Rod: The Autobiography (4 page)

The pros and cons of living above your parents’ newsagent’s? On the plus side: instant access, at any hour of the day, to a Cadbury’s Flake. On the negative side: a more than averagely high likelihood of being forced to do a newspaper round. In those periods when I was unemployed, my dad couldn’t see why I shouldn’t help him out. I would get shaken awake at six in the morning – not something which has ever gone down well with a teenager – and stumble blearily into the shop to sort papers into rounds with the other paper boys, who were, without exception, nine- or ten-year-old kids and (also without exception) cheeky sods. Here was humiliation more extreme than anything reality television has yet dreamed of.

Still, freed at last from school uniform, and with a bit of money coming in, I had begun to take an interest in clothes. In this, I very much caught the mood of the times. While I was a kid, shops had really only seemed to offer ‘menswear’ and ‘boyswear’; and ‘boyswear’ was ‘menswear’ only smaller. Now, after the 1950s, and the rise of teenagers, like me, with
a bit of spare cash in their pockets, clothes for young adults were their own separate boom area, and London in particular was rapidly ascending to the height of fashionability.

It was a great time to be young and fancying yourself as a bit dapper. On the Seven Sisters Road you could pick up good stuff cheap: a bolero jacket with a little belt in the back; drainpipe trousers with a buttoned slit up the side – I loved the buttons – and winkle-picker shoes, made out of compressed cardboard, leather being in short supply after the war and unaffordably expensive. Not great, cardboard shoes. Wet weather inevitably added an unwanted white salt-mark across the tops, and accidental immersion in a puddle would effectively convert your shoes into spats – but in a bad way. Six months in, you would be shoving in further bits of cardboard to block the holes in the soles and prevent your socks filling up with rain.

It wasn’t until 1963, when I was eighteen, that I had enough money set aside to splash out on a deeply longed-for pair of leather Chelsea boots from Anello & Davide in Covent Garden. I was proudly wearing these, thinking that I looked rather special, when I stepped into a coffee bar in Muswell Hill, only to find another bloke wearing an identical pair. His name was Ewan Dawson and we bonded over our boots. We became firm friends and fellow adventurers for many years thereafter.

So, clothes had begun to seem exciting, and so had sex – although, as at Brentford, I was very much a triallist at this point. A girl had allowed me to touch one of her breasts outside the Odeon cinema in Finchley – a fantastic breakthrough. Only one breast, mind. If I had touched both, we would have had to get married. Later, a different girl let me touch the promised land, a reward which brought me enormous pride and a refusal to wash the honoured hand for several days. And after that, with a third girl, I made the enormous tactical error of going to second base straight away, without going via first, and was sternly reprimanded: ‘Tits first, please!’

Hard, though, to be a budding Lothario when you live with your parents in a two-bed flat above a sweet shop. Neither this,
nor the perfectly neat and respectable council house around the corner in Kenwood Road that my mum and dad were moved into when JR Stewart Confectioners was demolished to widen the Archway Road, seemed to me likely to impress women in the way I imagined women needed to be impressed. So I would invite a girl ‘back to my place’, but then stay on the train an extra couple of stops to East Finchley and walk with her along Bishops Avenue, which is broad and lined with grand, detached houses with tarmac drives. I would pick a mansion with some cars on its drive and bring us both to a sudden halt on the pavement, pretending to be dismayed because my dad had ‘business people over’, so we ‘couldn’t possibly go in’. Then we’d turn around and walk back, and, if I was lucky, the girl would have been impressed enough by my landed status to put her hand in my trousers at the Tube station. I swear to you, this ploy worked many more times than you would perhaps imagine.

* * *

At sixteen, I’m at home most nights apart from football training on a Wednesday, staying in and saving money and energy for the weekend when it’s off to the pubs of the West End – to the Duke of York in Rathbone Street, the Porcupine in Leicester Square. Or perhaps one of my old school mates – Kenneth Pearson, Clive Amore, Kevin Cronnin, Brian Boreham, all, just like me, with burgeoning interests in music and clothes and girls – might know about a party in Earls Court, in which case you would jump on the Underground and head over there with a big tin of cider under your arm and listen for the noise in the street.

And then one time someone mentions the Beaulieu Jazz Festival – a weekend of music and drinking outdoors in the grounds of a stately home in the middle of the New Forest in Hampshire. Beaulieu was in its sixth year in 1961 and was really leading the way for the music festival culture that would explode
later in the decade. And hadn’t there been a bit of a riot at the end of it the previous year? Didn’t the traditional jazz fans and the modern jazz fans end up having a bit of an alcohol-fuelled punch-up? Who wouldn’t want to see some of that? None of my group of pals is particularly into jazz at this time, modern or traditional, but that’s not the point. The point is, it’s a scene. Bit pricey, obviously, but that needn’t be a problem because apparently there’s this beautiful pub, the Montagu Arms, beside a tidal river, across from the festival site. The word is that you can drink in the pub until the water level drops, at which point it’s possible to wade across and climb into the festival through the sewage pipe without paying for a ticket. You won’t smell too great afterwards, but you’ll be in for nothing.

So I go along, and it works out extremely well. We stay in the pub until the water level is right, and then set out to investigate our proposed access point. It turns out that the pipe is an overflow, rather than strictly a sewage pipe, which is obviously good news. We’ll get wet around the ankles and a bit muddy, but nothing worse. The pipe is about four feet in diameter, so quite an easy crawl, and although there’s a metal grille at its far end, blocking the top half of the pipe, which we have to duck under, that’s the only difficult bit, and then we’re inside.

And here in 1961, on a secluded patch of grass, some hours after emerging safely from an overflow, and to the muffled strains of trad jazz, possibly supplied by the Chris Barber Jazz Band, or maybe by the Clyde Valley Stompers, or even by good old Acker Bilk, the legendary clarinetist, I lose my by then not remotely prized virginity to an older (and larger) woman who has come on to me very strongly in the beer tent. How much older, I can’t tell you exactly – but old enough that she was highly disappointed by the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brevity of the experience. (Elements of this encounter, much altered and enhanced, later filtered into the song ‘Maggie May’.)

It was good to pass such a key personal milestone, of course, although as a life-changing, direction-altering experience, I can’t
say that short moment in the grass really matched what happened to me in 1962, which is when I got to hear Bob Dylan’s first album. Now that really
did
move the earth.

Other recordings had made an impact on me: the exuberance and showbusiness of the Al Jolson 78s that my mum used to put on and which I adored; Eddie Cochran’s ‘C’mon, Everybody’ from 1958 (some of my first efforts at singing publicly were blatant attempts to sound like Cochran on that song); or, on the radio at Shand Kydd wallpapers, the honey-and-grit sound of Sam Cooke singing ‘You Send Me’, which would later become a huge part of what I aspired to as a singer.

But nothing had altered the air around me like that Dylan album. I would play it over and over on the family radiogram, the dial of which promised, but never delivered, stations in impossibly exotic places such as Moscow and Kabul. But in this case, and to my young ears, as that record spun inside its wooden tomb, something in the timbre of the voice and the mystery of the lyrics genuinely seemed to be coming from far away. It sounded like America to me. It summed up what I thought America was like. Dylan sang ‘Talkin’ New York’, and it made me want to run away there. Not to upset my parents – I loved my parents – but just to experience this world of possibility that seemed to be there in the music, the vastness and openness of America. It didn’t just broaden my horizon, this record: it drew my horizon. No other album has worked on me this way since.

I wanted to be able to sing these songs and I wanted to be able to play them – to inhabit them entirely. I had £10 saved up and I borrowed another £30 off my brother Bob to buy a proper, steel-strung acoustic guitar – a Zenith, from a music shop called Ivor Marants in the West End. Unlike my first guitar, it had the useful ability to hold its tuning – and, hallelujah, I now had the ability to tune it. I also had a capo to clip across the strings, which seemed to me the height of musical sophistication. And from somewhere else I got hold of a harmonica and a frame to go around my neck, so that I could do the Dylan
thing in full. (It was at least a year before someone pointed out to me that you can suck, as well as blow, on a harmonica – and, furthermore, that it’s a combination of sucking and blowing that releases the instrument’s uniquely expressive potential. Until then, I had only blown, thereby mostly producing the noise of a chicken being strangled over and over again. But hey – it’s a learning process.)

Some days my dad would need to head off down to Islington to order stock and leave me to mind the newspaper shop. And as soon as he was gone, I would put up the ‘Closed’ sign and sit in the tiny backyard, next to the outside khazi, trying to master Dylan songs on the guitar – tough for me, because my guitar-playing wasn’t up to much, but I was finding I could get my voice around them well enough. This learning process would absorb me for hours, until I’d suddenly realise that Dad was due back, put the guitar down and quickly fling open the shop again. Dad would say, ‘Blimey, you haven’t taken much today.’ And I would say, ‘It’s been really quiet. Hardly anyone in.’

And thus, with a headful of Dylan, and a heart full of vague teenage rebelliousness, I entered a highly stylised beatnik phase. Its crucial opening gambit? Extreme hair-growth. All these years on, it’s hard to impress upon people exactly how shocking long hair was in Britain in 1962. In a country that was still very unified and uniform, it seemed like the abandonment of all social values, an act of almost grotesque rebellion, a deeply offensive affront to everything that was right and proper. When I worked at the picture-framers in North Finchley, three or four of the guys had properly thick, shoulder-length locks, and when I walked up the street with them, the stir they caused would make my skin prickle. People would literally cross the road. There was nothing threatening or aggressive about these guys; they just had long hair. Long hair was enough.

So I let my hair grow. It seemed like the way forward. I thought long hair looked great, and I thought the reaction long hair got was even greater. And then I stopped washing that hair, for added straggliness. In fact, I stopped washing everything
else, too. Smelliness was an important part of being a beatnik, as I understood it, in the version of beatnik culture which had filtered across to us in tantalising glimpses from America. You weren’t a proper beatnik if you didn’t whiff. So I gave up baths and washing my clothes – my prescribed beatnik outfit of jeans, roll-neck jumper and leather waistcoat. My parents hated this development, and my sisters and my brother Don were appalled – worried mostly about the strain I was causing Mum and Dad. Mary took me aside once and scolded me because she thought I was taking years off Mum and Dad’s lives. Only my brother Bob was easy about it, but he had a bit of the rebel in him and had been through a major Teddy-boy stage, earning himself many confrontations with my dad. Bob probably knew these things come and go in stages.

I also became intently, if superficially, political. You name it, I’ll ban it. ‘What are you rebelling against?’ ‘What have you got?’ That kind of attitude. I started buying the
Daily Worker
, the extreme socialist newspaper, just to annoy other people who weren’t extreme socialists. At lunchtime, at places where I worked, I would take it out and open it up noisily, giving the pages a decent rustle, and then sit there behind it. I didn’t have the first clue what I was reading about, but I thought it produced the right effect.

Of course, this was one of protest’s golden periods. In October 1962, we had to sweat our way through the Cuban Missile Crisis – Khrushchev and Kennedy going head-to-head for a fortnight, with Britain playing piggy in the middle, and the war to end all wars about to break out over our heads. That said, my mates and I had it worked out. As the situation deepened, we packed rucksacks with clothes and tins of baked beans and set off, hitch-hiking, in the direction of Scotland. We figured that if we headed as far north as we possibly could, with as many baked beans as we could possibly carry, we could still come out of this OK. Which might have been a touch naïve. In any case, we only got as far as Luton and then we turned back.

Equally earnestly, I took part in a couple of Aldermaston
marches, in which members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and other anti-nuclear protestors walked in thousands between the controversial government nuclear research centre at Aldermaston and Trafalgar Square in central London, fifty miles away. Well, I say ‘earnestly’. These marches were kind of like rolling music festivals, with bands and buskers along the way, and could involve a couple of overnight stops. Sympathetic schools beside the route would throw open their gymnasiums, or you might be able to unroll your sleeping bag in a village hall. Now, I definitely had a social conscience. I didn’t approve of nuclear bombs any more than the marcher next to me. When I shouted ‘Polaris – out!’ along with everyone else, I meant it. But at the same time, young people? Overnighting? In sleeping bags? I would be lying if I didn’t admit that as an Aldermaston weekend approached, one of the thoughts at the forefront of my mind was, ‘I might get my leg over here.’