by Rod Stewart
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.
CHAPTER 4
In which our hero has a fortuitous and life-changing encounter on a railway station, is almost asphyxiated in the back of a van and conducts his first experiment with tartan trousers.
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 Bo
ffey. 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.
However, after a short while, my role got bigger when Jimmy asked me if I could sing backing vocals on Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say’, which was the band’s showcase number. Obviously, this seemed like a major promotion, so I was very happy to accept – only to get given the elbow almost immediately.
Now, why do you suppose that happened? Was it because my backing vocals were truly appalling – so bad that they could not possibly be heard in public again? Hmmm. Or was it because Powell suddenly realised I could sing and didn’t fancy having competition in the band from some young guy with smart clothes and a nice haircut at the side of the stage?
I couldn’t possibly comment. You be the judge. All I know is, I was out . . .
. . . only to be gathered in again, not long after, by Long John Baldry. To say that Long John stood out on the music scene in those days is to put it mildly. He was six feet seven inches tall, for one thing, a singer with a huge, rich voice, fair-haired and almost shockingly handsome. He had charisma to spare, and was an almighty presence on a stage. He was twenty-three when I met him – just five years older than me, but decades more worldly. He was well spoken and always immaculately dressed, a great proponent of the silver sharkskin, three-button suit, worn with high-heeled boots – Carnaby Street fashion, you might have said, except he wouldn’t get his stuff from Carnaby Street, but from a back-street Greek tailor who could do it cheaper. He had a duffel coat, I remember, when that was a truly exotic item to be wearing, but he mostly specialised in suits – the high style inherited from the American blues musicians that Long John loved, with their superb three-pieces and shined shoes and carefully selected socks. You sang about poverty, and you may actually have been poor, but you never dressed like less than a million dollars: that was the deal.
John was a grammar school boy from Middlesex, just outside London, and seriously intelligent. In fact, his parents used to say his decision to spend his life in music was ‘a terrible waste of a wonderful brain’. He had an approach to music which was almost scholarly – and he had the cool records, the American pressings, seemingly before anyone else. It was John who turned me on to a lot of blues music, moving me on from my earlier, folk interests. I remember being in his flat in Goodge Street once, before we went off somewhere for a gig, and asking him if I could borrow his copy of Muddy Waters’ At Newport 1960 – that one with the cover shot of Muddy standing on the stairs in a fantastically cool white tie. John said, ‘I’m afraid not. I’ve only just got it back from Keith Relf of the Yardbirds, and Mick and Keith want it next.’ The Stones wanted to make copies of it on their reel-to-reels. Everyone wanted to hear this stuff. It was as though Long John was the lending library.
He was also a prodigious drinker of vodka and a big fan of what he called ‘madness’, which was basically his code word for stupid behaviour in the name of fun. He was also gay, which (and this is an indication of how unworldly I was) it took me some time to work out. Looking back now to the very first days of us being in a band together, it was beyond coincidence how many times I would turn up at his flat to wait for the van to collect us for a gig, and find John just out of the shower, only wearing a towel, or sometimes completely naked. And this didn’t even register with me, in my naïveté, as a signal. In football-team changing rooms, men walk around naked all the time. It seemed totally normal to me, and I was completely unfazed, let alone driven to interpret his motives.
I even ended up sharing a bed with him one night – on tour with the band, in some crappy hotel in Bolton where there weren’t enough rooms to go round – and was none the wiser. Only when I went down for breakfast the next morning and some of the other band members sniggered and made remarks such as ‘Are you sure your trousers are on the right way round?’ did the penny belatedly begin to drop – that Long John was, as people said in those days, ‘one of them pooftahs’.
Then again (and how incredible and barbaric this seems now), it was actually illegal to be gay in Britain in 1964, and would remain so until 1967, so it would be understandable if this were not something you necessarily wanted to go around advertising or even confiding in people. I’m sure things must have occurred, but I don’t even remember Long John picking up anyone out of the crowd when we gigged. In later life, he would openly have boyfriends. In those early days, however, he carefully kept them hidden – and therefore had to put up with the usual stuff from aunts, asking him when he was ‘going to find a nice girl and settle down’ and also from his mum, who apparently once expressed to John her concerns about him hanging out with
me, on the grounds that she found me ‘a bit poofy’.
Long John was steeped in music. He had hung out at the Ealing Jazz Club – a damp basement where they had to hang a sheet over the ceiling above the stage to stop the condensation dripping down on the musicians – and became a part of the Blues Incorporated collective, with Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, who took Muddy Waters as their model and declared themselves ‘the first white electric blues group in the world’. Then, when Korner decided to turn Blues Incorporated into a progressive jazz band, Long John went off to sing with Davies in the Cyril Davies R&B All Stars, which favoured the Chicago blues that John liked most.
Davies was a balding, burly bloke with a suitcase full of harmonicas who could play a real storm, having had less difficulty than me getting his head around the whole blow/suck business. Unfortunately, his health abruptly became unsound and then rapidly deteriorated, and in January 1964, after a period of illness, he died – of heart inflammation, people said at the time, although it seems that what he actually had was leukaemia. He was only thirty-one.
Long John decided to mark Davies’ passing with a tribute performance by the All Stars at Eel Pie Island: a wake in the form of a gig. I went to that show, although I remember very little about it. History relates, though, that also in the audience that night was Ian McLagan, later the keyboard player with the Faces, and that the support act was a band called Jeff Beck and The Tridents. But that’s how tight it all seemed to be in those days: at any time, almost everyone who would later matter would be standing around in the same place. One unfortunate gas explosion under the wrong club on the wrong night, and three-quarters of the history of British rock music would have been taken out in one go.