Back in the bedroom I share with my younger brother, the posters are wall-to-wall. They are all precisely cut out pictures from rock magazines. I take scissors and cellotape to the first ever edition of Kerrang! magazine, and hide my beige painted wood chip wallpaper. Completely.
I cut a hole in one, so it would fit around the tape recorder plug socket. The pride of joy though, that you could see from the street if my curtain was drawn just right, was a near life size live shot of Rob Halford and Glen Tipton from the heavy metal band Judas Priest.
When I was really young, I'd pick my nose and smear the prized bogies on the wall by my top bunk, then flick them from the wallpaper once they'd hardened. It's primitive stuff, the modern day cave painting by way of stiffened mucus, followed, in time, by rock posters.
Eventually it'll be Ikea.
We are, all of us, territory marking. Birth to death.
My first bass guitar was a mahogany finished Fender Precision copy from Kay's catalogue for £139.99.
I got home from school, as usual, otherwise occupied. Mum tells me there is an ‘ironing board’ in the sitting room that needs ‘taking upstairs' but I don't catch on. I’m legging it up the stairs, about halfway up she yells, in pure exasperation:
"Your bloody bass guitar, it's here! In the sitting room."
I three-step back down the stairs, before excitedly ripping the packaging tape from the box, prizing the cardboard apart in seconds. This thing should have come with its own light show, a chorus of "Hallelujahs", carried aloft by an elephant, whilst having its path swept clear by servants.
It’s all mine. A brand new, fully owned bass guitar.
At first, I’d press my left ear into the upper horn of the body to make out the notes. It created a sort of amplifier in your inner ear, 20HZ of pure bass reverberating and awakening possibilities around my young dormant head.
I couldn't get the amp yet, though. Mine was a straight up, valuable lesson in life: If I wanted something? I worked for it.
I'd be paying off my new bass, once a month, for a whole year.
I got a paper round, £4 a week. I had to get up every morning before 6am to go get my greasy paper bag weighed down at the newsagent, sling it around my back, cutting into my young right shoulder blade before I went out there, 5 or 6 miles a morning on my home made bicycle - wind, rain or shine. I’d almost freeze to death some mornings, weaving through the fog and traffic lights, sucking up thick plumes of monoxide from the exhausts of the bored and frustrated at junctions.
I got bollocked a few times for leaving newspaper print around the door frame whilst dumping the paper bag back in the kitchen cupboard.
Factotum. 10 years of age.
One morning returning from my paper round, I’m accosted by a massive unit hurtling towards me. He’s shouting through thick lips, staring angrily with conjunctivitis ridden eyes and there’s a sudden, awkward realisation that it's me he's actually addressing. He is the town's milkman who is now accusing me of stealing milk from his customers doorsteps (I hadn’t). He is as angry as the shocking red of his hair, and it’s a hard shunt in my chest every time he uses the word 'You'.
“I know it's you”
“People have seen you”
“Don't you dare deny it”
.. and so on.
Which was kinda like this:
I got bullied a lot as a kid. They were generally a bit overweight, bit ear waxy, bad teeth, not that pleasing to the eye. The very, very last privilege of the fuck all...
Bullying.
(cowards)
I have found that people usually are, in this life, almost exactly as they look. If you look shifty? You generally are shifty. If you look shy? You’re probably shy.
If you look like a cunt?
Odds on you are one.
Council estates are a tough place to grow up on. I saw a lot of violence as a kid. Brutal, without end fights. I saw one, near teatime on our road, that went on for at least 10 minutes. This kid, sat, pinning the other down at the shoulders by his knees, the kid on the floor trying to kick back whilst being punched full in the face. Through protective flailing hands you hear the sickening sound of bone clacking bone, blood stains the road and trails tiny dark red spots back onto the path. The back of the kid’s fragile skull continually bouncing from the asphalt.
Cars do not matter here. Not, in this fucking jungle.
The kid, now a Type-O smattered Jesus nailed to his own gravel laden crucifix by trip hammer left-rights in the middle of the road. He's all guts and not much glory. It takes his Dad to come running out from his house to peel them apart, shouting furiously at his own split flesh and pissing blood. His son was underdog, but he kept fighting, kept taking it.
His face turns back in slow motion from the front door surveying his own mad scene, a display of skinny red lines like b-roads on a map of pure fucking defiance.
He would have died before being beaten. Inspirational.
To me? he won that fight, by not giving in.
Anyway…I digress.
My first bass amp? It’s a different proposition.
Even a kid just into double figures has to learn bullshit - which is a great lesson for a short lived career in music.
If there had existed a more dodgy music shop owner in any hemisphere, he’d have never out-shat this bullshitter. Still, when you've got the bug and it’s the only music shop opening in your small town, you'll gravitate towards it, on your way home from school, like a moth who’s just noticed a light bulb.
In you’ll go, wide eyed, scanning everything with a neck and strings, gazing longingly at your first amps. You're getting your first feel of musicians too. It's here you encounter the more carefree, extravagant and eccentric. Some have strange, half-closed, bloodshot eyes and smell a little ‘musty’, some have trilby hats hiding their long, thinning, hair. They speak slower, a different tempo to the merry dance you've been led. You'll learn new words like 'gig', 'chick' and 'jam'.
You'll kind of like it if you're me. Seeking alternative steps.
I have my limited budget and let Trev, the bullshitting shop owner, talk me into buying a Kay 50 watt Solid State Bass Amplifier.
“Take abaaaaat 4 weeks, mate”
“Really? 4 weeks and it’ll be here?”
“Yeah mate, it’s comin' from Wales by cargo line, it might be 'ere next Friday, somewhere from 6-8pm they usually deliver.”
“Right, see you Friday!”
I’m Charlie Bucket, without the ticket. Far too fucking trusting for my own good. Gullible’s travels.
Meanwhile, the weeks roll on, and on, and on.
Eternally hopeful, I’ve been in to the shop, every Friday without fail. Sometimes Thursdays.
Week 7? I've taken to sitting on the 3rd step of our stairs as another excruciating Friday evening passes slowly on. It’s still light, about 7pm, when suddenly a shady figure approaches the glass in the centre of our front door. I am so fucking excited. I’m on my feet exactly the same time as the mystery finger reaches for the doorbell:
Dingdooooooooooooooooong.
I open the door, fast as a gunshot.
"The amp will be 'ere in abaaaaat 2 weeks, mate..."
It's my older brother. He’s teaching his soft young brother a lesson, like big cats do.
After 9 weeks of waiting, I'm starting to sense the runaround, so agree to take another bass amp home until mine arrives. It takes two of us to get it upstairs, a hulking great fucking billion watt thing made by Carlsbro, that made a fart noise when you pressed the 'on' switch at the back. With far too much speaker cabinet for a bedroom of my size, it's the beginning of numerous Mother/Son run-ins, a perennial battle of volume versus will.
Of her... versus me.
Day after day I'm in my room learning to play the bass. I stop going out. I become more withdrawn. I start by playing Shadows songs with my older brother on lead, a few rock standards, eventually entire albums, emanating my favourites. First up? A plectrum with AC/DC's Cliff Williams, then my fingers for Iron Maiden's Steve Harris. I'm getting serious. I go to Rush and Geddy Lee, but stop, sensibly, at the gusset typing of Jaco Pastorius, even though the poor bugger died from a beating outside a New York nightclub in his 30's. Monies owed for drugs, allegedly. It just doesn’t happen on the X-Factor.
Sacrilegious to some, probably... all that jazz.
Not for me, though. My given Christian name is Peter. It means, at least in Greek biblical terms, ‘rock’.
I used to pick out notes on the tape recorder and copy them. You don't need to read music in order to play it. With a hard headed youthful determination comes swift progress. There weren't a lot of albums I hadn't listened to, all the 70's players:
Lynott, McCartney, Bruce, Entwistle, Hook, Burnel, Jones, Waters, Matlock, Sumner, Butler, Kilmister, Fraser, the lot.
Chewed up, studied, spat out in months. Lock, stock, and four smoking strings.
My Dad's mate tells him, in Serbo-Croat, that I won't be "emptying bins for a living."
(Do all parents stand in bedroom doorways with their friends watching you?)
I have two bass lessons with an older guy in the school orchestra. I must have been doing alright when he cuts my second lesson to 20 minutes and says with a shrug of the shoulders “I can't actually teach you any more."
I was getting the buzz. Proper.
My bass amp must have turned up at some point, as I remember it in my room during another showdown with my mum.
"I've told you to turn it down 3 times already... How many bloody times do I have to repeat myself?"
"I have turned it down"
"Well you haven't bloody well turned it down enough, I can't hear myself think downstairs"
"Tell you what Mum…why don't you turn it down to where you want it?"
She brings her big hand to the volume button and finds somewhere between inaudible and 0.1. You can hear the plectrum hit the strings over the bass speaker. It’s fucking pointless.
She once referred to her own Mother, simply as “cunt”.
It’s the fatty plaque choking the artery of ambition, root to branch, lovingly passed down through generations, without even so much as a thought.
The baton of fuck you.
She could have gone to France and lived a simple life crushing grapes with her feet, she’ll later tell me. Providing, of course, that she hadn’t had me.
Crushing her son’s dreams will suffice for now.
I get up and lean my new bass carefully against the wall. I click off the amp at the back and walk out slowly. Defiantly.
"No point in even playing" I mumble under my breath.
"What did you just say?" comes my reply...
"Nothing"...
I say.