by John Taylor
Around about that age, I had a first thought about a future career, a pilot in the Royal Air Force. I wondered to myself after lights out, did the RAF still fly Spitfires?
The relentless construction of RAF fighter planes and Panzer tanks and ships of the Royal Navy was also a way of scratching at the surface of the great unspoken subject: Dad’s war years. We couldn’t communicate about the subject directly, so I just kept building. Shit, we English kids had it easy; what were the German kids of my generation talking to their dads about? Not a lot, I would find out later, but it did provide impetus for all the great and profound German art and music of the seventies and eighties.
My obsession moved up a notch when I began collecting and painting models from Napoléon’s vast Grande Armée. I particularly coveted bona fide rock stars such as Marshal Murat who, arm outstretched and saber poised, rode into battle on his leopard skin–bedecked steed.
I needed more cash to feed my habit because these figures, imported from France, or their smaller-scale cousins cast in lead, cost a lot more than the Airfix guys. Dad inadvertently gave me another life skill; I became the neighborhood car washer.
Painting all those uniforms in intricate detail on three-inch figurines left its mark on my aesthetic sensibility—the epaulets, the braids, the sashes, and the boots. You can still see an Airfix influence onstage with Duran Duran today. I just can’t seem to shake it off.
• • •
I was also crazy about cars, another passion I inherited from Dad. No one took greater pride in car ownership than Dad, and his relationship with his various cars was almost erotic. Every spare hour he had, he spent it alone in the garage with the car, tweaking, messing, customizing. And if, while driving, the car developed the slightest rattle or vibration, he would go nuts and, as soon as we got home, would disappear, taking the car apart until he found the cause of the noise and silenced it. He invested his entire working life in the British car industry, and any sign of imperfection he considered a personal affront.
Over twenty years, Dad had earned the reputation as the family’s designated driving instructor, having taught many uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews how to become drivers. Ironically, his most famous failure was his own wife, Jean, my mom.
One evening after school, Dad decided it was time to teach Mom to drive. Mom wasn’t sure that was a good idea, and she was nervous about getting behind the wheel of Dad’s prize bull. She knew how attached Dad was to his car and how easily he could get mad. However, we all climbed into the maroon Ford, Dad behind the wheel for now, and drove to a designated lay-by spot out in the country, a few miles from home.
Dad pulled the car over onto the roadside. In front of and behind us were ten-foot piles of gravel. The space between was maybe two hundred yards. Mom and Dad switched seats.
They are both edgy, and I must be picking up on that energy because I am bouncing around in the backseat restlessly, squeezing my body between the two front seats, as I always do, to really get an idea of what is involved in the “lesson.”
First thing Mom does is to push the gear stick into first, not taking into account the use of the clutch (these are the days before automatic transmission arrived in the United Kingdom), and the sound of screeching fills the cockpit.
“Christ, Jean! Don’t crash the gears!”
Mom looks terrified.
“Oh Jack . . . I don’t know, what am I supposed to do? Nigel!”—that is me—“Sit back!”
“You have to push the clutch in, Jean, before you go into gear. Use your left foot,” says Dad.
Once again, Mom tries to engage the gear, but not only do we get the screeching again, this time the car leaps forward in clumsy bounds, bumpa bumpa THUD!
The engine stalls.
“Christ, Jean, what is the matter with you?” Mom’s on the verge of tears, her face beet red.
“Forget it,” she says stubbornly. “I don’t want to drive, let me out.”
She can’t get the door open, and Dad now has his dangerous, furious look on, fit to burst. Then he’s out of the passenger seat, stomping around the front of the car, opening the driver door for Mom to get out. She climbs back into the passenger seat; Dad gets back behind the wheel.
“And you! Sit back! Sit back in that bloody seat!” he says to me. The car exits the lay-by with an uncharacteristic wheel spin.
And that’s it. Mom’s one and only driving lesson is over. Every time it gets mentioned in the future, my role is slowly but surely magnified until I have become the principal cause of the disaster.
“With you jumping around in the back, how was I supposed to concentrate?”
7 Junior Choice
On Saturday mornings, the three of us—Mom, Dad, and Nigel—would gather at the kitchen table for breakfast. On the radio at eight would be Ed “Stewpot” Stewart’s Junior Choice, another terrific bonding opportunity for kids and their parents.
From up and down the country, folk would write in. Ed would begin, “We’ve a letter from Edith Baker in Accrington: ‘Dear Ed, it’s our Jimmy’s eighth birthday on Saturday, and for his party he has asked for a cake with a picture of you on it!’”
Chuckling to himself, Ed would continue: “I can’t imagine anyone wanting to eat that cake, Edith. Are you sure it’s a good idea? She goes on, ‘We never miss the show, could you please play him something from Jungle Book?’ I would be most happy to oblige,” says Ed in his friendly, nasal tone.
And off we would go, with “I Wanna Be Like You.” Keith West’s “Excerpt from a Teenage Opera” was a popular selection on Junior Choice, as was “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and anything from Mary Poppins. We were all putty in Ed’s hands whenever he played “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
At 10:00 A.M., the show was over and we would dress for the weekend shopping trip. On Sunday, we would dress for church. Strangely, even though Dad was not working Sunday, he still did not come into St. Jude’s with us, preferring to sit in the car and read the paper. Would this mean Dad would not be accompanying Mom and me to heaven?
Back home, it was the afternoon radio broadcasts that really caught the family’s ear. Dad had broken down and joined the hi-fi set in the early 1970s, which was a necessary development, in my view, like adding a vinyl roof to the Ford or buying nylon shirts. This meant we could now play music and listen to the radio in the TV room.
The hi-fi, or stereo, for this system had two speakers, had been put on a purpose-built shelf to the left of Dad’s easy chair, so it was clearly meant to be his domain. He started buying albums: Dvorak’s Greatest Hits and the great Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. Mom and he would get together on some purchases, like the Max Bygraves Sing-Along-A-Max series—Max doing then what Rod Stewart would do later with The Great American Songbook. This was great party music for when my aunts and uncles visited and drinks were being served.
But the truth was, the Taylor household was a radio household, and we were a radio family.
After the boredom of Dad’s Sunday cricket had been suffered and slept through by all, including him, the Radio 1 Top 30 chart show would begin at 5:00 P.M. Dad and I—and visiting Nan—would gather around the living room table as Mom brought in our tea of sandwiches, cake, and, if we were lucky, her unequaled trifle. There wasn’t another event in the entire week that brought the three generations together with quite as much enthusiasm as the Top 30 show.
Let me qualify that. It was actually Mom’s and my enthusiasm that really got the party started; Dad and Nan could have taken it or left it. But they went with the flow, and it felt, at least, as if we were all as excited by the ups and downs of the pop world as we were by each other. It was one of our few family pastimes.
The highlight came at five minutes before seven o’clock when “the nation’s number 1 hit song” was played in full, unless it was a song as popular as George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” which sat at the top spot for seemingly months, in which case they just played a few bars of the song. After weeks and
weeks of overexposure, this was a blessed relief.
I was beginning to notice that the songs I really liked rarely made it to “the top spot.” Mostly the number ones were a little too cheesy for my developing taste: “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” “Welcome Home,” or “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” Talent show winners or songs from TV ads. The cooler songs seemed to sit a little outside the Top 10. After the number one song had been played, Radio 1 switched off and it would be time for The Shipping Forecast—that curiously interesting lesson in weather and European geography. What was Dogger Bite?—and after that, the airwaves were back in the hands of the controllers at BBC Light Entertainment for Your Hundred Best Tunes, all that maudlin stuff like “In a Monastery Garden” and “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” Dad would settle down in his seat, maybe with a drink of something from the front room, and Nan would doze off again, maybe singing along gently after a glass or two.
Number 34 Simon Road was a musical house, but not in the von Trapp family sense. Nobody could play a note and there were no instruments to be found anywhere. And other than Dad in his cups, no one had the nerve to sing out loud.
In addition to Mom’s transistor radio and Dad’s stereo, there was the trusty oak-paneled gramophone player, which had been sitting on the floor in the front room for as long as I could remember. It was an heirloom, something from my nan’s house, and rarely used by Mom or Dad other than as a tabletop for a drinks decanter and some whisky glasses. Stuffed into the shelves beside the turntable was a selection of scruffy 78s, remnants of the “dancing years”—Connie Francis, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee—parent toys that had been discarded long before I came along.
Two aspects of this old piece of furniture fascinated me. The first, since I was a toddler, was the turntable itself. It had been fun using it as a test site for my Matchbox cars, holding the tiny toys over the spinning felt, lowering them until the wheels bit into the madly spinning surface. I would duck down to get a close-up view of the tiny tires, accompanying the visual with some voice-activated sound effects: gears changing, engines growling.
The second element of the “radiogram” that would fascinate me in later years, as a boy, was the wireless radio, powered by tubes that took more than a minute to warm up. It picked up signals from all across Europe, places on the wave band such as Hilversum and Luxembourg that had an exotic allure, places I vaguely knew of from my home-school geography class. Sounds would come in spurts, sometimes consistent and soothing, sometimes loud and barking, stuttering in and out of reach. Was that a spy network? I loved the sounds of the out-of-tunedness almost as much as the broadcasts. The crackles, pops, and fizzles were sounds from other planets.
I would press my ear to the single speaker and turn the dial slowly, like a safecracker, hoping to make a stronger connection. Music of all sorts; some pop, but more often soaring symphonies and brittle, rhythmic music I would come to understand as jazz. Foreign languages spilled into the room, weather reports of storms, floods, and blazing heat waves.
It was as if the entire universe was being funneled into the front living room of our house, which was exciting, and it went on twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week. A room that measured 8 by 12 feet had become a space of infinite size, like Doctor Who’s tardis. This room was no longer going to be used only on Sundays and at Christmas. I needed to stay close to this thing.
Sunday evenings would always end with Dad saying, “You better get ready for school tomorrow, lad. Get in the bath.”
“Right, Dad, will do,” I would respond, but instead of going upstairs straight away for the compulsory cleaning of the body parts, I would quietly sneak into the front room, leaving the lights off, and click on the old radio, the low light that emanated from it not enough to give me away. “Now where is that Radio Luxembourg on the dial?” I would ask myself as the tubes began to warm.
8 My Moon Landing
At the age of eleven I took the compulsory eleven-plus exam, which would determine whether I would go to a “grammar school” or a “secondary modern.” The grammar school, traditionally, was where it was at. My dad, in an unusual show of educational insight, made me sit a special exam for King Edward’s, Birmingham’s finest grammar school (where they had taught J. R. R. Tolkien), but I failed that after mucking around on the playing fields between the two tests left me covered in mud, which caused Dad to have such a fit that I never quite relaxed enough during Round 2 to make any sense of the paper.
Despite not being the most diligent student, I did, however, pass the regular eleven-plus exam and left the Catholic confines of Our Lady of the Wayside for the greener pastures of the County High School in Redditch, a sixty-minute bus ride from our home in Hollywood. I never really settled down there. Again, it was a highly competitive system, and the classes were larger, so getting the attention I would have liked or needed was impossible. After a few years of questionable successes (“Worst second-year class of all time: 2F3”; “Worst third-year class in the history of the school: 3F2”), I started skiving off.
It began with me just skipping sports, and then whatever class came after that. As time went on, it just got harder and harder to stay interested in what school had to offer. I wasn’t a star on the playing fields, I wasn’t getting the work done, I wasn’t in the orchestra, and I wasn’t connecting in any of the classrooms. Mostly, I spent my time obsessing about Julie McCoy, whom I would spend at least an hour with on the telephone every night. The fact that she had a boyfriend didn’t stop me phoning, but it did stop us from going any further.
The school gave up on me in the end. I thought I was being so clever and getting away with it, but really the teachers probably thought, “Why should we bother with him when we have all these other kids who want what we have on offer?”
My parents had no idea what was going on. They were even less engaged in my schooling than I was. If ever a letter from school was written to them to tell on me, I could smell it in my hands and it never made it home. I became an accomplished forger. I could do a perfect imitation of both of my parents’ signatures, and it was easy to change a report card “E” into a “B+,” which was odd if you considered the accompanying comment: “He has had a very poor year and continues to disappoint, B+.”
As school became less important, music became a bigger and bigger force in my life.
At the age of twelve my cousin Eddie, who was five years older than me and was the neighborhood newspaper boy, took over from Dad as my primary male role model. Right on target, according to all the books on raising boys. He had three sisters, which may have added to the appeal that sent me on my bike to his house every chance I got.
Eddie also had a burgeoning record collection. Not just a record collection, an album collection. Pretty much every artist worth their salt in the early seventies, I heard them first in the company of cousin Eddie: Bowie, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Melanie . . . okay, maybe not every artist was all that significant, but boy, he loved his music. And he had the posters on his wall. Eddie bought into the rock myth, totally.
Forty years later, he’s still a true believer. Forty years later, if I want to know what’s going on in the British music scene, I still call him.
In return for helping out on his paper round, I got inducted into that teenage male world ahead of time, the world of girls and aftershave, racing bikes and clothes, penny round collars, Oxford bags, tight-fitting Fair Isle sweaters and platform shoes.
This was 1972.
I felt big when I was around Eddie and his friends. I got unconditional acceptance, like I got from Mom and Dad, but this was way cooler.
I remember the time he played me Bowie’s Hunky Dory album, my first exposure to that cultural giant of the seventies.
“You just wait, kid,” Eddie said. “Bowie’s going to be huge. We’ve got tenth-row tickets for his Town Hall gig next week. Right, Stan?”
Ed’s running mate Stan nodded obligingly. “Yep, yes, we do, Ed.”
“It’s gonna be a good one, kid, have a listen.”
The record player’s arm came down once more. The album played again. “I still don’t know what I was waiting for . . .”
Unlike cousin Ed, who liked his singer-songwriters, I found myself connecting with bands. I loved the interplay between the musicians, the guitarist and the singer: Rod and Woody, Mick and Keith, David and Mick, great alliances that spoke to me much more than the lonely troubadour pose. Two guys or more, maybe four or five, that was a gang; it was a cult and it was sexy.
The band that really got my attention, because all of them were stars and they all had extraordinary looks and musical character, was Roxy Music. Their debut on Top of the Pops in August 1972 changed everything for me.
It’s hard to say which was the more reactionary, the sound or the look.
Let’s start with the sound: sci-fi trash and vaudeville, a driving backbeat and a crooning, Sinatraesque vocal. The look: lip gloss, fur, calfskin gloves on a keyboard player who didn’t actually play keyboards, preferring to studiously turn knobs instead.
I couldn’t have gotten closer to the TV screen if I tried.
This was my moon landing.
I never fantasized about being a front man, but I began to see myself somewhere within the corps, maybe a little to the left of the main spotlight.
9 Side Men
The world of concerts and live music sounded thrilling, and I wanted in on that too, but it was going to be a tricky negotiation with the parentals. Eddie and his mates would often join the long lines formed on Saturday evening outside the Odeon in Birmingham city center, waiting overnight to get tickets when the box office opened at eleven the following morning.
“I’ll tell you what, kid,” Eddie proposed, after a concert by Rod Stewart had been announced for Christmas. “We’ll do the overnight shift with our sleeping bags, and you and your pal come in on the first morning bus and relieve us in the queue—you boys can get the four tickets when they open up.”