Victorian canal bridges with their beautiful cast-iron details. I think the low wall and platform may have been the remains of an old wharf, I don’t know what else it would have been. I can’t take you there and show you though, it’s not there any more, neither is the car park or the fence. It’s a memory and nothing more.

House of the Risin' Sun

I’ve known so many musicians in my life and I’ve read so many biographies of musicians and there always seems to be a musical parent or uncle somewhere in the story; an aunt that played the piano, an inspirational teacher at school. There always seems to be a desire to pick up an instrument from the earliest age, an obsession with buying records and a catalogue type obsession with bands and guitars. It wasn’t like that for me. I just liked film music to begin with (John Barry, Ennio Morricone, John Williams, Gerry Goldsmith - but of them all Morricone was my true hero). I didn’t have any relatives who played instruments… I didn’t really have any relatives. I liked the idea of playing an instrument but I didn’t know how to pursue it really. When I was about fourteen or so I started listening to my Mother, Carol’s records. We’d grown up with her listening to them at home so they were sort of familiar especially The Beatles records and her E.P. of the music to Jules Et Jim by Georges Delarue. Now I began to explore them on my own though, what really grabbed me were her Bob Dylan records and in particular his first album. I completely fell in love with that record, I couldn’t stop listening to it and there was one song in particular that I played over and over again: The House of The Risin’ Sun. I thought it was the most incredible thing I’d ever heard. The feel of it, the chord progression, the narrative, the idea of speaking through someone else’s voice and telling their story like summoning a spirit at a séance, not being afraid to speak in the voice of the opposite sex, the inevitability of the tragedy, the failure to break free of the curse of your roots. So many things blew my mind about that song but it took a long time for me to decipher them all. It has had such a long lasting impact on me over the years; one of them is that from learning to play it by ear I found out how to make a 1st inversion D chord by wrapping my thumb around the bottom string of the guitar and holding down F#. I didn’t know what an inversion was but I loved the sound of that chord (the open D chord always sounded crappy to me on the guitar and it still does... unless you de-tune the guitar). That chord shape still appears in an unholy amount of songs that I write. Years later I read about the song in Dave Van Ronk’s biography Mayor of Macdougal Street, of how he’d come to write his arrangement of it (which Bob Dylan ‘borrowed’), how he’d asked Dylan not to record it but he already had without asking and they fell out over it. How then he'd had to put up with people telling him they liked his version of Bob Dylan's song and how he'd laughed when the Animals version meant that people told Dylan they likeed his version of the Animalss song and I read how years later he’d been shown some old photographs of New Orleans and in one of them there was a gate with a wrought iron sign above it that said ‘Rising Sun’ and when he’d got excited and asked what it was, the person showing him the photographs told him it was the ‘poorhouse’ and suddenly Van Ronk realised that when he'd first heard the song he’d misheard ‘poorhouse’ as ‘whorehouse’ and because of that, the protagonist of the story had been misrepresented in every version since. I was so fascinated by this story that last year Emma and I rearranged the song for Sairie, changed the word back and added a new verse to redress the story (you can hear our version here: https://fandf.bandcamp.com/track/the-house-of-the-rising-sun )

When I first heard House of the Risin’ Sun, it was like some spark just went off inside me that I couldn’t account for, a sort of excitement in my heart and brain simultaneously. When Paul came over I said ‘you HAVE to hear this!’ I thought it would be as big a moment for him as it was for me but he just made a face, took the piss, made fun, ridiculed it… instantly. I couldn’t quite believe his reaction, I was utterly confounded by it, crushed really but I sort of played along I guess and in any case it was very funny. I learned to keep Dylan to myself though (something very similar happened with my first ever live gig because I’d fallen in love with the music of Philip Glass due to the films Koyannisquatsi and Mishima and when I saw that he was playing in London at The Albert Hall I asked Carol if she could buy me tickets - I didn’t want to go on my own. When the time came though, I couldn’t get anybody to come with me. I asked Paul if he wanted to come and his only response was to say ‘Philip Arse!’ and that was that. I don’t think he even knew who he was. So I had to go on my own). Despite Paul’s reaction to Bob Dylan, that record and that song made me want to own a guitar and learn to play it.

I remember about the same time I started listening to Bob Dylan, I’d been reading The Stand by Stephen King and there was a scene in the book where a young kid finds a guitar and someone says ‘ah yeah, that’s a proper folk guitar, that’s a great guitar’ or something along those lines but they also mention a ‘Spanish guitar’ at one point. I got it all mixed up in my mind. I knew nothing about guitars. I decided that what I needed was a Spanish guitar, a proper folk guitar. I’d never heard of steel strings or nylon strings. I knew nothing about guitars. I asked Carol for a guitar for Christmas. A Spanish guitar, a proper folk guitar. She bought me one as a joint Birthday/Christmas present (my birthday is in December).

My first guitar

The guitar she bought me (from a shop in the West End a shop near Denmark Street) was a lovely classical guitar made in Spain. It had a solid cedar top and beautiful inlay around the sound-hole (I didn’t know what a solid cedar top was). I fell in love with the smell of it. It all felt so exciting. I had a set of pitch-pipes to tune it with and I bought myself ‘Russ Shipton’s Rock and Pop Guitar Course’ vols 1-3. I first read about chords in those book ‘If you play more than one note together it’s called a chord!’ I told Paul at school. He just rolled his eyes ‘duh!’ But I was enthralled, it was so exciting to be learning these things, like an adventure and I started to lose hours fiddling around not knowing what I was doing, I just loved the sound of it, it seemed to make me go into a trance.

Paul already had an acoustic guitar at home, he’d had it for about a year I think. When I came in to school after Christmas and told him about mine he got quite excited. ‘Have you done the Cylon noise yet?’ He said. When he came round to see my guitar for the first time he showed me the Cylon noise which was just making the string buzz metallically like a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. I was disappointed that he didn’t know how to play any more than that and there was nobody else to ask, I didn’t know how to find out more about it or even what I should be trying to find out so I had to go back to Russ Shipton but I got to a song called Me and Bobby Magee by Kris Kristoffersen and I had no idea what that song sounded like or who Kris Kristoffersen was so I got stuck and my learning stalled. It honestly never occurred to me to bypass that song and move on to the next one.

I still remember how that guitar smelled and felt but I haven’t seen it for a very long time. I loaned it to Paul eventually and I haven’t seen it since.

Return to the Low Wall

We had a small group of friends at school. There were six of us in total: Paul, Jean Paul (always pronounced John-paul, J.P. or Jippy), Abdul, Stephen, Armstrong and me. Paul and Jean Paul were the only friends I saw outside of school and Paul and I were a double-act really. But at times all six of us would congregate on the low wall by the filled in canal. I remember clearly one day Paul and I were there alone talking, fantasising. It was a grey, muggy day. We wanted to travel so badly, neither of us ever went anywhere. I was lucky because I got to go and stay with my Grandma in the Isle of Wight every school holiday so at least I could escape from London. I think we must have been talking about sleeper trains, I think Some Like it Hot had been on TV the night before and the idea of being all together on a train like that in a carriage with bunks, travelling around was so exciting. Paul told me how successful bands had tour buses like sleeper carriages and that they travelled all over Europe on them playing in different places. Buses with bunks and TVs, sofas and bars. We got more and more excited by the idea of it. Just imagine it! I think it was him that suggested we should form a band (‘be’ a band I think he said). It seemed like the obvious solution to everything really: we’d get to leave Peckham, we’d get to travel around and see the world and we’d get to have brilliant times on a sleeper bus. I don’t remember the desire to make music being much of a factor at that point, music was sort of the thing that we’d have to do to make it all happen, it was the last thing to worry about (playing guitar at home and Bob Dylan records was a separate thing altogether).

It seems like such a natural thing doesn’t it? So many teens get into music and form bands don’t they? Completely normal behaviour. Except it wasn’t, it wasn’t at all. Nobody did that where we were, not a single person. There wasn’t any culture of that in our immediate surroundings or anybody we knew. It was almost as though we’d invented the whole idea of it. When we told the others about our plan they couldn’t tell if we were serious or not (to be fair to them we seldom were), we thought they’d jump at the chance to escape with us, we’d decided on roles for all of them and everything but they looked completely horrified at the prospect of forming a band.

I had no idea how to proceed with this plan but luckily Paul was a bit more knowledgeable. ‘I would quite like to play bass’ he said. I didn’t really know what that was so I had to ask him (a big, deep type of guitar). He said I could play ‘lead’. I didn’t know what that was either but it turns out it’s what Paul called the electric guitar, so that was what I now called it too. I was really pleased that I was going to be the guitarist but I didn’t let on, I just agreed soberly. So we decided that we would buy a bass and we would buy an amp (another new word to me, I don’t think I even realised that it was short for amplifier) but we wouldn’t have to buy a lead because we had an idea that Jean Paul already had one at his house, he’d mentioned it before. Jean Paul had an incredible house full of things, some of the rooms were actually impossible to get into and even if he knew that a thing was in there it would take him weeks to actually manage to get in and find something. His dad would just bring stuff home from everywhere. He worked for British Telecom and there was a place at work that he called the Dirty-Bin and broken equipment would be cast out into there and Jean Paul’s dad would bring it home to fix and it would end up piled away in this incredible collection of things. Paul and I were always desperate to explore there, we thought it was brilliant but he would get quite defensive about it and think we were taking the piss all the time which, I mean to be fair, we usually were taking the piss... I don’t even think we knew when we were and when we weren’t. There would always come a moment when he said to us: ‘Alright, you sods!’ and with that we’d have to leave.

So we decided that we would be able to use Jean Paul’s lead and that we would put our money together and go halves on an amp and a bass. I had some money saved because my Father had opened bank accounts for us after he’d left and started giving us £5 a week and I hadn’t touched any of it because for some reason it made me feel strange and sort of guilty so it had just accumulated.

I had no idea where we would find a bass, I assumed we would just travel up west on the bus because I always went there to buy anything; records (there was a specialist soundtrack record shop in Soho called Dean Street Records), books (on Charing Cross Road), Comics and film memorabilia (Forbidden Planet on Denmark Street)… actually I seldom ever bought anything really, we would just go there and look at things. We sort of treated shops a bit like museums. But Paul said there was a music shop in Lewisham called Gig Sounds and we could go there. I’d never been to Lewisham because you had to get two buses from East Dulwich where we lived and it seemed like it was in the wrong direction to me. There was a large shopping centre there that people used to talk about (or maybe it was just Paul that talked about it), shopping centres were still sort of a new thing back then.

Bin bags on the Bus

So, one Saturday afternoon the two of us got on a bus with our savings withdrawn and pooled together in an envelope and we headed to Lewisham. We didn’t go to research, investigate or window-shop, we went to buy a bass. I said that we would need something to bring it home in and so before we left I went to the kitchen, tore a bin-bag off the roll and stuffed it into my pocket. Paul thought that was very sensible. When we got to Gig Sounds, the shop was empty but for two guys working there. We told them that we’d come to buy a bass and one of them pointed to the sidewall where there were lots of guitars hanging.

‘Any idea what you’re looking for?’ He asked us,

‘A bass’ we said,

‘We’ve got these in’ he said, pointing at the guitars on the wall. We asked him how much they were. They were £119. I think Paul asked him if they were any good and he said ‘Oh yeah’ and then looked at the guy behind the counter who was reading the paper,‘they’re going to be really big aren’t they?’

‘Profile?’ said the other guy, smirking, ‘Oh yeah they’re gonna be huge!’ I had no idea what they were talking about. Paul and I were suspicious of everybody (Him more than me) and I don’t think we really had any idea how anything worked, so if people started smirking and smiling we always went on high alert in case they were trying to put one over on us. The price was something we could afford so we told them we’d take one. ‘Oh, OK, sure...’ said the guy, ‘would you like to try one out first?’ I think, from memory, they had them in white, black and sunburst. Paul chose the sunburst, it was definitely the classiest looking. I remember him telling me about that finish beforehand when we’d been talking about guitars on the low wall, only he’d said it was called a ‘tobacco burst’ and we both thought that was a strange name. It made us think of seedy pub ceilings. The guy took the bass down from the wall and handed it to Paul then he handed him a guitar lead which he looked at suspiciously, not wanting to touch the end. ‘Is it safe?’ he asked.

‘This?’ said the guy, waggling the lead,‘oh yeah, perfectly safe!’ He touched the tip with his fingers, ‘you can touch it, put it in your mouth even stick it in your ear if you want!’

Paul plugged the bass in and plucked some notes very cautiously. He let me have a go too and I plucked a couple of notes. Neither of us knew how to play it. ‘Isn’t it deep’ I may have said, or at least something like that.

We told him we’d take it and he asked us if we’d like a bag for it. I know now that he meant a gig-bag or soft case but we hadn’t ever heard of that then so we said: ‘no, that’s OK we’ve brought our own bag’ and I got the bin-bag from my pocket and we put the bass in it and gathered up the lip of the bag around the neck. It’s hard to describe the look on his face, it wasn’t horrified exactly but he looked quite surprised.

‘We need an amp too’ we said.

‘What sort of thing were you after?’ He asked. We didn’t know. We didn’t know anything about amps. I’d only just learned the word. We certainly didn’t know that basses had their own type of amp.

‘How much are they?’ Paul asked and pointed to a little combo (again, we didn’t know that word at the time) on the floor. It was called a Demon. There was a bigger version with a different name. Another kind of devil name but I don’t remember what it was now. The Demon was £85, we could just about afford that. We couldn’t afford the bigger version.

‘We need to be able to plug a lead into it too’ we told him. He looked confused. ‘So we can both play at the same time – bass and lead’ we said, ‘at the same time’. He didn’t look convinced but he gave us a two into one jack adapter which never really worked very well.

So, off we went to catch our two buses home with our new bass in a bin bag and a new amp which we just carried by the handle. Paul carried the bass and I carried the amp and on the bus I placed it it on my lap. It all felt very exciting. I don’t remember what happened next but we must have decided that we were going to practice at my house and perhaps because we’d gone halves on everything we decided that the amp would come home with me and the bass would go with Paul. I remember now that there was a sort of wooden drinks bar built beneath the stairs in his basement living room at home (I don’t think it ever had any drinks in it, Paul used it for puppet shows and things like that) and he discovered that if he rested the heel of the bass on it he could get it to amplify the sound like a very quiet acoustic guitar so he used to practice like that and that’s how he learned to play bass.

Demon

The Demon amp I still have and it still works. It’s a 15watt, single speaker transistor guitar combo, sort of unique in that all the controls are upside down. It’s fitted with a Celestion speaker which I now know is a good thing but didn’t at the time. Most new amps were trannies back then, the valve revival had yet to begin. I’d never heard of a valve in any case. I had heard of transistors, at least I had heard of transistor radios, I didn’t actually know what transistors were… I still don’t if I’m honest.

The Lead

We got very impatient waiting for Jean Paul to excavate the lead from his house and bring it over. When he finally brought it we were horrified and incredibly disappointed... and we laughed until we cried. It was the weirdest thing: a home-made guitar that somebody had started carving from a piece of wood but never finished. It had no hardware of any sort. It had a neck but no frets and no machine-heads and the body wasn’t quite finished but somebody had written ‘Rebel’ on the upper bout with a red felt tip in a shaky 50’s custom car sort of script. It was the shape of a Fender Strat but I didn’t know that then (I’m getting on to that).

It seemed pretty obvious that we would have to go back to Gig Sounds and buy a lead. I felt pretty apprehensive about that but I’d seen when we bought the bass that the leads were £112 and I had just about enough money left in the bank for that.

So again I tore off a bin bag from the roll and again we boarded the bus to Lewisham. This time when we got to the shop though I think we felt a little bit more purposeful.

‘We want a lead!’ We announced. We said it like it was a moment of great importance (for us it was).

‘Err.. OK’ said the guy, ‘well we’ve got a whole load of leads here’ and he indicated to the jack leads hanging on the wall behind the counter.

‘Ah, Ha!’ we said, ‘very good, no, we want a lead! A lead!’ And we waved at the guitars on the wall. We thought he was having a joke with us but he wasn’t, he was utterly, utterly baffled.

‘Oh’ he said, ‘a guitar? Which one would you like?’ I pointed at the lead that was the same kind as Paul’s bass, the one that was £112. I chose sunburst, the same as the bass.

‘That one’ I said. He handed it to me.

‘Would you like to try it out?’ He asked.

‘No’ I said. I was too shy to try it out in front of him and anyway there didn’t seem to be any point because we needed a lead and that was that really.

‘OK then’ he said, ‘would you like a bag for it or a case?’ ‘No’ we said, ‘we’ve brought our own again’ and I got the bin bag from my pocket and slipped my new lead into it.

When I got home that night I tried to look at every tiny bit of that guitar because it had cost so much money that I wanted to make sure I got to know every bit of it properly. It was called a Profile Silhouette. It felt really nice, like it was really good quality (though I had nothing to compare it to). I wasn’t sure what all the knobs did exactly but two of them said ‘tone’ and the other one said ‘volume’ so that seemed sort of straight forward. The thing that excited me about it most was that it had ‘made in Japan’ stamped into the metal neck plate (I had a real thing for Japan). I plugged it in and strummed some of my newly learned chords through it and I played some notes and moved the tremolo arm about to make them wobble but I just rotated it up and down at that point because I didn't realise that you were supposed to push it down. The strings felt so thin compared to my other guitar. Eventually my lack of skill began to make me feel a little bit depressed. I was too self-conscious to turn the volume up very much even though I was at home (I also wasn’t quite sure how the volume worked because there were two knobs and neither of them said ‘volume’, one said ‘Pre’ and the other said ‘post', also, there was a switch that said 'Lead' and 'Rhythm' which I had assumed was 'Lead' for my guitar and 'Rhythm' for Paul's bass but if I switched it to 'Lead' it just seemed to sound loud and horrible), so I went back to looking at it and at one point I managed to stab my finger on the clipped end of one of the top strings and it started to bleed. I managed to smear blood on the paper inspection sticker on the back of the head-stock and I felt so awful about that that I put the guitar down. In fact, the whole thing began to make me feel awful. It was such a lot of money to spend. It got to the point that I needed to lie down and I couldn’t bear to look at the guitar any more so I turned out the light and just lay there.

Later that evening I watched Top of the Pops on TV and I noticed that some of the bands had leads exactly the same as mine, in fact most of the bands! I started to feel quite excited about it. I’d obviously bought a really good one because everybody played the same ones! Everybody played a Profile Silhouette! When I next saw Paul I told him ‘We must have bought really good ones because everybody plays the same ones as us, a lot of the bands were playing basses the same as yours too! Profile must be really good!’ We both felt quite good about that I think, reassured.

I’d never heard of Fender or Fender Stratocasters. I’d never heard of ‘copies’ a lead was a lead as far as I knew and the ones that looked like mine were the same as mine. From a distance, on TV, if you didn’t know you were looking for something else, the logo on the head-stock looked the same.

I had that guitar until it was stolen from my friend Nick’s car. It was a really nice quality Japanese Fender copy, something that I began to be aware of when I saw other people’s cheap guitars which were much more crudely made than mine. At one point, a bit later on, I took off the scratch plate and I beat it up and painted it in a sort of Jackson Pollack style and it actually looked really good like that. I have very few photographs of it. Paul and I carried on using our bin bag flight cases for quite a while, we used them for the first gigs that we played (we didn’t use the word gig though, Paul said it was a ridiculous word and he preferred the word ‘concert’, so we called gigs concerts until a promoter at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden told us paternally that nobody would ever take us seriously if we called gigs concerts). Eventually I managed to buy a genuine Fender hard case for a pound in the ‘legendary’ Soho Soundhouse sale (It was actually a case for something called a Katana and I had to Carve out the lining to fit my guitar) only then was my guitar freed of its black sack.

Matching bass and lead

A still-life that I took for school

The Cure

We didn’t really have a point of reference for making music (my folk ambitions had been crushed by ridicule) but one day sitting on the low wall Paul mentioned a band that had come to his attention called The Cure and that they’d released an album of their singles so we both bought that and that became our datum. We fell in love with the Cure and especially the early records which were so stripped back and minimalist that even we were able to start playing some of the songs by ear. I used to use the opening synth notes from A Forest to tune my guitar, the first note is an A, so I would put the record on and tune my A string to it, it was easier than the pitch-pipes somehow. Paul bought himself a tuning fork in A and we used to use that to tune to at gigs. He would hiss ‘Shhhhhh!’ at everybody before we went on stage, strike it on his knee, put it up to his ear (or rest it on a table if there was one backstage) then tune his bass to it and then I would tune to him. We’d never seen an electronic tuner.

We were fifteen when we bought our guitars. That same year we started drinking in the pub and we left school, we couldn’t wait to get away from it. I sat just four exams, I’m not sure about Paul. I never went to collect the certificates. Over the days, weeks and months Paul and I got together and played music through our Demon amp with our two into one jack adapter and usually it would cut out intermittently with both of us playing through it. Music took over, it became everything. It felt like a magic door had been opened. We still didn’t know what we were doing, there was no one to ask and we had to make it up as we went along but we began to piece together our own language just like we always had and it was so exciting the way things sounded with the two instruments together.

We carried on making music in this way for a few more months but decided that what we really wanted was a drummer to ‘be’ a band. Rhys was doing his Foundation course at Camberwell Art School by then and he said that there was a notice board at college and he offered to put up a note there for us. A friend of his noticed it and said that her boyfriend was a drummer who was looking for a band and so that began the next chapter in the story for us but that's for another time.

Looking down on all this from the mountain is like watching a grainy movie of someone else’s life. I can’t believe how little we knew about everything. Of the two of us, I was far the more ignorant of the ways of the world. I was like a cloud floated down from the sky. It’s simply not possible now to be as ignorant as we were back then. Any information is available instantly from a device in your pocket. In the years since, technology has changed life immeasurably and made it unrecognisable in so many ways. Thinking back, the thing that strikes me most is how nobody ever helped or guided us, we were left completely to fend for ourselves and we had a very limited idea of how to do that. I wish with all my heart that it could have been different. All I can say really is that, given the power, it’s not how I would run a society.

Paul and I parted company a long time ago but wherever he is now I wish him well and I hope that he’s happy

So that’s how I came to make music. Once I’d begun, it became the only path out of the woods, the magic road. There didn’t seem to be any way back. It also mutated into something far more important even than that, it became my way of communing with the universe and I can’t now think of any other way of being.