Radio started to fall out of favour with me when I got my first record player, a beige boxy Ferguson model with a lid and four speed settings. Now I could pick exactly what I listened to, who needed radio? I had access to music or comedy on my own now and whenever it suited me. Mates would come round with boxes of 7″ singles or comedy albums and we would sit around and listen. The Goons and Peter Sellers were the frontrunners in the comedy stakes. Judge Dredd was a popular musical choice because his songs were all so filthy.
In 1973 I was taken out of Hassenbrook School because I was bombing academically, and sent to a place called Woolverstone Hall. Renowned at the time as ‘the poor man’s Eton’, it was a former manor house located on the Shotley Peninsula just east of Ipswich. The school came under the control of the Inner London Education Authority, so its diverse intake ranged from the sons of the military to those of well-to-do green-grocers and scholarship cases, which was where I came in. Although my cousins were there, I never liked it from the moment I arrived. The second my parents drove away on my first day, I knew I’d made a colossal mistake. I was terrifically homesick and basically spent two years crying myself to sleep. Eventually, though, you get used to anything and more through boredom than resilience the tears diminished, and the only way I could show my displeasure at being sent there was by sucking at all of my subjects.
I was at Woolverstone from September 1974 until June 1978, a time when British pop music was going through one of its most radical upheavals. On my arrival, the sixth form dorms were forbidden to us juniors. But I did occasionally get a pass to go and visit cousin Stuart. There were few ways to denote one’s coolness and sophistication in a boys’ boarding school. Smokers had a certain bad boy cachet, but were ludicrously easy to expose as their blazers would always reek of the stuff when they came back from their hiding places. Cheesecloth shirts were the garment of choice for the sixth form Lotharios whose beautifully parted and feathered hair and icy stares concealed the fact that the constant chafing of their nipples must have been agonising. Then there were of course the mad bastards. These boys would be avoided by staff and pupils alike, and had a propensity for sudden explosions of irrational behaviour. Going to lessons in dressing gowns, openly smoking pipes, joining the gun club and on occasion fighting teachers, the fact that these ordinary seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys seemed like grown men to me only added to their cool mystique.
The greatest weapon most possessed, however, was their collection of long-playing albums. In 1974 progressive rock was the music of choice for your average hipster teen rebel about town, and the biggest band of the day was Pink Floyd. Nowhere was immune to the music of Dark Side of the Moon. Every single study boomed with the chords of ‘Money’ or ‘Great Gig in the Sky’. As a fan of chart pop music, I was intrigued. I’d never heard anything like this stuff. Songs rambled on for over ten minutes, with lengthy instrumental passages and lyrics that were vague, elliptical and full of mystic imagery. Being twelve, rootless and emotionally frail, I was of course drawn to these strange new sounds and inexorably in the winter of 1974 I tragically entered my musical wilderness years.
It turned out that Pink Floyd were just a gateway band. Oh sure, the Floyd sound really cool, man, but if you like them then you’ll bloody love Genesis! Or Greenslade, or King Crimson, or Curved Air, or Steve Hillage, or Van Der Graaf Generator! Rather than studying, my free time at school was spent in pursuit of ever more obscure bands. And with every new study that you were allowed into, there was yet another wild-eyed advocate of some new and unheard-of band. In order to ingratiate myself with these spotty, brushed-denim-clad arbiters of taste, I would always wax lyrical about how right they were and how brilliant the music was. But it was a false dawn. I was a teenager, and teenagers aren’t supposed to sit around listening to music and nodding sagely. We’re supposed to throw ourselves around like dervishes, uttering primal howls of delight, rage and lust. We should be drinking too much cheap cider and scrawling gory Quink ink tattoos into our arms with a compass. We should be completely frustrated and enraged by both everything and nothing all at the same time. In short we should be listening to The Sex Pistols.
Just before Christmas 1976 the nation was rent asunder when a slightly podgy guitarist from Shepherd’s Bush called an even podgier local news television presenter a ‘dirty fucking rotter’. The whole country was outraged, the media went crazy and punk rock was delivered mewling and bloody onto the dingy sheets of mid-seventies Britain. As the eye of punk rock’s storm was in London where most of Woolverstone’s pupils came from, so it made its way on to dormitory record players faster than the rest of the country. Chief among the proto punks were Lance and James Jowers. Hailing from West London, they came back to school after holidays with tales of the Roxy in Covent Garden and brilliant singles from bands like The Stranglers, The Clash, The Damned, Buzzcocks and The Jam and truly dodgy ones from Johnny Moped, Wayne County and Eater. The prog lads were being backed into a corner by the energetic new sounds of the punks. And having had all the fight smoothed out of them by listening to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Tales from Topographic Oceans for the past three years they went belly up in less than a month.
The do-it-yourself ethos of the punks was taken up by two school bands. Lance Jowers was first with his combo Personal Problems, followed swiftly by Dan Gladwell with The Addicts. (Dan’s Addicts were nothing to do with the later and more successful Clockwork Orange obsessives who bore the same name.) These were the first punk bands that I saw; in fact, they were the first live bands that I saw full stop. Lance was stupidly good looking and had a brief flurry of success in the 1980s when his band 5TA were signed to MCA. But in the confines of that school assembly hall with his dog lead chain round his throat and ripped sleeveless T-shirt he was nothing less than a god.
It was in this year of punk that I wanted a piece of the action, and so borrowed a bass guitar from A-level student and Queen fan Clive Roberts and started to teach myself how to play. From my point of view I never ever fitted in with the hip Woolverstone punk crowd because I never had my hair cut by anybody other than my mum. The same loopy pudding bowl style was worn by me, my brother and my sister for over sixteen years. If I’d been an early fan of The Ramones, I might have got away with it. But I was never really cut out for rebellion: a hesitant nature and desire not to upset anybody borne from those early days in Barking made me risk averse.
The overriding positive that I took from the punk and new wave years was that I started to listen to the John Peel Show on ‘wonderful’ Radio 1. Like the sixth formers at my school, Peel had been a prog rock advocate who could now see that the cultural wind was changing and wasn’t about to get caught up in the storm. Over the space of a few months his show went from being a patchouli-scented bastion of all things delicate and ethereal to a one-stop shop for brash two-minute nuggets of teenage rebellion.
But Peel was much smarter than we were as kids. Whereas we saw punk as the new thing crushing all in its path, Peely understood that it was just the latest wave of youth culture breaking on our shores. He saw that characters like Johnny Rotten, Siouxsie Sioux and Joe Strummer stood shoulder to shoulder alongside the likes of Gene Vincent, Billie Holiday and Roy Orbison. So rather than giving his show over completely to the ill-mannered new youth phenomenon, he juxtaposed it with other musical forms to give it some context. Just as Don Letts, the deejay at the Roxy Club, was augmenting the fury of punk with the righteous indignation of dub reggae, so on our radios between ten and midnight John Peel was showing us a brave new world while reminding us of the debt it owed to earlier pioneers.
Listening to John Peel was like no other radio show I had ever heard. Gone was the artificial inflection of the voice and fake bonhomie. Gone were the constant trivial features and phone-in competitions and incessant time checks and jingles of the daytime output. Here was somebody who played music for one simple reason – because he actually liked the records. I genuinely thought that for some reason you weren’t allowed to do that when broadcasting.
Every deejay I had ever heard up until that point had played the music completely on autopilot. Their attitude seemed to be that everything was great. All the records were fabulous, life is fantastic, and how about that weather out there? Their shows hurtled along with a minimum of fuss, and these wireless giants were every bit as famous as the artists they were playing. They had big, talented, exciting and let’s not forget wacky personalities. They were on for