Divinity – Wren: a true eccentric. Would rabbit on and on, regardless as to whether anyone was listening or not. Compulsive viewing;
English – Browne: quite intimidating, but an interesting speaker. Inspired one to work hard;
English – Smith: took over from Browne, his Scottish accent hard to follow sometimes, but he was laugh-out-loud funny. A born entertainer and he knew it;
French – Marsh: again high on entertainment value, especially with the glasses on the end of the nose. Prone to moodiness;
French Oral – Roux: wouldn’t have missed this for the world. An absolute babe;
Latin – Barker: terrifying and certainly demanded 100% attention, just in case those flying blackboard dusters came your way. But putting the fear of God into someone doesn’t necessarily guarantee results, very relieved at the end of each lesson. Owned a motorbike, so definitely a rebel;
Mathematics – Armit: pretty entertaining all round, with a good sense of fair play. Always interesting, quite disciplinarian, made you work;
Music – Prinz: needed some lessons in humanity, but I detected a cruel sense of humour in there, crucially balanced against a hatred of all small boys without musical talent.
I enjoyed that.
Sadly, Richard left school after ‘O’ levels and got a job as an apprentice in a stained glass workshop, so the band we had together was frozen. Yet within two years, and before I’d sat my ‘A’ levels, he had struck gold with Fairport Convention. We lost touch when he left William Ellis, so the only way I kept up with his progress was via the music press.
At about this time, I remember being on my way to a party in Hampstead Garden Suburb and walking past a pub in Golders Green. Outside on a sandwich board was an advert for a band that was playing inside that evening. It read: ‘ONE NIGHT ONLY! JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE.’ But, of course, I didn’t go in.
I’d been pretty lucky with my influences up to this point as our house had been very musical for as long as I can remember. In the early Sixties, one particular TV programme revolutionized young people’s lives. It was called The Six Five Special ‘and it’s coming to town.’ It was on at five past six on a Saturday night and was arguably the first TV rock show. Don Lang & His Frantic Five were the house band, which featured Vic Flick on guitar. Anyone who claims to know anything about the UK rock scene won’t need to be told that Vic was responsible for that famous James Bond guitar line. Laurie Latham once told me that he had turned down the opportunity to record a Bond film title song with Duran Duran because none of them knew who Vic Flick was.
Anyway, Don Lang would lead his band behind all of the guest singers, and thus I was introduced to Marty Wilde, Jerry Lordan, Vince Eager, Adam Faith and Cliff Richard. Lonnie Donegan was one of the few artists who performed with his own band, but that was because, for a while, he was king. All the singers seemed to be competing to see who could generate the largest quiff of hair. It sounds pretty tame nowadays, but at that time it was cutting edge and very dangerous, honest!
I also discovered Saturday Club, which was introduced by Brian Matthews at 10a.m., and then later, Wally Whyton’s Country & Western Show early on Saturday evenings. My eldest brother Richard had inadvertently turned me on to jazz and country and western, while my other brother David had turned me on to Eddie Cochran, Cream and Hendrix. My sister Vicky took a lot of ballet classes and I would always find her sewing thread into the ends of brand-new ballet shoes, which I could not understand at all. I later found out that ballet classes naturally involve a lot of movements on tiptoe, and the shoes had to be strengthened to allow for this. My father was always listening to classical music, so it was inevitable that one of us would get the bug eventually.
David had lovingly restored a Spanish guitar and I would sneak into his room and play it at every opportunity. I was sharing a bedroom with Richard, who would tell me not to touch his jazz records whenever he went out, under fear of death. But, of course, as soon as he left I would go through them, finding stuff I didn’t understand plus some artists that appealed to me, such as Sonny Terry And Brownie McGee, Mose Allison, Jimmy Guiffre, Nat Adderley and Art Blakey. I would carefully put them back before his return so he never knew that I’d been near them. Then David went abroad to work for a year and I rushed up to his room to see if he had left the Spanish guitar. The fact that he had was probably very important for my future, as I found it very easy to mess around on it in his empty room by myself, with no one to listen to my mistakes. As a result, by the time David arrived back from overseas, I could play it better than he could and, as he had lost interest in playing music anyway, he gave it to me. It was at about this time that my father decided to get in on the act of playing music himself. He bought a clarinet and would practise every evening when he got home from work in his bedroom overlooking the street. His progress can best be measured by the fact that passing local kids would howl like dogs when they heard him blowing.
By the time I left William Ellis, I was an efficient rhythm guitarist, but I didn’t start to earn money from playing until I had reached Bristol University. During the first summer vacation I started looking for a flat and became friends with Boris Nicholson, a Russian drama student who’d actually dropped out but was looking to stay on in Bristol for a while. He was an experienced international busker and, as well as finding a flat, we also played music together. We were lucky to find a deserted first-floor flat in the middle of Clifton, which belonged to the owner of an Indian restaurant. It was in a prime location, being opposite a girls’ hall of residence.
We persuaded him to rent it to us under the proviso that we renovated it. We moved in and set about making the place habitable. The front room had a tall ceiling and lovely proportions, but it had a million cracks in the ceiling. We filled them all in and restored three beautiful sets of shutters. I even persuaded the landlord to split the very large front room into two, and then proceeded to rent out the smaller of the newly partitioned rooms. We threw a few good parties at that flat. We would drive out to Somerset to buy a plastic flagon of rough cider to get everyone pissed. It cost about £8 for thirty pints and was never finished. At one of these parties, I got bored and went out for half an hour for a stroll. When I returned I didn’t have a key with me, so I knocked on the door of the flat, which was opened by a complete stranger who then asked me who’d invited me. I was eventually admitted and the stranger apologized to me. He had gate-crashed, but I was pleased that he’d taken it upon himself to man the door responsibly.
Bristol was a great city to be a student in. Most of the halls of residence were grouped together in an area away from the city centre, although it wasn’t a campus as such, and all lectures took place downtown. The university buildings were completely integrated with the town, which meant that whilst you went around studying you didn’t feel cut off from the rest of life going on. The main benefactors had been the Wills’ Tobacco Company, who had built most of the original architecture, and they’d done a very good job of knitting it all together.
It was during my three years in Bristol that I discovered my fascination with religion, which I still have to this day. I attended a Biochemistry lecture and was surprised to hear the speaker enthusing about the precision engineering that occurs within nature, going on to doubt whether these systems could have occurred by accident. I went away realizing that here was a scientist, by definition a sceptic, being persuaded that some sort of divine intervention had occurred. It shook me.
At around the same time, a friend took me on a trip to Gloucester cathedral and introduced me to the misericords there. For anyone who doesn’t know, misericords are carvings that adorn the underneath of the choir pews, and form small platforms against which the choirboys can lean and take the weight off their feet when the pews are up during long services. They are an ingenious invention and happen to be quite beautiful as well. Although I’m not a devotee of any specific religious creed, I do have a fascination for all the artistic work that religion has given rise to. Of course, we would all be better off without any religion to belittle and divide us, but take away religion and you remove the biggest benefactor