Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  The next morning I got my thruppence for the school bus, and off I went. My father went to work as normal, as well. I guess it was a cultural thing that had been learned during the war: “They might drop bombs on us, but we’ll keep going no matter what.”

  After four or five days went by, I realized my mother wasn’t going to return. It was as if she had been swallowed by a black hole. That’s when my dad and my grandmother had to explain things to my brother, Ronnie. I somehow managed to find this funny little Off switch that allowed me to cope. I suppose it was a defense mechanism, although I would often run through things in my mind to see if I’d done anything that played a part in her decision to leave us.

  “Why did she do it? What did I do? Am I to blame?” I’d ask myself.

  Sometimes at night I would also worry about something happening to my dad; then my brother and I would be left on our own with nobody to look out for us. But in a strange way, despite all the pain, I was glad it was finally all over, because it meant we wouldn’t have to keep shutting our eyes and pretending it was going to work out with my mother. I know for a fact my father forgave her for her behavior a couple of times, and he just kept saying that maybe things would be all right.

  But things were not all right, at least not in that sense. It was eight months before I heard from my mother again. Later on in life, as an adult, I found one of the things I grew to hate about being on the road with a band was being apart from my own children; after seven or eight weeks of not seeing your kids it feels unbearable. So I often wonder how my own mother could have gone so many months without getting in touch. For me it seemed an eternity, because when you are a child the days seem longer and eight months seems like eight years.

  You can process a lot at that age without knowing it. Suddenly I was interested in a whole new world filled with girls and guitars and football and all the things boys are crazy about when they’re setting off on that whole teenage ride that lies ahead. It’s probably no coincidence that the Christmas after my mother left, my dad bought me my first electric guitar. I used to spend every Saturday going up to Newcastle in order to go around all the music shops just looking at the guitars and thinking if only. They were replicas of the ones I’d seen rock stars use, and they cost £19.95. Sometimes the shop owners would let you have a go on them. By now I’d really got to grips with the guitar book, so it was my dream to own one. My dad must have seen this, and maybe he wanted to make things up a bit for the fact that Mum had left us, so he gave me £20 for my Christmas present. We went up to town, and I belted out “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple in the shop while my dad watched and listened. He asked the assistant if I was any good, and I was flattered by the answer.

  “Good? He can play better than most of the grown-up blokes who we get in here!” said the shop assistant.

  I suppose I’d just passed my first audition. My gran gave me £10 on top of the money I had from my dad, so I managed to get a little amp to go with the guitar, and that Christmas became known in the family as the “Electric Guitar Christmas.”

  We were obviously still very raw over my mum’s departure. I used to discuss it a lot with my dad. He was furious and angry and hurt, but he would talk about it in a controlled way, not in a violent or an aggressive way, and I never saw him react angrily or do anything like throw stuff around the room. In a way I think that helped me, because he could articulate his frustrations and anger and I could relate to that and agree with him. It was as if he was speaking for both of us. I channeled a lot of my own anger into playing guitar. I would really thrash it for hours on end, and I became completely obsessed with it. I must have driven everybody mad with the noise, but my father never said a word. I think he was glad I’d found something I could focus on, and I doubt I would have had that sort of freedom had my mother been around.

  IT was inevitable that my parents would divorce, which was something people just didn’t do in the early seventies. We grew up watching Coronation Street, a cozy English TV soap opera and people in the fictitious Northern town where it was set just didn’t do things like that, it was a complete taboo. Cullercoats was like Coronation Street with fish.

  It was difficult at school because I didn’t know whom to confide in, but when I did I soon found out that plenty of my mates came from families with similar problems.

  But the truth is that by the time my mother contacted us again, I wasn’t exactly missing her. Life had improved because there was no more tension. When she finally got in touch, it came in the form of a handwritten letter, which my father showed me one morning out of the blue. I remember being struck by how matter-of-fact the tone of her note was. She simply told us where she was living and said it was our choice if we wished to get in touch. There was no explanation of why she had abandoned us, but what really shocked me was the fact she’d been staying just a few hundred yards away from my grammar school. I wondered whether or not she’d watched me getting off the bus on all those winter mornings, and I questioned how it was that I’d never spotted her myself. She must have seen me coming and going; it would have been impossible not to. I was angry with her, too, for trying to put the responsibility about whether or not to see her again onto my shoulders.

  “So I’ve got a choice now, have I? I don’t remember having any choice in the matter last September,” I said to myself.

  I guess it must have taken a lot for her to have written that note after such a long time, and I understand that for any parent it can be difficult when you make a mess of things. But it was too late. I didn’t want to see her.

  LATER on, when I got to about thirteen or fourteen, sometimes I used to think that maybe I should do something about the fact my mother was no longer part of my life, but then I’d think, Actually, you know what? As it stands there isn’t much wrong with the way things are. To go back and try to integrate everything again would have been almost impossible without causing everyone a whole lot of new pain. To this day I still don’t know the full facts, and there are questions that I will never get an answer to, but as far as I know she moved in with another man. And I now know I have a half brother who was born later on, so I guess she had to make some difficult decisions of her own.

  My father and I were going to church during the time that he was having troubles with my mum. He used the church as a means to help him through it all, but he knew he would be eventually excommunicated if he were to divorce, and so he faced a horrible dilemma. At one point he sat me down and asked me if I felt he should try and give things another chance with my mum. I had to be honest and I simply asked him how many more chances he would have to take before he knew it would never work. The fact that we were forced to discuss a lot of adult issues together meant I learned to communicate with him on an adult level at a very early age, and I guess it brought us a lot closer together. We used to sit together for hours on end at night talking, and he explained politics and all his views about the world to me.

  Church certainly played an important part in our lives. Our vicar, the Reverend Eric Zachau, helped me a lot when it was time to study for my confirmation exams. My dad used to do little carpentry jobs for him, and at one point when I was an altar boy I would carry a wooden cross that my dad had made. I had to kneel at the altar for an hour and ten minutes through the full Church of England service, which was a real killer on my legs. Then I had to set the wine and bread, and follow the priest around the congregation.

  We would go there every Sunday. Once a month they would have morning tea after the service, and I was always struck by how nice the people were. The church had an enormous cemetery, and we used to cycle there if we were staying at my grandmother’s house; or if we were at home it was close enough to walk. But despite the fact it was such a comfort to us, the whole experience would eventually leave me with a terrible contempt for authority, because of the way the church finally treated my dad. He got confirmed knowing full well that he would eventually get excommunicated because of his divorce, which was a crushing blow fo
r him. He did it because it was just something that he felt he had to do, but it absolutely shattered him, and as far as I could see none of what happened had been his fault.

  Ironically, once he got himself back together within a couple of years he went out socializing a lot and had a good time, but initially it must have seemed like life was constantly trying to cut him down. As soon as they excommunicated him I stopped going to church as well, and not long afterward I started drinking alcohol. The experience was another point of anger as a child, and I would think to myself: Well, if you don’t want my dad, I’m not coming either.

  I couldn’t understand how, if they had taught us that Jesus loved everyone, they could suddenly say Jesus didn’t love my dad! But it wasn’t religion I had a problem with, it was the church. I didn’t stop believing in Jesus as a good person, and I still find all the teachings of the Bible fascinating. But I realized there could be a very dark side to religion, and I lost my respect for authority because of it.

  Not surprisingly, things quickly went downhill at school. I started hanging around with the sort of kids who would always be sat at the back of the class. My disciplinary record wasn’t great and my attendance suffered. Suddenly we had found ourselves as a one-parent family, and despite all the overtime my dad worked we missed the money from my mother’s income, and we were forced to move to a smaller place. The grammar school claimed I now lived outside their catchment area, so I had to drop out and go to the local comprehensive instead. As far as I could see, nobody else who moved house had ever been asked to leave, so I think secretly they were just glad to have an excuse to see the back of me. But by then I wasn’t too bothered, because I was starting to get seriously interested in bands and drinking and girls, which meant I was more than happy to hang out with the kids I knew from the local comprehensive who were into similar things.

  I threw a lot of my frustration into sports activities, and some days after school I would throw a javelin for hours on end. But like every other kid in the North East, my favorite sport was playing football. I played left back and used to charge up the wing. I soon won the captaincy of the school team and went on to play at county level. I enjoyed it so much that at one point I had dreams of turning professional. One Sunday afternoon, when my dad and I were walking along a country lane together, I asked him what he thought would pay more, being in a band or being a footballer. The one thing I was sure of at the time was I didn’t want to end up like him, working his nuts off only to be slapped down all the time. He thought about it a bit before giving me his advice.

  “Son, you might find if you are a musician that your career will last longer than if you are a footballer,” he told me.

  My father was very musical himself, and I suppose it had always been something he’d wished he could make a go of himself but never got the opportunity, so I think he was glad I’d found a focus in life.

  As well as my dad, the other really important person in my life throughout most of my childhood was my grandmother on his side of the family. I still used to see some of my mother’s family around the village, but by now her own parents had passed on and we didn’t have much contact with her other relatives. But my paternal grandmother became the matriarch in my life and she later moved in with us. She looked after us in every respect. She was a kind, decent lady whom we all adored, and despite all the upheaval I never once went wanting for any care or love. She filled our lives with it.

  She believed in that Northern family thing that you had to have your dinner every night and you never went off to school without eating breakfast or wearing clean socks. And I never did. I never, ever had to suffer any indignity and the fact I was okay was because of her and the fundamental care that she gave us. I always went to the cinema and had a new pair of football boots at Christmas. My dad had two sisters, my aunty Meta and my aunty Pat, and together with my grandmother (whom we called Mam) all three of them had old-fashioned blue rinse hairdos. They were traditional, strong Geordie women. My brother and I would never dare to disobey our grandmother, but she used to cut me a lot of slack, presumably because she’d been so horrified by what my mother had done. As I got older, she’d let me keep my dinner money for a packet of cigarettes and then cook me a beautiful meal in the evening to make sure I didn’t go hungry. In the end we had to force her to stop working so hard, because she was basically looking after all of us right into her old age.

  IT was against the background of my parents’ breakup that music became the main focus of my life. I don’t know where I would have ended up without it. Throughout my teenage years I was jamming three or four nights a week, practicing guitar at home and playing records. It filled a lot of hours when I would otherwise have been getting in trouble. That’s not to say I still didn’t manage to find time to get up to no good. I had a pretty bad behavioral record, and I had the worst attendance in school by the time I was fourteen or fifteen. I had a mate called Tommy, and we just used to go and get our attendance marks in the morning and then bunk off from school together for the rest of the day. Tommy had been through similar experiences at home, so we were both in the same boat.

  We had every cave up the northeast coast covered, and we would go there with a can of cider and do daft things like attempt to smoke dried banana skins, because we’d heard rumors they could get you high (trust me, they don’t!). There was one little bay where amorous couples would go to have sex and we knew about a cave up above, so we’d go up there and throw things at them for a laugh. There were lots of fabulous beaches and big rural areas to explore in Northumberland; and we used to go on bike rides and set fields on fire, then ride off. At night we’d build fires on the beach and sit around drinking snakebite and eating potatoes.

  When I actually did bother to go to school, I think the shock of my mother leaving gave me a sort of rabid determination to do well, so when I played football I’d tackle too hard or I’d go in too hard at judo. Perhaps without knowing it, I was trying to prove myself by trying to kick someone. I was always clashing with two sports teachers, Mr. Denham and Mr. Chambers, whom we nicknamed Dodgy Denham and Choppy Chambers. They’d pull me up for my tackling and bellow, “Taylor—off for a minute.” My mates and I used to get into a lot of fights, and if you saw some of the kids that went to my school at the time you’d know why. They would go into pubs at fifteen or sixteen and look for trouble. They used to like picking fights at that age.

  Thankfully, if I was angry as a kid I used to take it out mainly on music. I soon discovered that music allows you to break the rules, change the rules, and make up your own rules as you go along. It allows you to thrash the hell out of a guitar and use up all your energy and frustration. The first band I was in as a young teenager was called the Haze. As I got older I started going to concerts at Newcastle City Hall and Newcastle Mayfair Ballroom on a Friday night. We’d catch a bus there along the coastal road, but we often ended up having to walk home at the end of the evening because we’d blown all our money on beer.

  Virtually every act on the planet played in Newcastle over that period—David Bowie, Roxy Music, and all the great metal bands like AC/DC and Van Halen. Concert tickets cost about 75p or £1 in those days, so I got a milk round to pay for them. I worked six mornings a week, and I had to be up at 5 a.m. in all weather, but fortunately my family had a large supply of old fishing clothes that I could wear. The milkman had big Eric Morecambe–style glasses, and he nicknamed me Elvis because I was so mad about rock and roll. Every day he would greet me by saying, “Morning, Elvis—made any progress yet?” It was tough work, but it meant I could go to two or three gigs a week and also afford to keep up the payments on a new electric guitar I’d bought.

  I was fifteen when I saw my mother again for the first time since she’d left us. I had a cousin on my mother’s side of the family whom I used to see out and about around town, and occasionally we’d stop and chat. One day he told me one of my aunts on his side of the family, who lived down South, was having a sixtieth birthday party at th
e same time that an uncle was due to retire. They were planning a joint celebration in Kent. I thought, great, a trip to London!

  I was starting to get inquisitive about my mum, and something inside of me just wanted to go to the party. I suppose it was curiosity. The only problem was my dad, as I didn’t want to upset or hurt him. He’d moved on by now; he was a good-looking bloke and he was having a great time, having met a new partner named Sandra. But even so, I didn’t think he’d be very agreeable to opening up old wounds, so I told him a bit of a story about going to see a band and I went down on the train. I thought it would be nice to see all the other members of the family whom I hadn’t seen for so long, but of course inside I was a bit apprehensive about seeing my mother. By now, I was a teenager in a band, with a regular girlfriend, and I was confident about what I wanted to do. But the last time I had seen her I was an eleven-year-old schoolboy, and a bit of that child was still within me.

  When it finally happened, it wasn’t a big emotional reunion like you might see in a movie. We didn’t throw our arms around each other and burst into tears. I just walked in and she was there and we said a polite hello. She was never very tactile, at least not with me, and we didn’t cuddle and we certainly didn’t discuss anything about what had happened. We just spoke about trivia—I can’t even remember what, but I know that it was completely nonemotional. I suppose in some ways we’d become strangers and it was very sad, but at least we were both at a stage where we could move on. I don’t blame her, but when I looked back at it as I got older, the one thing that stood out as thoughtless was her timing. She was never there to support us through certain achievements, and I’d wonder why she chose such a significant day to leave. You couldn’t pick a worse day to do it to a kid.

  We tried to keep in touch as the years went by, but it was very difficult because she never gave me an explanation for what happened. Years later, after I got married, my wife, Tracey, contacted her and urged her to explain things but my mother just wouldn’t do it. She was proud of what I later achieved in Duran Duran but she did not throw any real light on what happened. I daresay it has left me with a few scars, and to this day I don’t like saying good-bye to people, maybe because inside I fear I won’t see them again. But I don’t bear her any animosity. Why should I? In a way she did me a favor because all the trouble that had been going on before she left just went away. So that was it. Our meeting was over, and I got the train back to Newcastle and got on with my life.