could still be seen in the dark. Aside from the Milk Tray Man in the advert, no one wore black (The Milk Tray Man was a man dressed all in black who used to break in to women’s bedrooms late at night and leave a box of chocolates on the bedside table; not creepy at all). If you see pictures of Elton John in the 1970s, the reason he looked so outlandish is because he was trying to outdo what everyone else was wearing on a daily basis.
Chapter Five
Reality’s so hard
The campaign to go and see a Jam gig live continued throughout 1977 without success. I bitched and moaned to my mother but she wasn’t having it. To punish her for not letting me get my way, I behaved so badly and had so many tantrums that I almost certainly proved her point about being too young. I wasn’t rebellious enough to disobey her and just go anyway. I preferred to stay in and be moody. I was feeling very sorry for myself and I must have been horrible to be with. When I wasn’t glowering at her or monosyllabically grunting in her general direction I retreated to my room, turned up the first album to maximum volume and played the songs over and over again just to annoy her. She must have known them almost as well as I did. I figured I might wear her down. I suppose I did in the end.
Music for me back then was about getting a quick fix of energy, a three-minute hit of adrenalin that would temporarily distract me from the humdrum reality of life. There were songs on In The City about love and dancing and being young; they always hit the spot. I loved the finality of ‘I’ve Changed my Address’ and Rick’s drumming on the Batman theme. I bopped about to ‘Art School’. The whole thing felt so alive.
But the title track was a new experience for me. Later on in life I heard Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan and Billy Bragg singing political songs, but at fourteen hearing a song which talked about social change turned on a light in my head. I knew that Paul was political and I’m sure a lot of working-class kids got their first insight into politics listening to this album.
The lyrics on ‘Away from the Numbers’ explored the idea of breaking away and taking control and freeing your mind and soul. I was well up for that but how I was going to make that happen, I had not the first clue. I had a terrible haircut, a big nose, no independent financial means and very little in the way of social skills. Who was going to let me break away and have control of anything?
Paul seemed to have such fierce individualism; I had nowhere near that level of conviction in anything. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I was an idiot, but I had very few in the way of independent thoughts. My world revolved around needs or emotions. Hungry, angry, miserable, tired, that sort of thing. Other than that, I had vague notions and ideas which, with careful nurturing, might have turned into solid opinions, but they were subject to change at the merest hint of argument on the part of someone who knew better. Or even someone who didn’t. It would’ve been comforting to know that everyone I hung out with was feeling much the same way that I did.
I realise now that becoming a fan of Paul Weller and The Jam was my first real attempt to try and define myself. To consciously distance myself from my parents. To say, ‘This is who I am and this is what I believe in.’ The fact that all I really believed in was what Paul Weller told me to believe in was neither here nor there. Before The Jam, I tagged along with this and that group or fad but aside from Arsenal, nothing really captured my imagination. Now I had something to hold on to. Something that my parents couldn’t understand and actively disliked. Something that wasn’t nice. I knew as soon as I heard the first album that it was what I’d been waiting for. Someone not much older than me who seemed to have got their act together. There was hope after all.
But only after I got out of the house. Home was chaotic at best and toxic at worst. I was living with my parents Ken and Helena, and my sister Beverley. My parents hated each other and stayed out of each other’s way whenever possible. Beverley was six-and-a-half years younger than me. Being a teenage boy, I had very little in common with her. My mum stayed in the bedroom, my father in the lounge, Beverley in her room and me in mine. We were four strangers living in the same house. (I read recently that Paul Weller had a sister and there was a similar age gap and he didn’t have much to do with her. I felt a little frisson of kinship when I heard that.)
I kept away as much as I could. I even stayed later at school just so I wouldn’t have to go home. I tried to get detentions so I could have an extra hour away.
‘I think that’s enough, Stone’.
‘We haven’t done the full hour, Sir’.
My mother can be a funny woman although this became less apparent the more time she spent with Ken. She once went into a shop that sold nuts and asked them if the raisin shop was nearby. She had a nice line in sarcasm. As the marriage deteriorated, we saw less of this side of her.
I understand why my mother got married. She came from a religious family, so it was expected she’d get hitched as soon as possible. She said she was frightened of being left on the shelf although, as she was nineteen-years-old, she may have had a few more years before she withered away. She said that she was concerned that being the last of her siblings to get married, she may well be left with the task of looking after her elderly parents. These are all perfectly valid reasons to get married. Just not to my father.
Ken was born a baby, graduated to early childhood and decided that, emotionally, that was far enough. His thinking was along the lines of ‘I have control of my bowels, what else does one need?’ He was assisted in this first of all by my grandmother Cissie who indulged his every whim and thought the sun shined out of his arse. Although it’s difficult to know how she could tell seeing as he never got off it. And then by my mother, who was too fearful of being alone to tell him to grow up and maybe help around the house once in a blue moon. With their assistance (and one or two other female members of the Stone family), he’s managed to go through his entire life without ever doing anything that he didn’t want to do. He’s never cooked a meal, never cleaned up, never done any DIY. He changed one nappy and he still talks about it to this day. ‘Your sister’s done a packet,’ he regularly says (often at dinner when Beverley is sitting at the table), referring to an occasion almost fifty years ago when my sister had filled a nappy. ‘An absolute packet,’ he’d stress just so we knew how much shit he’d actually had to deal with. My mother had, for the only time in Beverley’s early childhood, left Ken with the responsibility of looking after her and it traumatised him for life. He’s eighty-seven this year and is the singularly most useless adult I’ve ever known. Beverley described him as a great dad and a terrible father and husband. Everyone else thinks he’s a legend. They never had to live with him, or needed him to do anything for them.
My parents got married in November 1958 and went to Bournemouth for their honeymoon. On the Friday night, my dad turned to my mum. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. ‘It’s a surprise.’ I guess any newly married bride would like to hear a sentence like that from their husband. She may have imagined new clothes or perhaps even tickets to a big show. What she almost certainly did not imagine was that on the Saturday afternoon, my father, as a surprise that, let’s face it, would endear him to any woman, produced two tickets for Bournemouth versus Brentford at Dean Court in the English fourth division. I imagine it was a pretty big surprise. According to historical weather data, it was a very cold but mercifully dry day. I’d like to think that as they were on honeymoon, my dad splashed out on a couple of seats, but it’s perfectly possible that three days after she got married, my mother found herself standing on an open terrace in the freezing cold watching two teams she’d never heard of playing a game she hated. And that may well have been the high point of the relationship.
My mother is no angel. She has been known to be demanding. But only by people who’ve met her. Being demanding is a fairly typical*6 character trait when it comes to Jewish mothers and it’s accepted in lieu of other more positive attributes. But it’s not useful when you’re married to a man as inured and impervious to demands as my father. My mother demanded, my father completely ignored her. There were a lot of arguments and very few laughs.
My mum felt trapped. By 1977, she