One of the strangest bands I saw around this time was Third Ear Band at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. I found out about them through listening to John Peel on the radio, he was always mentioning them. He played on their record Alchemy. The music was over my head, really difficult, but I understood the ideas – experimentation, pushing boundaries and not conforming to musical clichés. I stared at the stage, I couldn’t tell if one of the players in the band was male or female, the tall skinny one with long black hair; I stared and stared at this one hoping and hoping that they were female. I left without knowing as she or he had their head down the whole time.
Me and my friend Zaza went to see Third Ear Band again (even though they were very experimental, they played all over the place and had a big following) in July 1969 when I was fifteen. They opened for the Rolling Stones at the ‘Stones in the Park’ free concert in ‘the cockpit’ – the big dip in the grass in Hyde Park. King Crimson were on too.
Zaza was a year older than me and insane about music. She was strikingly beautiful, natural, never wore makeup (nor did I), long shiny black hair, always wore clean jeans and a cool T-shirt, never ever a skirt. For the concert I wore a long, pale lemon lace dress from the 1930s, it fitted like it was made for me. It was completely see-through and I wore a short mauve slip under it. I loved that the hem trailed in the dirt so it was muddy and frayed. As usual I had bare feet. Zaza and I couldn’t get near the stage, so we sat down on the grass towards the back. The atmosphere was laden with sadness because Brian Jones, the Stones’ guitarist, had died in a swimming pool two days before. He’d recently been chucked out of the Stones and replaced by Mick Taylor – it felt like they replaced god: how could they do that? Me and Zaza thought Brian probably committed suicide because he was so upset. We wondered how the Stones were going to handle the whole thing, if they’d ignore it or if they even cared that he was dead. Everyone around us was talking about it: Do the rest of the Stones feel guilty? How does Mick Taylor feel? Will he appear?
Mick Jagger drifted onto the stage wearing a diaphanous white dress with floaty bell sleeves over white flared trousers. The dress said it all. We are the Stones. We’re shocking but we’re also caring and gentle. We will honour and acknowledge Brian’s life and death, but in our own way. Black mourning clothes are for straights. Mick read a poem and then released thousands of white butterflies over the crowd, they fluttered over our heads into the park. We were part of a big moment in history and we knew it. It was like we were at Brian Jones’s funeral; the Stones shared this moment with us. During one song, Jagger strutted to the front of the stage and the girls in the front row reached out to touch him. He grabbed Mick Taylor and pulled him to the front, making Taylor sit down beside him on the edge of the stage, and gestured to the girls to touch the guitarist too. Taylor looked mortified, he hung his head down and just kept playing. I felt a terrible pain on the top of my foot, in between my toes. Someone was stubbing a cigarette out on it, we were so tightly packed together he didn’t realise. It didn’t matter. When the show was finished, me and Zaza walked back through the park, trying to avoid squashing the dying butterflies under our feet. There were so many of them.
Another great free concert was when Fleetwood Mac played an all-nighter on Parliament Hill Fields. My friend Hilary and I climbed out of the bedroom window of her mum’s flat in Highgate at 10 p.m. and walked along Southwood Lane then up Highgate Hill, across the fields, towards the corrugated-iron bandstand. Loads of like-minded people were walking along the roads even though it was so late. We felt special that it was happening in our area; we knew Highgate and the Heath back to front. More and more people arrived, hundreds of us. We got talking to two nice boys and hung out with them all evening. Fleetwood Mac came on at midnight. They played Albatross; it was like being in an open-air church, the sad guitar crying out over the black trees … we lay on our backs and stared up at the sky, transported away from North London by this haunting, elevating music. It was the most magical experience I’d ever had.
Fleetwood Mac only played a couple of songs before the atmosphere was ruined by skinheads running down the hill and throwing things. The concert was stopped, so we went home. The two nice boys walked with us. Me and Hilary played knock down ginger, ringing the doorbells of the fancy white houses and then running away. The boys, who were a bit older than us, weren’t so keen. As we all charged down the hill, ‘my one’ held his hair down as he ran. Completely turned me off. Couldn’t wait to get rid of him after that.
Marc Bolan was the most important man in my life for a year. I think what appealed to me most was his prettiness. He was sexual – pouting and licking and throwing his hips forwards – but he wasn’t at all threatening to young girls. It was a new thing for men to be so delicate and pretty and overtly sexual at the same time. Marc was almost a girl. He wore girls’ tap shoes from the dance shop Anello and Davide in pretty colours, had long ringletty hair, glitter around his eyes and a cupid’s bow mouth: you could almost be him. He wasn’t scary to fantasise about, you could be dominant or dominate him, he wasn’t the kind of guy who would jump on you or hurt you. Fantasising about Marc Bolan (or any pop star) was a great way to discover your sexuality, a safe way in.
Listening to T. Rex was one of the first times I actually noticed guitar playing (apart from Peter Green and George Harrison). Bolan’s riffs were so catchy and cartoony – combined with a very distinctive guitar sound – that I would find myself singing the parts. Girls didn’t usually listen out for guitar solos and riffs, that was a male thing – wow that was so fast, wow that was a really obscure scale, wow the way he bends the notes. I used to listen to the lyrics and the melody of songs, not dissect the instruments. I couldn’t bear Hendrix’s playing at the time, it was so in your face and he was so overtly sexual, it was intimidating. I remember saying to my cousin Richard, ‘The only words I can make out in this song are “’Scuse me while I kiss the sky.”’ He said, ‘I don’t even know that many.’ He was a huge Hendrix fan and he didn’t know one word of any of his songs.
I followed T. Rex around London with Zaza. We used to go to every gig. We couldn’t actually go to the concerts – we only saw Bolan play twice because we were broke – but we used to stand outside the stage door and try to talk to him or June Child, his wife. We were fascinated by June – I changed my name to Viv Child for a while. I saw pictures in Melody Maker of a mad hatters’ tea party her and Marc had in their garden – I was so jealous – they were in top hats and beautiful clothes, they’d set up tables and chairs under the trees, it was a different world. June was much more interesting to me than other rock girlfriends because she wasn’t druggy and she worked in a record company. Me and Zaza talked to her once outside the Lyceum, she stopped and had a few words with us, but she didn’t like it when we talked to Marc, she’d call him away – ‘Marc! Come on. We have to go in now.’
I remember John Peel playing ‘Ride a White Swan’ on his radio show late one night. The next morning I was going away on a Woodcraft camp to Yugoslavia (we usually went to communist countries) for a couple of weeks, and I said to Mum, ‘That song is going to be a hit.’ I thought it was great, I liked it better than his old folky fairy stuff, it was catchier, more of a pop song. When I got back from Yugoslavia two weeks later it had entered the charts and ten weeks later it was at number two. It was January 1971 and I was seventeen years old. Lots of my male friends were appalled that I liked T. Rex and pop music, but I love a good song. Whatever its genre, a good song is a good song.
David Bowie’s album Hunky Dory was full of good songs, I played it to lots of people at school. One Turkish boy said, ‘Viv, his voice really turns me on. I think I might be gay.’
I’d made a friend called Alan Drake, from Southgate, he was very pretty with long straight dark brown hair and sensual lips: we discovered Bowie together. We saw him loads of times in little college halls. The best time was in the Great Hall (not very big) at Imperial College in South Kensington on 12 February 1972. Bowie wa
s wearing tight white silk trousers and a patterned silk bomber jacket open to his waist, showing his bony hairless chest. Mick Ronson, the guitarist, looked uncomfortable in his flamboyant clothes, like a docker dressed up; he was too masculine, couldn’t carry off the androgyny. I didn’t know he was a brilliant guitarist, I just thought he couldn’t pull off the look.
Halfway through the show, Bowie climbed into the audience. I don’t know where he picked that up from, no one else I’d seen did that. None of us got it though, we didn’t realise you were supposed to lift him up and carry him along, everyone parted politely, thought he was off to the bog or something, and he fell on the floor, it was embarrassing. The gig wasn’t very crowded, so there weren’t enough people to do it anyway. He got up and walked around a bit. I leaned against the stage, trying to see where he’d gone, but the lights were in my eyes. Then I felt a hand grip my shoulder and Bowie heaved himself up on me. I nearly buckled – I wasn’t expecting it, I didn’t know what was happening. He climbed over me to get back on stage, kneeing me in the chest and treading on my head with his silk boxing boot – he didn’t care – he just had to get back up. He’s not as dainty as he looks.
Zaza and I went to loads of Hawkwind gigs too. She liked them more than me, and she’d chat to Dave Brock, the guitarist and synth player, before a show. I was too shy and just hung back behind her but he was very kind and friendly. There was a pretty girl with them called Stacia who danced completely naked whilst they played; she’d paint her body and light projections would swirl over her skin. We chatted to her a few times and she was very friendly too. Hawkwind got to recognise me and Zaza and often gave us a lift back into central London in the back of their van. They never made a move on us or said anything sexual, they were very gentlemanly. Only once did one of them ask for my phone number, he was the new bass player, but I didn’t have a phone so he gave me his. I never called. I met him years later when the Slits filmed a video at his recording studio in Wales. His name was Thomas Crimble and he was married to a girl called Nutkin. I reminded him (when Nutkin wasn’t around) of that drive in the van, he thought for a minute then said, ‘Yes, yes, I remember!’ It was obvious he didn’t though.
Once me and Zaza were so bored that we decided to hitch-hike across London, anywhere it took us. We ended up at the Hard Rock Café in Marble Arch. It hadn’t been open long and we wanted to have a look at it. We went in and looked at the menu but the burgers were so expensive – they were ten times the price of a Wimpy – we pretended we were just looking around and didn’t want to eat there. We hung around outside, sticking our thumbs out, trying to get a lift back home. A bunch of guys came out of the cafe and said they were going to get their van and they’d give us a lift a bit further into town. They were in a band called America. Funny-looking lot, checked shirts, denim flares, a bit country bumpkin-ish; very sweet though. They were going to a party and asked us if we wanted to come. We said, ‘No thanks, just drop us here in Shaftesbury Avenue at this cafe, the Lucky Horseshoe.’ We often went there, sometimes they gave us free soup. We sat down and watched the van drive away. Then we looked at each other. Are we mad? What were we thinking? We’ve got nothing in the world to do, nowhere to go, no money and we’ve turned down a party with an American group who have a hit with ‘Horse with no Name’. It took us months to get over that missed opportunity.
I felt so near to and yet so far from music. I thought that actually being a musician was something you were born to, a gift you either had or didn’t have. A few of my girlfriends had parents or sisters that were classical musicians: I saw them practising five hours a day and knew I wasn’t the sort of person to work that hard at anything. It looked like drudgery, plodding up and down scales for hours on end. As for people I knew who played electric guitar, I thought it was something you had to have a willy to do, or at least be a genius like Joni Mitchell or worthy like Joan Baez – and preferably American of course. I liked the look of Liquorice and Rose, the two girls in the Incredible String Band, but the whole set-up seemed a bit cliquey. No way in there. Melanie was fun, but eccentric, with her wobbly voice and clever lyrics. Sandie Shaw was more ordinary; she worked in an office before she was discovered and had a working-class London accent – but she was a singer and didn’t play an instrument.
To keep my mind occupied, I fantasised about musicians. There was nothing else to think about. We had no TV, and there was nothing on it anyway, I wasn’t missing much. (We eventually got a second-hand black-and-white set but the living room was so cold that we had to sit under a pile of old army coats, blankets and sleeping bags to watch it. It just wasn’t worth the effort.) A children’s feature film came out in the cinema once a year at Christmas, not many people had telephones (landlines), there was nowhere to go: youth clubs were a joke and I wasn’t interested in lessons, except art and English. Music and guys in bands were a way to let your imagination loose. I’d fantasise that Donovan or John Lennon was my brother, or that I’d bump into Scott Walker and he’d fall in love with me; cooking up an interesting world in my head.
I studied record covers for the names of girlfriends and wives. That’s how I connected girls to the world I wanted to be in. I scanned the thank yous and the lyrics, looking for girls’ names. Especially if I fancied the musician. What are these girls like who go out with poets and singers? What have they got that I haven’t?
I read the book Groupie by Jenny Fabian and I’m ashamed to say I thought it sounded OK, being a groupie. But I knew I wasn’t witty, worldly or beautiful enough to even be that. The only other way left for a girl to get into rock and roll was to be a backing singer and I couldn’t sing.
Every cell in my body was steeped in music, but it never occurred to me that I could be in a band, not in a million years – why would it? Who’d done it before me? There was no one I could identify with. No girls played electric guitar. Especially not ordinary girls like me.
15 HELLO, I LOVE YOU
1970
There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I’ve given up on becoming a pop singer since Dad told me I wasn’t chic enough and I haven’t managed to find a way to meet those beautiful people that I see floating along Kensington High Street every Saturday – the leggy girls with long blonde hair and astrakhan boots holding hands with pretty boys in tapestry bell-bottoms and plum-coloured velvet jackets – but I still daydream about falling in love and escaping these dreary doldrums I’m stuck in.
I’m sixteen, sitting in Crouch End public library, wearing a dress I bought from Kensington Market; it’s a dark purple cotton maxi dress with bell sleeves and a tight laced bodice. I’ve got no shoes on my dirty feet.
A shadow falls across the page of the book I’m reading – I Start Counting, by Audrey Erskine Lindop – I look up to see a handsome boy standing in front of me. He’s a few years older than I am, wearing a dark blue velvet jacket and a flowery shirt. He looks at me sadly with his beautiful blue eyes. I can’t believe it: this is what I’ve always hoped and believed would happen – a handsome guy looks at me and knows instantly that I’m his soul mate. I gaze back at him. The boy doesn’t speak; this is so intense I think I might explode. Gradually I become aware he’s holding something in front of his chest. I wrench my gaze from his beautiful face and look down. It’s a newspaper. The words swim, I can’t focus … I feel sick, it’s all too much, the excitement, the romance. I look back up at him and smile, there’s a slight change in his expression, a little cooler; I look down again. The headline on the paper is Jimi Hendrix Dead. When he sees I’ve registered the enormity of the occasion, the boy walks away. I’m devastated, not because Jimi Hendrix is dead, but because the messenger isn’t my true love.
Sixteen years old, peroxide hair, Ravel shoes. Tan and bracelet from Greece. Blue knitted elephant, ‘Ellie’, just seen on bed. Not as grown up as I think. 1970
16 AMSTERDAM
1970
Me and Zaza run down Clarendon Road in Turnpike Lane, away from my tiny two-up two-down red-brick council house, past the iron gasworks and abandoned cars, towards freedom and adventure. It’s the summer holidays and we’re going to Amsterdam, on our own. Our rucksacks – with just a spare T-shirt and a packet of crisps at the bottom (we’ve forgotten to pack toothbrushes) – bounce up and down against our backs. We own one pair of jeans each – straight-legged Levi’s – which we’re wearing. I’m sixteen, she’s seventeen. We get to the corner and look up and down the high street, wondering which way to go.
Me: ‘What country’s Amsterdam in?’
Zaza: ‘Not sure, Belgium, I think. Or Holland.’
Me: ‘Hang on, I’ll ask Mum.’
I run back to the house and knock on the door.
Me: ‘What country’s Amsterdam in?’
Mum: ‘Holland.’
I run back to Zaza, shouting, ‘Holland!’ We turn onto the high street, with its boarded-up shops and piles of rubbish stacked around the lamp posts, in search of a bus, a train, anything that will take us to Holland.
The journey takes two days longer than it should because we keep getting on the wrong trains and buses and have to sleep on station benches, but here we are at last, on Koningsstraat, in the middle of Amsterdam, bleary-eyed, greasy-haired and not a clue what to do next. We have enough money to buy one sandwich a day each, for a week.
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. Page 4