Educating Peter (23 page)

Peter:
‘My mate Sam – he's like the second best guitar player in school, after Raf? – taped this for me. I couldn't believe I hadn't heard it before. I mean, I should have – it's
weird that I hadn't read stuff about them in
Kerrang!
, 'cos I read that all the time, or used to, it's gone a bit crap now. Anyway, they look a bit weird – that bloke who looks like the monster guy from
The Fast Show
, and the oriental bloke with the long hair, I thought he was a girl at first – but they're really amazing musicians. The drumming is just . . . out there. The guitars remind me of squealing gerbils sometimes. Sort of goth, but sort of so . . . bizarre and more electronic than stuff I normally listen to. Not dance, though. I hate dance music. Me and Raf have formed this group outlawing dance. That's what it's called – Group Outlawing Dance. But we write the logo as God. But, yeah, that girl, D'Arcy, who plays guitar? Rhythm, I think. I think the bald guy plays lead. She's fit. Sam has a picture of her taped to his Humanities folder. None of the girls in my year could ever look as cool as that, even when they're, like, seventeen or eighteen. I haven't got their other albums yet, but I'm going to get them now. Probably tomorrow. I dunno. It depends if my mum can pick me up from fencing or if I have to go home on the bus. Anyway – soon. Wicked. Nine and three quarters out of ten.'

Tom:
‘Why did you knock a quarter mark off? I thought you were going to give it ten.'

Peter:
‘That
Fast Show
guy gives me the creeps a bit, that's all.'

DURING THE WEEK
following our Nottingham trip, I emailed Peter to ask what he'd thought of a compilation tape I'd loaned to him, ‘Tom's Peasant Island Discs 1993'. Much as I would have liked to deny it, I found email a much easier form of pan-generational communication than the telephone – not to mention a simpler way of getting feedback out of my pupil. In short: it was hard work to grunt via computer.

Peter's emails were terser than those of most of my other friends, dispensing with such pleasantries as ‘Hi', ‘What have you been up to?' and ‘Best Wishes', but at least he made good use of the subject box and expressed himself in something approaching intelligible English. Whereas on the phone he might have gone into monosyllabic mode, paused for uncomfortably long periods and failed to express that, say, he'd enjoyed ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' by The Smiths, email seemed to loosen him up, giving his inner cultural commentator the forum for
expression that it had been longing for. Either that, or he'd just really liked my tape. Peter might have failed to listen to a lot of the music I'd steered in his direction, but I had to give him his due: when he did listen to something, he
really
listened to it. In much the same way that I'd hoped
The Best Of Grand Funk Railroad
would, ‘Tom's Peasant Island Discs 1993', with its selection of forgotten leftfield rockers and bedsit poets, had really struck a chord with him, and before long he was quoting the soundtrack of my idiot years back to me. It was the kind of thing that, had I been Jim Eldon, would probably have had me blubbing into my keyboard, and I wished I could reciprocate by quoting from ‘This CD Will Self-Destruct', the CD that Peter had made for me of his favourite nu-metal songs. Regrettably, though, my hearing wasn't sharp enough to penetrate its sludge-laden guitars and Yeti-like bellowing.

‘I quite like the Kyuss track: it's got a sort of stoner rock feel,' I wrote of Peter's CD. ‘Reminds me of Blue Cheer. But I'm not so sure about the one by Drowning Pool. It frightened the cats a bit. And why do Kyuss keep singing about bodies hitting the floor?'

‘It's just a song about death and destruction,' Peter wrote in response. ‘It's cool. But I think “Eyeless” by Slipknot is the coolest. I like that lyric: “You can't see California without Marlon Brando's eyes”.'

‘What does it mean?' I wrote.

‘I don't know,' wrote Peter. ‘It's just really . . . thoughtful.'

Peter's emails didn't just feature regurgitated lyrics; they also featured impenetrable slogans and surreal
statements of a totally non-music-related nature: isolated sentences, occasionally of an unnervingly political inclination, bearing no relation to the remainder of the email. These tended to confuse me, and leave me feeling uncertain as to whether or not I was required to respond to them. Examples included:

‘What do Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Baghdad have in common? Nothing . . . Yet.'

‘Salute the carrot.'

‘Open the gates. What's inside? DARKNESS.'

‘Icons are like shoes: a matter of opinion.'

‘Blair, Bush, bomb: things that begin with B. Question: what begins with Z?'

And perhaps most perplexingly of all:

‘If a cauliflower is a dog in the animal world, what colour, in an ideal world, is a tree?'

Was Peter reaching out to me in some obscure way? I wondered. Maybe. Was he trying to get me involved in a deep philosophical discussion? Perhaps. But more likely he was just fulfilling another part of his hormonal destiny. In the end I decided it best to ignore his statements. I would probably only have had to go back to South Nottinghamshire College and read the ancient biro inscriptions on the rubber desks to find that I, too, had once felt the need to expose the wider universe to my deeper, more surreal thoughts. And what had that signified? Precisely nothing. Ten years on, what was I? An apolitical Steve Miller Band fan whose most profound daily ‘statement' involved inventing stupid names for his cats.

The other strange thing about Peter's emails was something I didn't notice until perhaps the third or
fourth communication in the wake of the Nottingham trip. It was to do with the way he signed off:

‘Laters,

Petter'

I understood the ‘Laters' bit. Even I was still hip enough to realise that this was an insouciant young person's way of saying, ‘Goodbye, take care, and – you know what? – I'm really going to miss you!'; it wasn't unheard of for people my age (people my age in complicated athletic footwear, anyway) to use it. What I didn't understand was the bit below it. Had Peter changed his name without telling me? Or was it possible that in all our time together I'd been spelling it wrong? Not wishing to hurt his feelings, I approached Jenny about the matter.

‘Oooh yes. I've been meaning to talk to you about that. He's decided to have a little bit of a change,' said Jenny.

‘What? So he's called Petter now? Isn't that Swedish?' I said.

‘No. You don't pronounce it “Petter”. One of the “t”s is silent.'

‘I don't get it. What's the point?'

‘Well, to be honest, I think he's a bit cheesed off at having such a normal name. You know, all his mates have these unusual names like Zed and Raf and Jonti. He's always having a go at me about it, so I figured, What the hell?, let him add a letter to it. He'll probably grow out of it. I think, really, it's just a bit fashionable to spell words in a weird way. There's the band, isn't there – what are they called? – Staind, but without an “e”. And there's the other one. I think they're called
Soil but they have a “d” at the end. I called them Soiled and he got very angry with me and started doing that stomping thing on the stairs on the way to his room.'

‘Actually, I think they are just called Soil, without the “d”. At least, that's how he's written it on “This CD Will Self-Destruct”.'

‘On what?'

‘Oh, the compilation CD he made for me. It's very professionally done. He even drew his own “Parental Advisory” sticker on it.'

‘Oh, one of
those
things. I sometimes think manufacturers only stick those on to sell more records.'

The next time I saw Petter, I opted to keep quiet about his new moniker. Going by what Jenny had said, it was clearly a sensitive issue, and I didn't want to do anything to detract from the new level of musical understanding we'd reached. Despite what Roland might have had you believe, I still felt secretly proud of ‘Tom's Peasant Island Discs 1993'. When I'd fished it out of an old box in my parents' attic at the beginning of the year, I'd been surprised – considering just how much unlistenable hogwash I'd pretended to like as an eighteen-year-old – at the quality of its track selection. Astonishingly, it didn't feature one band that sounded remotely like a broken dishwasher or some furniture falling down some stairs. Sure, I would have been happier if Petter had joined me in my love of Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd, but nevertheless, having him join me in my old – and, in a small way, still burgeoning – love of early Madder Rose and Pavement singles represented a bona fide result. I felt, for the first time, as though I was only a few short steps
away from gaining a better understanding of my pupil's musical universe.

‘This CD Will Self-Destruct' took me a tiny bit closer. It might have mystified me, but between all the growling, thundering, dying and destructing, I could find the beginning of a line of musical aesthetics and trace it back, if not to my old self, then at least to some people my old self had been slightly intimidated by. What Petter listened to still scared me, but at root it was surely just a slightly heavier version of what the DJs at Rock City's Alternative Night used to play, with more dying in it. It reminded me of a specific breed of alternative rock fan I used to know: slightly hairier than the people I used to hang around with, and almost certainly with bigger shorts. But most of all, it reminded me of the Reading Festival.

Ten years ago, the Reading Festival had been Britain's second biggest annual outdoor rock event: a less mellowed-out, smellier rival to the Glastonbury Festival. These days, it was still enormously popular, but seemed to have lost its personality somewhat. Or perhaps I was just out of touch. Whatever the case, I was pretty sure that, in late August, Reading town centre would be full of people who looked just like older versions of Petter. I was also sure that Petter would jump at the chance of being there and feel even greater respect for me as a tutor if I was the one to offer him his first taste – and, more to the point, smell – of festival life.

I hadn't attended the Reading Festival as a punter since 1995, chiefly because I'd been put off music festivals for ever after one particularly dismal Glastonbury where, on the same day that I'd had my
wallet pilfered, one of my friends had been mugged and another had had his tent stolen. Since then I'd been to Reading a couple of times for reviewing purposes, but never for more than a day, and always with the emphasis on clean, comfortable people-watching in the backstage area rather than on getting crushed in the moshpit next to the
Melody Maker
stage. Possessing no desire to sit in a muddy field watching metalheads paint their faces and sing along to Smurf songs in an ironic fashion, I had no intention of going back on my anti-festival stance now. Instead, I decided, I would take Petter to Reading on the day
after
the festival. By doing this I would a) avoid having my eardrums punished by Amen, Slipknot and Incubus, and b) give him the opportunity to see the day-lit downside of spending four nights without sleep in a field full of people shouting ‘Bollocks!' at the top of their voices for the hell of it. Yet, simultaneously, he would be grateful, in the special way that only a fourteen-year-old being plunged into a scene of chaos, alcoholic abandon and ear-splitting music can be.

In a sense, I was using Reading as a pay-off. A couple of days before we arrived there, I'd taken Petter to Peacehaven, near Brighton, to meet Bob Copper, the head of The Copper Family, a folk group whose story could be traced back well over a hundred years. The trip had been tough going on Petter. A few miles past Crawley he'd started to complain of a headache. I'd initially assumed that his discomfort could be entirely attributed to Crawley, or at least to the grating a cappella sounds of
Come Write Me Down
, the Copper
Family album that was playing on the Focus's stereo. I'd convinced him that he'd be fine once we'd stopped for a Burger King, and that there was no need to turn back. But I'd made an error of judgement. Around Rottingdean, with the Copper Family CD on its second rotation, Petter had spoken sharply to me for the first time ever and asked for the music to be switched off, and I'd realised he was in genuine pain. He'd also expressed a wish to wait in the car and read
Kerrang!
while I spoke to Bob.

‘Are you sure?' I'd asked him.

‘Yeah,' he'd mumbled. ‘My brain feels like a goat farted in it. I don't think any folk's going to help at this point. All those songs about “drinking a pile of ale” – it's too much.'

‘But I thought you liked booze now.'

‘Yeah. But that doesn't mean I want to hear a bunch of old men sing songs about it.'

Locating Bob's ancient storybook cottage in the middle of a decidedly non-ancient, non-storybook housing estate, I steeled myself for another slightly futile encounter in the absence of my student. Fortunately, Bob was in his late eighties and seemed to have forgotten that I'd said I'd be interviewing him with a teenager in tow. A former shepherd, he had a fascinating life story, which he was eager to tell, and had home-baked some rather tasty cookies, only a few of which had his wiry grey hairs embedded in them. At one point, he even sang me a song about ale. But to be truthful, my eye was on the clock and my mind was on the ailing Petter. I'd been with Bob an hour, and he'd only reached 1957. I dearly wished I could stay
longer, but I could feel my duty as a guardian overtaking my duty as a musical historian, and I made my excuses, stashing a couple of cookies in my coat for my poorly friend.

Reading was a far easier study proposition. For a start, it only had a couple of decades of history, as opposed to umpteen. Not only that, very little of this history involved sheep (although there was no denying the profusion of ale). Petter hadn't really blamed me for taking him to Peacehaven and exposing him to the delights of indigenous, ancient folk music, or at least had forgiven me from the moment I'd mentioned Reading, and as I steered the Focus through the throng of Slipknot t-shirts and matted hair running parallel to the festival grounds, he seemed in higher spirits than ever.