Educating Peter (26 page)

During Goat Enterprises' three-gig, two-week tenure as the commercial force behind Circulus, the band made a grand total of £67.38, not including travel expenses or replacement mandolin strings. During this time, they'd been ignored by an ageing border collie, Michael Palin and the Reviews Editor of
Mojo
magazine, continued to fail to get a record deal, and endured the misfortune of breaking down on the outskirts of Thetford. Even at my most optimistic and paternal, I had to admit it was all a huge disappointment. Sure, the music biz was experiencing a slump, but you only had to look at the career of The
Stereophonics to realise that anybody could get themselves signed these days. Yet my band were photogenic, skinny, sexy and musically erudite . . . and nobody cared.

Only Petter, it seemed, was coming round to their brand of psychedelic folk. He'd also seemed particularly impressed that the band had been paid entirely in cider for their final gig, and slightly disappointed that he'd had to travel back from Banham to West Norfolk with me in the Ford Focus, rather than to London with Michael, Emma, Leo and the cider in Alice The Retro Ford Escort, who'd now had her midriff bedecked with 200 pictures of Seventies Greek warbler Demis Roussos in a kaftan – a sort of hippie answer to go-faster stripes.

On a chilly Sunday afternoon in early autumn, with the zoo and car boot sale not quite doing the business they had at the height of summer, Banham had provided a perfect example of Norfolk sleepiness – the kind of place where people say, ‘Drive you steady, Bore,' as a form of farewell. We'd been slightly disturbed, upon arriving at the cider shed, to find a sign outside reading, in descending order, ‘Don't Spook The Horse, Circulus, The Bleach Boys', partly because we'd thought Circulus were headlining, but mostly because it wasn't initially clear whether ‘Don't Spook The Horse' was a musical collective or a safety instruction to people in the general area. To our relief, it had transpired that Don't Spook The Horse were a Neil Young tribute band who'd played the previous evening (The Bleach Boys were due to play tomorrow) and that Circulus had the stage to themselves. The gig
had been a success, with Goat Enterprises' number one export finishing their set to the sound of twenty-three ruddy-complexioned locals whispering, ‘Blimey, go you steady now, Bore – they're even better than Headspace!', but it hadn't been enough to dissuade me from feeling that my continuing guidance would do my friends more harm than good. Petter had looked slightly sad, in a nonchalant kind of way, when I'd announced that Goat Enterprises would be folding, and Circulus Robin had been kind enough to ask the pair of us to stay on for a probationary period, but I had seen that I didn't quite have what it takes to make it in the ruthless yet fatherly world of rock management. There was a limit to how many people's dads I could be, and besides, I had an educational obligation to fulfil.

Two days later, Petter and I, accompanied by Michael from Circulus, made our way down a pavement-free street in a leafy pocket of South West London, two of us doing our best to avoid getting the wide bottom part of our trousers caught on the brambles at the side of the road, the other one lagging a few yards behind, not seeming to care what the wide part at the bottom of his trousers, or the even wider parts in the middle and at the top, got snagged upon. It was to be our last adventure together. After this, Petter would be free, and only time would tell if I'd taught him something useful about rock and roll, or if I'd bumbled along uselessly, wasting his and Jenny's time. Whatever the case, it was impossible to deny the relaxed feeling of end-of-term exhilaration as we rounded the corner
where Gloria Jones's Mini had skidded out of control.

If you'd been in one of the cars that nearly knocked us into the undergrowth that day you might have been busy thinking about the stock market, or whether your spouse would have sex with you that night, or what wankers pedestrians were, but just maybe you might have wondered what these three people were doing: the man in the wide-brim hat and Cuban heels who looked like a Seventies singer-songwriter but slightly like a movie villain as well, the man in Seventies golf clothes, and the kid accompanying them in the big jacket and bigger trousers. I liked to think we made for a perplexing sight, but in the end we probably looked like three people going to pay their respects at the site of Marc Bolan's death.

I'd expected Bolan's tree to be full of frizzy-haired men with glitter stuck to their faces, wearing platform heels. In reality, what we mostly spotted were tracksuits: blue ones, purple ones, red and yellow ones, even shiny ones, but tracksuits all the same. It was quite possible that we'd missed the big celebrations earlier in the day and caught the less fanatical tourists who slunk along afterwards, but that didn't make it any less depressing. We'd arrived here with irreverence on our minds, but now we looked like the biggest T-Rex obsessives in town. Both Michael and I usually wore Seventies clothes from second-hand stores, but we'd imagined that they were the kind of Seventies clothes that signified a
specific kind
of Seventies music fan. In this setting, however, they just made us look like Seventies People – or, even worse, Bolan People.

‘Oh. Are you going to the tree?' a teenage girl clutching a Penguin Classic had asked us as we'd crossed the bridge approaching the famous site. ‘Cooool. I've just been there. There's a totally, like, mystic vibe. I wanted to stay longer and light some candles, but I've got yoga class tonight.'

‘Well, we'll er . . . light one for you,' I replied, before wincing in the direction of Michael.

‘Did she know you?' asked Petter, a moment later.

‘No,' I said. ‘Never seen her before in my life. Why do you ask?'

‘No reason,' he mumbled.

The tree itself didn't look all that threatening: you certainly couldn't imagine it going around murdering glam rockers. Beneath it was a guest book, a bust of Bolan, which in reality looked more like the bust of Val Kilmer's Native American spirit guide, and a selection of flowers and poetry. Crouching down next to a Polish girl in a shell suit with abnormally sharp elbows, Petter and I examined some of the eulogies to the dead singer, almost all of which seemed to feature the word ‘star' and a selection of clumsily scattered T-Rex song titles. Our five favourites were, in ascending order:

Somewhere, in the night sky, a star shines so bright. Is it you, or is it kryptonite? I seeked you ought, and hoped that you found me, but you didn't, but then again however though in a way I always thought you did. Your own little star (that setlist you gave me is in a framed now).

My never dead devotion,

Wesley ‘Faster Than Most' Saeka – Madrid (46)

Rock gods came down. They gave us a star. A little one only, but she shined bright. Thank you for making those young years such a treasure to behold. Love and glitter – Marquette, 47, Essex

Marc, you had silly hair and you were sort of pudgy – especially in the later photos

Your songs all had the same tune

And you weren't a patch on David Bowie

The band Cornershop once told me Dandy In The
Underworld was a lost classic

But I bought it for £1.50 and it was just as dull as all your other albums

That said, I did once dance to Get It On when I was really pissed

All my indifference,

Tom (27), Norfolk

Petter seemed to know more about Bolan than many of the other old-time stars who had featured in our studies. He'd seen him perform on
Top Of The Pops 2
and was slightly curious about his hair (‘How does he get it to look so cool when it's, like, so frizzy?'), but was as unmoved by T-Rex's music as I was. Michael, meanwhile, liked Bolan's early hippie strumming but hated the later glam stuff. Still, the three of us tried to keep a tight volume on our blasphemy. It was clear that there were people here who genuinely cared about Bolan – people who, despite their tracksuits, felt like they were a part of him. We didn't exactly want to get into a conversation with them or be their telegram buddies, but we didn't want to get kicked in the throat by them either.

As we made our way back across the common, I reflected on how well Petter now seemed to be getting on with my friends – particularly Michael. Ostensibly, the two of them had very little in common: Michael was a cheery folk musician who liked to buy waistcoats and go on walks in the West Country; Petter was a heavy metal fan who liked to buy t-shirts with pretend blood on them and go on walks around Camden Market. Yet, ever since they'd tied carrots to
balloons and shot them together, something subtle yet adhesive within their personalities had gelled.

These days, I thought of Michael as a paragon of human goodness, musical taste and quality clothing. But I wondered if, at fourteen, or even seventeen, I would have got on as well with him as Petter was doing now. Vague memories came back of writing people's entire personalities off, purely on the basis that they hadn't ever attended Rock City's Punk Night. My indie élitism had known few boundaries in the early Nineties, and I'm sure Petter's nu-metal élitism knew equally few now, but the fact that he could find respect for sunny Michael somewhere in his gothic heart at least showed that there was hope for the future. He wasn't going to be trading in his combat pants for a pair of corduroy flares any time soon, but he might, one day. I liked to think of it as another kernel of taste I'd planted in his brain, waiting to blossom in a more mellow time.

By now, Petter had met a dozen or more of my friends, yet I was still to meet one of his. Shortly, however, I'd meet virtually all of them: Raf, Caroline, Zed, Jonti, Sam, Sally, Cauliflower Head and many, many others I'd forgotten but who had no doubt at one point done something really funny involving putting a pair of pants on their head. I thought back to my own school, and the fact that I'd lost touch with everyone I'd known there. At sixteen, when I left school, I'd been impetuous, judgemental, and keen to start a new life and get away from a tiny North Nottinghamshire world where not dropping your ‘h's and using big words like, say, ‘typical' qualified you for status as a
‘posh twat'. But I'd also been to school with some nice people: I know I hadn't meant to lose touch with
everyone
. Did most young adults experience this phenomenon? It seemed so, from talking to my current circle of friends. Wasn't this why friendsreunited, the website that helped put people in touch with old acquaintances from their youth, was so popular: because there were so many people like me out there, entering their late twenties, getting over whatever petty snobbery had governed their social actions, and just wanting to hang out with some nice, wholesome folk they felt comfortable with? How many of Petter's friends would he fade away from over the next few years because of their differing taste in music or politics or clothes or food or drugs or nightclubs or shops? And would he regret it? And should I warn him, or just let him get on with it?

This was Petter's power over me: he turned me into a wistful, dewy-eyed wreck. It wasn't just that I thought about how my musical tastes had changed when I was in his company; I thought about how everything about me had changed. Alarmingly often, before or after, I would find myself emailing a close friend and dropping subtle memories or enquiries about my old self into the text. Stuff like, ‘Do you remember Ellie's parties? Is it just me, or do you miss those days at all? Call me stupid, but I
liked
sleeping with a basketball instead of a pillow . . .' and ‘Did I really used to wear that Jacob's Mouse t-shirt over a sweater, or is it just my imagination?' I didn't exactly miss my teenage self; I was just abnormally interested in him. Whether it was because I hadn't been to a
nightclub in nearly two years, or because, at twenty-seven, I finally felt that I couldn't delay entering fully fledged adulthood any longer, I wasn't sure. There was, however, a definite sense of leaving something behind.

That night – the night before Axe Demons – I made two lists: one featuring things that I liked as a teenager but didn't like now, the other featuring things that I liked now but had scorned as a teenager. Then, when I'd folded them up and put them in an envelope marked ‘To Be Opened In September 2012', I made a further two lists: one featuring the passions that I thought Petter might abandon in his twenties, the other featuring those that I thought he might hold on to.

Stuff That I Liked Then But Don't Give A Toss About Now included:

Stuff That I Like Now But Hated Then featured such unhip pleasures as: