Record Play Pause

by Stephen Morris

  Going to festivals alone could have been a recipe for disaster when my only way of getting about was either by pushbike or hitchhike, but surprisingly considering the huge number of coppers that would turn up without fail at these events, plus the fact I was mostly either very drunk or tripping, I never got stopped once.

  I began hanging about in the Hare Krishna tent where the disciples of Lord Krishna would dish out free chapatis as long as you joined in with the chanting and bell dinging. There was never any question of having to become a fully paid-up member to qualify. The closest I got into anything resembling trouble of the bonkers cult kind at these solitary outings was at the Great Western Express.

  This took place at White City, darn London way in 1973. It rained again. Funny how a UK festival in July is pretty much guaranteed a downpour. There was something very sad about watching Sly and the Family Stone doing ‘I Wanna Take You Higher’ and ‘Dance to the Music’ against a backdrop of cold grey drizzle.

  Canned Heat came on, and a week later I would see them doing exactly the same set and break a guitar string in exactly the same song. I wondered if this was what Woodstock had really been like.

  As White City was at an athletics/greyhound stadium, you could at least find some shelter in the stands. It was while I was doing this that a cheery bunch of folk spotted me – three lads and a couple of girls who looked like pretty normal festival-goers: denim loon pants and sewn on patches of the peace-and-love variety. They struck up a conversation.

  ‘Hi, you look a bit lost. Are you looking for someone?’ Always a good conversation starter in any situation.

  ‘No, have you got any drugs?’ would have been my normal stock reply but maybe these were undercover filth or something, so it was a nervous squeak. ‘Er no, I’m not. Ta.’ I hoped they’d go away.

  One of the girls then piped up with ‘Would you like one of our magazines?’ and started digging about in her orange-and-blue crocheted shoulder bag. She produced something that looked a bit like this . . .

  That got me interested.

  I had seen this sort of publication before, not in Dave’s hardcore section at the House on the Borderland, but at the slightly more genteel but very trendy Percival’s bookshop near the Library Theatre in Manchester. I did a lot of browsing there on my daily tour of Manchester record shops as it was on the way from Rare Records to Black Sedan. I recognised that the magazine was the work of Moses David, that much I knew from my idle magazine browsing. As for what it was all about, I had no idea. It just sort of rambled on and on about Jesus and screwing. The pictures, plus the close proximity of words such as ‘Devil’ and ‘Sex’ were bound to appeal to a lad of my age.

  ‘Oh yeah, Moses David, I’ve read a lot of his stuff.’ Trying to impress. ‘Have you got any drugs?’ They obviously weren’t undercover feds so I thought I was safe.

  Almost as one, their eyes lit up.

  ‘Are you here on your own?’ one of the lads asked curiously.

  ‘No, we haven’t got any on us but I know where you can get some. Have you got any friends with you?’ said one of the girls.

  ‘Whereabouts are you from then?’ As a group they kept getting closer and closer. Just being friendly, I thought.

  ‘I’m from Macclesfield,’ I said, just being friendly back, ‘near Manchester.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the other girl, ‘that’s a long way home, isn’t it?’

  ‘I know,’ said the first girl, ‘why don’t you come home with us? We’ve got loads of room.’

  I have to admit that initially this did seem a tempting prospect: running away from home and living in a London hippie squat had crossed my mind with increasing frequency in those days.

  ‘Yes, we can get some drugs and then you can come with us. You don’t want to go back to Manchester, do you?’

  Appealing as this scheme was, it didn’t sound quite right. I’d read the News of the World and I was getting a funny feeling about all this. Time for our reporter to make his excuses and leave.

  ‘Just a mo, I’m off to the loo,’ the old Morris escape line. No sooner had one of them said, ‘I’ll come too,’ than I headed for the nearest exit as fast as my legs would carry me. I legged it out of the stadium and got straight on the tube.

  It was very weird, a bit surreal. It dawned on me later, after I got over missing Ray Davies throw a wobbler at the gig, that they were members of the Children of God, an ever-so-slightly dodgy cult. Danny Kirwan of Fleetwood Mac had not been so lucky – he’d gone home with them in LA a year or two earlier. It did not go well.

  You should never talk to strangers. I always do though – they’re very interesting.

  The beginning of 1974 saw me slogging the week out at the mill, daydreaming of which album I’d get at the weekend, doing lists of potential buys in my lunch hour, usually after a trawl of the local record shops. Then back up the hill to the shifting of rolls of material from storeroom to cutting bench to loom. This was the way things went every day except for Wednesdays.

  Wednesdays were half-day closing so there was not much music browsing to be done. Like a bloody ghost town it was. It was one of those Wednesdays when, having some time to kill, I thought why not pay Dizz, a visit. I’d not been round for a week or two. Maybe he’d have bit of dope to sell. But I wondered if anyone at his house even got up before twelve. It seemed unlikely but it would kill a bit of time.

  When I got to White Street, the curtains were all drawn and the place looked empty. But what the hell, might as well give a knock. I could always leave a note or something, just to let him know I’d called.

  No answer. I was all set to shove a note through the door when it opened a crack and a mop of corkscrew hair and a pair of bleary eyes peered round.

  ‘Hi, what the fuck do you want?’

  ‘All right, Dizz, got any pot?’

  ‘Not so loud. Come in.’ The eyes darted left then right before the door opened wider.

  So in I went. Dizz vanished in the direction of the kitchen and reappeared with a big brown bottle full of pills.

  ‘No dope, man, the town’s dry, nothing nowhere. There’s been a big bust. Fuckin’ DS. Got these, though. Here, have a few.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘All sorts man, all sorts, bit of this, bit of that, triple mandies some of ’em, I think, or they might be . . .’

  ‘No, it’s all right. I’d best be getting back to t’mill.’

  ‘Oh fuck that – try a couple of these! What are you, man or mouse?’

  There was a bit of a Pinocchio vibe going on here, wasn’t there?

  I should have just put the pills in my pocket and buggered off, saved them for later or something. But no, I had to swallow them there and then. What harm could they do?

  At this point someone changed the film from Disney to something more Philip Marlowe. You know, the bit where ‘the broad slipped me a micky’.

  I fell down a rabbit hole to oblivion.

  I don’t know what the pills were but they didn’t agree with me. I blacked out sharpish and kept drifting in and out of consciousness. Maybe it was one of my turns. The only memory I have is of the Derek and the Dominoes album side one getting played over and over and over and over. To this day I can’t hear ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ without feeling queasy. They used to say ‘Clapton is God’. Not in my book he isn’t.

  I eventually came round sprawled on the floor between Dizz’s sofa and the fireplace. Someone had thoughtfully covered me with a rancid rug. It was night. The trouble was it was Thursday night. I’d been out for a day. Oh well, I was fucked, so I went back to sleep and decided I’d stay in this two-up two-down commune for a bit. Try living the bohemian life on the left bank of the River Bollin. The house was a basic old-fashioned terrace with a proper outside lavvy, no mod cons at all. Most of the other houses in the row were empty and it wasn’t hard to guess why. But beggars can’t be choosers. It took a few days’ before the rest of the house’s hippie occupants noticed I was still there.

/>   I really couldn’t face the row that awaited me at home. I’d done it again. Properly fucked up. But as long as I avoided facing the consequences, I could just pretend they wouldn’t happen. Put it off for another day and then another. Dizz played the congas in bands and I thought if I hung around with him long enough then maybe I’d get a job in a band too. I thought it’d be a bit like running away to join the circus but with amps instead of animals.

  I imagined that living in a commune would be a glamorous life fuelled by drugs and rock and roll. Much like the tales of life in Ladbroke Grove in Richard Neville’s Play Power and the underground press. I kind of expected warmth, water, food and drink too.

  If I wanted any of that I would have had to skulk off home and hope nobody noticed I was a part-time sellout.

  I never got a job in a band and I didn’t wash much either – I’d forgotten to pack any toiletries – but I did take up crime. I tried my hand at house breaking, milk-bottle theft, meat theft. Not easy, that, I can tell you: the theft of a joint of meat from a butcher’s was a three-man job needing guile and cunning. The usual train-fare dodging, cigarette theft and then record theft; living at Dizz’s was non-stop crime. The vinyl heist though – that was to be my undoing.

  A bunch of five or six of us set off from White Street to Manchester. Looking like a psychedelic version of the Beano’s Bash Street Kids, we fare-dodged our way to Piccadilly, and set about relieving Lewis’s record department of a large portion of its stock.

  Most record shops would just have the record sleeves on display and keep the vinyl out of sight behind the counter, but Lewis’s for some reason didn’t take this simple precaution.

  We were a motley-looking collection so, if we had entered en masse, our intentions would have been obvious. One by one, we would go in, lift a couple, then come out and let someone else have a turn until we’d got as much as we could carry between us. All that was needed was a large enough coat to secrete the goods in. You had to be quick and not too choosy – if I’m honest, 90 per cent of the stuff we lifted was total shit. There was one album by Man (Winos, Rhinos and Lunatics) that I quite fancied but that was about it. It was the Bay City Rollers, Showaddywaddy and David Essex mostly. Shit chart stuff. I liked bands who never troubled the top twenty and once they charted more than once I went off them. Alice Cooper, I thought, was the bee’s knees until he started having hits. Then I had to trot out the old line, ‘Yeah, he’s OK. Not as good as he used to be, mind.’ I was a bit of a music snob.

  Quality didn’t really matter, anyway. The plan was to flog this vinyl haul to the second-hand shop in Macclesfield Indoor Market once we got home. Criminal masterminds that we were, first of all we went into the café next door to the record store to have a cuppa, still carrying the trove of stolen albums. Somehow we had failed to notice that the caff was still part of Lewis’s. Predictably, the law turned up. We got arrested, bundled into a van and taken down to Bootle Street nick for grilling. I tried the old ‘A big boy did it and ran way and left me holding these records officer’ defence but the Manchester police were having none of it. I got locked up in Bootle Street with a stranger who claimed to have been beaten up as part of his interrogation. That really cheered me up.

  Eventually Dad turned up. God knows how the police managed to get hold of him and drag him away from his tap peddling. He wasn’t pleased to see me. Apoplectic is the word I’m looking for.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ and ‘What’ve you got yourself mixed up with now?’ were among his first words along with ‘bloody’ and ‘idiot’.

  I’d gone too far, yet again. Would I never learn?

  ‘I’ve a good mind to just leave you here and let the police sort you out. Your mother’s had enough of you.’

  Mind you, I did get in the papers when I had my court appearance. I got off with a fine and a suspended sentence. That was the end of my life of (largely) drug-induced hippie crime.

  It all could have been worse. For more than one awful moment, I thought I was going to end up in a cell for a long time. But how was I going to keep out of trouble while being bored in Macclesfield?

  Macclesfield of the late seventies did not have the best of reputations (it’s gone downhill since). Firstly, there was the aforementioned Parkside Hospital, the inmates of which were occasionally found wandering around the town, much to the alarm and distress of the unwary visitor. Then there was the youth subculture: a healthy contingent of mods or proto-skinheads, mostly without scooters, and an equally healthy contingent of greasers/bikers, again mostly without motorbikes. Between these two strata was a floating mob of ‘young farmers’ who could go either way and were best approached with caution. These apprentice agrarians rarely had any useful drugs.

  Heroin had a broad appeal in the town, and I came across a number of guys – most of them called Bob or Dave – who were devotees. The majority were pretty straight-looking, and they were either working in garages or hospitals. You would not have guessed they were users. They seemed honest and trustworthy and level-headed. They weren’t, but that’s how you’d peg them on first meeting. Over the years that I spent drinking and drugging in the town, these superficially normal smackheads all either OD’ed or met other junk-related ends. Everyone was always ‘surprised’. I tried most things but I was always very wary of smack. My limited experience of it wasn’t something that I particularly enjoyed. But the cliché is that it takes all sorts . . .

  To sum up what sort of person I had become:

  • I stole money and booze from my parents and my sister;

  • cigarettes from my father’s car;

  • records from just about anywhere;

  • milk from doorsteps while simultaneously stopping cars at 4.30 on a Sunday morning just to get a light for a soggy dimp.

  • I broke into the odd house;

  • was an inveterate smasher of windows;

  • was a compulsive liar;

  • and was a compulsive crier.

  I wanted to break out.

  8

  LIFE IS A CABARET

  Unsurprisingly, I was no longer welcome at Uncle John’s mill. Very reluctantly, my father finally suggested that I could have a job working for him. As if that would keep me out of trouble. I think the job description was ‘dogsbody’, which I took to mean skiver.

  Clifford’s tap-peddling business had been booming and he’d expanded the offices at Evington House. It was now home to a staff of six – soon to be seven. There was Bert Lee, who had taken over Johnny’s job of running the office, and five girls, Susan, Big Liz, not so big Liz, Hilary and Ann, who either answered the telephone or typed out dictaphone-taped letters and memos from my dad. The memo became my father’s favoured method of communication with me. I think he found it less infuriating than trying to talk to me.

  My dad would drag me into work at 7 a.m. and set me to filing stacks of invoices and dockets. As a fervent LP organiser, I found this surprisingly easy and almost relaxing. Once my father left on his daily travels, I could settle down to doing as little as possible. This mostly consisted of arguments with the girls about their choice of office music. I always lost these musical disputes and the ambience of fluorescent strip light and cigarette smoke was augmented by a soundtrack of poptastic chartbound sounds. This was immediately silenced at 5.30 when my father returned from making his calls. He would then deposit more invoices and dockets in the filing tray before going to his attic desk to dictate more letters and memos until returning to Ivy Lane.

  Practise, practise, practise. That’s what I did twice a day, usually at lunchtime (home was only five minutes up the road from work) and evening, drug-induced benders permitting. It didn’t make me any friends, but it made me feel better – there’s a lot to be said for percussion therapy. I began to get pretty good at drumming too, not good in a way that you could class as being technically perfect but good in a way that I enjoyed. The only trouble was there still wasn’t much call for a solo drummer, except maybe in the Boy S
couts, and I was getting a little bit too old for them.

  The ever-expanding drum kit that I carted in and out of my father’s room every morning and evening now comprised two bass drums, two snare drums, seven tom-toms (I was saving up for number eight), four or five cymbals and a hi-hat. They were a random mix of Premier, Hayman, Ludwig and Olympic, black, red, silver and mahogany in colour. Oddly, I never considered buying a proper drum stool and just perched on whatever rickety chair or stool I could find lying about. (Drummer tip: always get yourself a nice comfy stool to avoid spinal problems later in life.)

  I did my best to appear responsible despite still being in disgrace after the great vinyl robbery. The job at the office was not going badly. Even so, I thought it would be a good idea to avoid my previous employer, Uncle John, for a bit. I wouldn’t be visiting Elsie’s for a while.

  I settled into a life of clerical work. From filing, I was promoted to answering the phone, then taking orders, chasing orders, dealing with complaints and, best of all, working the telex machine. It was a cushy job, to be honest, and apart from having to unload a furniture van full of kitchen units every week, not exactly physically taxing.

  My father, feeling that I was a natural at the office-dogsbody malarkey, decided that he would indoctrinate me further in the noble art of tap peddling.

  I would receive an introduction to life on the road and get to accompany him on his sales calls. My joy was unconfined. The prospect of these trips out in themselves was not too bad. It was more the way they were to be conducted that bothered me. Clifford, as everyone always referred to him, always thinking of potential sales gimmicks, had dreamt up the idea that on these excursions I should dress myself exactly like him. A mini-me, complete with nice suit and bowler hat. I thought, not unnaturally, this was the worst thing I’d ever heard. Clifford’s mind was made up, though, and no amount of whingeing and moaning would convince him otherwise. I sold out my scruples for a packet of fags and I reluctantly hit the road.