Record Play Pause

by Stephen Morris

  I approached the thing with a bit of a reluctant sulk from the word go. I thought the clarinet was a crap instrument to be learning. Name one top record that’s got a clarinet on it apart from ‘Stranger on the Shore’ by Acker Bilk, or one group that features a clarinettist in any kind of semi-permanent capacity. See what I mean.

  ‘It’ll be OK. Uncle Johnny’ll give you some tips. He’s a bit of a virtuoso on the old liquorice stick.’ That was Dad’s response to my sullen demeanour and grumbling.

  Over the years I had got to know Johnny quite well from my visits to Dad’s office. He was the brother who stayed in answering the phone doing officey things while Dad and Eric went off travelling, chasing orders and selling their chromium and nickel-plated wares. He was all right but he wasn’t what you would call a bundle of laughs. Like most of the male Morris family, he had a bit of a Slavic appearance. He reminded me of Bela Lugosi, which made him seem slightly unapproachable, but I gave it a go.

  ‘The thing about the clarinet,’ he said, ‘is once you can play it, then you can play anything.’

  Anything? I thought. These fools learning to play the guitar are wasting their time. Little do they know that the clarinet was the gateway to virtuosity on all musical instruments.

  ‘So I’d be able to play the guitar as well?’ I asked, seeking clarification of this instrument’s miraculous capabilities.

  ‘Eventually,’ he replied. My hopes were a bit dashed. ‘But wind instruments are all the same, like the sax. Play a clarinet and you can play a sax no problem,’ he concluded, well and truly crushing into oblivion whatever hopes I had of discovering a hitherto unknown route to axe-hero status. ‘Come upstairs. I’ll show you.’

  I’d never been up the stairs at 11 Cedar Grove before. It was gloomy enough downstairs in the living room. Perhaps the upstairs didn’t smell as much of boiled cabbage. A little nervously I followed Johnny up the stairs to a small, musty-smelling and even dingier room full of all sorts of junk and old books. In short, my sort of room.

  Johnny reached up to a shelf that held several battered black cases as I blew the dust off some old books: Aero Engineering Principles and Construction, volumes one to nine. How to build a plane – wow! I started to browse. Meanwhile, my uncle’s nicotine-stained fingers had produced a clarinet from one of the boxes on the shelf. He blew a few notes and it sounded good. It sounded like a tune anyway.

  ‘Now,’ he said, opening another of the boxes, ‘take a look at this.’

  He produced a number of golden tubes from the dusty box. In no time at all he had combined the pipes to produce a lovely-looking alto saxophone. He blew again – it sounded great. Maybe playing the sax wouldn’t be that bad after all. There were lots of records with sax on them – the sax was kind of rock and roll, wasn’t it?

  ‘That’s a good book you’ve found there. Would you like it?’ he asked after finishing his sax solo.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I replied.

  ‘It’s one of your dad’s, so you might as well have it. Actually, I’ve got something else you can have that might help with your music lessons.’ He opened another of the boxes. This one contained another gleaming sax. No! He’s not going to give me that, is he? By now, I thought that would be fantastic. It will make me look really cool! Good old Johnny, not as tight as folk made out. He rummaged about in the bottom of the case and finally pulled out a folded brown envelope. Cash as well, I thought, perhaps an early Christmas gift.

  ‘There you go,’ he said, handing me the envelope as he slammed the case shut. ‘These softer reeds should make it easy going at first.’

  He snapped the case shut as I tried to smile and look grateful. It wasn’t easy.

  My tastes in literature were beginning to get a bit avant garde for a twelve- or thirteen-year-old. As well as the sci-fi of Philip K. Dick and Michael Moorcock, I had been fascinated by the coverage of the Oz ‘obscenity trial’: Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson had become my heroes. Anything described as having a tendency to deprave got my attention. To me, it was the most interesting thing since NASA put a man on the moon. I loved Tony Palmer’s book on the trial and Richard Neville’s Play Power was a mine of information on counterculture. I read whatever underground books I could find – Timothy Leary’s The Politics of Ecstasy was a good one (I had to buy two copies as one got confiscated in English class), though I think I only understood a quarter of it. I shared my interest with one of my new schoolfriends, Phil Sturgess. We became co-conspirators and underage drinkers.

  Meanwhile, I took to the playing fields of King’s with an unusual enthusiasm and gusto only to discover I was crap at rugby too. It made no sense. How were you expected to get to the other end when you could only pass the ball backwards? I was not alone in my failure to be sporty and soon new friendships were formed among my fellow aesthetes. We were looked upon as malingerers, conscientious objectors or boys who were lacking in moral fibre, and attracted disdain from the many tracksuited, be-whistled games masters.

  This was a grammar school, after all, as its carefully trimmed cricket pitch at the front and its not quite as carefully trimmed muddy rugby fields at the back gave testament. The teachers were always called ‘Sir’ – even the token woman was called Mrs ‘Sir’ Schofield. They swanned around in those long black robes that are usually topped off with the daft mortar-board headgear, like something out of ‘The Bash Street Kids’. My school world consisted of underground toilets and changing rooms, used mostly for illicit smoking; long corridors with worn wooden floors that gave off a mingled smell of sweat and floor polish, and signs forbidding running in the corridor. This was an institution of learning and its rules and timetables, marked out by the ringing of an electric bell, had to be obeyed at all times.

  There was a sixth-form common room with a record player and Pop Art posters on the walls. But that was out of bounds to the likes of me. The older boys strolled around in their ex-RAF greatcoats with copies of Cream’s Disraeli Gears, Led Zeppelin III or Deep Purple in Rock under their arms. The album sleeves, concealing their homework, were boldly displayed like tribal markings; hair daringly strayed over their collars. Parkas were so last year, and I had never even got to have one. I took an instant dislike to these older boys with their show-off ways. I decided there and then that I would never ever like Cream or Deep Purple – I was undecided about Led Zeppelin. I felt it was a matter of principle. The greatcoat-wearers were posers, fakers – the enemy.

  Another of my new friends, Kim Macintyre, had an older brother, Bert. In the course of going round to Kim’s house for tea, I visited Bert in his room. It was a revelation. He had decorated his walls with pages from wallpaper sample books and on the floor were neat stacks of NMEs from the last three years, all carefully placed in chronological order. Bert was trying to perfect the ‘schizophrenic hair style’, short on one side, long on the other, with a matching wispy half-beard and moustache. I liked Bert. He had a proper stereo set up there too, and stacked against the wall was his album collection. After a bit of album flicking, he placed his selection on the turntable and we were treated to a bit of Zappa’s We’re Only in it for the Money. Some Captain Beefheart and a bit of the Velvet Underground and Nico followed. It was not the weird unlistenable, impenetrable noise that I was expecting – this was all right. The sleeves were brilliant. I resolved there and then to get a proper stereo. There was no way you could appreciate such fine recordings on the old black box that wasn’t even stereo. I put my mithering hat on and set to work.

  My family were easily persuaded, surprisingly, and one Saturday afternoon we visited Hodgson’s in Chestergate and returned home with an ITT Hi-Fidelity Stereo. It was like so much of the 1970s generally: brown and orange in colour. The siting of this new source of musical wonderment was controversial. That it was to be placed in my (and Dad’s) bedroom was not what my mother had envisaged but that was where it was going. I put the speakers as far apart as they would go. One balanced on the wardrobe, the other hanging on the windo
wsill, brown wires trailing everywhere. ‘The Locomotion’ and ‘Return to Sender’ had never sounded better.

  I needed to expand my collection, though, which meant that I started doing more jobs in Dad’s office at the weekends. This mostly involved stapling the brochures together and then arranging them into categories. I was not exactly fastidious in my work but got paid anyway. As soon as I had amassed enough cash, I was back at Hodgson’s.

  The cellar was done out like some hippie dungeon and this was where the vinyl of interest was. With northern soul blaring from the speakers, I commenced to browse the sleeves.

  The flicking through a stack of 12-inch cardboard and plastic, the searching for one title only to let another catch your eye, the perusing of the sleevenotes, the filing for future reference or the spontaneous purchase – this was what most of my teenage years were made of. You can do all that online now at yer iTune s and Amazon or whatnot now, but honestly – and I know I sound like an old twat here – it doesn’t come close to the physicality of holding something real and somehow alive in your grubby mitts, getting it neatly put in a logo-emblazoned paper bag and then stalking off home to see if what you’d spent your last pennies on was pure gold or diabolical garbage. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

  Here I was then, making my first trawl through the stock. So much to choose from. I must have gone through everything three or four times, much to the annoyance of Barry the proprietor and his regular paying customers. Finally I made my selection: Hawkwind, In Search of Space. How could such an amazing sleeve fail to contain spectacular music? I took it to the counter only to discover to my embarrassment that I had underestimated the extent of my funds; I was ten new pence short. Blaming decimalisation and the poor standard of teaching for the eleven-plus, I returned Hawkwind to the correct alphabetical location. I was determined not to leave empty-handed. I felt everyone was looking at me and I grabbed the first thing my eye fell on that was within my price range.

  This was how I ended up with Melanie Safka’s Gather Me in my nascent record collection. History credits this as Melanie’s magnum opus, but it wasn’t really what I was after at the time. I pretended it was for my sister and left annoyed with myself. That ‘Brand New Key’ track was catchy though. It was the inspiration for the Wurzels’ ‘Combine Harvester’.

  I resolved to increase my brochure-stapling productivity and a few weeks later, with increased confidence and finance, I sauntered down into Barry’s dingy vault of 12-inch vinyl and coolly made my exit, Hawkwind firmly under my arm. I was in business.

  You get a lot of talk such as ‘Oh I heard this record/that band and it/they changed my life.’ I suppose In Search of Space did that for me. Not straight away, in a blinding, flashing ‘now I am different’ moment, but subtly in a drip-drip-drip way. I loved everything about that record. The sleeve was fantastic – the way it opened up like a puzzle box adorned with weird spacey graphics and a picture of what was clearly a naked girl on the inside. It came complete with a book, more a pamphlet really or a manifesto of sorts. ‘The Hawkwind Log’ was full of more freaky pictures and a lot of words. I had no idea what half of it was about but I was intrigued. What could it all mean? The music, though, that got me pretty quickly – swirly, swooping, spacey synthesisers and a driving rhythm. I had no idea what instruments were making the sound. I just knew I liked it. And I wanted more of it. I think I had decided that I wanted to be a hippie. I was thirteen.

  Rock replaced plastic and glue as my principal obsession. I absorbed as much as I could. No rock-based fact, however far fetched, was too small to waste. I soaked up every drop of its minutiae. This was something worth learning about.

  Albums by Zappa, the Faces, the Velvet Underground, the MC5, Neu! and Faust followed in a regular routine of stapling then off to the record shop to spend the cash. I had become a reader of Sounds, a weekly music paper. I preferred Sounds to the NME because it smelt better. A new copy of Sounds had an aroma all its own, some sort of nutmeggy smell, and every Thursday morning started with a good sniff of a fresh copy of Sounds. I wasn’t alone in this. A few of my classmates were picking up on the same sort of stuff at the same time, and album lending and music criticism became the main topic of conversation, that and Monty Python. My friend Phil took to wearing black Chelsea boots and the widest flared trousers you could get without being pulled up by King’s thought police. Very snazzy. With his hair daringly over the collar length prescribed by the school’s strict dress code and his black-framed specs, Phil already looked like a card-carrying member of the Beat Generation. We both aspired to be older and cooler.

  I desperately wanted a black polo-neck shirt but such things were not available in Macclesfield, or anywhere else in my size according to my mother (my stylist at the time). Never much of an existentialist, my mum.

  I would go round to Phil’s house, where we would try our best to look bohemian while trying to understand what people saw in jazz. We’d listen to Sonny Stitt and Rahsaan Roland Kirk and wonder was it any good. I’d heard enough jazz to know, mind you, and nothing had impressed me. That was the downside to having a record player in a bedroom shared with your dad. My father’s record collection suddenly bloomed in parallel with my own. Where did he get it all from? I think he’d had most of it stashed with Uncle Johnny at Cedar Grove, just waiting for an opportunity to smuggle it into the house unnoticed by my mother. Well, that opportunity had arrived. When cancer claimed Johnny, the contents of Cedar Grove were decanted into the office and then, in dribs and drabs, smuggled into our bedroom.

  There was more Duke Ellington than you could shake a stick at, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Tatum, Stéphane Grappelli, Jack Teagarden, Johnny Hodges . . . you get the idea. The biggest problem for me was the only time Dad could realistically listen to this was first thing in the morning before he departed on his travels. It became a kind of diabolical alarm clock. Bessie Smith may well be the best female blues singer ever but I doubt that she ever sang that early. Six in the morning without fail (well, eight at weekends), he would crank up the volume and all possibility of sleep was gone.

  To me, my dad’s music was all noise and not in a good way. I could have kept quiet about it, but I didn’t. It was the old ‘you call that music, it’s rubbish!’ argument that has raged since time immemorial. It could be quite ferocious.

  Now, in the twenty-first century, I can listen to one of my daughters’ latest musical obsessions and recognise where its inspirations lie. In the same way, she somewhat reluctantly listens to one of my songs from the good old days and admits that it does sound very much like ********’s latest (band name deleted to avoid embarrassment). There was no such common ground between my father’s and my musical inclinations. At the time it was a fact of life: whatever your parents liked, you hated; whatever your parents wore, you hated. There was a sonic Berlin Wall between us. My side faced the future, his the pre-war past.

  Listening to LPs was one thing, the whole experience of actually seeing a band live was another. Bert told tales of seeing Frank Zappa and Pink Floyd at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. These, combined with the gig reviews in Sounds, convinced me I was missing out on something. I desperately needed to find out what it was.

  ‘Can I go and see a band? On my own?’

  ‘No you can’t!’

  I tried to explain all the plus points of allowing me to swan off on my own to Manchester for a night of musical entertainment but I was having a hard time being convincing. So I settled for repetition.

  ‘Please can I go and see a band?’

  It became a war of attrition. ‘Something’s Gotta Give’, as Ella Fitzgerald was often heard singing at sunrise in our house, was my inspiration and my torment.

  Finally an accommodation was reached. It was to be trial by gig. My father would take me to see one of his bands and I’d take him to see one of mine. How this contest was to be judged or what the prize might be were two of the finer points we never ironed out. Before he had a chance to
change his mind or introduce other terms and conditions, I dug out the latest copy of Sounds and turned to the concert listings. Truthfully it wouldn’t have mattered who it was. I just wanted to see a live rock band, any band would have done, Van der Graaf Generator, Wishbone Ash, Pink Floyd or Jethro Tull. Well, no, not just any band. What I wanted was something with a bit of depth. Some honest to goodness hip credentials. Some counterculture resonance, heroes from the pages of It and Oz. They had to be hip.

  That Mel Bush has a lot to answer for.

  On the evening of the 17 March 1972, the entire Morris household prepared itself for a night out. Mum and Dad were done up as if they were off to a gala dinner at the town hall while me and Amanda felt the casual look more appropriate. We set off in the Austin Maxi for the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, for that was the venue for tonight’s entertainment, and providing that entertainment were Hawkwind with Status Quo as the support.

  I think Mum and Dad started getting a bit nervy when they got a look at the rest of the paying customers in the bar.

  ‘Look at the state of him, Cliff. My God.’

  ‘What’s that smell, is that marryjewarana?’

  ‘I think that’s patchouli oil, Dad.’ I tried to sound reassuring as we took our seats on the balcony, a safe distance away from the stage.

  Status Quo back then were not the national treasures they are today, though to be honest they didn’t sound that much different. Back then they were thought of as a bit of a greaser band, not that this would have made the slightest difference to my parents’ opinion of them.