Record Play Pause

by Stephen Morris

  ‘Are the next lot going to be that loud?’ enquired my mother during the interval, searching her handbag for more cotton wool to stuff in her ears. She could have had a mountain of this stuff and it still wouldn’t have deadened the aural assault that was to follow.

  Hawkwind were fantastic – I don’t know what I was expecting but they were everything I thought a rock band would be. Pounding drums, thrashing guitars and a couple of elves hunched over synthesisers that resembled the supermarket tills of tomorrow. There was even a sax. The light show was hypnotic with strobes and projectors flashing cosmic colours. The speaker cabinets and bass drums were painted with fluorescent, futuristic glyphs like the controls of some trippy UFO. I was transfixed, engulfed as the music just flowed from one barrage of sound to another without stopping. There was no ‘and now here’s one from our new album’ like there had been with Quo. No, this was a million times better than the album. It was relentless. What respite there was came in the form of doomy, echoey, sci-fi poetry about spaceships and such.

  My mother’s attention was by now more focused on the audience’s response to the sonic onslaught. A couple of guys commenced headbanging in time-honoured fashion with hair flaying wildly. Mother feared some sort of seizure was in progress. This really was brilliant.

  Things reached a peak when Stacia, Hawkwind’s scantily clad dancer, took to the stage. After a bit of wild gyrating accompanied by a frantic beat and some echoey sax honkings, the statuesque Stacia, bathed in strobe light, commenced to strip off what little she had on. This shock was too much for Mum and Amanda. They exited the hall faster than you could say ‘Bad Trip Man’. Clifford lingered for a few minutes more before he too felt it necessary to beat a hasty retreat. The killjoys! Eventually it became clear to me that unless I fancied a long walk back to Macc, I had better join them.

  My ‘Well, that was good, wasn’t it?’ went down even worse than Hawkwind and we drove home in silence, if you discount the ringing in our ears. My first proper gig; my parents’ last. It made a big impression on me.

  The sound of Hawkwind could also be heard at the dead of night in the normally tranquil pastures in the vicinity of my house. I had discovered music on the move. On a battered Sanyo recorder, Bert and I would take cassettes of Can, Terry Riley, Stockhausen – the weirdest noises we could think of – and would venture out into the fields at twilight (we always forgot to take a torch). We would play these sounds as loud as possible to the bovine audience as some sort of experiment. Maybe we were trying to attract passing UFOs? What happened mostly was we got cold and lost in the dark, and had to hitch a lift home.

  One time, though, we were ambushed from the self-same glade where, years earlier, I had tried to build a den. Like the troll in ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’, a couple of young farmers decided we were trespassing and were ripe for a good kicking. You read about these things, but never think they’ll happen to you. Not in a field in the middle of nowhere. Obviously, they were not late-night music lovers.

  It is curious that the seeming idyll of rural pasture at dusk should attract so many young people indulging in bizarre pastimes such as bovine DJing, flying-saucer spotting, stickleback fishing, ghost hunting or just general trouble hunting. The seemingly empty fields were filled with possibilities conjured up by the dwindling light.

  As neither of the combating parties had any form of illumination apart from the stars and the cloud-covered moon, it was soon obvious that the trading of blows was not going to solve anything. Bert and I were incompetent pugilists and our attackers seemed unaccustomed to the art of the moonlit punch-up. We did a bit of confused wrestling and futile punch throwing, accompanied by the traditional shouting of insults.

  Then we legged it into the gloom, stumbling over hedges and barbed-wire fences, becoming completely lost in the process.

  I replaced the batteries that had fallen out of the cassette player in our battle. And accompanied by the strains of Can’s ‘Augmn’ and ‘You Doo Rite’ and, appropriately enough, Riley’s ‘Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band’, we picked our way through a minefield of cowpats until we reached a road. It was very late and there was not a car to be seen. On a country B-road at the dead of night in the seventies, this was only to be expected.

  Unlikely as it sounds, we were eventually rescued by a minibus full of semi-pissed cleaning ladies on their way home from a cleaning-ladies convention.

  ‘Where y’off to, lads? Hop in.’

  The ladies were giggly and confused by our hastily concocted explanation that we were out doing a spot of night fishing.

  ‘Where’s your rods then?’ one shouted from the back.

  ‘Ooh, get your tackle out, lads.’

  ‘Put yer radio on and let’s have a sing-song.’

  Hitching in the 1970s was the most common method of getting from A to B for the skint and wheel-less. It was also a great way to meet weird fuckers – grey, sleazy geezers mostly. Getting picked up by the ladies in the minibus was the first time I’d ever been given a lift in a vehicle containing members of the opposite sex. Hitching was risky and asking for trouble, particularly if I was on my own, which I usually was, but I was young, so of course I thought I was immortal and knew better than everyone else.

  What I wanted more than anything was to get away from Macclesfield and go somewhere where things happened. Manchester – things happened there. Or even London – things definitely happened there all right. I’d read the books.

  5

  LITTLE DRUMMER BOY

  Whatever next?

  Three weeks after the Hawkwind debacle I was back at the Free Trade Hall again to see David Bowie. This time I played it safe and went with Phil for company.

  I’d first heard of David Bowie back in 1969 at the height of my space-travel frenzy. Like Telstar, ‘Space Oddity’ seemed to me the best record ever made. I remember feeling very disappointed when, despite appearing on Crackerjack, the song failed to get to number one. I began to suspect that the pop charts might be rigged in some way.

  The bits of Bowie that I’d heard were either from the Space Oddity LP or tracks off Hunky Dory that were getting played on late-night radio, mostly by John Peel. He’d play ‘Queen Bitch’ on Sounds of the Seventies. The singles ‘Oh You Pretty Things’ and ‘Changes’ both got regular plays on the way to school on the Tony Blackburn breakfast show of all things. Bowie must be good, I reasoned, because he went on about the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol in interviews in the music papers. He was weird (he’d worn a dress on one of his album covers and that qualified him as weird in the eyes of most folk) and I liked weird. I wasn’t sure if he was folky weird, poppy weird or rocky weird. He was, of course, a bit glam but everybody was in 1972. If you didn’t wear glitter, eyeliner and stack-heeled boots you were nobody.

  The gig was a bit different from Hawkwind; there was a space connection but not a full-on sonic and visual onslaught. He made a strobe-lit entry accompanied by ‘Ode to Joy’ from A Clockwork Orange. Bowie, with his flame-red hair and glittery turquoise jumpsuit, was exciting in a completely different way to the stoned sonic attack of Hawkwind.

  I’d never watched a proper rock axeman (that’s what they called guitarists in those days) in action before and Mick Ronson had all the moves down pat as he played at trying to steal the limelight from Bowie. Apart from the Jacques Brel solo acoustic bit in the middle, this definitely felt like a band, not a singer with a bunch of backing musicians.

  Which got me thinking. What was a band exactly? What were these people actually like when they weren’t on stage. What did they do? Did Mick Ronson playfully run off with David’s cup of tea? Did they all live together in a tower block, like in A Clockwork Orange? Was Trevor Bolder the bass player’s two-pronged beard real or was it stuck on with glue, only to be removed in the quiet of a dressing room after the performance? After the show were they whisked off to sophisticated parties where they would be plied with champagne and courted by hot and cold running groupies? Bowie’s much confess
ed bisexuality made this all the more fascinating. They all looked as if they’d come from the future and as it was a look that didn’t involve having hair down to your armpits, I thought I could get away with looking a bit like that at home/school. OK, maybe not the red dye and the make-up and the jumpsuit and that, but . . .

  Hawkwind, I thought, must live on some sort of a cosmic farm somewhere in the depths of the country where they made their own amps and brewed their own acid, jamming the day away in a Da y-Glo strobe-filled barn until they got busted by the pigs or someone, Stacia probably, told them that tea was ready and they’d better knock off the drugs for a bit, they’d been cosmic enough for one day. How this music stuff actually got turned into a record intrigued me.

  I would lie on my bed listening to the German band Faust’s beautiful, totally transparent first album and wonder where had this music come from and how had it actually been created and by whom? There were snippets of the Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’ and the Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ – how did they end up in there?

  Did those songs happen to be on the radio when Faust were recording something else and they got accidentally mixed in? Or did they have the ability to mimic the sound of any band at will, like a musical Mike Yarwood? Maybe the Beatles and the Stones actually popped into Faust’s studio one day for a cup of tea and got roped into proceedings.

  Was this actually the work of a band at all or was it some Teutonic supercomputer program that churned the stuff out?

  I bought the single ‘Starman’ from the stall in the bar at Bowie’s gig and played it to death for the rest of the weekend, especially the B-side ‘Suffragette City’. I decided that I was going to buy everything that David Bowie had ever done as soon as I could get enough cash. Oh, and I started smoking so as to appear sophisticated. But I think that was Phil’s idea.

  Ziggy Stardust came out in June 1972. It had only been two months since the Free Trade Hall gig but it felt like an eternity of waiting for Bowie’s newest record. I could now re-experience the gig over and over again. I saw Bowie every time he played Manchester after that. Every time the crowd got bigger, until the one in June 1973, just after Aladdin Sane came out, which was full of screaming girls who were probably about to become Bay City Rollers fans. I’d seen Faust the night before and suspected Bowie might be ‘selling out’, the ultimate rock crime. He’d gone from cool rock star to teen idol in just over a year. Whether this was a crime or not was usually pronounced by the NME.

  Ziggy, though was one of those records. An instant classic. From the drum intro of ‘Five Years’ to last chord of ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’, it was (and still is) perfection. He was singing about the same things I was feeling. By the end of 1972, Lou Reed’s Transformer had been released. That Bowie-Ronson production, along with Ziggy, convinced me that David and Mick were total geniuses.

  As well as welcoming nicotine addiction, Phil and I had a few other ideas. Number one, obviously, was that we should start a band. Who in their right mind wanted a boring job sat in an office or a factory? The life of an underground counterculture noise merchant – that was where it was at. We could make a disturbing racket that people might mistake for art just as well as the next bunch of freaks. So why not join the revolution? We were hip cats. We knew the score.

  Phil was saving up for a guitar. He’d already got a sax from somewhere, on which he would produce convincing, honking, Zappa-type sounds. I’d given up on the clarinet. It really was bobbins – I, of course, blamed the instrument for this.

  My main problem, I thought, was that most of the lessons were taken up by trying to teach me how to read music and count time. It was like learning to read before you could talk. I just wanted to be able to play a tune and quick! None of this C sharp F lark. I wanted to play avant-garde rock, not be constrained by outmoded musical conventions like the ‘proper’ notes and that shit.

  I’d had a go on Phil’s sax and I couldn’t even get it to squawk. (I think Uncle Johnny may have been pulling my leg.) Maybe I should get a guitar as well, Phil suggested. Absolutely, I thought, forgetting my earlier disappointment, I’d be good at that. Anyone could play a guitar. Just look at the vast number of guitarists there are. It’s got to be easy.

  Our other idea was: ‘Let’s buy some pot and get stoned.’

  There was this guy, Hobbo, a sort of friendly neighbourhood freak who hung around the school gates at going-home time, dressed in full freak get-up. A mangey brown fur coat, loon pants, long, lank greasy hair and the reek of patchouli about him. Phil had been sounding him out on the quiet and he reckoned that there was some good stuff turning up in the next couple of weeks, and that if we played our cards right, Hobbo could see us right.

  Phil had said, ‘Yes please, I’ll have a fiver’s worth of that,’ and was now looking for someone to go halves on the deal.

  Everyone knew that all the bands were stoned most of the time. This would be a way of finding out if a bit of pot smoking could give us some insight into how their collective minds worked. Worth a try, I thought, got to try everything once, haven’t you? We acquired Rizla papers and Old Holborn tobacco, and set to learning the art of fag rolling. After a lot of burnt fingers and tobacco swallowing, Phil managed to get his roll-up qualifications first. My early attempts looked like badly made Christmas crackers. They burnt like a fuse of cartoon dynamite and my God they tasted awful.

  One of the downsides, and there were many, to sharing a room with my father was the lack of any privacy. There was nowhere I could safely conceal anything illicit from my parents and, since the Hawkwind incident, I had the definite feeling that I was being eyed with suspicion. Funny looks over the marmalade at breakfast, that sort of thing. So Phil was going to have to handle the stashing of the goods. And as Phil’s mum worked evenings at the Belgrade Hotel, his home was also the ideal venue for our drug-crazed experimentation.

  Hobbo was almost as good as his word (a rare hippie characteristic) and we ended up with half of what was expected.

  ‘There’s been a big bust in Manchester, man. Don’t tell anyone where you got this from, right,’ he said as he palmed a lump of black stuff into Phil’s eager clutches. We had scored!

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said, ‘mum’s the word,’ and legged it in case the pigs were watching.

  As soon as his mum’s next shift rolled round, I was off to Phil’s for ‘tea’. As well as the hash, Phil had managed to get a quarter-bottle of Pernod from somewhere (we were sophisticated drinkers by now). After a couple of bath mugs of Pernod and water, we were off. Phil got out the £2.50 black lump and we studied it. What were you supposed to do with it? How much do you put in and, more to the point, how do you break the stuff up? We tried cutting off small chunks with a butter knife and rolling them up but they just fell out as soon as we went to light up.

  Phil then remembered some of Hobbo’s pre-sales mumblings. ‘He said something about having to sweat it.’

  ‘That’s just hippie speak for don’t worry,’ I reasoned as Phil got out a Ronson lighter and applied a flame to the intransigent lump. ‘Don’t set fire to it, man! It won’t work after it’s been burnt. Stands to reason, it’ll just be ash!’

  To my amazement the stuff succumbed and in its heated state took on a crumblier texture. We soon had a prototype joint ready for lighting up.

  ‘Best do a couple in case you get so you can’t remember how to do another,’ I suggested, which he did. Then, with a great sense of ceremony, he lit one up.

  Quickly passing it to and fro like a frantic game of pass-the-parcel, our first number was soon burning our fingers. We tried fixing it on to a paper clip so as to extract the very last dregs from the thing. The roll-up disintegrated in the process.

  We put on some Beefheart and waited.

  ‘Can you feel anything yet?’

  ‘Not really. I think my eyes have gone a bit fuzzy though.’

  ‘Let’s have the other one then.’

  So we fired up number two and took this o
ne at a slightly more relaxed pace.

  ‘Christ, this stuff tastes a bit rough. It’s like smoking carpet slippers. You don’t think Hobbo’s ripped us off, do you?’

  This sounded like the most hilarious thing I’d ever heard in my life and I began laughing uncontrollably. Before long, the pair of us were collapsing in laughter. Another slug of the Pernod and Rahsaan Kirk was blasting out.

  ‘Bloody hell, this track’s good, man. I’ve never noticed them like little tinkly bits before. It’s like . . .’

  ‘Metal jelly?’ I suggested.

  ‘Yeah, metal jelly.’ We fell about once more.

  All the random parping and tootling that had seemed chaotic before was now the most natural thing in the world. It all made perfect sense – there was even a sort of melody to it.

  ‘Quick, let’s have another one before your mum gets back.’

  I’d never imagined getting stoned would be like this. I’d thought that you would slip into a mild state of catatonia and experience visions of an otherworldly realm, possibly inhabited by pixies and fairies, like in ‘Focus on Fact’. I had never thought it would be so bloody funny. For £2.50, or half of £2.50 to be pedantic, it was certainly value for money.

  ‘No, let’s save some for next week. We’d better get the windows open and let the smell out.’

  So, still in the grip of hysterical laughter, we fiddled with the suddenly complex mechanism that controlled the opening of Phil’s windows.

  The chill night air brought with it the onset of mild paranoia.

  ‘Your mum’ll know we’re stoned.’

  ‘No, it’ll be all right, she’ll go straight to bed. S’long as we act normal we’ll be fine.’

  ‘What’s normal?’

  ‘Shit, I don’t know. Do you?’

  ‘How do you act normal?’

  After some confused debate, we felt that normal ought to involve the making of some supper and we made our way cautiously into the kitchen. We were still there some time later, marvelling at the vivid blueness of the gas burning in the grill, when Phil’s mum returned.