Authors: Mike Rutherford
Dad wanted to be like my grandpa but I couldn’t think of anything more depressing. With the Beatles, a new era had come in and all kids my age wanted to be the absolute opposite of everything their parents were. The weird thing is that it happened so fast – the Beatles only really lasted six years and Hendrix’s career was even shorter – and yet in that time everything changed. The newspapers were full of stories about the scandalous behaviour of the youth of today – the end was nigh. When I would drift into the room while my parents were watching Reginald Bosanquet read the TV news, the stories always seemed to be about the revolution that kids my age were leading.
I played it up, of course. I was sixteen: I didn’t want my dad to
get
me. ‘You don’t understand, you just don’t get it.’ Sometimes I said it more for effect than because I felt it, but the truth was that although kids had always thought their parents were old-fashioned, this time there really was a huge gulf opening up.
Did Dad think the world was coming to an end? I’m sure he didn’t: he’d lived through two world wars and been round the world several times. He understood what was going on. Maybe he’d also realized that because my generation didn’t have real wars to fight, we had to find other battles. In any case, his attitude was never like some of the other old captains at his club in London: ‘Damn young hooligans!’ It was more that he was just completely lost as the world changed around him.
* * *
The Climax and the Anon weren’t the only bands at Charterhouse. There was also the Garden Wall who the school magazine reckoned were: ‘the only true exponent of Soul Music in the school. With a distinctly earthy quality to their work, they gave some spirited performances in last quarter’s Charity Beat Concert, Peter Gabriel’s vocalizing being a major feature.’
Ant was part of the Garden Wall as well as the Anon, and Tony Banks was their piano player (although he spent quite a lot of his time fighting over the keyboard with Peter). The Garden Wall also had a trumpet player, which said it all as far as I was concerned. My band had guitars and amplifiers; the Garden Wall had a trumpet and an upright piano.
I must have done two or three concerts – calling them gigs would be stretching it – at Charterhouse, but it wasn’t just about the performing. Half the fun in those days was simply talking about it. The camaraderie, the preparation and the planning was as important to me as the playing. I would even get a kick out of carrying Ant’s Vox amp to the classrooms for rehearsals, me on one side and Ant on the other. Leading it through the old stone cloisters felt so clandestine: a real two-fingers up to the masters.
That said, it wasn’t planning but an accident that got me round Chare’s guitar ban. Having rejoined the Anon, on the day of the big end-of-term concert I made my way to the main hall: wooden floors, galleried ceiling, a balcony about two-thirds of the way back, 600 or so boys in the audience and the headmaster in the front row with Chare beside him. And only then did I realize my guitar lead was broken.
In a panic I scrabbled around in the wings and managed to find a replacement but it was only four feet long, which meant that I was four feet away from my spotlight. I’m sure the rest of the Anon thought that this was a deliberate ploy – lurking in the darkness – but I would have been out front, belting out Stones’ covers to Chare given half a chance. Not that it mattered: the gig was a huge success and I managed to avoid expulsion at the same time.
* * *
Music was a lifesaver at school but so too was the highly illegal Honda 50 motorbike that I’d managed to acquire. I kept it at a local garage where I paid a monthly rent, which doubled as hush money because the garage owner knew exactly where I was from.
It wasn’t a cool motorbike, the Honda 50, and I never managed to convince myself that it looked good, which made it more painful. But it gave me the freedom I needed and the fact that it was so completely against the rules made riding it feel even better. It often didn’t matter where I went. It was just the fact that I could start it up and escape the clutches of the whole suppressive regime.
One afternoon I was heading for Guildford and as I looked in my wing mirror I recognized one of the masters’ cars on my tail. Not that it had ‘Master’ written all over it, but there was a certain type of car parked in the staff car park and this one definitely fell into that category. However much I tried to lose him by turning down various lanes, he was right behind me. Eventually I realized there was nothing for it but to bail out.
Having made a sharp and dangerous turn into a driveway I leapt off the bike and ran across the garden with my helmet firmly in place. I then managed to jump the fence into the next garden – nearly taking the clothesline with me. Having clambered back over another fence and on to the road, I was relieved to find that the car had disappeared from sight. I can’t say it was one of my coolest moments.
It never really occurred to me not to go back, to ride off for good on my motorbike. Occasionally word would come down the wire about runaways – two boys from Harrow or someone from Eton – but even while I was busy rebelling it seemed paramount not to embarrass my father. What I did do was skip classes to go to the pub in Godalming and drink gin and lime – even though I still didn’t like the taste of gin – and I would regularly get beaten for sneaking off to smoke cigarettes with Ant. The worst thing about this was that it wasn’t the master who spotted you coming out of the bushes who did the beating: they’d report you to your housemaster who’d then drag you in for interrogation. And that meant Chare.
‘Have you been smoking, Rutherford?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Bend over.’
It was the lack of transparency that really rankled.
Amazingly I never got caught skiving off school to go to gigs at the Marquee Club in London. I took great care not to be seen: I would wait until it was dark and then climb out of the window in my mauve platforms.
I would either ride my Honda 50 to Guildford Station or walk down the hill to Godalming Station, a school mac disguising my velvet flares, and wait anxiously for my friends Chris Piggott and Andy Dunkley to turn up. (Dunkley was the brave one: he wanted to get expelled. As for Chris Piggott, I was surprised he was still talking to me because early on in my musical career I’d blown up his amplifier. ‘DC’ socket on the amp stood for ‘Direct Current’ and anything direct – so I thought – was obviously going be louder than anything that wasn’t. I had plugged in my guitar and smoke had come billowing out.)
The Marquee Club in Wardour Street was the home of everything that meant anything to me back then. It’s funny but I never found Soho threatening although it was seedy enough in those days. It was full of strip shows and dirty bookshops. (You’d wander in and wander out of those quite quickly: the fact you’d been in was the main thing. Strip clubs were a bit more intimidating. There’d always be a guy on the door trying to entice you in – ‘Come on in, young man’.) The funky buildings, the red and yellow and green neon lights at night, the cool London people with their scarves and hats: it all felt slightly forbidden but never scary. Maybe it was because there was so much music happening there that I didn’t feel intimidated. There were folk clubs, the 100 Club up the road at Oxford Street and, best of all, the Marquee, which felt like a real musos’ place and not just some nightclub with a disco.
The Marquee Club was where I saw the Nice with Keith Emerson, the Herd with Peter Frampton, the Cream, the Action and the Sands (Chris Squire had a fantastic Rickenbacker bass sound: he wasn’t just playing low notes, he was playing lead lines. I remember being very impressed by that). And I loved the harmonies – in those days every band seemed to have about three people doing backing vocals.
The volume was mind-blowing and the heat was amazing. The Marquee Club was on ground level but you felt underground as everything was dark and dripping with sweat. No one ever took their Afghan coats off, although if you were sensible you’d got an Afghan waistcoat and were wearing that over your tie-dye T-shirt. Everyone was in boots and flares, which made trying to tell the girls and boys apart difficult. At least I was in a room with the opposite sex which, after Charterhouse, was wonderful. The only girls most Charterhouse boys ever met would be at friends’ parties in the holidays: you’d find yourself trying to be the cool guy, which in reality meant shuffling from foot to foot and mumbling incoherently.
Chris, Andy and I would travel down to London, go to a gig, and then get the milk train back at 5.30 in the morning, something that – thinking about it now – still gets me hot round the collar. There was such great pleasure in escaping to London, feeling part of the scene, but I was also terrified of getting caught and letting my father down. I never, ever told anyone what I was up to – whispers had a habit of getting round at Charterhouse. By the time I left school, the pinnacle of my ambition was to play The Marquee Club. I thought that if you could play there, you really were somebody.
Ant and I were quite close by now and we’d often stay with each other in the holidays. At my parents’ house we’d play guitar late into the night and my mother would usually come down in the morning for breakfast and say things like, ‘Darling! Loved that tune!’ It was more difficult at Ant’s house. Ant’s father was a top banker who ran the finances for the Marylebone Cricket Club and I could tell he did not approve of our music: I always felt slightly uncomfortable. Ant’s mother was much more supportive, laughing and joking, and she also transported the Anon’s equipment to the Tony Pike Sound Studio in Putney when we went to a session there. She drove our gear in the back of her Mercedes while Ant, Rich and I had to take the bus.
Tony Pike’s studio was in the back of a small house and Tony was an old-school kind of guy. We could tell he had no understanding of our music and noise. He had a slight West-Country accent too, which didn’t quite work when he started complaining about the damage he thought we were causing to his equipment: ‘You just mind my comprezzorz . . . ’
‘Silly old fucker,’ I would mutter, not realizing that the whole point of control rooms was that you could hear everything when you were standing in them. As he was.
‘Oi! You mind your language down there.’
The song we’d recorded, ‘Pennsylvania Flickhouse’, was very much Ant’s – a sort of Godalming ‘Route 66’. Rich had worked out that, because our songs were three minutes long, we could easily record six in an hour. When we found we’d only managed one we immediately started making plans for a return visit but soon after that Rich’s father took him out of Charterhouse and sent him to Millfield in Somerset: he thought Rich was mixing with a bad lot in the Anon. He might have been right – at least, as far as I was concerned – but that left us without a singer, at which point Ant decided it should be me.
I didn’t like the idea of being a front man. It might have been different if I’d had a voice. I’ve always thought that 60 per cent of the world have an okay-enough voice to be a singer of some sort, and some great singers don’t have a great voice but still find a way to make it work. I wasn’t in that category (although neither was Ant). It was when Ant got me to sing the Rolling Stones’s ‘Mercy Mercy’ and I felt something happening in my Adam’s apple area (it was quite worrying: my vocal chords seem to slip out of place) that I really knew I wasn’t meant to sing. However, in those days if you could sing a bit, that meant you were a singer, so we dropped any songs with high notes in them from the repertoire instead.
Meanwhile, the tension was building between my father and me. He wrote me letters (of course, I didn’t keep them) and during the holidays I would argue with him constantly about the length of my hair and my clothes, most of which came from Kensington Market. I would go there at weekends and look round the stalls, see a band in the evening and get the train home afterwards, always making sure just to miss the one that I was expected on. On other occasions I would stay with Nicky, who now had a flat in Hamilton Gardens that she shared with a couple of other girls. I would go there and be slightly overpowered by these wonderful, long-legged and rather awe-inspiring women walking around the place.
Nicky had been to boarding school too, the Royal Naval School for Girls in Haslemere, and was now working as a secretary at the
Guardian
. She’d always been less scatty than Mum and me. Even at twelve she’d been grown-up, which must have made it easier for my parents, especially as they were older than usual themselves. As far as my dad was concerned she could do no wrong. She was bright, she wrote my parents letters, she visited them and now she was a young lady working in London while I was sloping off with Chris Piggott to anti-Establishment events like the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival. (Not a great experience: it was July, cold, wet and the sound was crap. Plus the Small Faces only played for fifteen minutes, which really pissed me off. But I was there!) I’m sure Dad thought that I was a waste of space in comparison with Nicky. The only good thing was that he didn’t know half of what I was doing. But it was only a matter of time before things came to a head.
Dad and I had often argued about Chare in the past but my father thought it was me who was the problem. However, when Chare threw me out of the school just before my O levels I think it finally dawned on my dad that something odd was going on: the timing was so bloody stupid as I had only got one term left. Perhaps I’d been right and the old bugger really did have it in for me.
It was still term time when my father was called down to meet with Chare to discuss my future. I only found out what happened later: apparently Chare lost it completely with Dad, ranting and raving and scolding him like a pupil. That wouldn’t have impressed Dad. He had a word for people like Chare: ‘uncharming’. More than that, when Dad asked for a list of all the terrible things I’d done, Chare couldn’t come up with anything: I hadn’t killed anyone, I hadn’t maimed anyone, I hadn’t burned down the school.
My father had been paying my school fees for the past three years and, as far as Dad was concerned, Chare was not behaving correctly. Dad wrote to the headmaster to say as much, no doubt quoting precisely the figure he’d paid for me to be at his school. At that point the headmaster must have decided to overrule Chare, who was not a popular figure. A deal was cut: I could go back for my O levels but would have to leave to do my A levels somewhere else.