Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  So I took my air gun to school.

  We were in the changing room mucking about after football and my mate, not me, fired my air gun. The pellet bounced off a wall and hit another friend in the eye. It was a freak accident, a one-in-a-million shot, but all hell broke loose and, of course, because it was my air gun, I got it in the neck. That was fair enough. If I hadn’t taken it to school, the accident wouldn’t have happened, but I didn’t pull the trigger. The bloke who did never got pulled up, but I got six of the best on my bare arse. That teacher should have been reported for sexual abuse. Much more upsetting, my mate lost the sight in his eye. That was the point at which the headmaster, Mr. Kibblewhite, decided I was expelled. “We can’t control you, Daltrey,” he said. “You’re out.” And, as I left his office for the last time, a parting gesture: “You’ll never make anything of your life, Daltrey.”

  Thanks a lot, Mr. Kibblewhite, I thought.

  On the afternoon of my fifteenth birthday, I had to go home early and tell my parents the good news.

  They were devastated. I think we might have ended up in a fight, me and my dad. Not fists, but wrestling with each other. He wasn’t a violent man at all, but that day he was angry. I just didn’t see what the problem was. I’d be all right. If anyone had ever once sat me down and explained that school was for me, not the teachers or the system, and that there were reasons why I should stick at it, it would have been totally different. But no one ever did. My life was settled until I was eleven and then I had to go to this school. It felt like I was being punished. It never occurred to me that it was a successful thing to do. I think that’s what it was. The first school had the vision of doing as well as you can in your eleven-plus exam.

  And I did. I passed with flying colors. The next school had no vision at all. So when rock and roll music came along, that became the vision. I decided I was going to do that. Dad had other ideas. When he’d finished shouting at me, he sent me straight off down to the employment office. Within a week I was working on a building site.

  * * *

  If it hadn’t been for Elvis, that could have been it. The laborer’s life. But the first time I saw Elvis, aged twelve or thirteen, I knew what I wanted to do. Of course, Elvis was Elvis. Elvis the Pelvis. The King of Rock and Roll. He was completely out of reach to a boy from Shepherd’s Bush. Nobody could be like him even though we all thought we could look like him. We couldn’t afford Brylcreem to slick our hair back in the style of the King, but with the help of a bar of soap we could get close enough. But then along came Lonnie Donegan and the first time I saw him it was different. There he was on our little black-and-white television in March 1957 and he looked nothing like Elvis. He was wearing a tuxedo and a bow tie, which was definitely not cool. But he was singing an Appalachian folk song called “Cumberland Gap.” Even though I didn’t understand what it was about I got it. His music felt primal. I felt a frisson.

  I wouldn’t have known what it was called then but I read an article about it recently. Scientists at Eastern Washington University studied our response to music. Two-thirds of us have an intense emotional reaction to unexpected stimuli in our environment, particularly music. If you’re immersed in a piece of music and you have “openness to experience,” you’re more likely to experience this frisson. That’s exactly how I’ve always felt about music. It was like that when I was listening to Lonnie and it’s been like that every time I’ve sung to an audience. I’m not just singing it. I’m feeling it. And on a good day the audience isn’t just listening to it. They’re experiencing it on some deep, primal level.

  The music had already begun to change before Lonnie and his skiffle band. I remember when I was about six, you started to hear more American music on the afternoon shows. My uncle used to play the drums in a little jazz band and he really loved Hank Williams. That was the first time I’d heard country. But when Lonnie came along, singing all those traditional folk songs, like “Bring a Little Water, Sylvie,” and “Midnight Special,” it was different. He did it with a bit of oomph. When Lonnie used to put his head back and wail, I thought, that’s what I want to do. I didn’t feel like that with Elvis but even I could do a pretty good imitation of Lonnie. He was less controlled, more primal, and that suited me.

  It was in that tradition of skiffle that I decided to make my first guitar when I was twelve. This meant I had to get a summer job, which was not unusual for kids of that age to do in those days. I managed to get a gig at a laundry. I began at the bottom, which meant working on the “in tray.” Blimey, I couldn’t believe the filth and dirt some people lived in. After one of the longest weeks of my twelve-year-old life, a week trying not to breathe through my nose, of being on the brink of fetching up every time a new load came in, the boss told me I was moving up. Moving up, my arse. I got moved to the washers. My job was to untangle the newly washed, soaking wet sheets as they came out of the washers and they weighed a ton. I had to keep up with the women doing the ironing and they were on piecework. Keeping those women fed with untangled sheets was some of the hardest work I’d ever done. Boy, I paid a hard price for that guitar, but by the end of the summer I had enough cash to buy the bits and pieces I needed to get started.

  I was copying a really cheap instrument lent to me by one of Dad’s workmates. It was, very loosely speaking, a Spanish guitar. I cut the body out of plywood and bent thinner bits of plywood around the sides. I didn’t have a clue how to join the body onto the neck, but I managed it somehow. Then I scouted around Hammersmith’s music instrument repair shops for fret wire, struts, tuning pegs, and a half-decent bridge. After a considerable amount of effort and experimentation, I had made what could almost be described as a guitar. It certainly looked like one and it worked like one. On a good day, it even sounded like one and that was enough.

  I was off, playing every minute God (and my bloody teachers) gave me, and a few more on top. It’s amazing how you can apply yourself if there’s no trigonometry involved. The “guitar” was more like a cheese grater stuck to a block of wood, so I had terrible bleeding fingers, but within a couple of weeks I’d mastered the three chords you needed to play pretty much anything you heard on the radio. A couple of weeks after that, I had played my first gig, channeling Lonnie with Elvis hair. The gig was the youth club dance and I didn’t feel nervous. I just climbed up onstage and went for it. “Heartbreak Hotel,” full belt.

  If you asked me to explain how a skinny little boy struggling to cope with his miserable life at school had the confidence to get up in front of an audience with a plywood guitar and perform, I couldn’t begin to tell you. It was weird then and I still don’t fully understand it now. But I survived and so did the guitar. Then, a week later, it folded in half. Bit of a design flaw and a bit of a problem because I was now in a band. Well, not a band. A skiffle group. I was in a skiffle group and my plywood guitar had given out after six weeks.

  To the rescue came my Uncle John, who happened to be a carpenter for the Bedford Park Estate. He had watched me struggling to make Guitar One and now he was going to help me make Guitar Two. This time, we got the joint between the neck and the body right, and this one was French-polished. The action was better. The intonation still wasn’t perfect, but I only needed to play the magic three chords. It did the job and, most importantly, it didn’t fold in half after six weeks. In fact, it lasted almost three years. And from then on, whenever I wasn’t working, I never went anywhere without that guitar around my neck.

  Outside school, life was okay. I didn’t talk to my parents much, but when I wasn’t practicing with the band I would hang out with my old Shepherd’s Bush mates and my older cousin Graham Hughes. He wasn’t one of the future nuclear physicists. He was at art school. He’d go on to become a successful photographer, producing many album covers for The Who and my solo work. But, back then, the important thing was that he had lots of records. He introduced me to rock and roll. I moved on from Lonnie to Little Richard and, by the time I was fifteen, I was ready to make my first elect
ric guitar. I was going to be a rock star, although there would be a few bumps in the road ahead.

  chapter three

  The Skiffle Years

  One week after I escaped from the hell of Acton County Grammar, I found myself working as an electrician’s mate on a building site just down the road. This was more of a deliberate career move than it might look. As an electrician’s mate, it wouldn’t take long to acquire the skills and trouser the materials needed to make that electric guitar. And it felt great. There I was out in the fresh air, free at last from calculus, and I got to watch those mugs traipsing in and out of school while I lived the high life.

  That is an exaggeration.

  I was earning two quid a week. Most of that went to my furious mum but there was still enough left over to buy cigarettes. They used to sell them in fives for the kids. Horrendous to think about that now, isn’t it? The problem was that I was an electrician’s mate, and an electrician’s mate doesn’t do any electrician’s work. All I was doing was bending the pipes that the electrical wires would go in. And I thought to myself, this isn’t electrical work. This is bloody plumbing. One of the things you don’t need to know when you’re making an electric guitar is how to bend bleeding pipes. Also, it was March. That fresh air was bloody freezing.

  Six weeks later, I walked out, went back to the employment agency, and asked for a different job. You could do that back then. The bloke behind the desk looked at my last school report, which I imagine made grim reading, and eventually said, “You’re obviously good with your hands. Go down to the sheet-metal factory in South Acton. They’re looking for a tea boy.”

  A tea boy? What’s that all about? I wondered. How good with your hands do you need to be to serve a cup of tea? I did what I was told, though, because I could see potential in this particular tea-making appointment. After all, there would be metal in a sheet-metal factory, wouldn’t there? And there would be tools, too. With a bit of luck, I could be a tea boy who made electric guitars when no one was looking. So off I went down to Chase Products, a factory that specialized in making computer cabinets, to present myself as the new brew-maker-in-chief.

  It turns out that “factory” was an optimistic way of describing it. It was a not very glorified shed with these big old potbelly boilers, which we used to have to light every morning and feed with coke all day. It was like stepping into a Dickens novel. The only difference? Our shed was built from asbestos sheeting.

  In the middle of it all was old Frank Altman, the foreman, and, well, for some reason he just took a shine to me. Before I knew it, I was an apprentice tea boy earning the princely sum of £4.50 a week selling tea and sandwiches to the welders and the other men. The job came with some responsibility. Everyone wanted something different. A quarter of cheese, a ham sandwich, a bacon roll. If you got it wrong, then you’d upset the welder, and you did not want to upset the welder because the tea boy’s other job was to file the weld. If the welder was upset, the weld was rough and bumpy—not easy at all. If you got it right, the welder was happy, the weld was smooth, and you got tips. I’d take the orders at the start of the shift and then pop round to Marco’s corner shop—you name it, Marco’s sold it. And they’d always look after you because they wanted your business. It was win-win.

  After a month of tips and free sandwiches, I decided I could improve on my situation. I’m mad buying this stuff from Marco’s, I thought. If I get the rolls from the bakery and the ham from the butcher and the cheese from the corner shop, I can make my own bloody sandwiches in the paint store round the back. They’d be fresher than Marco’s and I could take all the profit. So I had a whole little business going and all the lads were happy because Daltrey’s Sarnies Consolidated was an even more professional outfit than Daltrey’s Personal Tailoring. I was quite the little entrepreneur.

  In the afternoons, I went from tea boy to filer. We were making cabinets for computers the size of lorries. It wasn’t exactly Apple. It wasn’t precision engineering. There was a lot of filing to do. I filed bits of metal and the welders welded them together. The key was to file well enough to keep your welder happy, which, as we’ve already discussed, was the key to a happy life.

  I’ve said in the past that my time at Chase Products, in that asbestos-lined shed in South Acton, was the happiest of my life. I’ve also said I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Looking back on it now, I think both things were true. It was dreary, monotonous work, but there was routine. You clocked on for your shift, then off for tea, off for lunch, and off to go home. There was structure. Life was simple. Innocent.

  One of the problems with the rock business is that you never know what’s going to come through the letterbox next. Those few teenage years in the factory were the last time for a long time that anything in my life was remotely predictable. It was also a happy place to work. The trick was that we used to sing. We sang all day, every day. We used to drive the guv’nor mad. He wouldn’t let us have a radio, and I’m glad he didn’t, because then we wouldn’t have sung. I can’t tell you what a difference that made.

  There were the young apprentices like me and the older lads, many of them not long back from Korea and the war in Malaya. We had our adolescent angst and they had their veterans’ shell shock, and we held it all together with singing. One of the paint-shop guys could do a mean Sinatra and a beautiful Nat King Cole. He was just great; he had perfect pitch so I used to sing along with him until I had it perfect, too. We used to do all the Everly Brothers songs. We had a regular barbershop quartet going in that shed.

  In 1968, The Who was performing at the Hollywood Bowl, and we were on the same bill as the Everlys. I couldn’t wait to meet them. All those years playing their songs and here we were at the same gig. It would have been a big moment. I might even have told them about the barbershop choir in the tin shed in South Acton. But it didn’t happen.

  So we did our bit. Keith and his entire drum kit ended up in the moat between the stage and the audience and Bobby Pridden, our sound guy, set off several military-grade smoke bombs during “My Generation.” As the dust settled, we heard sirens. Half the Los Angeles Fire Department arrived, accompanied by most of its police force. Bobby was carted off to jail and released only after enduring a lengthy lecture on the hazards of fire in a desert environment. The rest of us were sent packing. I didn’t see the Everly Brothers play. I didn’t even meet them backstage.

  The idea of sharing the bill with the Everly Brothers was unimaginable at the start of the decade. But I loved those impromptu sessions on the factory floor. You couldn’t have called it rock and roll, but we got some pretty good rhythm going with our improvised drum kits of hammers, presses, and guillotines.

  It’s one of the sadnesses in modern life that no one sings like that anymore. In those days, everyone did. You’d be walking down the road and people would be singing on building sites, at roadworks, in garages, everywhere. When you’re singing, you’re happy. Singing changes your brain. It reduces cortisol and increases the release of endorphins and oxytocin. Some people have to take drugs to do that. Why not just have a bit of a sing-along? Singing in groups is even better. Scientists, not musicians, have found that our heart rates sync up when we sing together. You don’t even have to be any good. Don’t believe me? I refer you to the University of Sheffield’s memorable 2005 paper “Effects of Group Singing and Performance for Marginalised and Middle-Class Singers.”

  “The emotional effects of participation in group-singing are similar regardless of training or socioeconomic status,” it says, which I could have told them but, wait, here comes the interesting bit … “However, the interpersonal and cognitive components of the choral experience have different meanings for the marginalised and middle-class singers. Whereas the marginalised individuals appear to embrace all aspects of the group singing experience, the middle-class choristers are inhibited by prevalent social expectations of musicianship.”

  I think it’s fair to say our merry band of veterans and reprobate youths fit
ted more into the “marginalised” bracket. We certainly weren’t middle class. So the downtrodden masses benefit more than the posh kids I left behind at Acton County Grammar.

  The last time I heard anyone singing at work outside of the Caribbean was in Majorca a couple of years ago. I was walking up this mountain for a bit of morning exercise. Halfway up, I pass this builder’s van, and there’s a couple of Spanish lads there unloading bags of cement. It’s a blazing hot day right at the end of August and one of them is looking very pissed off with his lot in life, but he nods an hola as I walk past. As I’m coming back down the mountain a little while later, they’re unloading the last bags of cement and the one who had looked pissed off looks a lot chirpier. Then he takes a deep breath and starts belting out our 1966 single “Substitute.”

  “I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth,” he’s singing in this heavy Spanish accent. “The north side of my town faced east, and the east was facing south … la, la, la.” I laughed my head off at that. It was just brilliant. I’m sure he felt better. He was certainly laughing, too.

  I wasn’t in the shed only for the singing, though, was I? I was there for Guitar Three. And this one was going to be a Fender. Or a close approximation of a Fender. Or a not-very-close-at-all approximation of one. I had heard Buddy Holly play one and, even on our little black-and-white television, the noise he got with “That’ll Be the Day” was just amazing. I couldn’t buy one, of course. The price was astronomical. It cost more than a house. Only Buddy Holly could buy one. I would simply make my own.

  One afternoon, tea made, sandwiches distributed, cabinets filed, I got off shift and took the Tube to Charing Cross Road to stare wide-eyed at a Fender Stratocaster hanging in the window of a music shop. Fender was so clever. He hollowed out the back of the guitar so it just sat on your hip. It was like a tailored suit, and I learned that by staring at it through the window. I took all the measurements and hightailed it back home.