Rod: The Autobiography (6 page)

But it’s understandable, surely. The hair is part of the job. It’s my signature: a convenient shorthand for me and what I do, and, if you will, a logo for the business. Even now it would be possible to go into any barber’s in Britain, plonk yourself down in the chair and ask for ‘a Rod’, and without further explanation the barber would know what you are talking about.

It announces my presence, and my availability for work, as effectively as the light on the top of a taxi cab. If I want to go unnoticed, a baseball cap or a trilby or any kind of hair-concealing hat will do it, pretty much every time.

The cover of my
Out of Order
album from 1988 is a photograph of the top of my head. No face visible: just hair. The cover for the
Storyteller
box set that came out in 1989 – and similarly the posters advertising the residency that I took on at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 2011 – show a drawing of the back of my head.

And forgive me, but I take a little bit of pride in that – in being someone who can be recognised by his hair alone, seen from the back, or even from directly above. That means your hairstyle is working for you, doesn’t it? That means the hours with the hairdryer have paid off. That’s doing hair properly.

IN 1962, AT
the age of seventeen, I met a girl called Susannah Boffey at a party in London. She was extremely pretty, of medium height, with brown hair, well spoken, well educated, thoroughly middle class – altogether out of my league. Yet I charmed her and made her laugh and she was my first serious girlfriend. And within a year, to the profound shock of both of us, she was pregnant.

It must have happened in Brighton. Although I had put my beatnik phase aside and smartened up, those weekend trips to the beach with mates and a guitar continued, and Sue was part of them – with me, cuddled up in British Rail train carriages, arm in arm along the promenade. In late March and early April, all of us used to sleep on the Saturday night under the arches beneath the road along the seafront. Or we might use the beach in front of the area called Black Rock, beside the wall of the art deco lido. If the police moved us on, which frequently happened, we would pick up our things and find a spot under Brighton Pier instead. And in one of those locations – and certainly not in a bed – the baby was conceived.

It was bewildering. We were eighteen, blithely having fun, being teenaged, riding trains out of London for kicks, unused to weighing consequences. Nothing about our lives was formed or settled. Neither of us had regular jobs or money, although Sue’s background was more affluent than mine. I remember the disbelief I felt on the evening she told me – assuming that she was joking and then realising from the expression on her face that she wasn’t. And I remember the disbelief being replaced with fear – fears, too immense and vague to process at once,
about what this would mean for our lives, but also fear, very sharply, of my parents and their certain reaction. They would be scandalised. I had got a girl pregnant, out of wedlock. In their eyes, I would be visiting shame upon the whole family. No distress I had ever caused them would be comparable with that.

So I kept the whole story from them. I told myself I was protecting them from something they didn’t need to know – although, of course, I was protecting myself from them at the same time. The only member of the family in whom I confided about Sue’s pregnancy at the time was my brother Bob. I was in tears when I told him. He was angry with me for my carelessness, but sympathetic too. He was my brother, in other words. He went to see Sue and told her that if he could be of any help to her, he would be. Sue told him, ‘I’ll manage.’

Our friends weren’t scandalised. They rallied around us in their own ways. The lads – being the lads – proposed having a whip-round for an abortion but abandoned the idea when they realised they wouldn’t be able to raise the required fee. Remember that abortion was illegal in Britain until the Abortion Act of 1967 – four years later – and Sue never had any intention of terminating the pregnancy, and I never suggested to her that she should. Her chosen course was to have the child and then give it up for adoption. At first, during the pregnancy, we carried on seeing each other and trying to behave as we were before: two young lovers, boyfriend and girlfriend, enjoying the freedom of London in the early 1960s. But obviously things between us were permanently altered. After four months we separated. An incident on Brighton beach, not long before we split up, indicates how fractious the relationship had become.

Sue was just beginning to show. I was sitting, as ever, with the guitar, and people around me were saying, ‘Sing that Dylan one, Roddy.’ Perhaps I was ignoring Sue, not giving her the attention she deserved while in such a delicate state, because suddenly there was a clunk and a crack and the instrument jumped in my hands. It seemed she had picked a large stone
off the beach and heaved it through my guitar. I can only assume that she was trying to get my attention, which she most certainly did.

The scene nearly became very ugly. One of the lads started to grab hold of Sue, forgetting she was pregnant, but everyone shouted at him to calm down. Meanwhile, in silent horror, I stood there examining the damage to my guitar – my prized Zenith steel-strung guitar, which now had an ugly split across its body. (I still, incidentally, have that broken guitar at home.) It wasn’t long after that, as the summer ended, that we parted.

The next thing I remember about all this is that it’s November, and I am being woken at midnight, in the bedroom above my dad’s newspaper shop, by a woman shouting my name up at the window. I push back the curtain and see two of Sue’s friends on the pavement down below. I open the window and look out blearily, and they say, ‘You’d better get down the hospital. Sue’s having the baby.’

I throw on some clothes and slip out as quietly as I can, so as not to disturb my sleeping and still entirely unaware parents. I go down to the Whittington Hospital in Highgate and wait, walking up and down in the corridors, until I am told that the baby is born, that it’s a girl, and that the mother is well. But I don’t see the baby. I want to see her, but at the same time I don’t want to because I am afraid of what I might feel.

I sign the adoption papers. And then I walk out into the cold street and go home, assuming that this passage of my life is closed and expecting never to hear anything more.

I OWE SO
much to Long John Baldry. He discovered me – on a bench on a railway station, as the perfectly accurate story goes – and he turned me into a singer and a performer, but that’s really only the beginning of it. I loved him while he lived and was distraught when he died. I carry his picture in my wallet and, I’ve got to tell you, there is not a day goes by that I don’t think of the guy.

The station in question was at Twickenham, out to the west of London, which was somewhere I ended up a lot in the period between 1962 and 1963, when I was going to clubs, watching bands, wondering if I fitted in – though I felt pretty confident that I did – but also
where
I fitted in, which I had yet to work out.

Over in Richmond, down the way from Twickenham and placed conveniently opposite the railway station, was the Crawdaddy Club – nothing more than the back room of a pub, but a sensational place to be when it was packed with people jumping around and going nuts. It was where I saw, and loved, the Yardbirds. They had a guitarist called Eric Clapton, who didn’t seem too shoddy. The Crawdaddy had to close eventually because it got a bit too rowdy, but everyone simply shifted over to the Richmond Athletic Club, where there was no stage and the audience could get right in a band’s face. Incredible atmosphere.

But the legendary Eel Pie Island Hotel was the big hang-out
for me – an ancient, damp ballroom stuck out on a lump of land in the middle of the Thames and reached by a rickety wooden footbridge. The place was used for ballroom dancing in the 1920s and 1930s and was then a jazz venue until the early 1960s when it started booking the newly emerging rhythm and blues bands. At the end of the bridge, two old dears in fur coats would be waiting to take your thru’penny toll.

Inside the club, a bar ran the length of one wall – and never ran out of glasses, which was strange given that the sport at the end of the night was lobbing your beer mug into the river. Debate continues to rage over whether the dance floor was sprung, or simply rotten on one side. Either way, when people danced on the left, people on the right would bounce up and down whether they wanted to or not.

The bands’ dressing room, meanwhile, was a strange kind of hutch, or doll’s house, suspended above the stage, with little curtained windows through which the performers could look down on the audience. The stage was accessed via a narrow staircase in the corner. Many were the singers who attempted a dramatic entrance down those steps and finished on their arse in the audience.

The ruler of this unique kingdom was a shrewd bloke called Arthur Chisnall. As I discovered when I started to play there, Arthur paid the bands in one-pound notes and fivers – never anything bigger. At the end of the night, he’d thumb out the money and you’d leave with a stack of notes that was too big for your pocket.

But at first I went there as a paying customer – riding the Tube down to Waterloo and changing onto the overground train for Twickenham. That was a pretty lengthy journey to make from Archway, where I lived. And it could be even longer going back if, tired and a little the worse for wear, as one frequently was, I fell asleep, skipped through Archway and woke up with a jolt at the end of the line in High Barnet. Still, it was worth the effort. When you dressed up in your finery and carefully arranged your hair and set off for Eel Pie Island,
you had the palm-tingling sense that you were heading somewhere truly exotic. Membership cards for the club were done up to look like mock passports – marked ‘Eelpiland’ – just to make the message absolutely clear: the place was its own country. And that country was densely populated with music nuts, art students, and pretty girls in short dresses. As George Melly once said, ‘You could see sex rising from Eel Pie Island like steam from a kettle.’ It was a fantastically exciting destination and the place that I really began to understand the power of rhythm and blues, when it’s done right.

I was eighteen and going out with Sue Boffey. Sue had a friend called Chrissie, who one night wanted us to go and see her boyfriend’s band, over in Richmond. This boyfriend was some kind of singer, evidently. Sue and I agreed to go.

Chrissie’s surname was Shrimpton, her boyfriend was called Mick Jagger and his group was called the Rolling Stones. I wonder what became of them. The night we saw them, they were sat on stools, wearing cardigans, playing blues covers and one or two numbers of their own. The singer could certainly hold a room’s attention. Long John would later describe Jagger as ‘a medieval rendering of a hobgoblin’, which pretty much summed it up. I didn’t meet Mick on that occasion, but I remember thinking the band was great, while also having this nagging feeling inside: ‘I could do this.’ In fact, I may even have been bold enough to think, ‘My voice is better than that.’ I could draw a few people around me with a guitar on a beach; why couldn’t I take it up a level and enthral an audience from a stage?

But who with? I had hung about a bit with the members of a group from round my way called the Raiders, who knew that I could sing. But that hadn’t worked out particularly well. The band got an audition with Joe Meek, the record producer, and invited me along to do vocals at the session. Meek was an intimidating bloke in a suit and tie who sported a rather magnificent rock ’n’ roll quiff and had a studio in a three-storey apartment above a leather goods shop on the Holloway Road.
We trudged up the stairs, set up in the sound room and played for a few minutes – I can’t remember what. But I can remember that, at the end of the number, Meek came through from the control room, looked me directly in the eye and blew a long raspberry. I got my coat. I guess that was my first official review. The band became a solely instrumental group after that. Not an especially auspicious start.

I got a kinder break eventually with a band called Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions. Powell was a blues singer from Birmingham, built like a boxer, a tough old fucker who had become a bit of a player on the gig circuit through the fact that he could do a really accurate Ray Charles impression. How did I land up playing with Powell? It was all about who you knew. The aforementioned Raiders turned into the Moontrekkers, and the Moontrekkers’ guitarist went on to play with the Five Dimensions, and he in turn mentioned me to Jimmy Powell. And that, clearly, was how you got yourself a gig.

Well, sort of a gig. If I stood around for long enough, looking hopeful, I would be invited up on stage to play harmonica on a couple of numbers at the Ken Colyer Club in the basement of a building in Great Newport Street, just off the Charing Cross Road in central London. Colyer was a 34-year-old jazz trumpeter who had come back from a stint in the merchant navy with wide experiences of American, and particularly New Orleans-style, jazz, and had become a pioneering performer and promoter of jazz in London. Lonnie Donegan, who made the skiffle records that fascinated me at school, was a guitarist in Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen for a while. Originally a place for traditional jazz, the Ken Colyer Club was now hosting the emerging wave of rhythm and blues acts, which is how Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions came to be there, and I would stand there at the side of the stage and give it some huffing and puffing in G, while the audience looked on, nodding appreciatively, or possibly asking themselves, ‘Why the hell doesn’t someone teach this bloke to suck as well as blow?’

My other principal job was to entertain the band in traffic
jams by throwing open the back door of the Dormobile we drove around in, and rolling out onto the road. Never fails to get a laugh.