Educating Peter

by Tom Cox

  6. Desire, to buy Peter a packet of crisps.

  Crisps weren’t The Deep’s strong point, but it did sell a heck of a lot of cod. On the radio, everyone was talking about it. Well, not everyone: Steve Wright, on Radio Two, was following an ironic aside about the dress sense of someone who used to be in Sad Café with an even more ironic aside about the facial hair of someone who used to be in Foreigner, while John Humphries, on Radio Four, was rudely interrupting a politician. But in and around Hull, the big topic was cod, and whether the world’s biggest submarium had the right to sell it in its restaurant when it was virtually an endangered species. Kevin from North Hull felt that it was ‘a bit weird admiring fish, then eating them in the same place’, but Linda from Grimsby was more philosophical, suggesting, ‘It’s not a proper fish, is it? Not like them pretty ones.’ I had to say, overall, I was with Kevin on this one.

  To be fair, Peter and I didn’t see any live cod at The Deep. We did, however, see a hammerhead shark that looked like former England striker Alan Shearer. The Deep might have thrived in the middle of the day, but forty minutes before closing time it was a ghost town, strewn with empty Solero wrappers and tired-looking computer screens that were supposed to tell you the origins of the sea but didn’t. At one point we were excited to see a small pool advertising fish you could touch. At another point, two seconds later, we were slightly less excited to see a sign below it announcing that the touching fish were ‘tired’ and had been given an ‘early bedtime’. How exactly did you make a fish ‘tired’? I wondered, my head filling with images of aquatic badminton, inter-tank volleyball and games of fetch involving driftwood and particularly obedient koi carp. More to the point, how did you give it an early bedtime? Did you read to it for twenty minutes and hope it nodded off under one of those ornamental underwater caves? You had to hand it to The Deep: it was deep. It also had some great features. Today, though, something monumental had passed through it – if not a shoal of rioting cod, then at least a party of very unruly schoolchildren – and left its mark.

  ‘It’s like a town in one of those old Westerns, just after Clint Eastwood or someone has gone through it,’ observed Peter. ‘Except with fish.’

  Once again, I was enjoying talking to Peter about random rubbish surrounding music (or fish, in this case) more than I was enjoying talking to him about music itself. It was slightly alarming how quickly our pupil–teacher relationship had accelerated, with rock and roll becoming just another academic subject, albeit one taught slightly more haphazardly. Sometimes, when I related a well-known anecdote about a television going through a hotel room window or a heavy metal hellraiser defiling a national monument, it could feel worrying, like I was talking about Third World debt or the ins and outs of the private sector. It didn’t matter that what I was lecturing about was wild and rebellious; what mattered – and what was responsible for the occasional absent look in Peter’s eyes – was that I was an older person setting the agenda, trying to make too much sense of the world on Peter’s behalf. I tried to stay conscious of keeping a fun, freewheeling element to proceedings, of encouraging Peter to learn in the direction that he wanted to learn, just like the teachers at his strangely laid-back school did. Whatever Peter had thought about today’s meeting with Jim, though, I could be pretty sure he hadn’t seen it as anything to do with flexible learning. Whatever hidden riches the experience had held, you couldn’t say it had a lot of bend. I’d hoped that forcing Peter to interact with Jim would give me an insight into Peter’s thinking, but now it was over, his brain remained a mystery, and one that was just a little further from my grasp than it had been a couple of weeks before.

  Now I wanted to atone for our misadventure with an activity that was impulsive and loose. The only problem was, we were on the Yorkshire–Lincolnshire border, a place more renowned for its high rate of road casualties than its musical legends and landmarks. I quickly ransacked my brain, but could only really come up with Mick Ronson, David Bowie’s old guitarist, who was dead. There was always the Beautiful South, but I had a dim recollection that their lead singer was busy working in a petrol station in a TV soap opera. I also had a less dim recollection that I didn’t care. In desperation, I turned on the radio and manual-tuned to 828 medium wave, the frequency that (usually) played host to my favourite European radio station, AERO CLASSICROCK. Immediately, I felt calmer.

  Being able to tune in to AERO CLASSICROCK is, to me, one of the chief joys of living near one of the outer points of the East Coast of England. For those unfamiliar with it, AERO CLASSICROCK is a Dutch station whose name tells you everything you need to know about its modus operandi: wall-to-wall, in your face, unashamedly fashion-free rock music around the clock. Since AERO CLASSICROCK isn’t even supposed to be broadcast in the British Isles, I’ve never seen it advertised or listed, yet you can just tell that its name is capitalised, in the same way that you can just tell that the man who does the horror movie trailer voiceovers at the cinema is over six feet tall and owns a drinks cabinet. AERO CLASSICROCK doesn’t have disc jockeys, just occasional goofy between-song voices that say things like, ‘LUNCHBOX!’, ‘ROADRUNNER!’ and ‘ROCK OF AGES!’ for no sensible reason. In fact, it’s quite feasible that AERO CLASSICROCK is not a radio station at all, just one big randomly shuffled mix tape, yet somehow this matters not a jot. For any man honest enough to get in touch with his inner Homer Simpson, the station remains a full-throttle, life-affirming experience. The fact that it can descend into painful sizzling noises in bad weather and that on a Saturday afternoon, in the ten-mile area directly north of my house, it mysteriously shares half its bandwidth with a farming programme just makes it all the more special.

  Now, listening to U2’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ back-to-back with Todd Rundgren’s ‘I Saw The Light’ back-to-back with Styx’s ‘Renegade’, I marvelled at my stupidity. Over the past few weeks I’d laboured over such home-mix tapes as ‘Mystic Britain, 1968–73’, ‘Fuzz Pedal Guerillas, 1971–75’ and ‘Families With Beards, August 1972–June 1973’, trying to tailor my pupil’s musical exposure to perfection, when the answer was right in front of me all along. Here, in hissy yet vital form, was everything you could ever want to know about real, good-time music – the kind that transcends fashion and adolescence and, well, everything, apart from life itself. Here were Foreigner, singing about how the woman in their woman brought out the man in their man. Here were The Faces, smelling of booze, fags and neglected hair on ‘Stay With Me’, building, building, building to the show-off guitar hook of the century, then talking sexist crap, but doing it brilliantly. Here was Rod Stewart in his prime: a black 1930s blues singer disguised as a vertically challenged scarecrow posing as the ultimate sex slob. This was Man’s Music, and we were both Men – or at least we both soon would be – in the middle of a Man’s Trip, and this was what we needed to make us both believe in it, to make it stop feeling like work. If I’d been stopped at a traffic light, I would probably have run off into nearby woodland. This was the essence! Sod ‘ammunition’. This was what Peter had to get in touch with at any cost! Isn’t this just the most awesome thing? I thought.

  ‘Isn’t this just the most awesome thing?’ I asked Peter.

  But he was asleep.

  PENTANGLE – BASKET OF LIGHT (TRANSATLANTIC, 1970)

  TOM:‘THE EARLY Seventies was a time of musical symbiosis, with black and white, folk and rock, soul and country, funk and blues feeding off one another like never before and never since. Pentangle were the quintessential folk band for the time, catching the tail end of the psychedelic movement and mixing a spiritual Led Zeppelin-type aura with a knack for very traditional, very English melody.

  ‘Basket Of Light is their most bewitching album, largely because of the production, which conjures up the image of a group of hirsute angels composing hymns to the starving earth in an enormous wooden auditorium with moss on its eaves. Here, the group mix traditional tunes with original ones, and it’s hard to tell one from the other. Songs like “I Once
Had A Sweetheart” and “Springtime Promises” are richer than the parallel work of Fairport Convention, more attuned to the land than the equivalent warblings of Mellow Candle. Vocalist Jacqui McShee is a seraph in clogs, and if Bert Jansch’s co-vocals are occasionally weedy, it’s less in an effete way and more in a way redolent of the things that grow in the ground. Normally, you’d have to roll around in the mud beneath an agricultural museum for weeks to make a record this at one with the great old outdoors; Pentangle, apparently, did it in a recording studio. Their songs are tinted with acid, but, as with all the best folk, ultimately you get the sense that they could have been written and recorded at any point during the last thousand years.’

  Peter: ‘I’m sorry. This annoys the piss out of me.’

  THE BIG SLEEP

  IT’S HARD TO pinpoint the exact moment that I decided youth culture was dead. Looking back, I could possibly narrow it down to the moment I initially became aware of The Stereophonics, or a day in 1994 when I first saw a bootleg screen print of Kurt Cobain with a shotgun in his mouth, or the first time I felt the urge to strangle a skate kid. Or perhaps, on a more general level, I could posthumously attach some sort of ominous significance to Blur beating Oasis to number one in the singles chart in the summer of 1995. But that would probably be a little too neat. Much as I’d like to think there was a pivotal event that gave definition to my change of heart, it’s far more likely that comprehension crept up on me gradually, until finally the all-consuming young person’s pursuit of Keeping Up felt hollow and pointless.

  Of course, there was the possibility that youth culture hadn’t gone off at all; that it was me who was stale. But, in the end, that was immaterial. The important thing was that my youth culture was dead: the bands that I had loved as a teenager had either disintegrated or gone out of fashion, the clothes that I’d worn had vanished from the high street, the arthouse movie icons I’d worshipped had gone bald or blockbuster, and the mutual beliefs that had helped hold my network of friends together had fragmented into something more complex. If these intrinsic elements of coming-of-age had been replaced by others that seemed just as important to the generation that followed me, then I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to understand why. Attempting to comprehend why anyone would want to listen to Papa Roach or watch Dawson’s Creek seemed far too difficult a proposition. It was far easier – and a lot more fun – to take the view that youth culture had been hijacked and transformed into something meaningless and corporate.

  The question that interested me was: would Peter feel the same in thirteen years’ time? It was hard to imagine that something even more meaningless and quasi-alternative than Slipknot would arrive a few years from now, hoodwink a new generation and leave my fresh-faced companion feeling as world-weary as I felt. But fifty years of pop culture evolution told me it was perfectly possible. And the more time I spent with Peter, the more I understood why.

  Spending time with Peter didn’t change the way I felt about youth culture; it just changed the way I thought about it. Three months into our curriculum, I still let out an involuntary Sideshow Bob shiver in the vicinity of Puddle Of Mudd albums, couldn’t understand why anyone would want to give Heath Ledger a starring role in a movie, and had absolutely no desire to attach a long, purposeless piece of metal to my trousers. Yet, at the same time, I clocked a flaw in my gloomy philosophising. In believing that youth culture was sour and jaded, I’d made the mistake of believing that the people who consumed it were sour and jaded as well. I’d forgotten that, due to their singular lack of perspective, teenagers would always be teenagers. They didn’t know that the generations preceding them had reserved all the good clothes and tunes, and even if they did, why should they care? They had other, more important matters to worry about, like finding an effective brand of spot-remover or getting Denise Jones in 8D to notice them in the quadrangle at breaktime.

  When Peter flabbergasted me, he tended to flabbergast me because of his sheer teenageness – a kind of awkward adolescent essence that, in the aftermath of the American teen flick revolution and Harry Enfield’s Kevin The Teenager sketches, seemed almost too clichéd to be true. Sometimes, when he hunched his shoulders or buried his hands in his sleeves or overslept in a comic fashion or grunted unintelligibly or repeated a catchphrase from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I’d assume he was making some kind of post-modern statement. I’d forget, for a moment, that he wasn’t one of my own twenty-something mates, mimicking one of the classic teen qualities for effect. Then it would hit me that he was just being a typical fourteen-year-old; that to him, these actions weren’t yet clichés, and that, even if they were, clichés had a slightly different meaning when your chief priority in life was gaining acceptance. Then I’d take some time to ponder this, momentarily awestruck by this weird state halfway between childhood and adulthood that I, bafflingly, had also occupied not too long ago.

  Oversleeping, in particular, was almost a point of adolescent pride for Peter. He talked about getting up in time for the Sunday EastEnders omnibus with the same fervour that I talked about getting up in time to hear the dawn chorus. The logistic preamble to our trips had a pattern to them: I’d initially speak to Jenny and make an arrangement, then, later, speak to Peter, who would adjust our meeting time by a couple of hours, claiming that this mum had forgotten that he had ‘coursework’ to do in the morning. I found it strange that Peter, who was yet to begin his GCSEs, would have coursework, and even stranger that someone with so much energy who didn’t work for a living would want to waste so much of the day in bed. I also wondered exactly who was in charge here. As the teacher, wasn’t I the one who was supposed to set the starting time for the lesson?

  I’d known for a while that it was only a matter of time before Peter’s lethargy ate into our schedule to detrimental effect, so, as I stood outside Sloane Square tube station, peering anxiously towards the exit gate, I couldn’t say I was surprised. Thirteen times in half an hour I’d looked up the number listed under ‘Thardoz’ in my mobile phone’s address book. Thirteen times in half an hour I’d scolded myself for not buying a phone with a redial button on it. Thirteen times in half an hour I’d been met with Peter’s singularly unmoved answerphone message: ‘Er. Yeah. This is Pete. Now you say something . . .’. Perhaps he was stuck in a tube tunnel with no reception, but instinct told me otherwise. If I was being totally honest with myself, I’d seen this coming the previous evening, when Jenny had called to inform me that Peter would be spending the night at Zed’s house and making his own way to our rendezvous point. I had, after all, witnessed Peter in inaction in the morning and, helpful as I’m sure Zed’s parents were, I couldn’t imagine them coaxing him into his start-the-day bath with quite the same zeal as Jenny. Not, that is, unless they owned a particularly high-powered set of electric cattle prods.

  I looked at my watch. Then, remembering I didn’t have a watch, I looked at my mobile phone. In minus five minutes, Peter and I were scheduled to meet Jenny Fabian, one of the world’s most famous former rock and roll groupies, next to the July issue of Golf World in the Sloane Square branch of W. H. Smith’s. I gave Peter’s number one last try then finally moved away, immediately going to work on excuses for my charge’s absence.

  Fabian represented something of a last-minute addition to Peter’s curriculum. It had struck me, as I’d reached the halfway stage in my adventures with him, that his education was somewhat lacking in female perspective. In order to rectify this, I’d immediately made an attempt to contact some of the hippest, best-known female stars in the music industry. Then, when their agents had asked me to put my request in writing and thrown my fax in the bin without looking at it, I’d attempted to contact some of the least hip, lesser-known ones. These included Stacia, the buxom nude dancer from prog rockers Hawkwind, Stevie Langer, the woman with the big voice who’d sung the theme tune for the Bodyform sanitary towels advert, and Fabian.

  Langer had either failed to get or decided to ignore the message I’d left at the mus
ic shop she was affiliated to, and Stacia, from what I could ascertain from the many sci-fi-obsessed fansites devoted to pictures of her breasts, had married a blues musician and relocated to Germany, but Fabian had returned my call within the space of an hour. She spoke a saucy hippy version of the Queen’s English, made tongue-in-cheek references to ‘getting the old fishnets out’, and remained in good humour when, while I was describing the thesis for my project, she fell under the misapprehension that I had described her as ‘a British rock landmark’. I was impressed, and more impressed still when she actually seemed more keen to partake in an interview because I had a teenager in tow.

  But now he wasn’t here.

  A fortnight earlier, with Peter’s mum’s approval, I’d passed my copy of Fabian’s autobiographical 1969 novel, Groupie, on to Peter in order to prepare for today, and I was starting to think that maybe this hadn’t been such a smart move. The book, which tells the tale of a well-heeled nineteen-year-old who shags her way through Swinging Sixties London, is full of references to ‘plating’, ‘getting high’, ‘kinky sex’ and a myriad other activities a fourteen-year-old probably wouldn’t dream of imagining people older than his parents indulging in. Sure, I might have been able to get past the fact that the book had been written thirty-odd years ago and that its creator was now old enough to relate to an episode of Last Of The Summer Wine, but in Peter’s mind it probably fell under the catch-lots category of Strange Old People’s Stuff That It’s Best Not To Know About. It was quite probable that he saw the prospect of meeting Fabian in the same way that the sixteen-year-old me had seen the prospect of having my cheeks pinched by Doris, the over-affectionate, overperfumed, middle-aged checkout supervisor at the Tesco supermarket where I once worked. In truth, I imagined Peter had read the first few pages of Groupie, got to the bit where Katie, the heroine, plates the lead singer of the Satin Odyssey, cast it onto the same pile that he’d cast most of the other texts I’d given him, and turned his attention back to mastering the riff to ‘Enter Sandman’. And, to be honest, I couldn’t blame him.