This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (31 page)

Thus Mrs Kenny, her unseen grown-up son and I lived our lives completely independently of one another while occupying the same address. My friends envied me such freedom but, used as I was to being on my own, Hamlet Gardens could feel lonely after the clamour and bustle of the Coxes’ home. Andrew was going steady with Ann so I didn’t spend much time with him when we weren’t practising or performing with our band. I’d had a few girlfriends myself, from Susan Kelly, who’d bought me ‘You’re My World’ by Cilla Black for my fourteenth birthday, to Stephanie Bates, who lived in the prefabs on the notorious White City estate. Even though I chivalrously risked being beaten up by the local gangs when I walked her home every night, she dumped me unceremoniously for her cousin. All of these romances had, however, been short-lived.

None of that mattered when I stood on stage with the Area. The band was still doing well and we truly believed that stardom was just a recording contract away.

ON ONE GLORIOUS
evening, 4 March 1967, to be precise, we played at a dance in Shepherd’s Bush. That afternoon, I’d been at Wembley to see QPR beat West Bromwich Albion 3–2 in the League Cup final. It was the first such final to be played at Wembley and the first time a Third Division side had triumphed in the competition. That cup remains the only major trophy QPR have ever won. That season, they went on to complete a double by winning the Third Division title as well.

Although I never made the association, it was the third anniversary of Lily’s death. Had Linda, living quietly in Watford, registered what a momentous day it was for all Rangers fans, she would have told me, as she so often did, that Lily’s spirit was guiding our lives.

That night of celebration found the Area in the heart of Rangers territory, playing at a wedding reception attended by about a hundred jubilant fans. The atmosphere was amazing, with the band at one with the audience. Their constant chant of ‘Rodney, Rodney’ was turned into a nifty little drumbeat by Andrew, and this collective tribute to the most skilful player I’ve ever seen on a football pitch, the incomparable Rodney
Marsh, who’d scored a fabulous second goal that afternoon, punctuated the evening.

A month earlier, Danny had managed to hire Regent Sound Studios in Denmark Street in Soho for an hour. Studio time was expensive, particularly at a place like Regent, where many top artists recorded. Danny met the cost with the aim of getting a return on his investment when the demo disc we were there to produce was picked up by one of the major labels. We recorded two numbers, ‘Hard Life’ written by Ian and Tony, and one of my songs – ‘I Have Seen’. Having taken so long getting ‘Hard Life’ right, we had only ten minutes left for my song. No time for retakes or to overlay the harmonies, but thanks to Andrew’s exceptional drumming and the chance to hear the song played back over the state-of-the-art equipment at Regent Sound, we were happy. It sounded brilliant to us and we left the studios convinced that a record deal was achievable.

By this time, Andrew and I had grown so confident of our abilities that, unbeknown to our fellow band members, we were both keeping our options open by responding to ads placed in the music press by established groups with vacancies to fill.

Danny couldn’t have tried harder with the Area’s demo disc. He hawked it round all the established labels and took it to a new one, Deram, that was enjoying a lot of publicity at the time. He managed to interest Don Arden, who was considering hiring us as a support act for a Small Faces tour and releasing ‘Hard Life’ as a single at the same time. But London was brimming with talented musicians and up-and-coming bands. Making the breakthrough was a matter of luck and timing as well as public appeal and musical prowess, and we couldn’t all succeed. Neither the Area nor the record was bad, just not good enough.

The end came for the band when somebody broke into the Fourth Feathers, where we stored our instruments between gigs, and stole the lot – Andrew’s drums, the mikes, Ian’s and Tony’s guitars and amps. Luckily, I had taken my Höfner Verythin home that night to practise, but I lost the new amplifier I’d bought on hire purchase with Johnny Farugia as my guarantor. It wasn’t insured. None of the equipment was. There was no way we could afford to replace all the instruments and so the Area was no more: killed off by the crime wave that seemed to be following me around.

A few months later, Danny Curtis told me that a band he knew were interested in recruiting me. I wouldn’t need to worry about buying another amp, he assured me: one would be provided for me. The In-Betweens were a proper semi-professional group, with a manager and even a small fan club. What was really interesting and unusual about them was that their manager, Arif Ali, was Asian and the band was multi-racial. The bass guitarist, Sham Hassan, was from the Caribbean; the drummer, Mike Bakridon, was Indian; Ivan, the lead guitarist, was Indo-Italian and others flitting in and out had Indo-Guyanese and West Indian backgrounds. Their greatest asset was a stunningly beautiful lead vocalist named Carmen. It was rare then for bands to have any female members, let alone for a woman to be fronting a group as Carmen did. The daughter of an Indian mother and a German father, she had big brown eyes, long black hair and a fabulous figure.

And so I joined the In-Betweens as the white guy on rhythm
guitar and backing vocals. We played soul – Stax, Tamla, Atlantic – but with a fair smattering of pop, songs like ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’, the Bee Gees’ ‘To Love Somebody’ and our classic rendition of the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’. I took lead vocals on this while Carmen danced seductively around me, draping herself across my shoulders in a way I wouldn’t have appreciated Danny Curtis doing.

Our base was a pub called the Pied Horse at the Angel, Islington, opposite the Post Office’s Northern District headquarters, where bass guitarist Sham worked as a postman. North London was a foreign land to me and getting there involved a circuitous tube journey at least once a week for our regular Friday-night gig at the pub and on the odd Saturday when we weren’t booked elsewhere.

Afterwards I’d make my way back to my solitary billet in Hamlet Gardens.

Andrew and Ann urged me to find myself a girlfriend so that we could go out in the evenings as a foursome. I had been nursing a serious crush on Carmen, our exotic vocalist, but, much to my amazement, she preferred Mike, the drummer. So when Linda invited me to a party, I was unattached.

It was a New Year’s Eve party at Mike and Linda’s house in Watford. Or, to be more accurate, a New Year’s Eve Eve party. There was no Bank Holiday on New Year’s Day back then, and with 31 December 1967 falling on a Sunday and everyone due to greet 1968 at work, the event was held on the Saturday night to ensure that the occasion could be properly celebrated.

Somehow I managed to perform with the In-Betweens and get to Watford for the party, arriving on the last train well after midnight. Everyone was bopping away in Linda’s house when I
arrived. Among her friends and neighbours was an attractive black-haired girl with a lovely smile who had come alone. I asked Linda who she was, sotto voce, as she fussed around getting me a drink in the crowded kitchen. The only part of the reply I caught was the girl’s name, Judy Cox, and Linda’s insistence that I’d met her before. Given her surname, I assumed this would have been at Lancaster Road and that she must be a relative of Pat and Albert’s.

In fact, as I discovered, Judy was nothing to do with the Lancaster Road Coxes. She’d trained as a nursery nurse with Linda, they had become close and I’d met her one afternoon when Linda had brought three of her friends to Pitt House. I remembered, then, trying to impress them in my pretentious way by offering them a cigarette from my flat box of Du Maurier’s, which I considered the height of sophistication. I recalled thinking how pretty she was as she took one.

Judy was a few months older than my sister. She had been engaged to an Italian who had been in England training to be a teacher. They had been together for three years when Judy fell pregnant and her fiancé fled back to Italy, breaking off all communication. Her daughter Natalie was now fifteen months old and sleeping upstairs with Mike and Linda’s baby daughter Renay while the celebrations proceeded noisily below. When the party was over, the other revellers had all gone home and our hosts had retired to bed, Judy and I were not ready for the night to end. We stayed up into the small hours, talking and getting to know one another, with the radio playing softly in the background – hearing ‘Nights in White Satin’ always reminds me of that New Year’s Eve. As the old year ebbed away, my increasing loneliness went with it.

Judy’s upbringing hadn’t been conventional. She had been just sixteen months old when her mother died of peritonitis in pregnancy at the age of twenty-four. The baby had been stillborn. Her father was a drunken bully who had immediately married the woman with whom he was already having an affair. They put Judy’s two brothers in a children’s home and sent her to live with one of his relatives. Her maternal grandparents tracked her down and took her back to live with them at Camelford Road, a turning between Ladbroke Grove and St Marks Road in Notting Hill. It was a leased war-damaged house that Judy’s grandparents were eventually forced to sell to a slum landlord because they didn’t have the money to repair it.

Judy’s father cut off all contact and it was some time before her grandparents were able to trace her brothers, who were living in separate Barnardo’s homes. There they remained until they were sixteen. All this time Judy’s dad was still living in Notting Hill. It took her some while to realize that the man who crossed the street to avoid her whenever he saw her approaching with her grandparents was her father.

Now Judy was an unmarried mother, which still carried a stigma in the late 1960s, albeit not to the extent it had ten years previously. The ‘sexual revolution’ was by no means as sweeping as is sometimes supposed: the concept might have been
de rigueur
among pop stars and metropolitan radicals but it certainly didn’t filter through to ordinary families, where having babies outside marriage was still frowned upon. Judy and Natalie – the loveliest child I’d ever encountered, with huge, melting brown eyes and a mass of curly hair – still lived with her grandmother, her grandfather having died when Judy was six.

We went out on our first date on Judy’s twenty-first birthday a couple of weeks after Linda’s party. I bought her a box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray, which was all I could afford and which must have signalled to Judy that there would be nothing extravagant about our courtship.

For a while in 1968, the In-Betweens were doing so well that the prospect of music as a sustainable career didn’t seem entirely fanciful. The band was in demand and we had at least two bookings every week. We were becoming more daring in our repertoire, adding our take on Vanilla Fudge’s hard-rock version of ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’, which became a bit of a showstopper with its power chords and piercing crescendo. There was interest from a well-known A & R man at the time, Ian Samwell, and Pat Meehan from EMI sent a talent-spotter to one of our gigs in South London.

The EMI scouting mission resulted in an audition at a recording studio in Shepherd’s Bush, which in turn led to the prospect of a recording contract and a short film centred on the racial diversity of the band. Johnny Farugia gave permission for me to be filmed at work in the store in East Sheen. However, before shooting could begin it was all brought to a shuddering halt by what was by now becoming a familiar disaster: the room above the bar at the Pied Horse was broken into and all our equipment was stolen – this time including my precious Höfner Verythin. Perhaps the Victims would have been the most appropriate name for any band I played in.

After the theft Sham, my closest friend in the In-Betweens,
asked me to form another band with him but I knew the time had come for me to take a sabbatical from my life as a musician to concentrate on domesticity with Judy and Natalie and, most pressingly, to find an occupation that would bring us some financial stability.

Judy and I had decided to get married that July, two months after my eighteenth birthday. With a wife and daughter to support (I later adopted Natalie to make my paternity official), I needed to forget my pipedreams of making a career out of music or becoming a writer and knuckle down to a steady job.