I’d put both of my precious new boots into a bucket of wallpaper paste.
Jackie became pregnant in the winter, and Roger married her in March 1964, five months before their first son Simon was born. Nick was seeing Liz Reid, a pretty, blonde Scottish girl from fashion school. A few months before, he had gone out with a stunning Irish girl, also from fashion school. She had just ended a relationship so we went out as a foursome to eat Chinese food. On a tube train home that night she whispered in my ear that she wanted to sleep with me, and then, outside Ealing Common station, we smoked pot; for me it was the first time. I remember feeling I had discovered something quite important, but wasn’t precisely certain what it was.
At home in my bedroom, Nick and Liz lay together on my bed in the dark. I was on the floor with the Irish girl. This was my first genuine sexual encounter, so the rock ’n’ roll components of sex and drugs arrived simultaneously for me. My orgasm came in seconds. The next morning, in Sid’s café, I overheard the Irish girl a few tables away laughing good-naturedly about my sexual inexperience, but I didn’t care. Skill didn’t matter, there was plenty of time for that. I had arrived at last.
I wanted to be a sculptor, but Ealing Art College lost its diploma status for Fine Arts and Sculpture, and my parents were concerned I might emerge from college without any qualification. The band still felt like a side-project to me, so I considered moving to another college. I was particularly interested in kinetic sculpture: installations combining vibrant colour, lighting, TV screens and complex, coded music. All this, I imagined, would be interactive, brought to life by the computers that Roy Ascott talked about.1 However, I knew I would miss my friends if I left Ealing, and so, with Barney, I decided to switch to Graphic Design.
Everything changed when I met Tom Wright, the stepson of an American Air Force officer stationed nearby. It turned out that he and his best friend Cam had been the ones responsible for adding R&B singles to the café jukebox. They were notorious for having introduced marijuana in their circle, and for their enormous record collection. One of their buddies had heard me playing blues guitar in the classroom one day and ran to bring Tom to hear me.
I had already bought a number of blues albums of my own – by Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy. I had heard Chuck Berry, but only his pop-chart stuff. Tom and Cam had albums by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Little Walter, Snooks Eaglin and other blues artists entirely new to me. As long as I’d play my guitar sometimes, they’d let me come back. Every album was a revelation, but the real richness of their collection was on its fringes: Mose Allison sat alongside Joan Baez; Ray Charles alongside Bo Diddley; Jimmy Smith alongside Julie London.
The mainstay of the collection was Jimmy Reed. They had every recording he’d ever made, and ‘Big Boss Man’ and ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’, big R&B hits in the US in the late Fifties but unheard in the UK. Simple riffs supported basic lyrics provided by his wife. Steady low bass, chugging rhythms and shrill harmonica solos set the scene for Reed’s whining, wavering, old man’s voice. But there was something absolutely unforgettable about the music, especially when you listened to several albums in series, a little stoned.
I was also drawn to the jazzier side of R&B, especially at first. I had grown up with Ella, Frank, the Duke and the Count, so I liked Ray Charles, Jimmy Smith and Mose Allison. But I couldn’t play keyboards, had no access to one and was still a fairly rudimentary guitar player. But you didn’t have to be fast or clever to play R&B guitar blues. You had to be prepared to really listen, and ultimately really feel the music. This seemed less absurd for a young middle-class white boy in 1963 than it does today, so I proceeded without difficulty to learn to play the blues, especially rhythmic blues. I loved emulating Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker and Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist, and I started to develop my own rhythmic style based on a fusion of theirs.
If I felt torn, I’m sure the other members of the band felt the same. They had regular jobs. Doug was a bricklayer and a father. Roger worked in a factory that cut tinplate for specialist equipment boxes and recording studio racks. John worked at the local tax office. I was an art student – and I was also becoming a recreational drug user, smoking several times a week. Lately Roger needed to bully me out of bed to get me to gigs. I was often very sarcastic about the music the band members wanted to play, and Doug had to come to my rescue a couple of times when Roger and I nearly came to blows over the musical direction of the group. I kept pushing because I felt that if we didn’t change we’d never appear cool to my art-school friends. On the other hand, the chart-type songs I was trying my hand at writing for us to perform were really quite corny.
We recorded my first song, ‘It Was You’, in late 1963 at the home studio of Barry Gray, who wrote music for children’s TV puppet series like Thunderbirds and Fireball XL5. Dick James, The Beatles’ co-publisher at the time, heard ‘It Was You’ and signed me to his company.
I was a guy who thought love would pass him by.
Then I met you and now I realise
It was you, who set my heart a-beating.
I never knew, love would come with our meeting.
The song was recorded by The Naturals, a Merseybeat-style band (actually from Essex), and a couple of other groups. It wasn’t a hit, but the fact that it was published at all gave me tremendous confidence. I felt I now had a right to speak up about the band’s musical direction, and even get bossy about it. Roger was definitely in charge, but there was a new tension between us. We were both really keen to make it and had our own ideas about how to do so. Still, we developed a grudging respect for one another that would last a lifetime.
On top of our daily work schedule we were doing gigs every couple of days, sometimes several in a row. Our audience was mainly Mods. A few venues, like the Notre Dame Church Hall in Soho and the Glenlyn Ballroom in Forest Hill, were true Mod strongholds where fashion leaders, called Faces, displayed new outfits and dances like fashion models. Roger and I were probably hipper to what was going on than most because his sister Gillian and her boyfriend were still so solidly in the Mod front line. There were some lovely Irish Mod girls who went to the Goldhawk, the historic music venue in Shepherd’s Bush. I managed, on occasion, to even keep my feet out of paste buckets.
Tom and Cam were caught dealing pot, and deported, leaving their entire record collection behind in our care. I finally moved into my own place with Barney as my roommate, where we set ourselves up as Tom and Cam’s heirs. For the first fortnight that we shared the flat Barney and I thought we were doing very well looking after ourselves, but it turned out later that the landlord had let Mum in every day to tidy up, vacuum, do the laundry and washing up. She still liked to have a protective, maternal role in my life in a way that, as a young, independent man who had flown the nest, I wasn’t willing to acknowledge. I may not have even wanted her to clean up after me, but of course ‘at least I’d get my washing done’.
Jimmy Reed played constantly, and some great girls began to show up. If Roger had had difficulty controlling me when I lived at home with my parents, he was in big trouble now. All I wanted to do was get stoned, listen to records, play my guitar and wait for the doorbell to ring. After a hard day at college I would often decide to forget the band altogether, and if Roger had been less forceful I would have stayed home in my cloud of pot smoke.
We were scheduled to support The Rolling Stones in Putney at the end of December 1963 and I was prepared to be cynical; without hearing them play, I’d decided their reputation must be based on their hairstyles. Instead I was blown away. Our producer, Glyn Johns, introduced me to Brian Jones and Mick Jagger, who were courteous and charming. From the side of the stage I watched them play and became an instant and lifelong fan. Mick was mysteriously attractive and sexually provocative, possibly the first such talisman since Elvis. As Keith Richards waited for the curtain to open he limbered up by swinging his arm like a windmill. A few weeks later we supported them again at Glenlyn Ballroom, and when I noticed that Keith didn’t use the windmill trick again I decided to adopt it.
A band called The Yardbirds, with Eric Clapton playing lead, was hot, and Roger had seen a rehearsal