EPSOM ART SCHOOL

‘I’ll never forgive you if you go to college’ said my nan when I told her I was gong to college. She was, as a nan default, old school. She left school at fourteen years old, on a Friday and started a job on the Monday. If you had a job you kept it. Bettering yourself was for the chattering classes, for people with inherited money, who had time for that sort of nonsense. My Nan and her ilk grafted, made what they could to get by and were happy with their lot. She lived through the aftermath of the First World War, the Great Depression, World War Two and the rebuilding of the country thereafter. Being good at drawing got me a pat on the head but the thought of studying it with an eye on a career was alien to her.

To be honest, while I was at school it was alien to me too. In the fifth form we all got the chance to talk to a careers advisor and, in concluding our chat my bloke suggested I go to art school. My immediate thought was ‘I don’t want to hang out with a load of weirdos’. I wasn’t ignorant to my own weirdness, but his was Sutton. It was a prerequisite to at the very least be in denial of it.

‘I’ll get a job somewhere with a design department and work my way up from there’ I thought. And that’s a perfectly reasonable career path, but I worked at Derwent publications and there didn’t seem to be one, so rather than try another job I decided to try out the weirdo route and go to art school and, surprise surprise I found my people. Well, maybe they weren’t really my people but I did discover drugs and they suggested that they were my people.

I had an advantage from the start in as much as I was on the same course as my old school mate Nick. We’d not seen each other since I left school (and, incidentally he was allowed to stay on even though he failed his ‘o’levels exactly as I had, but I’ve never resented him for it and have never mentioned it to him since, apart from most of the time) and we’d bumped into each other at a party in Sutton and discovered we were going to be studying together for the next couple of years. Nick was a bit more of a geezer than me. He liked soul music and would go to Troubador, the local men’s outfitters and try and tear the labels off the Robe Di Kappa or Pierre Cardin roll necks and the like, but we hit it off again, just like when we were eleven, playing snooker on a little table in my mum’s dining room and, a couple of years later getting very sick on a bottle of Malibu at a party at his local scout hut.

The first day didn’t go as I’d planned though. I thought I might take the Mick Jones from Big Audio Dynamite (I know I’m supposed to say ‘The Clash’ but BAD were my favourite band and my mock jones intro) route of hanging out in the bogs and waiting for musicians to turn up so we could form a band, but instead we sat next to a bloke called Tim from Godalming who seemed to want to fight everybody. He was a proper ‘pub boy’ as we used to call them. He bragged about drinking and fighting every weekend and, when we went it McDonald’s on Epsom high street on our first lunch break I caught him staring intently over my shoulder.

‘What are you looking at?’ I enquired

‘Geezer over there’s screwing me out. Cunt.’ He replied.

I looked over my shoulder to see a young man just ordering some food, seemingly unaware that he was offending our new friend. On the train back at the end of the day Nick told me he though Tim was ‘a great bloke’ and when I woke up the next morning I didn’t want to go to art school anymore. I lay in bed, mulling over two years on a BTEC, designing posters and getting dragged into fist fights.

I had made a terrible mistake.

I reluctantly dragged myself in on the second day and got chatting to a chap called Jason. We talked about music and I told him, as I had never done to anyone at school that I made music

‘Can you bring some in? I’d love to hear it’ he said.

This was something of a revelation. Nobody at school had ever shown an interest in my music. Nut then again, perhaps that was just my own presumption. Either way, for the first time ever I decided to do just that and play somebody else my music.

‘It sounds like Stump’ said Jason the next day, with my Walkman earphones in his ears.

That was not the intention. I loved the discordant Irish funk-jazz-indie weirdos, but I’d never considered my own music to be at all discordant, but there we have it. Listening back to the unnamed tune I was playing him in 1988 I can hear the Stumpiness. It was discordant. It was a mess, but he liked it and a little page had quietly been turned in my story. I had, on the second day of a college I was about to quit, gained the confidence to play another human being my music and until now I had never thought of Jason as such a pivotal figure.

Jason, if I could remember your surname I would thank you now.

After that I met a couple of longhairs called Dave and Simon, who were into music and had some friends who would gather on a Friday night and have a jam at their friend Heitham’s house.

Heitham was spoken of as an oracular figure, who knew all about music and drugs and all the sort of things that an eighteen year old art student would wish to know in 1988.

I told them I was decent on the bass and they invited me along.

These Friday evening jams became a staple for me and I honed my skills in playing with others, which pretty much meant holding back on the showing off much more than I did when playing alone. It’s called getting in the pocket- this fitting into a groove with other band members and, in particular the drummer, which was easy as the drummer was a seventeen year old hippy with red heyday and a gentle disposition called Steve, who played drums better than anyone I’d ever seen. He was also an incredible beatboxer. I became good friends with Heitham and we would hang out at his or at gigs, like a Fishbone at the Astoria in Charing Cross Road, which was like a religious experience. I’d never seen a band with as much energy, joy and anger combined with musical skill. I went home and didn’t sleep a wink. I just wanted to be in Fishbone.

Whilst I was discovering ‘the pocket’ and honing my musical chops with other musicians something else was happening in Blighty. From the early days at Epsom art college in September a couple of my fellow students had strange tweeting noises coming thinly from their earphones and would arrive at college on Fridays saucer-eyed and not able to work much. It was late summer 1988 in a deep suburb of south London and acid house was quietly…sorry, noisily changing the United Kingdom forever. Those bleary Friday types had all literally and metaphorically been to The Future. It was a club night run by Paul Oakenfold with a slightly wider musical remit than other trailblazers like Shoom and Spectrum, which quickly became known as ‘Balaeric’, due to the main players on the scene finding inspiration from a holiday in Ibiza the previous year. The tweeting sound coming out of late 80s headphones was the Roland 303, an accidentally iconic sound made by mistake from something created to make basslines to accompany pianos. Originally used by Charanjit Singh in 1982, it would go on, via Phuture’s twelve minute epic ‘Acid Trax’ to invent Acid House in Chicago which, in turn started getting plays in the UK at the same time as British kids were discovering previously exclusive drug ecstasy, the perfect accompaniment to the repetitive and hypnotic grooves of the music.

All of a sudden football violence all but ceased, as previous hooligans were now hugging it out in clubs and the lifestyle became more important even than the Beautiful Game.

For a bit.

Before I knew it my quiff fell to the sides and I started growing my hair out. My denim shirt found its way to the bin, replaced by long sleeved t-shirts from Kensington Market, like one I had featuring a photo of disgraced Canadian one hundred metre Olympic champion Ben Johnson crossing the finishing line, arm raised with the legend ‘Get On One Matey’ above his head. I wish I still had that t-shirt. And my multi-coloured smiley face one. Where do t-shirts go? I have no recollection of ever throwing a single t-shirt out yet, here we are. No Acid House t-shirts.

The my 19th birthday came around I was, if not fully then mildly ensconsed in both jamming with my friends and clubbing in warehouses and railway arches in undisclosed South London locations, as well as often twice weekly visits to the Whirlygig club night. The Whirlygig became ‘our’ place. I first attended in late 1988 when it was at Notre Dame Hall in Leicester Square and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I first stumbled in. It was a ‘bring your own booze’ do but nobody needs much of that as everyone was skinning up everywhere and passing it about. There were kids and dogs there, not that you could see much as the dry ice and oil lamps made it an immersive and bewildering experience. Heitham was mates with the Ozrics and a couple of them were trying out something new there, which ended up going by the name Eat Static. It was acid house and acid rock fuzed into a sludgy, danceable mess and it worked a treat.

Our own fusing of interests in Acid House and live music had naturally coalesced to make us, for want of a better word- ‘Hippies’. Yes, I became hippy.

On my birthday itself I was at college and it just so happened my friend Olivia’s birthday was on the same day, so at lunchtime we all piled into the Rising Sun pub in Epsom and some kind people had the bar person prepare us a pint each of ‘everything from the optics’. I managed to down mine, but Olivia refused after a gulp or two so I, being the chivalrous type that I am decided to finish hers for her. I was lauded for this feat and oddly enough felt fine, right up until the moment we exited the pub then everything suddenly became everything times two. And possibly three. Having just spent a year in central London working and drinking with people whose tolerance for booze outstripped their tolerance for people who couldn’t handle their booze by a hundred to one I manfully staggered back to a lecture that I managed to get twenty minutes into before dashing off to the bogs to be violently sick. I dragged myself home after college to prepare myself for the soirée I had planned in my newly minted loft room. I slumped myself on an armchair in front of the telly to get some rest before people started arriving. After I don’t know how long my friend Pete arrived and sat himself down on the sofa.

‘Oh hello Pete!’ I said, grinning like a drunk student

‘Hello’ he said

‘Just got here?’ I asked

‘Bloody hell Jim’ he laughed ‘I’ve literally been sat here for twenty minutes’

I hadn’t noticed a thing. I think Dr.Snuggles was on.

That evening saw the launching, if not in name- that was almost a year off yet of the Cheambeat Loft. I’d already got a few people to sign the plasterboard wall below the roof gable so I got all who attended my 19th birthday do to sign it too. I have no recollection of how many were there but I do have one photo of me, hair becurtained and looking bemused. Over the years whilst I still lived at my folks’ that wall filled up with names and slogans and cartoons and there’s another book in that somewhere.

At Epsom Art college I found my people. I found the confidence to play music and exchange ideas with others. It was all the things that school wasn’t. It was open, welcoming, creative and yes, it was full of weirdos and I finally opened myself up to the possibility that I was a weirdo too

W*RK (PART II)

Derwent Publications

This was my one and only full-time job which lasted more than about three months. This one I stuck out for almost a year, before deciding to head for even slacker climes at art school.

It was a publishing company of sorts, so my intention was to work my way up the ranks and head in some sort of design direction, but seeing as the company only published one book a year and that was the an annual of patents for inventions or something like that, there was very little design work to be done and any that was done was sent out to designers from the very department in which I was working, hence its name ‘The Send-Out Department’.

I was dreading the thought of full-time employment, even though it meant being in the west end and soaking up a bit of proper London, but I quite quickly discovered that, in full time employment, particularly at office junior level on five grand a year it wasn’t the work that counted, but the people you worked with and my office seemed like a happy little team, managed, in name, by a bearded mouse of a man called Ken and in spirit by a 23 year old (which seemed unfathomable old to me) bloke called Mike.

I sat opposite him and we quickly established a rapport, revolving around old comedy and music, we were soon joined by a bloke called John from Chigwell, who was a year younger than me and a Prince fan, so he was ok with me on that score. He was gobby and excellent fun to verbally spar with. Then, for a while another bloke called Steve from Oxford turned up who was sort of close to fitting in, but never quite managed it. What with Mike, John and I being from various parts of outer London we used to natter employing much often invented cockney or mockney rhyming slang, making up our own little contemporary mid-80s rhymes. At some point, a month or so after Steve joined us, John discovered a notebook in the Oxford boy’s desk wherein he’d taken notes on these rhymes- ‘oxo cube = tube’ etc and he was ribbed into the middle of the next week by the rest of us, the next week during which he resigned. I’m sorry Steve, you were a nice bloke and we were dicks.

I quickly gained legendary status as the slowest worker in the history of the department, something which I think was meant to shame me into working harder but in fact made me feel rather proud. Because Mike was almost entirely banter-based and Ken was such a mouse I suppose I never quite grasped that fact that they might have been annoyed about it.

The other reputation this job gave me was, as far as my nan was concerned anyway, that of an alcoholic.

The thing was, there was a pub called the White Hart that was part of our building and every friday after work we would go down there with some of the ladies and gents from the other departments, all of whom Mike was good friends with, because he was just that sort of chap and we would all pop a tenner in the kitty, which in 1987 would get you about five pints. Then you would put another one in there, etc, etc until it was time to stagger home. It just so happened that every friday night my nan and granddad would frequent Cheam social club for bingo, then stay over at mum and dad’s, where I was still living, thus forth the only contact I had with them for a while was when I would turn up, at best half cut if not almost completely cut after a night having to try and keep up with blokes older and more able to take their booze than me.

This did, however give me the ability to appear sober when not- a skill which has stayed with me ever since. So thank you, you drunken bastards of Derwent Publications who wouldn’t let me move onto soft drinks.

Oh yes, and I smoked my first biffter there as well, off a bloke called Tayo. It was soon after that, oddly enough that I applied for art school.

FURTHER EDUCATION

My immediate problem in the summer of 1986 was what on earth I should do next. I thought about using my artistic skills to be a sign writer, so I went to the only place I could find locally that did that and the bloke who run it said:

‘If you can get the dole to pay you twenty five quid a week to work here then fine, but I’m not paying that’ so that was a sign that my sign writing was career over in a sentence, before it had even begun.

I drove past that very same sign writing place the other day. It’s still there and still has the same sign on it that it had in 1986. I guess he didn’t want to pay anyone to do a new one.

I decided instead to retake some ‘O’levels at Carshalton College of Further Education. On my first day two significant things happened. Well, significant to a directionless sixteen year old. Firstly, our class tutor was a sociology professor and, as we filed into the class he leant on the front of his desk, waited for us to settle and told us that this wasn’t school. We were adults and it was our own decision to attend. We didn’t have to be there. We were there because it was our choice.

I think this was meant to encourage us to take control of our destinies and our education and to inspire ourselves and all that sort of gubbins, but I took it as a green light to not bother attending much at all, to the point when I would leave some musical gear hidden in my parents’ garage and often head off for college in the morning, go and hide in said garage, wait for my folks to leave for work and spend the day in there noodling about making music and writing lyrics. Some not even in Menzoblian (See chapter 4). I would have to time my returns though, as my mum and dad got back at different times. I could see the hallway from the garage through the kitchen window so I would wait until I could see my mum either going into the living room or going upstairs, then leg it out of there, out of the back gate, through the alley and back round to the front where I would return from a hard day’s graft at the ‘O’level retake coalface.

The second first-day event was being passed a note at the front of the class, where I sat which read ‘Do you want to meet up? Tina x’.

Tina was sat at the back in a brown leather blouson and stone washed jeans. She was small and cute, with a round face and pinched features that made her look tough and a pixie cut that was highlighted and moussed-up. So I met up with her.

Well, I met up with her and one of her friends. I waited at Carshalton train station and she arrived with a wing-girl, saying ‘I thought we’d arranged to bring a friend’ We’d done nothing of the sort. I may have been less nervous if we had, but we hadn’t. This wasn’t going to go well. I was unsure as to how I would entertain one girl, let alone two. And particularly when she looked pissed off already.

We got the train to Cheam. My folks were away for some reason and I had the place to myself, which was beginning to seem pointless now, unless her friend was up for a threesome. I doubt if I’d have known what a threesome was then anyway. If she was, then this may have ended up being a very different book. I probably wouldn’t have bothered making music at all and just dedicated myself to going on about it to everyone I met, but here we are- it’s about a bloke who has spent his life making unsuccessful music. That’s about all you need to know.

When we got back to ‘mine’ it transpired that my brother had also decided to capitalise on his freedom by inviting a load of his friends over, who I remember making full use of the space by running around a lot in it. After Tina and her even more disgruntled mate sat on the stairs for an hour they left, I sloped off to bed and Tina spent the rest of the college year ignoring me.

Having been utterly ambivalent to my experience at school, Carshalton college did give me a sense of how lucky I had been getting a grammar school education though. Most of the other students were from south London comprehensives and, having been a below average student at Sutton manor I suddenly found myself top of the class. On my first go around at school I did a load of revision and got three ‘O’levels and this time round I did bugger all work, because I’m so hard and straight and cool (sorry, I still have the need to insert Young Ones quotes into every possible sentence, it was that important to us) and left, somehow with four more. Another early pointer that work doesn’t pay.

I enjoyed meeting people outside of my previous, almost entirely white male environment and I enjoyed warping my accent into the pure Sahf Landan that so disappointed my mum, I loved Anne-Marie from Brixton’s raucous laugh, Tony from Carshalton’s Escort XR3I, in which he turned up at mine one afternoon saying ‘my dad died yesterday, but it’s alright coz I got his car’ and a sweet Mauritian girl called Devi, who I spoke to on the phone for about two hours a couple of days after college finished, putting the world to rights and reminiscing, in the way seventeen year olds can do about things that happened mere weeks before.

‘We probably won’t speak to each other again’ she finished ‘have a nice life and I’ll see you in heaven’

I never spoke to any of them again, but I hope to see Devi on the other side, it would be nice to catch up.

W*RK (PART I)

I consider probably my singular greatest achievement to be my long term avoidance of the great four letter word.

Work.

But now I’ve mentioned it, I might as well try and summarise the few bits that I have done.

Saturday Jobs.

Do ‘Saturday jobs’ still exist in the way they did in the 80s? And did they exist before that? I have very little frame of reference as the only person I know even remotely that age is my godson, who is studying drums at BIMM in Brighton (and who, incidentally was the unwitting two-year-old inspiration for my purchasing my first ukulele, but that’s another story for another time) and he seems to be doing some vague online-based drum tutoring, which I guess is increasingly the nature of ‘work’ as it currently stands- less structured and more ‘gig’-ish.

Anyhoo, let’s start with those, shall we?

Church Hill Road greengrocers.

I’ve no idea how I got this job. I must have just gone in there and asked the owners if they needed any help. Luckily they were more than happy to take on a hapless 14 year old who they could get to sit in the cold early spring days under a corrugated iron lean-to washing potatoes in a bath (the potatoes were in the bath, not me) all day for 90p an hour.

After a hard day’s scrubbing I would go home with the princely sum of £6.30 for a day’s work.

Now, I was not enamoured with school by any means, but this introduction to the crushing mundanity of the working world more than likely begat my general disdain for such things and inspired me to avoid the whole thing by any means necessary.

Anyhoo, I didn’t last long and finally cracked when, instead of my usual start time of 10am, the owner asked me to come in a bit earlier.

‘how much earlier?’ I asked

‘5am’ they said

One day the following week I went in and made up a story about having been picked to play cricket for Surrey and would hence forth be handing in my notice.

He didn’t seem too fussed.

Allders of Sutton

Having taken a gap year from the working world I got myself a Saturday job at the local department store, whilst there were still such things as ‘local department stores’. I thought it would have been a bit of a doddle, but instead I was employed as what they called ‘a mobile’, which meant that every Saturday morning I would report to the personnel office and be sent off to any department which happened to be a bit short-staffed that day. This meant that, even though I worked there for the best part of perhaps nine months, I never knew what I was doing. I never had a role to ease into. Every Saturday I was chucked in with people I didn’t know, doing jobs I didn’t know and having to explain products to customers when I had less of a clue about them than they did.

I made no friends, as it’s not easy to make chums when you’re only spending a few hours with anyone and those few hours tended to be spent stood about in silence waiting for an unwitting member of the public to ask you a question, the answer to which you are, at best unlikely to know unless it’s ‘where’s the toilet?’. Every week at least one customer would ask me if it was ‘my first day’, to which I would have to reply ‘no, I’ve been here for months’. This tended to inspire a sort of ‘oh, isn’t he doing well for a simpleton’ sort of smile.

I made only one notable impression on the place and that was on one glorious afternoon when I was instructed to send some cash through the pneumatic tubes- an archaic system of pipes which apparently ran throughout the shop, through which cylinders containing cash would be sent to…wherever they were sent to. I think I was in the ‘white goods’ department on this day and the manager or whoever he was handed me a small wad of notes and coins and told me to ‘send it through the tubes’. I remember looking at the monies in my hand, then looking at the ‘hatch’ of the pipe, then looking back at the money before simply shrugging, opening the hatch and just bunging the money into it, sans the cylinder within which it was supposed to travel. The whole thing made the most almighty clanking noise which caused heads to turn in all directions as the loose change made it random way around the tubes, ending up i don’t know where.

Apparently the whole thing cost the store a lot of money to repair. I don’t remember getting into much trouble for it, even though it was clearly my fault.

I think I left soon after that, as it was about time I set about failing my ‘O’levels. Which I did with flying colours.

ADVENTURES IN MENZOBLIA

As I’ve already mentioned, I was a shy child. Nothing illustrates this better than Menzoblia and, in particular its language- Menzoblian.

This may well be the title of a forthcoming, separate book about mental health issues and general neuro-spiciness in teenagers, but it’s not yet, so here we go…

Once the Jim & Eggie Songbook project was abruptly cancelled Eggie and I continued our ennui-relief in class in class by, for starters inventing a set of Top Trumps cards based around other members of our school year, but to avoid libel actions or, more likely than that the occasional kicking we toyed with the subjects names, eventually forming a number of linguistic tics to separate them from the real world. Our main trick was to swap out the ‘son’ on the end of some kids’ names with ‘zoom’, thus forth Danny Anderson became Danny Anderzoom.

As time went on and our Trumps collection grew we detached the characters entirely from real life and began inventing people ourselves. These people, we decided had to be from somewhere. So we invented a made up country called Menzoblia and our game became Menzoblian Top Trumps.

So we had a country and a developing population, now all we needed was a language. So we invented one of those.

God, school must have been boring. My school reports would famously (in my parents’ eyes) be littered with ‘he would do much better if he stopped looking out of the window/ daydreaming etc’. It’s a cliché but I suppose clichés are there for a reason. My mind could rarely focus on anything unless I was absolutely invested and interested in it. This trait continues to this very day. Just ask my (spoiler alert) wife. If something piques my interest then the rest of the entire world falls away and I can lose hours and days and weeks and, perhaps about nineteen years in whatever world I have either invented or decided to involve myself in and I involved myself wholeheartedly in co-inventing Menzoblian as a language.

It was only a written language, basically replacing western letters with hieroglyphic symbols, like a swirl for an ‘e’ or…I’ll need to consult my notebooks to remember, but it was an alphabet replacement. Like many of these things in which I involve others I think Eggie lost interest after a while but I kept the notebook in which the alphabet was invented.

And the following is how the sort of hyper-focus I just mentioned meets extreme shyness to create, well…

By this point I was becoming quite prolific on the recording front. I was knocking out tune after tune on my karaoke machine which were effectively backing tracks, but I felt that they needed some lyrics, so I started writing some.

In Menzoblian.

Lots of them.

Before long I had two notebooks entirely full of these odd little symbols that only I could decode. So now nobody would hear my music and, even more so nobody could read my lyrics. This is just as well as, as far as I can remember (and I will one day re-decipher them) they were sub-Prince sex fantasies and ham-fisted teenage social commentary, so almost certainly not worth reading at all. I will keep you informed though, in case I do manage to work out what those squiggles meant.

Most music autobiographies at this point head in the direction of trying to get signed or noticed or collecting like-minded band mates, on a quest to conquer the world and all that. This one follows a boy who just wanted to listen to some music himself. Some music that he made. Some music that he didn’t want anyone else to hear in case they didn’t like it and he would have to do something else instead. Something that he didn’t love, but saved him any embarrassment. Which is probably what would have happened.

I always marvel at the sports cliché that pundits always say which suggests that young players ‘have no fear’. It’s one of the greats. Any teenage footballer is always utterly unbowed to authority or older players or managers, they’re ‘fearless’ and therefore free to express themselves on the pitch.

I remember very little but fear. It wasn’t a crushing fear, I lived in a loving family who could afford to holiday at Warners holiday camps once a year and I got cheap synths for Christmas and what-not, I had little to worry about, but worry I did.

Nuclear war, we all loved that little dread in the early to mid eighties; parents dying; a general lack of control over your own life; getting the shit kicked out of you by a gang outside school at thirteen years old…all the usual things, but I was quite crushed by it all for a while.

And so my lyrics remained un-translated and it took another few years for me to open my vault up for a listen.

And it will take me even longer to re-learn Menzoblian.

Wasted Youth

In most of the photos of me as a wee child I’m holding a musical instrument.

In the first I’m a baby, sat up holding a little mallet and hitting a mini xylophone. I’m assuming this was taken by my nan as I recognise her carpet and everything above my mouth is out of shot. Another has me leaning into my mum and blowing on a harmonica, in another I’m looking nervously at the camera holding, I’m assuming the same little mallet and whacking a xylophone, held by my grandad in his lap. I’m sure he was probably more nervous than me. Most of the others feature young me holding a guitar or a ukulele.

I’m always just holding the neck around the back. My fingers never touching the fretboard. Nobody ever told me that you were supposed to press your fingers on the frets to make different notes, because nobody in my family knew that either, because nobody in my family was remotely musical. I think my auntie queen played the piano back in the day, but outside of that not a single Burke had shown any musical aptitude or a desire to try or encourage us to, so I enjoyed the instruments in ignorant bliss of technique for the few festive days I owned each of them until I inevitably broke them, which was usually around new year’s eve. Few made it into the next year.

From the age of six or so, as far as presents went I was distracted by the likes of Batman (my brother got Robin), Stretch Monster (my brother got Stretch Armstrong), Action man (mine bearded and brunette (can a man be brunette? Should it just be ‘brunet’?), my brother’s clean shaven and blonde), Octopus on the Nintendo Game & Watch (my brother got Fire Attack) and my Raleigh Grifter (the most memorable birthday surprise, sat, as it was by the French windows in the dining room as if waiting to get out and live as ponch from CHiPs’s bike), but at the age of 11, after a brief dalliance with the guitar, upon which I only really learned how to play, in another ‘inadvertently inventing hip-hop’ way ‘Apache’ I awoke Christmas morning 1981 to find a little plastic sleeve, cream in colour with brown piping and the legend ‘Casio’ diagonally across it, within which was an object that would change my life forever…

The Casio VL-1.

Otherwise known as the VL-Tone, this was a beautiful piece of design. Small enough to carry in a coat pocket, oblong and white with a two octave keyboard, the keys separated from each other as little black and white buttons, a tasteful speaker taking up about a quatre of it on one end next to a small LED display and some coloured buttons and switches to change tone, rhythm, octave and tempo. It was a glorious thing to behold and, for its time a wonderful thing to hear. It’s 8-bit sounds and, in particular the drum machine, the sound of which was made famous by German band Trio on their hit ‘Da, Da ,Da’. I was obsessed and, as much as it was limited in its music making scope, I made a point of playing with it every single day for pretty much the whole of the next year. Even if I’d forgotten to one day, I’d get it out of its sleeve and play a few notes before bed.

(Did rich get a tape-to tape boombox then ?)

A while after that…it may have been my birthday the following April, although I do remember finding it in a wardrobe in my parents’ bedroom alongside my brother in what would have been a pre-Christmas ruin-the-surprise type raid, so it must have been the following Christmas, I got a tape-to-tape proto-karaoke machine- basically an amp with two tape decks on top and a rudimentary reverb/delay dial for making your voice sound remotely palatable.

My voyage as a recording artist had begun.

The first thing I remember recording was an untitled Instrumental (apart from a vague noise I seemed to make with my mouth when recording the guitar part) electro rockabilly number.

I programmed a basic 12 bar blues/ rockabilly bassline into the Vl-1, recorded it onto tape, then switched into the ‘play’ deck and popped a fresh tape into the ‘record’ deck and, with extreme precision started the VL-1’s ‘swing’ beat over the top of it and recorded both of them onto that tape, then switched them over again and played an almost skanking guitar (on a Kay electric guitar I borrowed from my cousin, who was in a punk band called ‘St.Vitus Dance’, a classic ‘let’s form a band off the back of punk’ outfit, like hundreds of other school bands inspired by the movement that I was too young for, but would have suited the likes of me right down to the ground, whose big ‘hit’ I remember being a lovely little racket called ‘Go Away’, which had very few lyrics aside from the shouted title) skanked over the top of that. As far as I remember that was it. I may have recorded some sort of VL-1 piano medley over the top but I’ll never know as some of these early tapes are now lost in the midst of time, more than likely victim to one of my mum’s occasional ‘themed’ Chuck-outs, like ‘Jim’s bucket of tapes’ or ‘the boys’ Star Wars toys’ or, rather harshly ‘all of Richard’s correspondence from his 18 months travelling. That one was a bit of a shocker, but it had the desired effect- the following week my brother and I cleared all out most prized possessions out of the Cheambeat Loft (tm) (…more of that later).

Not always wishing to fly solo I formed two or three bands at the time. First up I cajoled my best friend at the time Robert into forming a Rockabilly band with me called ‘The Rebels’, which was a band in name only as the only thing I remember recording was a track called ‘The Wildcats Are Coming To Town’ (I’m pretty sure I rhymes with ‘so everybody look around’, as one would as a young neo rockabilly, it wasn’t rocket surgery) and that I recorded on my own. I think Robert may have banged on a biscuit tin, so he was the drummer. Bless him for coming along for the ride. I’m fairly sure he wasn’t remotely interested in any of it.

The second was Burkie & The Bees, my crude rip-off of Adam & The Ants. I think I did this with my friend Lee Coombs, but again we only recorded one thing- a vague reworking of ‘Ant Rap’ called ‘Mousetrap’ that I recorded solo, accompanied only by the aforementioned biscuit tin for a little radio show thing that some geeky kids from school made.

The third was Take Three, formed with my younger brother and my even younger cousin, ‘Take’ being an amalgam of Taylor and Burke, our surnames and ‘Three’ being, well, the number of members in the band.

Once again the first thing we recorded I did alone, and only half finished. It was called ‘Space Rap’ and was, I’m going to claim pretty much the first UK hip hop track ever recorded. In Cheam.

It was, at best basic. Early hip hop flow was made largely of pretty simple rhyming couplets and this was considerably more simple than any of those. Again the VL-1 was at the fore, with its ‘rock 2’ beat and my rudimentary rhymes about early 80s sci-fi. How I wish I still had a copy, but it was another victim of my mum’s occasional Stalinist clear-outs. Probably for the best.

Around this time I somehow managed to pass my eleven plus exam and atarted at Sutton Manor Grammar School for boys.

The London Borough of Sutton is an unremarkable place, as I’ve mentioned before, but it does have an inordinate number of grammar schools compared to other London boroughs and so it was I found myself, quite unexpectedly passing my eleven plus exam and donning the burgundy blazer on a grey September morning in 1981 and taking my first walk to Sutton Manor grammar school for boys.

The very first lesson I had was maths with the headmaster, which was scary as he was the headmaster and my previous experience of such people was genuinely terrifying. He kept his gown bib throughout the lesson and I rarely remember him removing it for the rest of the time he was at the school.

My time there was as unremarkable as Sutton itself- pockets of violence, as many laughs as I could drag out of it and a lot of boredom.

I did enjoy an early thrill of blagging when, at the end of the first year, having not played a minute of football for the School team I was picked as reserve goalkeeper for the for the Sutton borough schools cup final. I did get a bump of enjoyment from showing off my utterly undeserved deal on the coach back to school, having added a total of zero extra minutes to my playing time.

In the second year I won the unofficial detention prize for most detentions in a year. I wasn’t badly behaved, I must have just been very bad at hiding my ambivalence and, for teachers the ambivalence of pupils is even more unbearable than their own. I spent most of my time waiting for art lessons. I loved art lessons. Our teacher was a delightfully eccentric welshman called Mr. Jeffries, whose demonstration at the start of the first lesson of how to wash the brushes and pallets was a work of manic, comic genius.

‘Washwashwash! Brushbrushbrush! Drydrydry!’

He was also that teacher, I’m hoping most of us had one, who recognised that I had some talent and encouraged it. He wouldn’t outwardly show it during lessons, he was too busy being manic and amusing, but his comments on my work and in school reports let me know that I was doing well and to a shy youngster who didn’t appear to be much cop academically and was average at best on the sport front, the two tings that mattered at Sutton Manor.

Years later I would occasionally bump into him at Tooting Broadway tube station, where he worked after retiring from teaching. He recognised me immediately and would regale me with fun tales of the London Underground:

‘One chap nicked someone’s shopping bag, jumped over the barrier and ran off down the escalator. Only trouble was, it was the ‘up’ escalator, so I heard an almighty crash, then saw all this fruit and veg popping back up the top’.

Throughout my time at grammar school I was making music at home on my own.

Once I got the hang of this lark I was hooked. I retreated to the bedroom I shared with my brother, who was far more active and enjoyed going outdoors and that sort of thing. This left me free to pursue my studio tan and make music to my heart’s content, as much as an early pubescent boy can be content at all. I fell quickly into love with making music. I filled tapes and tapes of what developed into largely instrumental, sludgy funk, especially after I discovered Prince at the age of about 13.

But I never played them to anyone.

The thing is, I was a very shy child. Maybe it was something about being the middle child, although I was in an odd situation in which I was the second born, but my older sister has a learning disability, so I was in semi-default as ‘the mature one’. Either way, I enjoyed being on my own and making music more than anything else so perhaps that stunted my social skills somewhat. There was also another event which I know made me further want to beat my retreat from society.

One afternoon, a thirteen year old me and some of my friends popped to Dobb’s sweet shop, a five minute walk away from the school, to get some chocolate after lunch. On our way back I saw a couple of the sixth formers getting jumped on just outside the school gates by three kids who weren’t from our school. It seemed like just a bit of a lark, so I ignored it and carried on my gentle amble. Just as we were about to enter the school, the kids approached us. One of them said to me ‘It’s alright, we’re not after you’, I said ‘what?’ And the next thing I knew my Double Decker had been slapped away from its journey into my gob and I was on the floor getting my head kicked in by three older kids I’d never spoken to before.

I curled up into a ball, just to minimise the possible damage being done, as I had no idea how long this was going to go on for. Luckily for me a couple of workmen stepped in and stopped it.

‘He punched my brother!’ Said the main attacker as a means of explanation

‘What?’ I said again, but decided not to quiz any further as my previous ‘what?’ Had not gone down to well and anyway, it was time for me to now leg it back into the relative safety of the school.

I found an empty classroom, sat on the window sill, had a feel inside my shirt and around my head for numerous bumps and bruises, then had a little cry.

A few of the kids at school heard about it and I got scant sympathy from them, to the point that a rumour somehow started that I’d been beaten up by a child in a wheelchair so then I never told anyone about it for a few years after that. Particularly not my mum and dad. I just didn’t want to spoil their day. They were nice people and I loved then, so I didn’t want to upset them. So I kept it in and let it fester for a bit. Always the best way for an Englishman to deal with trauma.

Reading this back to myself I realise that this was a moment that lead me, violently and inadvertantly into the musical life. I became nervous of going out and preferred to stay in my bedroom recording tunes and learning how to play as many instruments as I could blag my parents into buying for me whilst keeping myself hidden, as much as possible away from society in general. So, in a way thanks to those three older kids who kicked my head in outside school on lunch break in nineteen eighty three. You were an inspiration.

Around this time I struck up a friendship with a kid in my class who was nicknamed Eggie. I’ve no idea why. It wasn’t a pun on his name and I don’t remember him having any proclivity for dairy products, but anyhoo, that was what we called him.

We sat together in a couple of classes and started writing some rude songs about the teachers. Really rude songs. I started writing them down in a school notebook thing we imaginatively called ‘The Jim & Eggie Songbook’. This became a Lieber/Stoller style songwriting partnership. If Lieber and Stoller were a couple of immature grammar school kid trying to make Each other laugh in class. We whiled away many a physics or French lesson writing increasingly rude songs about the teachers, culminating in our masterpiece ‘Wilson, Wilson’ about the titular female French teacher, which featured a particularly unsavoury rhyming couplet about what she might be doing while she was ‘sitting up the front’.

The songwriting partnership was hastily disbanded after one night at home, when my mum accosted me in the hallway and handed me the sacred ‘Jim & Eggie Songbook’- a school exercise pad in red with the title written on it in bubble letters and awaited an explanation as my brother, who had just appeared behind her, having clearly pointed her in its general direction looked on with gleeful expectation.

One thing I did that almost resembled a band was with my friend Simon French and we called it The Sexy Chemists- so called because it seemed to us, in our teenage eyes that every pharmacy had at least one pulchritudinous employee.

We wrote a few songs, or at leats had names for some, like the unrecorded ‘Bobby Grant Nose Explosion’- a paean to Brookside’s patriarch. I think we only managed to record one track, but it was a banger. It was all distorted guitar, overdriven drum machine and a slap bass, compressed to death due to the nature of tape-to-tape recording and it was called ‘My Thingy’. The lyrics started thus:

‘My thingy can’t pay the milkman,

My thingy can’t pay the bills,

But I know my thingy

Can give you precious thrills’

I made the music and Simon sang. And crikey Moses he belted it out. This usually shy fourteen year old became a writhing, panting rock god, somewhere between Prince, Michael Hutchence and Basil Fawlty. We’d made some sort of filthy funk rock classic, so of course we did nothing with it and that was the last of it and not even the first that anyone apart from the two of us ever heard of it. A year later it was at Simon’s house that I first heard Public Enemy’s ‘you’re Gonna Get yours’ on John Peel’s radio show. We found the sheer fury in their voices amusing, but it struck a chord with me. I didn’t even know at the time that they were yet another Def Jam Golden Age act. Things would change after that.

But, once ‘My Thingy’ was done we’d shot our thingies and it was time to knuckle down and concentrate hard on failing my ‘o’ levels, which I did with, to quote a phrase, with an absolute plomb. I even managed, as someone who generally excelled in the subject to get a ‘U’, the lowest grade possible in English Language. I can only chalk that down to my somewhat Bret Easton-Ellis style take on the ‘write a story about…’ question. One of the options was ‘The Party’ and I don’t think the exam board was quite ready for my no-holds-barred take on the sort of vom-and-snog house parties sixteen year olds were attending in the mid eighties.

And so it came to pass that I found myself sat next to my mum in the headmasters office, being told that I wasn’t welcome at the school anymore. I got kicked out of school. Which is a great rock’n’roll headline. Just don’t read any further to the bit when it explains it was because I was just too thick to stay.

‘Don’t do anything silly’ was what my mum said she dropped me off at a (more academically successful) friend’s house on the day of the results. Assuming she was worried about my mental health so I assured her I wouldn’t.

Looking back now I think she was in fact more concerned that I might end up doing exactly what I’m doing now, so I lied. Sorry mother.

In a post script to Sutton Manor (now called Sutton Grammar School). When the internet turned up and google started taking photos of the earth from space it turned out that a formation of bricks, forming a large structure spelling out the word ‘Cock’ was spotted on the roof of the building. Nobody will ever know how long it had been there.

Chapter: Junior School

A lot of parents around our way sent their kids to Cheam C of E Junior Boys school because although it was a state funded it was run like a prep school. I had no idea what that meant at the time, but clearly it meant those places were run with an iron fist. That iron fist in this case belonged to the headmaster, who was a local vicar. I’m sure he felt like he did everything for the good of the school and its reputation and clearly most of the parents agreed with him, but as far as the kids were concerned he was a psychopath.

As scary as he was (and believe me, he was genuinely terrifying. A giant of a man, round and bald with bulging eyes and large, slightly purple lips from which the spittle would fly when he spoke, or mainly shouted, giving him his nickname ‘Gobby’) the one lesson I took away from junior school was the power of keeping calm in the face of authority.

I learnt this lesson from a mousey little kid called Andrew. One morning he was dragged through assembly by Gobby in one of his regular kangaroo courts/ humiliations/ beatings.

This was at the turn of the 1970s into the 1980s, not ‘Oliver’, but this sort of thing still went on. Gilbert flung Andrew onto the stage, I think the charge was theft, but it could well have been just breathing too loud. It seems he’d pocketed something as he was promptly turned upside down and shaken from his ankles to see if whatever contraband was in his pockets, all whilst the spittle flew from Gobby’s luscious lips.

All us kids, sat cross-legged on the school hall floor were open-mouthed in terror. This was not an unusual occurrence, but it was unsettling every time, as you never knew if Gobby would get bored with his current victim and pick a new quarry from the rest of us.

Andrew, on the other hand was stone-faced and nonchalant. Utterly unbowed and seemingly without a care in the world. He kept a straight face throughout the entire ordeal.

I knew at this moment my life had changed forever.

As a child I’d simply assumed that the natural reaction to a telling off or anything approaching it was tears and upset. I had no idea there was another option. I’m not quite sure how healthy it is in the long run, but the scales had fallen from my eyes and I had a new path. I would now embark upon a life of being unmoved by those in authority.

Or at least trying not to openly weep in front of it.

This would lead to a high point in my life very few years later when I would win the detention prize (unofficial) in the second year of senior school.

In a cruel twist of fate first year art class and choir practice happened at the same time, so I chose art, but seeing as most of my life outside school was spent drawing comics and the like I changed my mind after a term or so and decided to have a crack at a bit of singing, so I joined the choir.

This was a bit of a disaster.

By the time I joined they were already halfway through rehearsals for, funnily enough Lionel Bart’s ‘Oliver!’, so I was added to the chorus having learned none of the lyrics. At one point, during a visit, or more like an ‘inspection’ from the headmaster I somehow ended up at the front of the gang of orphans, me-mawing as many words as I could remember of ‘Food, Glorious Food’, like former Tory minister for Wales John Redwood being ambushed by the Welsh national anthem as Gobby stood on, frowning grimly and brandishing the truncheon (yes, a truncheon) he used to carry to keep kids who had not done their rehearsing properly in check. By this time my nerves were shot to bits. I got through the final performance but decided to leave the choir straight after that.

It turned out that leaving the choir was not quite as simple as I’d anticipated. It was a bit like leaving the Church of Scientology. Once you were in, you couldn’t get out. It’s possible that the Cheam C of E Choir might still have me under surveillance, but seeing as the school was demolished in the early 90s and replaced with some houses I’m probably alright.

I remember what seemed like months, but was probably a couple of weeks, of meetings, tears, pleadings and an angry headmaster which, as I’ve described was not unusual but made a difference when the anger was aimed at me, until one day I decided to take one last roll of the dice. One last attempt at freedom. One afternoon at the start of choir practice I tentatively approached the choir mistress.

‘Miss?’ I began, as bravely as could be mustered

‘Yes?’

‘Can I leave the choir and go back to art class?’

‘Go on then.’

She didn’t even look at me. I legged it sharpish just in case she became less distracted by nothing in particular and changed her mind.

I returned to the stage three years later, in a play called ‘Not The Truth About Icarus’, a comedy about an early attempt at manned flight written by our art and drama teacher. He gave me the title role, he had done for his aborted previous play ‘Not The Truth About William Tell’ (I think he was trying to get a film franchise on the go). He also painted a portrait of me that hung in my parents’ bedroom for years after.

Yes, I believe I was his favourite.

Yep.

Years later I saw a photo of him on short-lived proto-social media site Friends Reunited. He was stood behind ten boys who were all wearing swimming trunks. He was wearing a flared suit and had a big grin on his face. The caption below read:

‘I don’t know why we’re wearing trunks, we were the chess team’.

…….

I was born in the same house that my mum still, at the time of writing lives today. She was in labour with me for an hour and twenty minutes and the ambulance hadn’t even arrived when I almost shot off the end of the bed, which was apparently raised up on bricks so the midwife could get to me. I don’t know where my mum got the bricks from and how she managed to bung them under the legs, but it happened.

‘You’ve never moved as fast since’ is a family joke.

That house is in Cheam, a small suburban town ten miles or so south west of Charing Cross and fictional home of Tony Hancock. He apparently lived in East Cheam, which does not actually exist, but if it did, that’s where our house would have been.

My dad was a big fan of Hancock and we had an album of ‘The Blood Donor’ and other episodes of the legendary sitcom. I didn’t understand them as a child- it wasn’t my place to, but these little works of genius about a man who thought he was better than the little world in which he lived, but clearly was not would go on to influence so much of my work. He was what Cheam was all about. Or at least he was trying to escape what Cheam was all about. He was the suburban dreamer, the man with ideas above his station in a place where one’s station was pretty much settled at birth.

It’s not the sort of place set up to make people want to leave. It’s pleasant enough, Sutton has one of the lowest crime rates in London, (although you wouldn’t think so on a Saturday nights on the high street) there’s plenty of green space and nobody has any real need to complain, apart from writing to newspapers as ‘disgusted of...’

Cheam is a classic piece of English suburbia, the ‘commuter belt’, where even as late as 1989, when local non-league club Sutton United triumphed over top tier and 1987 cup winners Coventry City in the FA cup fourth round legendary BBC commentator John Motson suggested that their fans were celebrating by ‘throwing their bowler hats in the air’.

Looking at the Wikipedia page for Cheam, it seems the only other thing it is known for is the disappearance of 15 year old schoolboy in 1988. His mum, bless her, still lives a few doors away from mine. She can’t move. Just in case.

So, save for one tragic event nothing much happens in Cheam, apart from the occasional parking dispute, or Vic from across the road berating me for turning my Ford Fiesta round on his driveway in the late 80s. It is very much, as Paul Turner, lyricist of my first band Skank Thing would put it ‘where the only crisis is a roast joint under-done’.

And so I was born into cosy suburbia in a cosy home on a slightly too busy road, to a family with working class south London roots, although my paternal grandparents were from Lancashire, they moved down south when my grandad got a job helping to build and consequently work in Battersea Power station. During the war my dad was evacuated back to Lancashire to stay with some aunties and seemed to thoroughly enjoy his status as an exotic creature from the capital.

My mum’s side were pure south London types- my Nan from Peckham and my grandad from Brixton. Their wedding was interrupted by an air raid and they had their reception in a bomb shelter in Morden.

My dad worked for the GLC (the Greater London Council) under the stewardship of Ken livingstone- the socialist thorn in Maggie thatcher’s ultra-libertarian side.

My dad’s job was to check fire doors and safety standards of public buildings. On his first day he went to a restaurant somewhere in West London at lunchtime with a senior colleague and was wined and dined for a couple of hours by the proprietor before giving the place the safety thumbs-up, having not done an awful lot of checking. Upon leaving said establishment dad found himself setting off in the opposite direction to his colleague.

‘Where are you off to?’ His colleague asked

‘Back to the office’ replied father

‘Don’t be silly, just go home’ he was told.

So he did.

He stayed in this job, as it was right up his street, up until Maggie had the whole GLC closed down out of spite.

Mum largely stayed at home and looked after us kids. Me, my younger brother and my older sister, as was the wont of women generally in the early-to-mid 70s. During the Christmas season she would work at Marks and Spencer’s on the tills on Saturdays and that would mean fish and chips with dad. He was not a cook. I remember him making beans on toast once. His idea of stirring the beans was to stroke them gently with a wooden spoon, just on the surface, as if petting a cat and we ended up with beans that were shiny on top and caked to the pan below.

In the late sixties my folks did the whole move-out-of London thing and bought a place in Aylesford, a village just outside Maidstone in Kent. My sister was born there and all was well until she started having fits as a baby. It turned out that, apparently she had received some brain damage because of a whooping cough vaccination and this was causing both fits and stunting her learning. A say ‘apparently’ as we can never be quite sure and also, the debate about vaccinations was considerably less ferral in the late 60s, so we’ll just leave it at that and move on. My parents decided to move back to south London to be nearer my grandparents so they could help with caring for my sister and also because my dad was a bit bored and missed ‘London life’, not that he was some sort of dandy, carousing around the streets of Soho, but he just felt like he was missing out. He always loved London and was suffering what at that time wasn’t called FOMO.

My brother was born twenty three months after me and I always take pleasure in informing him that he was only born so I could have someone to play with.

When asked (as I never am) about my earliest memory, the only thing that springs to mind is sitting in the living room, looking at a cigarette card depicting what I believe is the Montgolfier hot air balloon- an ornate, blue easter egg looking thing from the late 1700s. I must have been impressed by it and, seeing as my first memory of going to the cinema was to see ‘Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines’ this probably should have ended up being the memoir of an airline pilot, but that would have been far too full of adventure for my liking. I’m just a not-quite-successful rock’n’roll star.

So, early life…let’s get this out of the way because unless it’s full of pain nobody wants to hear about some stranger’s early life.

To sum up, long, sunny summers, especially that of 1976, when my main memory was of a school sports day when I won the backwards bunnyhope race (why was the backwards bunnyhop never an Olympic sport? I could have gone pro), the smell of the petrol being pumped into Dad’s Mark 2 Cortina by Dave who owned the little garage on our street, Sunny Christmas days (is it just my odd memory or was every Christmas Day in the1970s gloriuosly sunny?), cycling about on my Grifter with my brother, pretending to be Ponch and John from CHiPs, my nan falling off a space hopper in the back garden as caught on my uncle’s cinefilm camera.

………………………………………

Introduction:

Narcilation

On Tuesday, 6th October 2021 I set up my living room, ready to stream in the manner to which I had become accustomed since the first lockdown of March 2020. I erected the ironing board in the corner of my living room, upon which I placed a towel (wouldn’t want any accidents involving beer, wine or general filthy electrical equipment), a couple of books, upon which I popped my iPad mini, a mixer on the metal bit where the iron usually goes and my laptop on the other end, precariously overlooking proceedings. In the middle was an assortment of noise making implements like spoons, a kazoo, a sopranino ukulele and, hanging from the board an atomatone- a musical note shaped tadpole looking thing with a sonic strip up its ‘neck’ that made a sound like a stylophone with a rubber mouth that gave it a subtle ‘wah’ effect. This was my standard Tuesday evening now, but this one was just a little bit different.

I turned 50 at the very start of the pandemic. I had a big party planned, my friend Kunt and The Gang was going to come out of retirement to play it. I’d asked him not to play his song ‘Paperboy’, his response to which was ‘well I’m definitely gonna play it then’ and people had booked trains and flights from all over the shop to come along. Then the pandemic hit and that was the end of that. I remember my 40th Birthday bash happening during the Icelandic volcano ash cloud thingy and a lot of people missed out on that as all flights had been grounded. I’d probably best not bother booking anything for my 60th or it’ll go all Terminator 2. It’s heading that way anyway, but I’d best not encourage it.

Seeing as everyone was stuck indoors on my birthday in April of 2020 I decided to jump on Facebook and have a party at home, so I set things up as previously described and, using Traktor on the iPad did a four hour DJ set to what ended up being a couple of hundred Facebook types. It was a lot of fun. We managed to score a few beers from The Lord Of Wine, a local shop that delivered supplies within about 45 minutes if you texted them what you wanted (bless you, oh Lord) and just had ourselves a bit of a bash. It went down so well that a few people started asking me to do it again the following week, so I did. And then I did it again the week after that, and then again and again and then I had my Facebook account suspended for repeated copyright strikes, so I moved the whole operation over to Mixcloud, which apparently paid PRS and was there specifically as a platform for DJs.

After a few weeks a small community formed around these ’Niceolation Parties’ as I called them. The sidebar of chit-chat became a place for people from all over the world (that makes it sound like there were loads of them when there were maybe fifty or so) to catch up on their weeks of doing nothing indoors and making food out of scraps (that’s what we did wasn’t it? A couple of years later and I already don’t quite remember how apocalyptic or not it was, all I remember is quite enjoying the relative solitude). But they became friends- trusted compadrés who would share cocktail ideas and news or gossip or talk about where they were from or just enjoy listening to whatever music I was playing. They christened themselves ‘The Nice Biscuits’ and have since formed friendships and have regularly, bit-by-bit met up with each other and indeed with me.

Obviously during these sessions a played a lot of my own music. A lot. Frankly I was taking the piss. Not only that but after a year or so, having spent so much time mixing tunes that I decided to mash some together, rather than just mix one into another and started recording my own mashups.

Since the death of rock’n’roll as a going concern in the early 90s (which will will discuss at length later on) I’ve been a fan of mashups, or, in ‘I’m Sorry, I haven’t a Clue’ Radio 4 speak ‘one song to the tune of another’. In the same way as I got into sampling as a means of culturally signposting your ideas, mashups were a great way of, at the very least tweaking the nose of popular taste. I’ve enjoyed mashing indie gods like New Order with the light entertainment likes of Russ Abbot, or rescuing a great song like ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ from the evil grip of its singer, R Kelly and mashing it with the accapella of ‘I Wish I Could Fly’ by Keith Harris and Orville. Actually I think that one may have broken me, as I’ve not mashed since then, I think I may have jumped the shark with that one.

After a year or so of weekly Niceolation parties, someone suggested I do a night of just my music, or at least music that I’d been involved in, so I spent a few weeks dragging music off of cassettes and minidiscs and ended up with a playlist that was over a day long. On the night I went through my choice cuts chronologically, from my teenage years recording overdubs on a karaoke machine right through to the birth of Chap-Hop. I’d natter away about each tune and give its history, circumstances and weaved a few tales about it all. By the time I got to about five hours I’d not even reached the birth of Chap-Hop yet, so continued the thing the following week, ending up with about nine hours of ‘Narcilation’ (get it?).

It was then when I had the idea of writing this book. I’d been doing this for about forty years now, thirty of them being, for want of a better word ‘professionally’ and, although I will warn you in advance that this is not ‘The Dirt’. There are few ‘rock’n’roll’ stories here, (although there will be a discussion about Rock’n’Roll behaviour itself later. Something to look forward to) but it turns out that, even though it seems to me like I’ve spent thirty years sitting about in my pants watching telly, then, as telly became obsolete watching YouTube I have in fact done quite a lot of different things and a great deal of it has been entirely independent. I have no idea quite how this happened, so perhaps this is my way of getting everything down on paper and figuring out myself how a lazy young man (and then older man) forged what he may now begrudgingly call a career in music. On his own terms. Mainly.

And what better time to start than during lockdown, when most of the world’s population were forced into a life of laziness for a bit.

Lockdown was very reminiscent of the dole. As a self-employed person I’d managed to blag the government grant which paid me about eighty percent of my projected earnings during the pandemic, so I was getting money from the government, albeit a tad more than my income support in 1993 and I had even more time than usual to explore some creative avenues.

And sit around in my pants.

Lockdown was basically dole with less financial worry but a bit more global existential angst.

And so I started writing down a few anecdotes and began trying to piece together how this all happened. Memory is an inexact science, as I have gathered already in starting this book. Having spoken to many of those involved in this little voyage it seems our recollections of things vary regularly, so this is a disclaimer to say that this is my story as I remember it and sometimes it’s best to print the legend. Plus it’s likely to be a bit more interesting that way.

…….

Narcilation and Niceolation parties are available to listen to on https://www.mixcloud.com/GentlemanRhymer/

Here we go then…

Preface: Elvis’ Golden Greats

The first connection to music that I remember was a physical one.

I was probably five years old. My mum and dad had a little Dansette record player in the back room of their semi-detached house in Cheam, purchased in 1968 for £6,000 (the house, not the record player, that was probably a bit cheaper). It sat on the floor, underneath a shelf which housed their modest record collection. Crouched next to it, I reached up to pull ‘Elvis’ Golden Greats’ from the shelf. It was a thing of beauty- a single vinyl compilation with a booklet sleeve featuring technicolour portraits of the King.

As my little fingers tugged at the corner of the sleeve the record dislodged itself and fell, sharp edge down onto my forehead. I yelped and my folks came running in to find a newly-born bump on my head, in the centre of which was a valley made by the vinyl impact.

I’ve felt a strong connection to Elvis Presley ever since. I’m always declaring to friends and anyone who is willing to listen that if Elvis hadn’t wandered into Sun studios in 1954 to sing a song for his mum’s birthday then we wouldn’t be doing whatever it is that we happen to be doing. As the years have gone by I’ve expanded the membership of this ‘without ‘x’ we wouldn’t be doing ‘y’’ club to include Baroness Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven, P.G. Wodehouse, Ronald Frankau and DJ Kool Herc.

It’s not a declaration I make without affectation. Things may well have been exactly as they are without all these people. Culture moves forward like a snake, weaving, shifting and occasionally striking out, attacking its prey or devouring a weaker or older creature whole, but it moves ever forward.

I may not have studied snakes enough to use this metaphor, but there you go, I’ve done it now.

But just as Elvis singing a souped-up version of Bill Crudup’s ‘That’s Alright, Mama’ changed the life of the 20th century, then the people and events in this book changed my not-hugely-significant life. Chance meetings, happy accidents, cultural stumblings and general serendipity have lead to my own tiny part in rock’n’roll /music hall/ comedy history.

I absolutely refuse to credit hard work. That would be a depressing conclusion to draw.

So here are some short stories, such as I recall them, that tell the larger tale of my quest to avoid gainful employment and how my dear departed father would, after three decades of enquiry as to my gainful employment eventually say, walking with me back to the car after I played a show in a pub in Putney:

‘I’m glad you never got a proper job’.