Listening back to the recording now and it comes to mind just how noisy, annoying and screechy you are as a kid.
I found a cassette tape, pressed play...
... and magic:
Using his own, unfathomable inner metronome, my young Brother palms a stuttering rhythm on an old brown and white fur covered native American drum, I’m playing a bass guitar that's a little bit big for me, whilst my older Brother delivers the riff to Deep Purple’s 'Smoke on the Water' in barre chords. It’s a cacophony of noise, each trying to outdo the other with volume, intercepted by stabbing arguments. We smash the tape recorders input levels to full distortion, with our high pitched emotional jostling, though my older Brother’s voice is breaking with a refreshing, soothing tone in contrast to the hot heads in his rhythm section. This is my first memory of interacting musically in his room.
You make out in one part an angry, distant shouting from the stairs, to 'keep that bloody noise down, will you', it goes unnervingly, deathly silent for a moment and the screeching instead quietens to frightened, contemplative whisper.
I actually wanted to be a drummer.
My first drum kit was home made. Washed up ice cream tubs flipped upside-down for toms, thick cardboard box for a snare drum, cooking pan lid for a cymbal precariously balanced on a bed post, with a gold plated vinyl rack for hi hats, all along the bedroom floor. I didn't need a drum stool. You use your knees for everything when you're a kid, and even though you stand in later life, you're always, technically, on your knees, so It's good grounding.
“If I ever win the pools I’m going to buy him a drum kit” promised one of my Mum's friends, pulling on a Rothmans kingsize one afternoon, watching me from the doorway of our shared bedroom, through sun lit plumes of cigarette smoke I am happily pummelling ice cream tubs and smashing the cooking pan lid from the bedpost. From that day on, every time I see her, I ask her... Well? It could perceivably happen, I think, and why couldn't it happen?
"Barbara?"
"Yes, my love?"
"Have you won the pools this week?".
“Not this week my love”.
The same rueful answer. Every time.
My Aunty was an influence with the drums, she used to play a snare drum in a marching band, when she wasn't whooping my sorry balls at table tennis, Tuesday nights after school.
Me? I just wanted to hit things.
I got my first drum sticks by pestering my Dad after seeing The Police drummer Stewart Copeland hitting the rockets at Kennedy space centre on Top Of the Pops. I used to walk to the cycle path at the top of my road, pretending the brick and mortar was Cape Canaveral spacecraft, my new drum sticks and me. The medium of early pop video had captured my young imagination. He told me I couldn't have the drum kit, but I got the sticks. I must have been adamant, determined.
Annoying.
He never parted easily with his cash.
Truth is you don't really need a drum kit if you have the fire. I'm in my Sister's room on my knees again, by her record player, air drumming to Black Sabbath’s 'Paranoid', teeth clenched, eyes closed, I am a young plump prepubescent king of my own techni-coloured glorious stereo surround sound imagination, onstage at some Odeon, some tour, somewhere far away from here, full capacity crowd, and had been playing my vinyl so loud that I hadn't noticed my Dad at the bottom of the stairs calling my name and catching me in the act, laughing, I was mortally embarrassed. it's like someone bursting open a toilet door whilst you're crapping one out.
My first unofficial performance, swirly black and white Vertigo label, with a forty five r.p.m plastic spindle snapped to the centre of my newest and most precious love. The centre of my everything. I must have been a 6 or 7 year old.
Music was everything to us in that house, our escape, sanctuary, catharsis, fucking... religion.
Our first loves. We weren't very good at showing it to each other.
Moving from door to door in our Thatcher era 'buy your own' house on our council estate was a musical journey in itself, Mum in the kitchen with Phil and Don Everly, Sister in her room blasting The Who's 'I'm a boy', Dad bellows, lustily, along to Pink Floyd's 'Comfortably Numb' and my Brother shoots to thrill with 1980 AC/DC. It alleviated us and helped drag us a little, from one more of those dreary, oppressive, argumentative and claustrophobic households. A little melody goes a long way when you're stuck on the frozen bread line.
Us Panzer divisions of poverty.
Our mornings, sound tracked by the sound of smug, self satisfied radio 1 disc jockeys droning out the unspoken suffering of suburban working class English familial dysfunction. The margarine tub studs with burnt toast crumbs and is already down to the clean plastic, time it gets to you, so you learnt to scrape the lid with the straight back edge of your knife.
The Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter of our discontents. These future knights of the realm, subjects of empire, sex tourists, oh... these superstars.
Kevin Keegan falls from his bike.
'Our tune'.
Simon Bates.
Stolen money.
Stolen cigarettes.
Us colour television children.
Us coal bunker cunts.
Us replacement smokers.
Us dropped cabbages.
Rod Hull.
Jimmy Saville.
Jack a fucking nory.
One day a family friend comes by and presents me AC/DC's 'Rock 'n' Roll Ain't Noise Pollution' 45 on vinyl, the hook slashes my cheek deep and beds the fuck in. I wilfully leave the water that day. Music was everywhere. He also gives me a Police poster on my birthday, so I go 8 miles out of town to his house to watch a live German broadcast of a gig, late night BBC2, rare, scarce, precious and wonderful, until the 2.45a.m signal starts intermittently cutting out. I remember another time being laid down on the floor with my index and middle finger stuck to the play and record buttons of my tape recorder, in anticipation of a live radio broadcast of The Police at Newcastle city hall, the year is 1980.
You had to be there, with hindsight, to know and fully understand the excitement, pre-VHS, pre-Betamax, pre-compact disc, pre-mini-disc, pre-mp3, pre-internet. You had to actually press big clunky buttons to make music actually work. I bought a brand new cassette tape as well, a blue TDK AD-90, which looked a bit, like this:
My cousin was a punk, stripy red and black mohair, zips in his trousers, the town hairdresser's version of punky hair. I remember looking at his record sleeves, The Sex Pistols’ 'Never Mind The Bollocks', 'Into The Valley' by The Skids, 'Babylon's Burning' by The Ruts, Ian Dury and the Blockheads 'New Boots and Panties'.
'Arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks'.
All the vinyls in his collection had his name handwritten neatly at the top right corner of the back sleeves in biro. That's how much they meant to him. Gold dust, man.
I just missed real punk so the plastic ones would have to do for now.
On my 9th birthday I get the first 2 Police albums, 'Outlandos D’Amour' and 'Reggatta de Blanc' on vinyl and put on my first gig, 'live' from my bedroom, I get my mate from down the road on my ice cream tubs and brick splintered drum sticks, my older brother is 'Andy Summers' and I am fat ‘Sting’ doing vocals down a used bog roll tube sello-taped to the head board for a microphone whilst playing the bass, we mime with plastic red Bontempti guitars we get for Christmas and our Police cover band's rider that day consists of orange coloured cheese crisps and lemonade, we stop the gig only to turn over the brand new static vinyl as the stylus catches the end grooves:
Shhhhhhshhh.. b’ka shhhhhhshhh b’ka
(“Don't touch the vinyl, kid... ALWAYS, hold it by the edge, son”)
No-one is allowed in to the gig.
When my older Sister gets an acoustic guitar, black coloured with a nice red rose design, it sets a passion on fire within the household. I guess it all really starts when one morning and without her consent I go into her room, pick it up and begin picking out the notes to AC/DC’s ‘Riff Raff' before school. 29 temper tantrums and 62 angry plectrum indents into the scratch plate later, and I’ve loosely mastered it.
Life...
...coughs, splutters and chokes out another odd beginning. No, Mr. Lennon, you're not the only one, make way for my degeneration, here I am, a young fur ball spewed onto the great, joyous, hope filled, promising and alluring piss stained carpet of life.
My older Brother is a fine, fine guitar player.
I mess on with a thing called the bass.
Our kid brother even comes home with a second hand violin, one day...
But we don't much talk about that.