Ain't Bad for a Pink (7 page)

There was an important convergence: aged twenty-two, I once again came across David Ernest Barrow – a man I had known since the age of fifteen – at the dole office. Plum was out of prison; I was out of work. During the time in the mid Sixties when we were going to The Oddfellows on a Sunday evening with our rock band Axe, along with most of the other local musicians, I realised that there was a potential market amongst this fraternity for repairing and supplying equipment. I had the eye for a good venture and a good musical purchase and Plum had the practical skills. Here was an opportunity for collaboration: making, hiring and selling speaker cabinets. So we started a partnership using Plum’s front room in Ford Lane. We subsequently took over a workshop in Hewitt Street, just off Nantwich Road – where, incidentally, coffins used to be manufactured. Eventually, in 1971, premises on Nantwich Road were taken on the proceeds of the Hewitt Street business and I came off the dole. We had started with nothing but built up the business steadily and gradually: buying and selling guitars, making and selling speakers and hiring out sound systems. We bartered speaker boxes for instruments from other shops; we made equipment for local bands and I continued to collect guitars. In those days they were not worth a great deal but I saw a future in it. I used to go to Birmingham and Manchester to buy and I would buy to order as well. Once a month there were enough orders from Crewe musicians to warrant a 5 a.m. journey to London. A thousand pounds would eventually convert into fifteen hundred pounds worth of sales. Plum thought I was off on a nice day out: a view that was to lead to a rift between us.

Orders flooded in and I continued to travel about to buy for people. Everybody wanted to play in a band and there were plenty of local venues in those days. And young people had money.

Loss has been tangible in each decade of my being and has set the tone of my life. Music is by nature emotional and intuitive. As a musician I am particularly open to emotional involvement, so separation is always going to hit me hard.

In my infancy it was Uncle Willie Billington: my father’s best friend and my favourite uncle. My favourite storytelling war hero of an uncle. Willie had received the equivalent of a George Cross in Greece, had founded a motorcycle display team and was a Regimental Sergeant Major in the Commandos. Aged forty-two he had come home to his mother’s house to die. It was all in the air: not quite spoken and not quite clear, yet I knew something hushed and momentous was going on. When he died he was laid out in his mother’s bay-fronted net-curtained front room in Ruskin Road and there was something important to see but they wouldn’t let me see him. Even though I was on my father’s shoulders. His was the biggest military funeral held in Crewe.

I was three years old.

It was shortly after this that my mother collapsed. Twelve years later she died. Three years after that Bert Bellamy suddenly died. His was the first death associated with the musical side of my life; there were to be many more.

In my twenties my father became ill coincidentally with having his teeth out. Feeling awful he sought medical opinion and was sent for radiotherapy at Christie’s. His terminal illness – diagnosed as cancer of the chest cavity – lasted for nine months, though he was originally given three months. I accompanied him when he went for treatment and me and my stepmother Vera looked after him at home. I was his youngest son but I had to be the man. I became
his
father though he was too proud to allow me to nurse him. Vera did that but I administered his medicine in the last few weeks of his life. While my father was dying we became extremely close and he divulged things he wouldn’t have said; I’m more emotional about it now than I was then. He who had such a strong constitution became a frail little thing with everything drawn in and a grey skeletal face. My father died in my arms; I was helping him to breathe and get his medication down when the terrible guttural struggle suddenly stopped.

“He’s gone – thankfully,” I said.

I regret not giving him more morphine in the last days. His final two and a half weeks were spent in a coma. In fact, if I’d known more and been stronger he’d have died two months earlier.

Mother had died unseen in a hospital; I’d been prevented from seeing my uncle laid out in a front room. But
this
death was in my arms. I felt it; I heard it; I was strong enough to deal with it because I had to be. I didn’t want to see my father again but I went to the mortuary for Vera’s sake. Like with my mother, they’d done a face job but his ‘smile’ was more of a grimace – well there hadn’t been much in his life to make him smile.

My mother’s death left me an angry teenager; my father’s death left me grown-up. I was official and controlled at his funeral; I had to be because everyone else was crying on my shoulder. Wearing his suit, I found myself in his role. Like my father I have found myself in situations where I had to take responsibility for what was happening, where people were relying on me to sort things out.

My father hadn’t lived to see the ultimate success of my business. He had been really upset when I opened a music shop instead of carrying on with a career in management consultancy or sport – my music still meant nothing to him. But before he died I had already begun to make serious money. Partly for his sake, I bought a Volvo 3 litre – almost a Rolls Royce to Norman Johnson and a very posh car in its day – and I took him all over the place in it. He must have realised that I had made a success of something.

The death of my father in 1972 marked the end of an era that had seen the establishment of a viable and growing sound system business called Custom Amplification with branches in Crewe and Hanley, an embryonic business in vintage guitars, the purchase of a house in Sandbach, my marriage to Linda and a burgeoning musical career.

The main strands of my life had been established from my childhood: the seductive, though limited power of luxury, self-reliance, confronting bullying, the precariousness of life.

And the blues.

1972 saw the inauguration of Snakey Jake’s Dead Skunk Band.

(1)
War has its ironies. Whilst my uncle struggled with the moral issues of pacifism and my father fretted about being responsible for making life and death decisions and saw unspeakable sights, Fred Watts was kept in a reserved occupation. And that occupation was…making coffins.

(2)
Quoted from Son House’s “Death Letter”.

(3)
From an undated letter Bina left for her husband.

(4)
From website: bluesandrhythm.co.uk

(5)
Fred Watts, interviewed by Sandra Gibson, 2006.

(6)
Jazz Journal
August 1963.

(7)
Joe Boyd:
White Bicycles
, published by Serpent’s Tail, 2005.

(8)
Woman’s Hour item, BBC Radio Four, 16
^th
July 2009.

(9)
Joe Boyd:
White Bicycles
, published by Serpent’s Tail, 2005.

(10)
Carl Palmer:
Rock & Roll, an unruly history
, published by Harmony Books, 1995.

(11)
Quoted in
Rock & Roll
,
an unruly history
by Carl Palmer, published by Harmony Books, 1995.

(12)
Zoe Johnson, interviewed by Sandra Gibson 26
^th
April 2007.

(13)
Linda Johnson, interviewed by Sandra Gibson 4
^th
November 2008.

(14)
Song Talk
magazine.

(15)
Robin Denselow,
The Guardian
, Wednesday 17
^th
December 2008.

(16)
Linda Johnson, interviewed by Sandra Gibson 4
^th
November 2008.

(17)
Jonty Ellwood, from a conversation with Sandra Gibson, 28
^th
March 2010.

(18)
Review by Rick Batey in
Guitarist
1990.

(19)
Ibid.

(20)
Des Parton, interviewed by Sandra Gibson May 2006.

(21)
Headmaster, Nantwich and Acton Grammar School, letter dated 20
^th
June 1966.

Since 1972 my music shop has been the hub of a wide and loose social, musical and economic network. The music, the business and the lifestyle were so intertwined that a bit of exploratory strumming soon became a full-on session and people hired amps and bought guitars to a background of jamming and horseplay.

There’s a photo of me standing over a tuba. The tuba is standing in a bath full of soapy water. Drunken shenanigans? Well – there was plenty of that but this time there was a serious purpose. I wouldn’t abuse a musical instrument; I was just using the best method to clean the tuba. But I was also aware of how bizarre it was and I had fun doing it. This image, though taken in recent years, captures the ethos of our musical life.

There were plenty of ways to mix business with pleasure. A young punk band used to hire equipment from the shop. They were not that organized and took on a girl to manage them who had an unusual way of negotiating the deal. She had only a tenner to pay for £15 worth of equipment. “I’ll settle for a blow job then!
”
I said jokingly. The plucky girl took me up on the offer and did an expert job cheerfully and thoroughly. I remembered her for some time because she left a reminder. She had bitten me, as I was able to remind her twenty-five years later when she revisited me – her bartering punk days long gone. She was now an Oxbridge lecturer.

Outside pursuits impinged on life at the shop in a farcical way. I once had an eight-man, fully supplied inflatable life raft stored in my upstairs office. It had a painter line and it was this that Whitty became drunkenly fixated upon. “It’s a painter line. I’m a painter – it must be mine!” Whitty – a talented artist – was pointing unsteadily at the painter line: “I’m a painter – it must be mine!” Within moments he and Slim and Shep and Deannie were in cartoon land: pinned against the wall by this gigantic, rapidly inflating raft. Whitty hadn’t been able to resist pulling the painter line. Well who could?

When I first met Pete Johnson he had the Nantwich Road shop and his entourage consisted of Slim, Shep, Al Dean, Plum and Pete Whittingham. My early memories are graphic. The group favoured tea as a beverage – as long as it had whisky added. In one of the milk bottles scattered about the place, overturned and now containing rancid yoghurt, Boomtown the Rat was to be seen: quite dead but a dominating presence.

I also remember Plum’s reputation for taking a dump in your speaker cabinet if he didn’t like you. I was initiated into Special Brew as a result of knowing Pete Johnson, It was
de rigueur
in the shop in those days: warm, flat Special Brew
a la
Keith Richards before breakfast.

John Darlington.
(1)

I used to go to Pete’s shop on Nantwich Road to buy guitar strings during the school lunch hour. In those days Pete Johnson had a big dog – an Alsatian Old English cross: a formidable big dog. But it wasn’t just the dog that was intimidating for me as a fifteen year-old entering the shop for the first time. There were people in there, drinking and raucous, most of the times I went. There was no sense you were a customer. It was like walking into a crowd of Hell’s Angels or Motorhead’s dressing room. One of them – Mick Wicklow – looked like Lemmy. It was blokes and beards and beer, playing and singing. Not your average people. It was a masculine world: the world of the alpha male and I was only a lad.

Andy Boote.
(2)

Some days, being in the shop was like being in a
Carry On
film. A prim and proper girl rented one of the upstairs rooms. One evening there was a timid knocking on my door: Miss Prim was standing there, looking anxious. “Have you seen my pussy?” she asked. It was difficult keeping a straight face.

One of my partners did secretarial work for me. There was some confusion about the dress code and I found it pretty hard to concentrate with her dressed in a waitress outfit! Pretty hard. She seduced me over my tax returns. The short skirt and dark stockings were every man’s fantasy and appropriateness didn’t seem to come into it! I enjoy the memory.

There were plenty of opportunities for, well, opportunistic sex. Imagine the scene at breakfast in a posh hotel: me casually dressed in jeans and my partner with dishevelled, uncombed hair, wearing her evening gown. This generous girl had asked me to chauffeur her to and from a works do. Realizing that I would be unable to relax and drink because I was ‘on duty’ she spontaneously booked us a room for the night. There was another escapade with a girl who was not as big as she appeared: she kept a ferret down her tee-shirt. I had somehow ended up in her flat, unfortunately unable to raise more than a smile because my in-laws lived across the road. The
impasse
was overcome by the sexual dexterity of this animal lover.

The ferret was safely stowed.

You never know what will happen after a performance or how you will store a memory of a good time. A woman helped me carry my stuff back from a gig. I invited her in for coffee and one thing led to another. She stayed the night. It was obvious that she was a married woman so the relationship had to end, as far as I was concerned. But she had the most amazing nipples…I can still see them now. Amazing.