by Rikki Brown
I was lying there so ill that I couldn’t even sit up for appearances sake, I just lay there whimpering, limp and with one shoe missing.
Eventually we came round enough to walk to Ally’s house, albeit with the aid of fences, parked cars and each other. We went into his bedroom and collapsed and lay there fully clothed and covered in and stinking of vomit. Winker managed the strength to say, ‘See as soon as I feel better Dixon I’m gonnie kick your head right in ya tube.’
Ally didn’t answer him as he was too ill.
Thankfully I ended up in the arms of Morpheus and I awoke next morning very surprised as I was sure I would have passed away in my sleep. One by one the other three awoke. Winker was claiming that he was blind in one eye, Wilco with a face so translucent you could see his skull through his skin, and Ally none the worse for wear. It was at this point that we decided we hated him. Him and his hair that was too blond even for the Third Reich.
After a lot of moaning and groaning we decided to head home to recuperate and the three of us started what seemed like an endless trek homeward. The sun was splitting the trees and the light was boring into our eyes like a Black & Decker drill. I was hobbling as I had lost one shoe and I had sick in my hair but I was far too ill to care. We split up and went up our own streets.
I passed my mother who was on her way to church with her friends, she looked at me, declined to comment and kept on walking. I got home and slid into bed. It felt great to get under the covers but no sooner had my head hit the pillow than my father started to hoover the house and stick a Sydney Devine record on the old Dansette. At that point I reached the lowest ebb in my life.
Incidentally, it was another four years before I really touched drink ever again, even the smell of lager was enough to bring the sorry scene back and make me vomit. Ironically, every time I put on my records my dad would bang on the bedroom door and tell me to turn the music down because it was annoying the neighbours. Yes, but he had no problem with Sydney Devine at full blast annoying the neighbours. He had no problem with that. No problem at all. My father didn’t like my music and although I was allowed to watch Top of the Pops I couldn’t hear it half the time for his criticisms of the acts. ‘Look at their hair, you can’t even tell if it’s a man or woman.’ That was one of his favourites. Another was, ‘Bloody noise,’ and yet another, ‘You can’t even hear a word they are singing.’
If he did like a song he was full of praise, but it was always for songs that I hated. The phrase he used when he actually liked something was ‘bags of rhythm’. He’d say, ‘I like Lieutenant Pigeon’s “Mouldy Old Dough”, it’s got bags of rhythm.’ He did say once that he didn’t know why Sydney Devine never made it onto Top of the Pops. I would have explained, but I never swore in front of my parents.
I returned to school on the Monday still feeling God awful but we were cheered by the news that the school had been given a grant to buy musical instruments. The money was intended for cellos and flutes and the likes but after a Teacher/Pupil discussion we persuaded them to release the funds for guitars and drums. After our first musical foray, which ended abruptly, we were going to get another chance.
The whole school wanted to be pop stars and have access to the equipment but after a lot of threatening behaviour from Winker and Ally we got exclusive third-year access. The fourth-year boys also started a band and we rehearsed on alternative days. We had slightly more musical knowledge than they did though and they soon got bored with it and left us with total access.
To justify the expenditure we would have to play the school dance and the Headie came up with a list of songs he thought it would be nice if we could learn. Winker took one look at the list, saw ‘Beautiful Sunday’, and ripped it up. We remembered the fiasco of the first school band’s appearance and decided that we would have to be much, much better than them. We wanted people cheering and shouting how great we were, not jeering at how shite we were.
The equipment was top of the range so at least if we weren’t exactly brilliant we would sound good even if we were bad. We now had a different line up: Winker on vocals, Ally on drums, Kenny on lead guitar, me on bass and this bloke Ronnie that no one liked except Kenny on rhythm. Since Kenny was the best amongst us and we needed him, we had to go along with his Ronnie decision. One big problem we did have was deciding what we’d play. Everyone liked different things. Kenny liked Queen but Winker told him in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t going to sing any Queen songs because Freddie Mercury had ‘big giant buck teeth’ as he so eloquently put it. By that I think he meant that he couldn’t identify with him, and not being able to identify with a singer was also the reason he wouldn’t sing any songs sung by ‘daft burds either’ as he again so eloquently put it. Kenny did at one point say we should write our own songs, but that was shouted down because the one thing an audience doesn’t ever want to hear is ‘and here’s one we wrote ourselves’ unless it’s said by the Beatles. Plus most lyrics are pretty bad or don’t really make much sense and whatever we did write would have been in both categories. The worst of the former category for me was a UFO song which began with the line, ‘She was a Brownie, I was a Scout, she showed me how to shake it about,’ and the latter, despite being a classic, is Free’s ‘Alright Now’: ‘There she stood in the street, smiling from her head to her feet.’ So basically she’s just one giant head with feet growing out of her chin? Somehow I don’t think so Paul Rodgers, Andy Fraser, Simon Kirke and Paul Kossoff.
On the playing front, I was only ever an adequate bass player and I learned to play by numbers. In other words, two plucks of G, then a B, A, then back to G. I once spent an entire weekend learning to play Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ exactly as it sounded on the record and when the band came to learning it Kenny said, ‘Okay, we’ll do it in the key of G.’ My answer to that was, ‘Unless G is what I’ve learned it in then no we fucking won’t.’
We rehearsed most days and became quite proficient. The only problem we encountered, apart from Winker’s ego, was volume. We’d start off balanced and you could hear every instrument clearly then someone would decide that their guitar was too low and turn it up. This led to someone else turning theirs up and so on. Pretty soon all you could hear would be Winker screaming above the feedback.
And, of course, we needed a name. For some reason Winker decided that he was the band and we were his backing group and he thought the name Winker’s Blues Warriors was quite apt. No one agreed with him.
‘Oh aye fuckin’ Popeye, why stop there? Why not Winker and his Wankers?’
It was settled democratically when Ronnie beat Winker up and we simply became the Blues Warriors. But only after a teacher explained to us why we couldn’t use our first choice of Master Bass. Apparently it sounded an awful lot like another word.
We were to play for the first years to kick off the dance season, and as the night of the gig approached our confidence ebbed and we started crapping ourselves. We sat backstage and listened to the usual Heelan’ records come to a close and the Headie giving his usual speech.
He said will you now welcome the Westwood School group, the … the … he went into his pocket for the piece of paper with our name on it and eventually got it right. The curtain went back. Before we took the stage Ronnie went off to the toilet and we’d forgotten to tell him we’d decided to open with Alex Harvey’s ‘Midnight Moses’ instead of Deep Purple’s ‘Strange Kind Of Woman’.
The result was chaos. He was playing one thing and we were all playing another. For some reason he blamed Winker for this and called him a stupid fucker. We composed ourselves and started again. This time we were all in tune with one another and surprised ourselves so much that we all had broad grins on our faces, which was hardly the mean moody look we were going for but we couldn’t help ourselves as we were on a roll. After a few numbers the crowd actually started to dance and, at the end of a song, went into wild applause.
We finished the set and left the stage.
They were screa
ming for an encore, we went back out but as we had exhausted our full repertoire of four songs we had to repeat a couple of the songs. They didn’t care. We finished and walked off after Ally had walked to the front of the stage and thrown his drumsticks into the melee and they started fighting over them.
This was glory, this was fame and we went backstage and started congratulating ourselves until Ronnie, who was strangely silent throughout all the backslapping, said, ‘Well whit did ye expect, anything’s better than they fuckin’ ballroom records and they even mair fuckin’ Heelan’ records. That lot would have asked for an encore if I had farted.’
He was always capable of putting a dampener on things.
Ally was well pissed off with him and a few weeks later murdered his budgie ‘Tottie’ in a revenge attack. Not really murdered as such. We were in Ronnie’s living room with our guitars and while Ronnie had gone to the toilet, Ally took a shot of it and turned the volume up to full, strummed it and the noise gave the budgie a heart attack and it landed with a very small thump in the bottom of its cage. When Ronnie came back from the toilet he went mental because not only was his budgie dead, but the man who lived below him was on the nightshift and he’d get a telling off when the man told his mum about the racket.
12
LEAD ON MACDUFF
After the Christmas break we returned to school for what was going to be most of the class’s last term. Those of us staying did our best to learn but the leavers had no intention of spending their last five months in any sort of educational pursuits and the classes were disrupted at every opportunity.
One by one the leavers played truant, then disappeared entirely.
This left the rest of us to ponder the advantages of a long-term education. Fifteen is an awkward age, money or lack of it had become important and in a few months time our classmates were going to become wage earners whilst the supposedly brainier lot wouldn’t see any real cash for another three years.
It was a tough choice to stay or leave but my parents had attended one of the parent’s nights and were told that I had a chance, so from then on I had no choice. I was staying on for the duration and that was that. I said I could leave after the O-levels and get a job then but no, I was ordered by my dad to get Highers as well, and if you knew my dad you’d have got higher too.
The lessons at times seemed inane and pointless but I felt I had to learn something for my parents’ sake. We were not a rich family and as they were going to have to fund me for a further two, maybe three years, I’d have to give them some gold at the end of their rainbow.
It was a strange changeover. Once the teachers had learned that we were willing to listen a bit, their attitudes altered. We still had a mischievous streak but they were now more apt to view our ‘getting through the day’ with more humour than we thought was possible.
Our Geography teacher that year was a Mr Johnstone and he looked every inch like a Geography teacher. He had glasses, cords, tweed jacket, beard and thick walking shoes. Come to think of it he looked every inch like Gerry Adams. His classes were fun. If we asked stupid questions we got stupid answers. But sometimes our questions weren’t so much questions as attempts to get him to sound as though he was swearing.
We’d heard about Shi-ite Muslims on the news and so we asked him, ‘What’s a shi-ite surr, know a shi-ite surr, what is that, the shi-ite thing surr, know?’ Patiently he explained and managed not even once to not sound like he was saying Shi-ite.
He had a way of handling the class that we’d never come across before. If we didn’t want to learn we were to sit at the back of the class and amuse ourselves and if we did want to learn we were to sit at the front and listen.
Also, on entering his class Winker and myself were ordered out to the front.
‘Any jokes, comments or remarks before we start?’
‘Em … no, Sir.’
‘Great, now sit down.’
It worked and we very seldom misbehaved. His classes were interesting probably because he didn’t teach us normal geography and would basically just tell us of his travels and strange encounters he had experienced. We loved it and I’m sure he had a soft spot for us.
He was also the only teacher who caught me red-handed and never belted me. One Friday afternoon he left the room to go to the toilet and while he was away I was hit on the back of the head with a rubber thrown by Crammond, a really irksome kid who had one of those faces you just want to slap. I jumped out of my seat, grabbed Crammond’s bag and swung it above my head. I had started the swing when Johnstone walked back in and it was too late to stop. Crammond, seeing the teacher enter, thought he was safe and stupidly clasped his hands on the desk in innocence instead of using them to protect himself. The bag almost dislocated his head from his shoulders.
Johnstone asked me to the front of the class.
‘It’s Friday and there’s only five minutes to go before you and I commence our weekend, and now I have caught you assaulting another pupil. Maybe Mr Crammond deserved it, I don’t know, so I am going to flip a coin, heads I belt you, tails I don’t.’
He then flicked up a ten pence and I guessed heads.
‘Very lucky, return to your seat.’
I could have sworn I saw a tail. In the seventies we were taught that the world was heading for a new ice age. In fact we were taught that a lot because scientists had confirmed this, so therefore it was true. In the new millennium that very same science has changed its mind and the biggie now is global warming, which is apparently worse than they first predicted. The problem is that they predicted that it was going to destroy the planet, and what’s worse than that? Just destroying part of the planet but leaving Paisley intact. At least in the seventies anyone who didn’t buy into the ice age scenario wasn’t thought of as some kind of heretic because everyone was allowed to have an opinion. However, not believing that man is responsible for global warming has now become heresy. Even though the environmentalists have moved the goalposts somewhat and now refer to it as climate change because people who spend the winter up to their arses in snow were starting to doubt the global warming theory. Despite what we were taught as gospel, the new ice age never happened and all that work we did in Geography compiling graphs to indicate which crops would fail first when the temperature fell, and drawing maps showing Scotland as one big glacier, were a complete waste of time. No matter how much a waste of time, it was still time much better spent than on algebra.
Our attitudes changed towards all our subjects. In English, Mr Smart was looking for volunteers for the end of term play which this year was to be an abridged version of Macbeth and all the kids who had caused so much trouble the year before now offered their services. He accepted with a humble show of gratitude that we actually found quite embarrassing.
I ended up playing MacDuff and Ally was to have the starring role of Macbeth. The school plays were always a culmination of the year’s work in English and a chance for the teachers to show the attending hierarchy from the school board what they had achieved.
The day arrived and everyone had worked really hard. We had costumes, make up and scenery. This was to be no Am-dram production, we knew our lines and we were pros.
The matinee was for the pupils and the evening performance was for the parents, so we were expecting the evening slot to be met with more appreciation.
The first scene involving the witches was met with jeers and catcalls. ‘Hey look there’s yer burd,’ etc.
It was to be expected. What wasn’t expected was Ally’s ad-libbing. He walked onto the stage in tights, make up, cape and crown and someone in the audience shouted, ‘Ya big poof.’
Ally, forgetting that the first rule of theatre is ‘the show must go on’, replied with great wit and professionalism, ‘Right which one of you bastards said that?’
Mr Smart, in the wings, was whispering loudly to him to get on with it.
‘But one of they bastards called me a poof.’
The school board members who were sit
ting in the front row were tut tutting and making notes.
Smart by this time was in a panic so he brought the curtain down and ran over to Ally and gave him a short sharp lecture on the principles of theatre. He reminded him who was watching plus a hint at how miserable he could make his life if he didn’t get on with it in true thespian style. What he was saying was that the show must go on, because if it didn’t then Ally’s life wouldn’t be worth living.
Ally looked at me, ‘Right you watch who shouts out and we’ll knock the crap out of them the morra.’
The curtain went up and my head was popped discretely round the side of the stage, but this time teachers were also dotted about the hall ready to haul any would be theatre critics out for a hiding.
The play now went without any major mishaps, apart from most of the lines being forgotten or paraphrased, and Mr Smart was congratulated by the board members. He had survived the test of his teaching skills.
The evening performance was even better and no one accused Ally of being a big poof. He went home with the success of his first big thespian adventure coursing through his veins.
About a week later I saw him running after the school magazine editor with a copy of the magazine clutched firmly in his grasp. He chased him into the toilets, so we followed them in. The editor had written a review that said Ally was so wooden he must be sponsored by Kelvin Timber, and for that we left the editor dangling from his shoelaces on the toilet door. It was our trademark punishment, which isn’t easy to carry out as it requires quite a lot of cooperation from the victim. In the next issue he printed an apology saying he might just have been a wee bit hasty in his criticism.
During the last week of third year, two events occurred, the first being the Strike followed by Eddie Beattie’s revenge on McConnell for belting him on his very first day at secondary. For some reason – I can’t even vaguely remember why – a spate of strikes broke out in various Glasgow schools. Basically it comprised of some pupils forming a union and refusing to leave the playground and enter the classrooms.