Educating Peter

by Tom Cox

  ‘I think so, yeah,’ I said.

  ‘And isn’t that that guy?’ he said.

  ‘What? Him? Yeah. Looks a bit smaller in real life, doesn’t he?’ I said.

  It was heartening to know that Peter was familiar with some of the celebrities here. Shortly after we’d arrived, I’d had a five-minute conversation with Ray Davies from The Kinks – five minutes, because of all the Americans wanting to come up and tell him just how much ‘Waterloo Sunset’ had enhanced their life – whom I’d interviewed for a music magazine a couple of years ago. Davies had been friendly and, to my immense surprise, actually remembered me, and I’d hoped Peter might be impressed – even if you hadn’t heard of Davies, his thick mane of hair and proud posture would have told you he was someone important – but when I’d returned to my seat he’d merely smiled vaguely and shrugged. But now Peter had his eyes on Richard Ashcroft, the former lead singer of The Verve.

  ‘I can’t believe he’s here!’ said Peter.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘Well, he’s . . . Some of my mates like his music.’

  ‘Well, yeah. There are a lot of young people who like The Beach Boys, you know. But I’m not going to go and speak to him, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  The party was breaking up, and Ashcroft, shielded by a forcefield of cagoule-wearing men with Seventies footballer haircuts slightly less expensive than his own, was leaving. You knew he was leaving because he was obviously the kind of person who wouldn’t have been able to leave a room inconspicuously if he’d tried. He probably couldn’t clean his teeth without swaggering slightly in the process. We watched as he and his reserve haircuts strutted their way towards the swing door at the end of the corridor. There was a pause. Then we watched again as, realising that they had entered the kitchen, they turned around and made their way back. Then, finally, we watched some more as they called the lift and tried manfully to adopt an aura of insouciance while waiting for it to creak down to the right floor.

  Shortly afterwards, we, too, made our way to the exit. The five of us had our differing views on Brian Wilson and the exact degree of his genius, but we were all agreed on one point: the night had reached its peak.

  SALLY

  ‘SO YOU ENJOYED it then?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say “enjoyed”. It was . . . interesting.’

  ‘“Interesting”? That’s normally what people say as a put-down, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, no, it was cool. It was just, I thought they could have made more of their guitars. I mean that guy – the one with the silly hat – he was using a Danelectro Twelve. You can get really cool sustain with those. Or maybe it was a Fender Jazzmaster.’

  ‘Oh. Can’t say I noticed. But you liked the songs, yeah? The harmonies and stuff?’

  ‘I suppose. Mmmm. Er. Yeah. They were pretty nice.’

  ‘And what about the backstage party?’

  ‘Mmm. It was good. I thought there would be more . . . going on.’

  ‘What do you think you’ll tell your mates about it?’

  ‘I’ll tell them about Richard Ashcroft, definitely.’

  ‘You’d have to really, wouldn’t you? It kind of reminded me of Spinal Tap – y’know, what happened with the lift.’

  ‘Spinal Tap? I think I’ve heard of it. I’m not sure.’

  ‘Oh, wow, you’ve never seen Spinal Tap? You have to see Spinal Tap. I’ll lend it to you. It’s the funniest film ever. It’s all about this heavy metal band who go on tour in America but I won’t go on any more because I’ll just end up talking about it for hours and reciting loads of catchphrases that you’ve never heard of. But the thing is, that thing with Ashcroft, it really reminded me of a scene in the film where the band get lost backstage and can’t find their way to the stage.’

  ‘Uh. Sounds cool.’

  ‘So what’s next for Goat Hero?’

  ‘I dunno. We’re rehearsing next Wednesday.’

  ‘I’d love to hear some stuff.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’d like it.’

  ‘I might. I like some of the stuff you like. We both like AC/DC.’

  ‘Yeah. But not many of my friends like AC/DC.’

  ‘What about the girl whose dad’s a TV chef? Whatshername? Does she like them?’

  ‘Sally? Don’t talk about her. She thought, like, Darius was cool until about two and a half minutes ago, when she suddenly decided to like nu-metal.’

  ‘Is that because of you?’

  ‘I dunno. Don’t care.’

  ‘Why? Is she not attractive?’

  ‘She’s just kind of immature. There was this girl she used to hang around with, Hannah? And they just used to go round poking people in the ribs at breaktime. I mean, she was in year eight at the time.’

  ‘Year eight? So what’s that in old-fashioned terms. Second year? Used to—’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘—be different when I was at school.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘So – poking people? What was that all about? Was that a flirting thing?’

  ‘No. I dunno. It was just, like, really sad. Just poking people! They used to wear their hair in pigtails, too.’

  ‘Not very goth?’

  ‘Neh.’

  ‘And now she likes Staind?’

  ‘Says she does, yeah. And anyway, they’re just sooo not the best nu-metal band. Raf and me hate them. They’re kind of seriously fake.’

  ‘So there are different degrees of quality in nu-metal? I never realised that. I thought all those bands sounded phoney and corporate.’

  ‘No. No way.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘What’s psychedelia?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just wondered. What’s the definition of it? ’Cos you’re always going on about it. And all your mates and everyone seemed to be talking about it tonight.’

  VARIOUS ARTISTS – NUGGETS: ORIGINAL ARTYFACTS FROM THE FIRST PSYCHEDELIC ERA (RHINO BOX SET, 1999)

  TOM: ‘IN MODERN rock music, six years represents an evolutionary microsecond: enough time for Elastica, My Bloody Valentine and The Stereo MCs to record an album (if they all formed one supergroup, put in overtime and cut down on fag breaks). But by 1972, 1966 – the bloom year of America’s garage punk movement – was a period rendered indistinct by at least a couple of aeons’ worth of musical revolutions. If you even remembered it, you were a card-carrying historian.

  ‘Lenny Kaye, a rock critic who moonlighted as a guitarist for Patti Smith, was such a historian. Disenchanted with rock’s tendency for pomposity in the early Seventies, Kaye masterminded the original Nuggets album from his own singles collection – picking twenty-seven low-budget fleeting classics recorded in the suburban garages and cheapo recording studios of America between 1965 and 1968. Was he aware that he was sewing the seeds of punk? Doubtful. But trace a line back from the King’s Road in 1977, via the East Village in 1974, and you’ll end up here, cradling the genre’s raw, overenthusiastic genesis.

  ‘By 1972, most of Nuggets’ DIY John Townshends and Pete Lennons had long since swallowed their dreams of stardom for jobs at post offices and insurance companies; only the odd few grew into internationally famous pop innovators (Nazz’s Todd Rundgren) and squirrel-shooting metal maniacs (The Amboy Dukes’ Ted Nugent). On Nuggets, though, they sound like two-bit crooks who’d kidnap your mother, joyride her around the neighbourhood, and give her the best time she’d ever had.

  ‘Kaye secured their place in the Sixties canon and recognised that they weren’t just derivative trash, but some of the greatest singles bands in history. Most of them had only one single in them, but it was invariably more than the sum of its parts, a scuzz-caked, phlegm-baked blast of attitude over aptitude concocted on the cheapest out-of-tune guitar in Pisswolf, Idaho, or Candlelicker, Illinois. Nuggets – justifiably extended on this box set to a 118-track marathon – is one of those rare albums that seems on the verge of bursting into flames from begi
nning to end. Those volts of excitement you can hear are the waves of electricity that the British invasion left behind: the mind-altering radiation that escaped when a million American teenagers heard the thrilling, squalid central riff of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”. Some Nuggeteers made carbon copies of their heroes’ music (play the Knickerbockers’ “Lies” to a Beatlemaniac and watch them squirm), but most simply didn’t have the talent or the patience. Through their boundless gusto and frantic inelegance, they made another form of equally cool, world-changing music by accident. Ever wondered what The Doors would have sounded like if they’d been sneering small-time hooligans without girlfriends? Check out The Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard”.

  ‘Groups like The Standells and The Sonics were inhabiting a pretend macho world where they looked like Mick Jagger, played guitar like Jimmy Page and were the bedtime fantasy of every girl on their street. When you were a disenfranchised, possibly virgin, male bursting with testosterone, it must have been a great place to live. To hear Minneapolians The Litter howling “Hey Miss High And Mighty/Walking Right Awn By Me/That’s Your Last Mistake” then attempting to make a two-dollar guitar sound like a sitar through a broken amplifier on “Action Woman” is to hear the essence of Nuggets: pseudo-sexual prowess plus playground sexism plus angst plus pseudo-satanic howling plus souped-up minimalist brilliance. Nuggets is the story of the psychedelic movement from the perspective of the people who couldn’t afford drugs, replacing LSD with snot, fuzz and bile. It’s the tale of the freaks and the outcasts who took over the garages and high school dances of Middle America. The sound of teenagers doing the exact thing they were invented for, doing it quickly, and doing it well.’

  Peter: ‘I can’t believe a lot of these bands are teenagers. They sound so old, but maybe that’s just ’cos the music’s old. I like some of it. There’s one song with a kind of duh, duh, duh, duh rhythm that’s from that old film with those guys at the college with the togas. You know: the one with all the food fights and stuff. I don’t know what the lyrics say – it sounds like the bloke’s got false teeth, so it’s hard to tell. All these bands sound like they’ve got something stuck in their mouth. But, yeah, that’s a good song. And then there’s another one, something about going to the centre of your mind, which has some nice FX on it – almost metal in a way. But a lot of it reminds me of people dancing in that way they do in Austin Powers films, with their arms flapping. It’s probably kind of okay in a film and stuff, but I’m not sure I’d listen to it, like, at home. It’s a bit buzzy-sounding, and I don’t really . . . relate to it. At least I know what psychedelia is now. I thought this was it, but I wasn’t sure. I thought there’d be more lyrics about heroin and stuff.’

  HOMEWORK

  WHEN I WAS at secondary school, during the late Eighties, I had a friend called Richard Bush, who would play a game with his older sister called Pass The Cake. Fairly self-explanatory, the game involved the ongoing distribution of a dog-eared slice of chocolate cake, baked by Richard’s mum in August 1988, between the two siblings’ bedrooms. Neither would take responsibility for the cake, and both would rather set fire to their own limbs than admit defeat and take it downstairs. However, what started as a point of pride became something altogether weightier, reminiscent in its strategic planning of the most complex and clandestine war manoeuvre. As the months went by and it decomposed, the cake was secreted in more and more outlandish places – a shoe, a Trivial Pursuit box – often with a long-neglected toy soldier or Lego fireman protruding from it. Once, at the beginning of a Geography lesson, Richard found the cake waiting for him in his pencil case, decked out with rubbers for eyes, a Sellotape mouth and a pencil sharpener nose. Yet he refused to back down, despite the fact that by now, after all its manhandling, the cake had been reduced to a quarter of its original size. The following day, it was back in his sister’s room, squashed between the pages of the latest issue of Look-In magazine.

  ‘Who’s on cake duty this morning?’ was always the first thing I would say to Richard, when I called for him before school. Richard was a late riser, and it was my job to make sure he got up in time for our five past nine form meeting. This would normally involve me knocking at the door a dozen times, then amusing myself with Richard’s sheepdog, Bracken, while Richard – one of the first kids in our school year to get stubble – shaved expansively, put a Move record on and thought up a new, ingenious place to hide the cake. On and off, I considered Richard my best friend, but I never quite sensed that the sentiment was reciprocated. Richard seemed above a concept like ‘best friends’ and, while popular at school, was generally considered an enigma: an astute classroom commentator whose sophisticated, mordant wit and taste in ‘weird music from the old days’ contradicted his callow years and made him, at heart, something of a loner. Still, it remains one of my bigger regrets in life that we lost touch, especially since now I listen to the exact same ‘weird music from the old days’ that our friends mocked him for listening to as a schoolboy. The last time I’d seen him had been in 1992, a year or so after leaving school, during a repugnantly worthy ‘political scuzz-rock’ fad in my musical development. By that time, the cake survived merely as a hardened blue-ish crumb, the rest of it having been devoured by Bracken.

  The more time I spent with Peter, the more I thought of Richard – partly because Peter, in his frequent bursts of age-belying perspicacity, often reminded me of him, but also because Peter and I were involved in our own ongoing version of Pass The Cake. In its lines of attack and resourcefulness, our adaptation of the game lived up to the one played by Richard and his sister in every way. There was only one difference: it wasn’t a cake we were passing; it was a Blue Oyster Cult CD. Specifically, the one I’d advised Peter to buy in the Music And Video Exchange in Soho.

  Somehow, the CD kept finding its way back into my possession. First, upon returning from Hastings, I’d found it stuffed beneath the back seat of the Ford Focus. I had to admit it seemed in some way significant that Peter had left this particular CD behind, rather than the nu-metal albums he’d purchased alongside it, but I’d given him the benefit of the doubt and politely returned it to him. But then, in the aftermath of Brian Wilson, I’d found it abandoned mysteriously in the glove compartment of the transit van. So now, recalling the rules of Pass The Cake, I’d decided to play dirty. As I sat in Peter’s kitchen, watching Jenny (who’d been remarkably forgiving about our eighty-minute late arrival last night) pack Peter’s lunchbox in the prelude to our next adventure together, I began to develop a plan. Today, I would suggest that we ate at Burger King, knowing that Peter would be powerless to resist. From there, implementing the different components of my killer strategy would be easy. It would be unfair to Jenny, and I’d feel guilty, but it would be worth it, and I had to suppress a sly little smile as I thought of tomorrow, when Peter would arrive home, unload his rucksack, open his lunchbox to throw away his uneaten organic lunch, and find one of the classic rock albums of 1976 positioned neatly between two slabs of wholemeal bread.

  The day involved an early start for all of us. Edie and I were creaky and slow-witted from a night sleeping on the futon in Jenny’s living room (although not slow-witted enough for me not to quickly switch the Agents Of Fortune CD with some Parma ham while Peter cleaned his teeth). Peter, meanwhile, was acting sheepishly. For lengthy periods of last night, at the Royal Festival Hall, it had slipped my mind that he was anything less than an adult, but this morning he was a fourteen-year-old again, being brashly instructed by his mother to take a bath, wrap up warm and remember to eat his cucumber with hummus dip.

  We were on our way, in a convoluted fashion, to Cambridge, to hunt for the reclusive former Pink Floyd singer Syd Barrett in the second leg of what I was thinking of as the Mavericks section of Peter’s training (in other words: very much like the Loose Cannons section, but with a different name). First, we’d make the two-hour drive to my house, dropping Edie off and fetching for Peter what I was referring to as his first ‘homework pack�
�: a selection of background material that I thought would aid him in his musical studies. Then we’d head back down the All to one of my favourite British cities and go cult hero-hunting, with a stop for fast food along the way. All in all, I had a positive feeling about what the day held in store.

  I’d had the idea about ‘homework packs’ the previous afternoon. It was no good, I’d decided, simply taking Peter out on trips, then returning him home and letting his capricious teenage mind forget about them. If I was going to give him something even remotely approaching a proper musical education, I had to get him thinking on my wavelength. He needed to be utterly consumed by our adventures; he also needed to be prepared, and in order to do that he needed homework and background revision. Rock and pop were, after all, scholarly subjects these days. Their finest achievements had aged too well to be written off as ephemeral trash.

  Each time I met up with Peter, I decided, I would provide him with ‘texts’ which he would be expected to report back on. Would they all be actual texts? No – some of them would be records, some would be books, some would be films or documentaries – but I would call them all ‘texts’ anyway because it made me feel learned and important. I couldn’t expect Peter to understand the natural gifts of Brian Wilson, coming in cold, having never listened to Pet Sounds or Holland – just as he couldn’t expect me to understand The Crow, having never worn an enormous black jacket. From now on, he would be adequately prepared for our trips. His homework packs, though, wouldn’t be limited to material that was relevant to our adventures; I would provide him with an entire didactic spectrum of rock and roll experience from the last four decades – good and bad, bizarre and straightforward. A ‘text’ could be a brilliant film, like This Is Spinal Tap, or it could be a rotten one, like Sweetwater: A True Rock Story. It could be a great album, like Big Star’s Radio City, or it could be one composed entirely of what I deemed to be drab, scum-sucking brainrot, like The Stereophonics’ Performance And Cocktails. It could be an eye-opening book of tales from Rock Babylon, like Nick Kent’s The Dark Stuff, or it could be an impenetrable one of rambling egghead essays, like Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces. It didn’t matter – it would all help. More importantly, it would make me feel like I was a proper academic, and not just someone spending the best part of a year hanging around listening to music with a fourteen-year-old goth.