Educating Peter

by Tom Cox

  ‘Sometimes. This girl had to have her stomach pumped after this one time. But normally it’s not that mad. I don’t really drink much ’cos I don’t like the taste. And sometimes parents are there anyway.’

  ‘You seem to go to a lot more parties than I went to at your age. I’m jealous. For me it was just the school disco at the leisure centre a couple of times a year. Everyone would go down the off-licence and get shit-loads of Special Brew, then we’d watch Johnno Reed – he was a complete nobcheese – snap a load of wing mirrors off cars on the road to school – this was when I was a bit older than you are now, probably fifteen – then we’d go and punch the air to Simple Minds, and get off with people we didn’t like. I once got off with this nerdy girl with braces who I pretended I didn’t like, but actually did, and called her “Jaws” at school the next day. About four years later I met her again and she was really gorgeous and she said she was going to go out with me, then decided she didn’t want to after all, because of what I’d said about her before. It was either that or the fact that when I kissed her my Dead Kennedys hat got in the way. Sorry – I’ll shut up. You probably don’t want to hear about that . . .’

  ‘Mmmnff. All sounds . . . weird.’

  ‘Are all your mates’ parents really cool and groovy?’

  ‘Not all, but, yeah, most I guess. It’s kind of frustrating.’

  ‘How do you mean? Because you can’t rebel against them?’

  ‘Sort of. I dunno. My dad’s always going on about how much he likes stuff like The Manic Street Preachers and Rage Against The Machine, but I’m not sure if he really does.’

  ‘Does he ever shout at you to turn stuff down when you’re at his place?’

  ‘When he’s working, sometimes, but not much.’

  ‘What about your mum?’

  ‘Neh. Well . . . I’m not sure. She’s kind of cool about everything. She just worries about my schoolwork, mostly.’

  ‘How’s that going at the moment?’

  ‘Okay, s’ppose. It gets a bit annoying and boring ’cos with Raf and stuff, he’s, like, two years ahead of me, and his year just don’t really do much work, they just hang around and play guitar and watch all these cool kung-fu films.’

  ‘But it sounds like quite a laid-back kind of school. I mean, you have loads of concerts and stuff. I think my school only had one that was at all rockish. It was this band Flymow Death, and the Head of Year stopped it halfway through because all the kids on the front row were banging their heads against the front of the stage.’

  ‘Mmm. I guess my school’s okay.’

  ‘But you’d rather be on stage somewhere all the time, playing guitar?’

  ‘Mmnnm.’

  ‘You don’t sound too sure.’

  ‘Mmm. No. I am. I’m just tired.’

  ‘Did my cats wake you up in the night?’

  ‘Couple of times, yeah. That one with the weird voice that goes “eh-weh-weh-weh” and sounds a bit like a baby.’

  ‘Oh, Brewer.’

  ‘Why’s he called Brewer?’

  ‘Well, there’s Brewer and there’s Shipley, his brother. They’re named after an early Seventies folk duo. They did this song about pot called “One Toke Over The Line”, but their other stuff is better.’

  ‘What? The cats did a song about pot?’

  ‘Yeah, right. The only pot they’d sing about is the one with my mum’s plant in that they’re always pissing in.’

  ‘Would I like them?’

  ‘What? The cats?’

  ‘No. The folk duo.’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Mmm. Yeeeeauuuhhhhhh! So tirrred.’

  ‘Don’t worry. We’re almost off the motorway now, then you’ll be home in about half an hour. Then I’ve got to zoom back and get this van back to Clive.’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why are we travelling around in a van?’

  LITTLE GREEN FOLKING HOOD

  FOR SOMEONE WHO’D spent much of his adult life avoiding teenagers, I’d developed an unusual amount of theories about them over the years. Naturally, owing to the lack of research to back these theories up, there was every chance that they were complete nonsense, but nevertheless I was happy to have them to cling to. There was, for example, the Modern Teenagers Are The Nastiest Kind Yet theory, which I would adhere to while looking back on my own teenage years and wondering exactly how much of a loathsome little irritant I really was. Then there was the Teenagers Are A Concept Only Meant To Last Five Decades theory, which argued that teenagers were invented in the Fifties but made redundant at the end of the Nineties with the mass-marketing of their rebellion, and gave me a warm sensation of having been in on something good before it became stale. And, finally, there was the closely related Teenagers Don’t Have A Proper Subculture Any More theory, which was a convenient way of assuaging any doubts about whether my short-lived phase as part of a ‘subversive’ indie-rock gang was as significant and energising as it had seemed at the time.

  What struck me, unexpectedly, during my adventures with Peter was just how much time I’d spent pondering all this. Throughout my twenties I’d been going innocently about my business, assuming that adolescents were less than a blip on my radar, when in fact some arcane back engine room of my mind – the same back engine room that made such subconscious decisions as ‘Yes, it is suddenly true: I don’t think The Doors is a good movie any more!’ – was treating them to the most in-depth analysis. I shiver to reflect on the kind of questions this engine room was posing on an average day, while witnessing me walk along an average high street – ‘Did I used to be as obnoxious as that little turd with the bleached hair who’s just pushed that granny out of the way in the doorway to Kwik-Save?’; ‘Did my Dinosaur Jr t-shirt used to look as crap on me as that goth girl’s Puddle Of Mudd t-shirt looks on her?’ – when I’d been under the naïve impression that I’d had nothing more probing on my mind than what kind of sausage to buy from the Italian deli and whether there was going to be anything good on Sky Sports that night.

  With Peter, the front part of my brain took over and everything began to spew out. How did he compare to me at fourteen? Why did he seem so much more worldly? Did my hair used to be better than his, or worse? Did his parents give him more freedom than mine had given me? Did it work better? Did all my anecdotes used to start with ‘It was dead funny’, too? Did he see me as someone cool and together, only a little bit older than him, or past it and boring? It was impossible not to dwell on these questions, and, as a result, I could see that I was exasperating him slightly. My tendency to make the same enquiry in seven different ways wasn’t fooling him, either.

  ‘So, with the goth thing . . . Let me get this right. It’s cool to be goth now? You make lots of friends by going around in white face?’

  ‘Well, yeah, but no, not white face. It’s just wearing black, more than anything.’

  ‘What about tight trousers?’

  ‘No. No way. Got to be baggy. Much better. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘You see, that’s weird as well. Goth was always about tight trousers in my day. Tight trousers, weird make-up, veils and scary jewellery. It just wasn’t cool to be goth – even the alternative kids thought they were weird and depressing. They’d have their weekly night at Rock City in Nottingham and flop their frightening hair around to Fields Of The Nephilim, but apart from that they’d be alone. Then, one day, they all died out. I just assumed they’d all gone to work in banks.’

  ‘Yeah. You told me before.’

  Yet, simultaneously, I sensed a breakthrough. By expressing irritation with me, Peter was forced to stop being polite, which gave our relationship a new, looser feeling. I still had my doubts as to whether we were going to be friends when all this was over – between non-relatives, the specific age gap between fourteen and twenty-seven is one that tends not to transcend educational commitments – but at least now we were spending time with each other on a more relaxed basis. No longer did Peter pick up the phone and say,
‘Tom who? Oh that Tom . . .’ or hide in his bedroom for unreasonable amounts of time when I arrived at his house. I started to introduce him to my friends and feel comfortable about it. Occasionally, if I was in London for work purposes, I’d stop in at the Crouch End house for a coffee – not because I felt obliged to owing to my commitment to our project, but because I wanted to. Almost.

  As a rainy May turned into a rainier June, I felt that we’d reached a new plateau in our teacher–pupil relationship and that the programme was progressing smoothly. Feedback on my teaching skills was fairly scant from Peter himself, but Jenny reported that the quality of his schoolwork had picked up, and that – though he attempted to disguise it – he tended to return from our adventures in a garrulous mood. On one occasion she’d even overheard him boasting about ‘the Hobbit bloke with the axe’ to an impressed schoolfriend.

  At this point, there was just one hitch in the syllabus, and it revolved around my volunteers – or rather my complete and utter lack of them. I’d half expected this to be the case, but I hadn’t anticipated how despondent the reality of the situation would leave me. There was no getting away from it: we were living in a post-Jonathan King age. To most musicians – even eccentric, liberated ones – the thought of hanging around with a bloke and his fourteen-year-old accomplice was a weird one. I could understand, since I thought it was weird as well, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating. For entire weeks I emailed my sources, then emailed their sources, asking for an hour or two of their client’s time, to little avail. Bono was ‘busy’, Lenny Kravitz was ‘tied up’, while Paul McCartney was ‘getting married’. These seemed like pretty thin excuses to me, but I soldiered on to what I assumed would be more amenable pastures. Julian Cope, the psychedelic singer-songwriter, said he’d be glad to meet us, particularly after I’d given him the impression that Peter was the reincarnation of Bon Scott from AC/DC, but the loveable Cope’s schedule was tight, since he was in the midst of writing a book about stones. Meanwhile, Billy Bragg, the defiantly non-psychedelic singer-wrongwriter, was in the middle of a busy tour schedule and a job teaching guitar at his local school. Others – fire-eating one-man band Rory McLeod, guitar god Norman Blake, former Hawkwind dancer Stacia, Saxon lead singer Biff Byford, the community of famous American blues singers who’d relocated to Yorkshire – were either on the road, out of the country, AWOL, or – least considerately of all – dead. Even Bez, the former Happy Mondays dancer, now fortune-telling for a living under the name ‘Mystic Bez’, failed to return my call.

  It was at times like this that I thanked my lucky stars for the existence of Circulus. In fact, that’s not true. I thanked my lucky stars for the existence of Circulus every day of my life; I merely did it more vehemently at times like these.

  Now, don’t get me wrong here: I’m not hard. And by the summer of 2002 I was no longer the kind of music fan who’d yell himself stupid sticking up for some band or other. I’d met too many musicians and seen the fragility of too many of my own opinions to view music as a life and death matter. That said, if you were to insult Circulus, I would have done my best to bare-knuckle box the crud out of you on the spot, even if you were Geoff Capes.

  Circulus were a folk group from South East London who, since their inception five years previously, I’d come to regard with the level of affection most people reserve for a favourite son. I didn’t have a favourite son, which made the whole process easier, but if I had, you could bet he’d have been made aware from an early age that he would be playing second fiddle (or lute, in this case) to Michael, Emma, Robin, Kevin, Leo and Sam. Not only were these six fine musicians influenced by nearly all of my favourite bands – Traffic, Pentangle, Crosby, Stills And Nash, to name just a few – they also wore the kind of Seventies clothes I could never seem to hunt down, and enjoyed the kind of lifestyle I would have loved to live, if only I could have got fully in touch with my inner slacker. Like any good father, I’d watched proudly as they’d experimented with facial hair and mind-altering drugs, released limited-edition singles on broom-cupboard record labels, and recruited a small-yet-loyal fanbase of out-of-time dreamers. To me, the fact that they were yet to secure a record deal was one of the great mysteries of the modern world, right up there with Roswell and the continuing gainful employment of Calista Flockhart.

  I knew I could count on Circulus. I knew they wouldn’t find anything untoward about spending a day hanging out with Peter and me. In fact, it’s quite possible that if I’d turned up at their house with a small yellow alien life form and said, ‘Hi guys! This is Troffimog, from the planet Dustbuster,’ the six of them would have simply smiled beatifically, patted us both warmly on the back and stuck the kettle on.

  Until a couple of years ago, the founder members of Circulus, Emma Steele and Michael Tyack, had lived on opposite sides of Blackheath, near Greenwich, in South London. The heath itself is a huge, eerie expanse of grass, barely heathlike at all in any conventional sense, abutted by a haunted pub and populated by ravens on a basis too permanent not to be considered ill-omened. I’d lived in a flat overlooking it for twelve months at the start of the Millennium, and always regretted that I hadn’t had the chance to use the landscape for anything more profound than the fine-tuning of my golf swing. Despite the introduction of a popular micro-brewery and the regular Saturday night cries of ‘Leave it, John! He’s not worth it!’ that now rang out over the heath’s breadth, it was a place which had stubbornly retained its mystique in the face of twentieth- and twenty-first-century progress. It was also a place to which Circulus’s music – which, while thriving on the influences of classical West Coast American pop and folk, ultimately seemed steeped in dark, very English history – was irreversibly tied in my head.

  That said, the band had recently decided to relocate. I say ‘the band’ because it’s hard not to think of Circulus as a collective entity, such is the tautness of their personal, sartorial, philosophical and musical bonds. In truth, Emma still lived heathside, in an unruly flat spilling over with ancient fuzz pedals, roach clips and vinyl, but Michael had moved five or six miles down the road to a house in Plumstead, owned by the band’s newest members, Kevin and Leo. It was the latter domicile that now provided the group’s base.

  My trip to Plumstead with Peter marked my first visit to the new Circulus headquarters, and the house was everything I’d expected it to be and more. I’d wanted Peter to see a proper musician’s dwelling, where every fibre spoke of the residents’ undying commitment to Sergeant Rock – or Sergeant Acid Folk Rock, in this case – and everything that surrounded him, and here was the real thing. Mr Benn would have been impressed: the magical threshold in his favourite fancy dress shop had nothing on the one that separated the interior of Camp Circulus from the humdrum street outside. Inside were more rugs and drapes than you’d find in the most overstocked souk, odd little wicker heads and odder little wicker men, Buck Rogers-evoking half-moon speakers attached to the kind of stereo system you saw advertised in Seventies issues of Rolling Stone, a cat called Orbit, and a recording room that looked like it had been stolen from The Old Grey Whistle Test. If you ignored a poster advertising a Demis Roussos comeback tour, all evidence of post-1976 history had been banished.

  Only one piece of the picture was missing.

  ‘Where are the records?’ I asked, and with a conspiratorial smirk Kevin and Michael unhooked a couple of drawing pins and let a huge, room-size batik hanging fall away from the wall. Except it wasn’t a wall made of bricks, but vinyl.

  ‘There were about two hundred thousand at one stage,’ said Michael. ‘I think there are a few less than that now. Kevin used to work in a warehouse and get them free.’

  ‘A good warehouse,’ said Kevin.

  In a place like this it was easy to get distracted from the itinerary of the day, and time briefly stood still as I reeled slightly. The names flashed before my eyes in a blur – BrewerAndShipleyEastOfEdenCOBStone A n g e l M i g h t y B a b y F r e s h M a g g o t s P e n t a n g l e Mell
owCandleSunforestAstralNavigations – every cult hippie-era band I’d ever loved, and every cult hippie-era band I wanted to love. I had an urge to bathe in vinyl, or at least to lie on a bed and roll in it in that way that people do with money in films about gambling. It took me a moment to remember that I was a recovering vinyl junkie who wasn’t supposed to dribble in the presence of records any more, by which point Michael and Kevin had disappeared downstairs. It took me another moment to realise that Peter was standing behind me, his head at a slight angle. He was looking at me in the way you might look at an overweight kid who’s been given free rein in a sweet shop.

  ‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. Never.’

  ‘I mean . . . it’s just – everything.’

  ‘Well, not everything. I mean, I bet he doesn’t have Cruelty And The Beast by Cradle Of Filth.’

  ‘I don’t think that came out on vinyl.’

  Typically, the previous night – a Friday – had seen a party at Circulus HQ, and the acrid weed cloud that served as the band’s perennial halo was even more (omni)potent than usual. I’d felt stoned almost as soon as I’d mounted the stairs, and I worried about Peter, since I didn’t know how lenient Jenny was about this sort of exposure. Maybe she still smoked weed, maybe she did it in front of Peter, maybe she wouldn’t dream of doing either. Perhaps Peter had already smoked it himself. Fourteen-year-olds were pretty advanced these days, weren’t they? Once again, it was dawning on me how little I knew about contemporary parenthood. But, not wishing to take any risks, we headed out to the garden, stumbling through an ash-caked kitchen and a room decorated entirely in mirrored cardboard, and skirting around slumped survivors from the previous night’s debauchery.

  Outside, lunch was being served – a charred tray of that specific kind of oven chips that seem to have flour, rather than potato, as their centre – and proper introductions were made. Here, finally, was the chance for Peter to hang out with musicians as you might hang out with friends, and I felt proud as I introduced my six retrograde heroes. There was Michael, for whom the word ‘easy-going’ had been invented, for whom there were never enough medieval capes in the world, and for whose looks a new hippie James Bond movie villain needed desperately to be invented. There was dark and mysterious Robin, otherwise known as ‘The Walking Cheekbones’. There was Emma, the angelic vocalist with the cheeky edge. There was Kevin, who liked to wear wigs. And there were Leo and Sam, who, if I was truly honest with myself, I hadn’t got to know particularly well.