by John Taylor
Sounded good. And I wouldn’t even have to mention it to the folks yet.
All went according to plan until the line started moving at eleven. What a rowdy lot! Stewart had a really boozy audience in the early seventies, and they’d been drinking all night. Little me and my mate got tossed and shoved and pushed aside, and we lost our place more than once, but we hung in there. I just couldn’t let down my cousin who had invested so much trust in me, and I had that hot, sticky tenner (best tickets were two pounds each then). But with maybe ten or twenty in the line between me and the Odeon lobby, the sign went up: ALL TICKETS SOLD. Did I lose credibility with Eddie and his pals? Actually, he was very understanding. All he had to do was fork out a little more of his cash for a pair of tickets from the scalpers—he wasn’t going to miss the show.
Next year, when Rod Stewart and the Faces announced two Christmas concerts in Birmingham, I sailed into town on the first morning bus with my new friend Nick Bates. Amazingly, we found ourselves at the front of the line after little effort and were able to buy a pair of front-row seats.
It was so easy, and I saw this as evidence of magic. Nick, “the man who would be Rhodes,” always was and always will be someone entirely settled at the center of his own universe. He is an extraordinarily creative individual blessed with good fortune. I mean, his mother even owned a toy shop! How lucky can you get? I knew from the beginning of our relationship that if I stayed close to him, life would be exciting.
I first met Nick in the winter of 1973. I was thirteen, he was eleven. The eleven-plus exam I had taken successfully turned out to be the last year the exam would exist in our area. It was replaced by something supposedly more democratic and less selective, so Nick didn’t get a crack at it. He got sent to the local secondary modern school on the housing estate up the hill, Woodrush School on Shawhurst Lane. Basically, the government had decided everyone should go to the school closest to where they lived. One negative effect of this decision was that my school, the County High, was now flooded with local oiks, some of whom just wanted to make as much trouble for the “grammar school” boys—those ponces!—as they could. I quickly became a skilled negotiator, friendly to the morons but staying as true as possible to my own tribe, particularly the cultured young ladies in their tight blue skirts. My closest neighborhood friend went by the rather unusual name of David Twist. He was my age (we had been born together, as it were, on neighboring beds at the same hospital), and his mom was one of my mom’s few friends. David had failed his exam, so he was at Woodrush too, which was where he got to know Nick. Even though Nick was two years younger, David divined that Nick and I would get along, so he made the introduction.
In 1973, David Bowie was king, and deservedly so. He had pulled off a remarkable string of successes. The release of his masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, was just the beginning. He also wrote “All the Young Dudes” for Mott the Hoople, one of his favorite bands, who had split up but regrouped when they heard the song. He produced Transformer for Lou Reed and helped to give Lou his first-ever Top 30 hit, and then, most amazingly of all, he muscled his way into Iggy and the Stooges, adding additional production work and mixing their new-metal colossus, Raw Power. In June 1973, DB was on a massive tour of the United Kingdom, at the end of which he announced his retirement from the stage of London’s Hammersmith Odeon. It was a ploy, of course, as we would all learn in time (it was Ziggy retiring, not David), but I remember hearing it on the 8:30 news, sitting on the backseat of the school bus. It was as if the queen was abdicating her throne, which in a way, I suppose is what it was.
But Nick and I shared some secret knowledge about all this. While the Dame was taking the bows and plaudits, the real power behind the throne was lurking stage left, in peroxide and platforms: Bowie’s lead guitarist, Mick Ronson.
Every girl at school was a fan of Bowie’s that year, so for us, being a Bowie fan was too obvious. We shared a fascination with the subtle and silent Ronson instead, and that served to bind our friendship. The jewels were of Bowie’s making, no doubt, but it was Mick who crafted the settings and made sure those stones were shown in the best possible light. In the serious music journals of recent years, there have been many stories about what Mick brought to the Bowie canon, as if, after years of investigative research and laser scanning, the experts had discovered that it was actually Michelangelo’s assistant, Luigi, who did all of the really good shit on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, while the boss was out to lunch.
Nick had already been to a couple of concerts—yes, this boy was advanced for his age—Gary Glitter and Slade, if memory serves. But I was yet to pop that cherry. So, in the spring of ’74, the two of us lined up outside Birmingham Town Hall on Saturday morning and got a pair of seats to see Ronson’s first solo tour that coming April. We got our tickets, in Row J, for one pound thirty-five each, about two dollars. It was the first time my parents allowed me into the city at night.
Their approval was conditional on Nick’s mom, Sylvia, agreeing to drive us in and pick us up afterward. No need for the night bus.
No one arriving at the Town Hall that night had to pay for a program. We were all given beautiful folders with photos, badges, a biography, a full-color poster, and a flexi disc. Nick and I would play and laugh over that flexi disc for hours, as dear Mick, in his deep Yorkshire brogue, would marvel about love: “Luv . . . luv . . . when you’re in luv . . . it’s . . . it’s the best thing in the WE-ERLD.”
What do I remember most about the concert? Not so much what was happening onstage but off, a foreshadowing, maybe, of the experience I would have in the Brighton Dome just a few years later. The violence of it all; seats getting smashed, all this pushing and shoving, girls screaming, standing on top of each other. I had expected it to be like going to the movies—that we’d be able to sit back in our velvet seats in Row J and soak up the experience—but this was no passive activity. It was visceral.
Onstage, however, it was clear that Mick really wasn’t up for this. The kids, caught up in Bowiemania, were going crazy. Mick just wanted them to quiet down and listen to the songs, but that was not going to happen, not that night.
Mick may have been the greatest living sideman, perhaps second only to Keith Richards, but he was never really comfortable center stage.
Nick and I both wore chiffon without needing much encouragement, and we both loved the clothes, the hairstyles, and the makeup that helped make Britain’s glam-rock era so great. Neither of us was old enough, really, or had the dough, to fully express ourselves in the way we would have liked, and besides, the glam movement had peaked on that Bowie tour the previous summer, but we found our level.
Bryan Ferry’s sartorial direction was having its effect, and all the boys were going through their dads’ closets to find his old demob suit; the forties stylings, the baggy double-breasted suits like Bogie wore in Casablanca.
Dad’s fit me perfectly. But then there was the transsexual glam aspect, and we found ourselves mixing it up with ladies’ blouses. At British Home Stores, in the city center, there was a huge floor filled with two-piece ladies’ suits from the forties and fifties to be had for a song. Vintage heaven. Some of those jackets were divine, and fitted both Nick and me. Throw in a little chiffon, maybe an animal-print scarf from Chelsea Girl, and you were away.
“You’re not going out dressed like that?” our parents would cry.
“Don’t you worry about it, Father,” Nick would tell his dad defiantly, as I applied a little lip gloss in their bathroom.
“Oh, leave them alone, Roger,” Sylvia would say. “They’re just having fun.”
We often drew insults from construction workers.
Nick was a little more outré than I, having the protection of a girlfriend, Jane, which gave him some cover.
One evening, on the train back to Hollywood, we were sitting in the front seat of the carriage behind a glass panel. A gang of denim-clad bozos started banging on the glass.
&n
bsp; “We are gonna get you! You fairies are fucking dead!”
Nick and I were shitting ourselves, but we edged ourselves as coolly as we could to the far end of our carriage. Where was the guard?
I needn’t have worried. Being with Nick, somehow we magicked ourselves out of danger. By the time the train pulled up at Whitlocks End, the bozos had disappeared.
We had other things in common as well as our dangerous tastes in clothing and music: He was also an only child, our birthdays fell in the same month—June (we are both Geminis)—and our favorite board game was Chartbuster.
“Throw a six—your first single advances ten places!”
This pop music business looks pretty easy.
The next concert Nick and I went to together was Roxy Music in September at the Odeon. It was a Saturday, so in the afternoon, during our usual trip into the city, we found ourselves in the theater lobby where we made the acquaintance of two guys, Marcus and Jeff, older than us and both serious Roxy fans. They told us that the band were in the building and if we hurried down the alleyway that led down the side of the Odeon, we could hear them playing. This is where I learned about the secret world of the sound check. The logistics of an artist’s show almost always require a visit to the venue in the afternoon, when the wires and mics and amps and drums are tested to make sure the triumphant arrival onstage later that night is not hampered by any technical oversights. There were a dozen or so kids standing there in Roxy regalia, T-shirts, scarves, haircuts, beside a purple articulated truck that had been backed up to the stage door to unload the gear. We couldn’t see Roxy, but we could hear them, vaguely, playing songs from their new album, Country Life. Then the music stopped, and as if on cue, a black Mercedes limousine rolled down the alleyway.
In a sudden frenzy of activity, the band rushed out of the stage door and, without stopping, piled into the comfort of the car, which then took off at speed up the ramp toward New Street.
A girl yelled, “They’re going to the Holiday Inn! I know a shortcut!” and off we went, Birmingham’s twelve biggest Roxy Music fans sprinting across the city at full pelt.
This was a club I wanted to belong to!
She knew her stuff, this girl; we were waiting under the hotel awning when the car drew up.
I don’t remember Ferry, but I do remember guitarist Phil Manzanera, who was the tallest man I had ever seen in my life. Maybe it was the platform boots. Keyboard player Eddie Jobson took time to say hello and sign autographs. I asked one of the drivers to give me the champagne cork I spotted on the back shelf of the limo. I was proud of that. Was this strange behavior for a fourteen-year-old suburban boy? I didn’t think so.
Nick’s and my gig-going gathered momentum. I still have the ticket stubs from those years. The Faces show came in December, Queen, Genesis—big gigs by big bands, usually at the Town Hall or the Odeon. And if it was an artist we were real fans of, such as Iggy Pop, touring with David Bowie, or Mott the Hoople, we might find ourselves standing under those hotel awnings again or waiting by the stage door listening to the sound check.
10 The Birmingham Flaneur
I took my skiving up a notch when I began spending the entire school day in the city of Birmingham. I didn’t ride the bus into Redditch anymore; I just crossed the street from the school bus stop and got on the city bus instead.
I loved the Midland Red double-decker buses. Even though they were older, they ran better than the slower, sloppier West Midlands buses and they were more pleasing to the eye, with a tidier, more compact design. The sight of one coming over the hill and down the dip toward the stop on Alcester Road never failed to cheer me.
I always sat upstairs if possible, grabbing one of the two front seats. I liked to watch the journey from the best vantage point the vehicle could offer. Past the Maypole and Bates’s Toy Corner, through Kings Heath with its massive Sainsbury’s supermarket where I now worked a weekend job, past Neville Chamberlain’s old residence in Moseley and the Edgbaston Cricket Club, up onto Bristol Road and past the ABC Cinema (now a McDonald’s), peeling off at the Albany Hotel, taking a right at the Crown pub and past the Jacey cinema, where Mom and I used to watch cartoons and shorts, but by then showed twenty-four-hour porn. Then, in a moment, out of the daylight and into the depths of the bus depot.
Where the adventures began.
Is there anything more exciting than the sounds and smells of the city? Never mind the architecture; the noise inside that torpid black bus terminus was something else. The fighting of gears, the firing up of fifty-year-old diesels, the honking in D-flat minor signaling departure. And the smell: of engineering, of fire and oil being kept a-simmer, just below boiling. Ah, the Midland Red fleet, that industry of freedom, bringing the country to the city and the city to the country!
From the terminus, I walk through the double swing doors into the Bullring market, more noise and stink. The fish market, florists, hardware, butchers in white cotton aprons and hats shouting attention to their wares, and one small record stall where I first heard Bob Marley. I head to the elevators, which convey me to the newer Bullring shopping center and its relative calm and finesse.
The most astounding feature of the Bullring was its indoor shopping bridge, a seventies take on Florence’s Ponte Vecchio. It was one of the seven wonders of Birmingham.
There was another record store actually on the bridge, then the entrance to the Mayfair Ballroom, locked tight now, and maybe I’ll make a stop at Hawley’s bakery by the entrance down to New Street train station for a cup of tea. Then into Threshold Records, owned by Birmingham progressive rock group the Moody Blues. Yes, the Moody Blues had their own record label which has a chain of retail stores, inconceivable now.
I liked to look in at the imports and secondhand vinyl at Reddingtons Rare Records behind the co-op. We all sold our souls to Danny Reddington over the years. He was the punk pawnbroker. In ’77, I had to take the pittance he offered me for my album collection in order to be able to buy my first electric guitar and amplifier.
I was Birmingham’s teenage flaneur, walking idly along New Street. It wasn’t Paris, but it worked for me.
At 10:00 A.M., I would head over to Moor Street station, to meet fellow Roxy fan Marcus, coming off his shift around 10:30. Marcus would be taking tickets from a line of commuters coming into the city off the train, see me, and smile. “I’ll be finished in a minute, and I’m starving!”
He would park his cap on a hook on the office door and we would quickly walk off, hands stuffed in pockets, through the pedestrian tunnel that passed under Queensway, catching up on gossip and ideas, mostly about music. Marcus was a few years older than me and his tastes were advanced. He loved Eno’s solo records, especially the latest, Another Green World, which I found a little heady. The prints that came with the album adorned the living room of the flat he shared in Moseley with his girlfriend, Annette.
Annette worked in the city and often met us on her lunch break. The three of us would get a sandwich or go to Oasis, the indoor clothes market, or Bus Stop (one of the cooler boutiques) for Annette to look at clothes. This was 1975; lots of sparkle and glitter still, but also Northern Soul influences like star sweaters and skinny rib tees. The baggies had gotten baggier. Six-button Crimplene pants with side pockets. Cheap as hell from the outdoor market.
I had the city mapped out according to a three-tier system. You must have guessed it by now: record stores, food stops, and clothing. I could spend the day going from tier to tier to tier.
And then there was Virgin.
Virgin Records was how the Virgin corporate empire began. Before the airline, the moneylending, the media empire, the cola, there were the record stores. They were the least corporate record stores imaginable.
Virgin was the most Bohemian place I had ever been in; a hippy enclave, the floors lined with aircraft seats and no limit on the time you could sit and listen to music on the improbably large headphones. It was radical. They had turntables behind the counter and you could ask th
em to put on whatever albums you liked. The manager would give me odd jobs and reward me with used display posters that I would recycle onto my bedroom wall. Once he gave me tickets to see Gong, of Planet Gong and “The Pot Head Pixies.”
When Virgin moved into its shiny, upscale megastore on New Street, I was the first customer to buy an album there—the Doctors of Madness debut—and was rewarded with a free copy of Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn, which I never opened. Mike Oldfield? Who cares?
Everywhere in Birmingham there are monuments to heroes of the steam age, heroes of manufacturing and engineering. The Victorian aspect of the city, built at the peak of its wealth, was its DNA, supposedly so solid and unshakeable, but Birmingham never stops changing.
In 1975, it was the perfect modern city, and I never envied kids like Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones who grew up in London. How on earth you find your way through that pile of bricks at sixteen I just don’t know. At sixteen, I had my city mapped out. Everything about it I loved. I never stopped wanting to spend time there. I could make my daylight guerrilla raids, filling my head with the culture, then step onto the red bus back to Hollywood. I never left town empty-handed and, on my upstairs perch, would inspect the booty, an album or magazine, the city receding as the bus heaved south, carrying me toward the safety and comfort of my bedroom, my sanctuary.
Toward the end of my schooldays I could time that trip to perfection. I would be walking up to the front door of 34 Simon Road just as the school bus was dropping off my classmates. The suckers!
11 Neurotic Boy Outsider
If the city was the classroom, the New Musical Express was the textbook. The NME in the seventies had the most amazing, hip writers; Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray, Ian MacDonald. They looked like rock stars and they lived like rock stars, hanging out and taking drugs with them most nights of the week. Or so we were led to believe.