Outside the Headmistress’s office. 1976.
I’m here because I’m in trouble. The class I’m in have been given an assignment to make handmade ‘Welcome Back’ cards for Miss Roberts, our Headmistress, who has just returned from hospital.
On my card I draw a brick wall. On the brick wall are spray can slogans, like the one of ‘CRASS’ in my local park. Everybody else’s cards are reverential, warm and welcoming.
Mine has two messages ‘sprayed’ on the wall. The first says: “WE DON’T WANT YOU BACK MISS ROBERTS”...
...and the clincher:
“FUCK OFF MISS ROBERTS”
5 years old. I know, right?
1984/85
My send off from middle school is a flea bitten old slipper from the headmaster, for drawing a huge phallus on a school desk, which sort of looked a bit like this:
After hearing the command “BEND OVER, BOY!” I’m told, between hard whacks on my 11 year old, bare, fat ass, that I’m a “disgrace” to my family . I sneak a curious - and morbid - peek at the headmaster who is now busy lifting the slipper upwards and, amidst his fevered and frenzied working up of sweat, notice his white Brylcreem’d hair falling out of position and dropping into his eyes. His glasses having now fallen to the middle of his nose, which looked very very much like this:
He seems to be really enjoying it and, as if to confirm his own hyper masculinity, asks “DOES IT HURT?”. People pleaser that I am, I appease with a strained and for effect “yes Sir” although I’m well used to this ‘hands on’ stuff at home. So, no… not really.
At ‘big’ school, some will impose themselves on you. Some, without even knowing who you are. I’m walking across the assembly hall when I’m stopped in my tracks. She has a right side parting, bottle blonde hair with dark roots coming through. Her 3D ‘flick’ is constructed entirely of hairspray. She is made up to the nines with dense black eyeliner, foundation and lipstick. Her gold chained handbag, an accessory to her 3/4 length black and white chequered Cromby, flashes the familiar and warming gold of a 10 Benson and Hedges cigarette pack. She is a twelve year old Alpha Female, flanked by a girl at either side, and chews gum with a mildly intimidating authority.
“Will you go out with me?” she demands, before the gum chewing resumes, like a pillow case being thrown around a washing machine drum. Her words hang for a brief eternity and as I was brought up to smile sweetly, to be a good boy, I am not entirely sure how to do this without hurting her feelings. I blurt a feeble, dying, reply. More a question.
“Uh... yeah?”
And with that I am a taken boy. I have, a girlfriend. A girlfriend who doesn’t even know my name. Unlike Jimmy Fox, who lives opposite me, and who 24 hours later will come out of double art and inform me - excitedly - that I had better take off my school shirt.
“Why?” I ask.
“Neil Ryman is gonna cover it in blood and wants to smash your fuckin’ ‘ead in” followed by “Vuckovic”. Why do kids always address you by your surname when it comes to settling matters?
So, in roughly 5 minutes time I’m going to get the absolute shit kicked out of me.
I feel, justifiably, compelled to ask my mate what I’ve done to deserve this? “It’s cos you stole his girlfriend”, he’ll tell me, matter of factly, no longer behaving as someone I’ve grown up with and now, more neutral.
I did?
Right now it’s a pretty solitary ice-cold world for me, but there is only one way out of this school. So I walk. Fast. I walk and walk and walk and walk until, all of a sudden, I’m passing the 100 kid fight ring. A killing field now replacing the usual playing field, like a slow motion cloud drifting across my right side periphery, the very one I’m supposed to be at the centre of, getting covered in my own blood.
‘Has anyone noticed me?’ I think to myself, and ‘how am I getting away with this?’ but incredibly I am and, like the final scene of Alan Parker’s ‘Midnight Express, I leg it at the end of the school path, out onto the pavements.
A free man.
For now.
Just another one to avoid if I didn’t want my “fucking face smashed in”.
I didn’t fall in with a bad crowd, they fell in with me. At night I’d walk to the top part of town and hang out with my new girlfriend’s friends. Cold nights at the park, smoking cigarettes and getting the piss taken out of me as I hadn’t yet lost my virginity.
Back at her house I am given explicit permission, a council house rites of passage, to smoke in the sitting room. It’s where I will meet her older brother - officially the ‘Hardest Bloke In Year 5’ - who, after a secret porno viewing in his black painted bedroom, tells me he is the boss of a cleaning team at the town supermarket. He asks if I would like a two week trial at becoming a part of the team.
I say “yeah” and now have another job to go with my other two. Cleaning key locks (for my Mum) and helping (my Mum) clean the local Job Centre after school.
A 12 year old about to enter his own part time occupation, wrestling a buffing machine around the top and bottom floors of the supermarket. A 12 year old learning to clean menstrual blood from a ladies toilet with bleach. A kid who grew up way, way too soon. A 12 year old, fresh from the crash, and now…no longer a virgin.
A few months in, and having now settled into my new position of mild mannered janitor, it’s 8.47am and the floors are swept, mopped and buffed. My co-worker mate Shaun and I are on our way to school after the morning shift, walking slowly towards the glass exit door. When you’re trying to look innocent you don’t do things like walk fast, or look behind you, that’s too obvious, a dead giveaway. We’re trying to not look like we’re in a rush, trying to not look like the thieves that we are.
So neither of us are ready for the tap on the shoulder and the polite request to follow the store manager back to his office for a “routine check”.
FUCK.
A few nervous minutes later and Shaun has the zip to his Harrington jacket three quarters undone, revealing the top half of a mega-pack of Duracell double AA’s. There are also 3 or 4 more items poking from the inside, revealing the unmistakable form of plastic packaging. A mini-mountain of stolen items form in a small pile on the managers desk beside him. Black may indeed, be slimming...
... no good for stealing, though.
Ah, what’s a poor boy to do when he’s spent all his dinner money on cigarettes?
Batteries were standard. My orange-ear padded Aiwa cassette tape personal stereo never once ran out of power. I was never short of socks, trousers, birthday presents for my Mum, a 30 piece screwdriver set for my brother, endless albums, and bits and pieces I’d pick up for mates.
I am Robbing Hood.
The trousers, jeans and socks were easiest, you stuck them over your existing school trousers and skipped your way out merrily. This morning though? I have the brand new AC/DC album about my person. My heart beats fast and I adopt the “I’ve done nothing wrong” look from Mother’s bollockings.
I’m looking at Shaun, and his spilled loot, his anxious expression haunting me whilst I’m being frisked by the store manager. Unbelievably though, he does not notice the rectangular plastic protrusion of the cassette tape box wedged between my school trouser button and my chubby waist and says “alright Pete... on your way.”
I’m off to school. Shaun’s off to the police station.
It was largely the same for my other job, stacking shelves at the same supermarket on evenings and Saturdays.
Peckish?
Simple. Just grab a brand new tray of anything edible and shove it underneath the empties. You had the time it took for the lift to go down 3 levels to wolf your swag.
I grab a 20lb turkey from the freezer section on my way out one Christmas and shove it into my coat for the holidays.
Ho ho ho!
Back at home and it was time to take my fat bottom end outside. Out of Mother’s earshot, but only as far as the garage.
You could form a band in eight seconds back in the early 80’s. My Older Brother is the guitar player, who knows a great little drummer from just out of town, and we find a guitarist to play rhythm who is the younger brother of the towns hottest rock act.
We had a band.
Now... every band is going to need a singer.
Here’s how I remember it. We’re stood between songs, guitars on, arms folded. It’s a stand-off. Older Brother swings the boom arm of the microphone stand until it’s in a perfect line with my face, and says:
“You’re singing”
So I swing the microphone back to his face and say “No, I’m not”.
Older Brother could be quite persuasive. I’d already been clubbed over the head numerous times by two pillows held together, whilst crawling across the landing on all fours with two cassette tapes in my mouth, in a game he had ‘invented’. The rules of the game? You had to deliver the cassette boxes into the slot handle of the linen basket without getting them whacked out of your mouth, no prizes or anything, you just did it.
I had also previously, upon his suggestion, upturned a toy car mat and rode it bare knuckle from the top of the stairs to the bottom.
I’d even been a ‘London bus’ for when he wanted to be Evel Knievel.
But I’m not fucking singing.
“Well I ain’t doin’ it” he says.
“I’m playing the bass, so I ain’t doin’ it either” I protest.
“If you don’t sing I’m gonna tell Mum” he threatens.
“Go on then” I reply.
It starts with him going back into the house to ‘tell Mum’ and ends half an hour later with me, returning through the garage door, now apparently a ‘singer’. Yes. It took the threat of getting my mullet chopped short to give you, ‘me’. The all-dancing, all singing bass player.
Phil Lynott, Sting, Jack Bruce, Tom Araya, Lemmy Kilmister… and now, me.
For me though, there is no great dream of becoming a singer, no hairbrush, no mirror, no diva hissy fit or costume change, just a simple case of needs must, or, more to the point: “You’ll do”.
And at least I kept the mullet.
Dad's garage was his pride and joy. It was - at least twice at any rate - perfect for rehearsing a band in, although woe betide any kid who'd accidentally touch his garage door with a football:
"OI!! You f**kin' bastards, f**k off, go on... F**K OFF!"
Those experiences were magic. Days of wonder. I remember the sunshine would pierce the dusty interior of our new rehearsal space through it’s one solitary window, highlighting the first live drum kit I'd ever seen.
On our first ever practise break, my brother takes our new drummer out for food and I get the nod to play his drums until they get back. They return to a nice 2 inch crack down one of his brand new Paiste cymbals. Thankfully though he’s a cool kid, a nice guy and a decent time keeper, but with the slightest nervous disposition when it came to song arrangements.
These types, like yours truly, will often have aggressive, underachieving yet over demanding parents. My first drummer’s father was one. Big fish, small pond. All sheepskin coat, cigar and far too much advice. It is amusing to recall the types of people you encounter without award, reverence, fame nor fortune, that are always first in line to dole out all the advice a 12 year old should ever need for a career in a business this guy, clearly, has none of, and it's the old classic:
"Listen boys, you wanna get anywhere in this life, there's only one way... it's called hard work".
He booked us a gig once, where the only thing I remember seeing was the shape of this portly, gregarious, amplified Del Boy cartoon of a man, ‘puuh puuh puuhing’ on a cheap cigar swirling a brandy and gently tap tap tapping his foot in the way that old people do to let you know they have rhythm. An edge. They've been there and seen it all. They’ll let you know, before your sweat has dried, what you should be doing better. You’ll stand, sweating, knackered, cold with a mild case of hypothermia, having to look interested. Taking it. You’ll never be 'good enough' at this point.
You know how good your gig went, you were up there doing it. You can see and hear as well as anybody.
I learnt, early on to not ask anyone’s opinion of your gig. It’s just easier.
We were good enough, however, to procure the opening slot of a bill playing at our local private school, which none of us, obviously, went to. The headline band were the guitar player's brothers band.
My first gig, 12 years old. I drink four small cans of Carlsberg Special Brew before sobering up when I bump into the microphone stand. A girl from my class at school will later ask me how come in school I am so quiet - yet onstage I am really loud?
Our set is largely uneventful, but the whole evening will end in farce when the headline band gets the power pulled on them after the headmaster deems they’re playing past the 11pm curfew. It’s my first recollection of a real life lunatic in the form of the headline band's one man road crew, who swiftly appears at the middle microphone, arms flailing, eye's bulging, with a righteous anger I've not seen since, demanding to know whether the crowd wanted more. He didn't need a microphone.
It was here I learned that you could swing a situation to your own advantage on the spur of the moment. It was here I first saw genuine excitement. The headmaster shuffled off and the band played on.
Pure theatre.
By the way.
If you don’t want the police around your house on a Sunday afternoon? Then don’t do this:
It’s an early ad, drawn by me to advertise our first bookings at a local pub which pays £50 plus chips. (£10 each and a tenner for petrol)
It was a kind of residency eventually, the Sunday night slot where we'd jam our borrowed Marshall cabs into the drummer's car, after he's unloaded the kit first, always a two time load-in. You won’t have a band van at this point, so drummers are always handy because they drive (extra bonus) and have cars with space in the back for drums. They are beautifully practical beasts, drummers: I have found mostly that they (as well as drum) - can cook, are great mechanics, have boundless energy, and are great drivers. Drummers, in general, are pretty cool guys. They make Joe Public's foot tap at the bar, are the heart of a 90, 000 strong clap along at any stadium ever, they make Majorettes strut and lead armies of frightened men into battle. They have to be solid or very grounded and strong, they are, but, the very heart and rhythm of your vision.
Not that I had much of it back then, a chubby teenager shyly fronting a band kicking out 8 AC/DC cover versions, a few blues standards, and a couple we'd made up ourselves and hoped no-one would notice if we stuck them between some famous ones. You're nervous as all fuck, but pub gigs are instant learning schools and I swear you will never know the excruciating feeling of expectant silence after a song ends if you've never had the responsibility of fronting a band in front of 80 odd piss heads in a local. It goes quiet, a pint glass chinks, a bar stool scrapes, then silence.
And you're on.
You.
All eyes transfixed through the cigarette smoke and house lights.
The drummer, he'll adjust his snare a little. R-r-r-ra rattle...
The Marshall cabinet feeds a second...
You'll say:
"Thank you".
Desperately. Trying not to sound either too local, American, or night club.
Remember when someone removed your armbands at the swimming pool?
Time you were pushed off on your bike without stabilisers?
First take off in an aeroplane?
First cigarette?
Tetanus injection?
Your first fuck?
It's worse than all of that.
You'll say:
"This next song's called... "
Guitar stage left will hiss in your ear "Louder, they can't hear you... "
... and you freeze.
Your drummer, your salvation.
He counts in 4 clicks and you're free. You'll soon come to rely on this guy. Especially if you're not a natural, are painfully shy, or didn't really want to be the singer in the first place. There is nothing and no-one who can quite prepare you for the radio silence that it will become your job to fill a good few thousand times eventually in your life. It is a largely thankless task thinking about it. Like when you become the singer, it says nowhere that you will have to speak to and entertain people over a public address system. But the job, like wiping your ass after shitting comes as part of the territory.
You kinda have to.
I have played thousands of gigs in my life, yet still struggle on a microphone. Even at sound check. I’m still not sure I even want to be a singer.
Those pub gigs were good grounding. End of the night, punters gone home, dim lighting, pre-smoking ban, these are your first lock-ins. These are the moments you know everyone from school is packed up in bed for the night. Meanwhile, your 13 year old ass is supping a refreshing cool pint and sucking back a Marlboro red, the barman is happy because he's sold drinks. The band is happy, excitable, drunk on Bloody Mary's and 1664.
Our residency was in a pub with a bleak history, talk of the place getting closed down was common. Rough as arseholes. The kind of place where punters would piss in letter boxes on their way home. Passing by, on the other side of the road with a bag of chips one night, I saw a guy get punched in the jaw and knocked cold to the pavement outside. From time to time it could have done with a little chicken wire to protect it’s turns.
One night we finish up with a cover of Chuck Berry's 'Johnny. B. Goode'. Rhythm guitarist takes the lead vocal on this one, but halfway through the song a pissed guy in my Older Brother's year strolls through the crowd, grabs the lead microphone and starts yelling in a drunk slur 'Bye bye Johnny... Johnny B. Goode" until our rhythm guitarist has an angry word in his ear. Next thing I see is the guitarist’s head snapping back quickly. He's been punched square in the cheekbone a couple of times, but in the spirit of things carries on, like a trooper. A fight was never far away in those days, I once saw a guitarist who upon spotting his girlfriend being chatted up mid song, threw down his guitar, scrambled his way through a packed crowd, laid the guy out, then turned up, back onstage casually putting his guitar back on.
Meanwhile, back in school, we were getting a name for ourselves and were put forward for a nationwide competition to get a slot on a bill playing at the Albany theatre in London as part of the Live Aid charity. We win the preliminary contest and get the coveted prize of the gig. Initially we are told we'll be playing alongside a couple of guys from Status Quo, but are later told by a 6th form teacher that it’s changed.
It’s about 7.45p.m with my now growing hair dragged into a wet pony tail and I’m stacking shelves at the supermarket. He happens to pass by and stops, there’s something he's just that second remembered:
Teacher: "Yes... it's changed... Yes, it's um... something 'head'... I forget the name... Um."
Me: "Uh... Would that be Motörhead, sir?"
Teacher: "Yes, yes... That's it! Motörhead! Yes, well done."
Me: "Thanks sir!"
We were going to do 'Rockin' All Over The World', which changes rapidly, and gleefully, to 'The Ace Of Spades'.
On the day of the gig I remember turning up to the venue, taking pictures outside, we were excited, young and wide eyed.
In all seriousness? You heard Lemmy Kilmister before you saw him. I’m standing with rhythm guitar in the dark stalls of the theatre gazing up at the stage, when we suddenly hear a chink... a clunk... then a chink... another clunk, and then:
"Alright?"
It’s the great man. Bullet belt. Black jeans, boots, t-shirt and a black leather motorcycle jacket emblazoned on the back in silver with the Ace of Spades insignia. He wants to go to the pub over the road so after unloading we’ll meet him there. Sure enough, when we arrive he is hogging the one armed bandit, cigarette clenched between snaggleteeth, full pint in hand. We also meet Motörhead's most recent acquisition, Würzel.
We stand around, drinking and smoking, having a proper fucking laugh with him. He too, will speak with a Silk Cut clenched tightly between teeth. It’ll be at least 2 years before I learn about amphetamines, and so think it’s just normal.
Later, at the venue, it’s time for sound check. Lemmy is ambling about the stage whilst I locate the stagehand, who’s a proper theatre dah-ling, round eyeglasses, tight wrapped scarf, blazer jacket and lots of thick curly student hair.
I ask: "Um... excuse me, but do you have a longer lead for my bass please? This one’s only about 4 ft long... " I’m helpless, intimidated and not very important.
After my 10th minute of being made to wait, the guy passes again, I try to ask again but am appeased by a bothered "Yes, yes... I know" and an extravagant wave of his hand. We had to soundcheck in minutes.
I go into panic mode...
... along comes Lemmy.
"Lemmy... I asked that bloke there for a longer lead and... "
He was off... I was becoming increasingly tired of being ignored until I hear him roaring:
"Get ‘im a fuckin' lead... NOW!"
I get my longer lead in less than 10 seconds.
We soundcheck, then go up to their dressing room for some quality Motörhead time. Walking through the white painted brick walled corridors, I remember June Brown (Dot Cotton from BBC’s Eastenders) passing and saying hello to Lemmy, “Oh, hello Darling!” came his reply. Jesus. This guy knows everyone! When we reach the safe confines of the dressing room I ask him how he gets that distinctive bass sound, he says something about “ramming the fucking thing through the fuckin' cupboard door”.
So I leave it at that.
We’re then treated to some of his Jim Beam bottle, poured from a brown paper bag, and shown some photographs of some on tour ‘antics’, Kilmister style. I remember seeing some shots of girls in various poses, but the overriding memory is a shot of someone's cock, cigar and glasses, placed, just so:
Lemmy: "Look! Groucho Marx!"
As first dressing room experiences go, this should be up there as the best ever. I don't remember much about the gig, other than watching as they strutted out from the wings, bass and guitar strapped on and ready, dream-state like, and did the song with us four.
Does life get better than this?
Well... maybe, but not much. I would have another Lemmy experience a few years down the line which I’ll tell you about later. I love Motörhead. If you don't like Motörhead, you cannot be my friend.
After the event, the local newspaper will do a write up all about our latest adventure, giving full details, names and ages, and on a quiet Sunday night shortly after, the barman will walk over to the table we are drinking at, lay the paper open on the table, by the half drunk pints and over flowing ashtray, and enquire:
“Now… which one of you is 13?”.