Art Sex Music Page 5

  8 December 1968

  What a terrible day it’s been for our family. Granddad died. Mum said I’d never see him again and she was right, though I wish with all my heart for once she was wrong.

  I got home from babysitting with Maz and banged merrily on the front door. Pam answered and just said, ‘Granddad’s died.’ I was speechless, then burst into tears. I was riddled with guilt for not seeing him before he died. He’d had lung cancer for some time but I’d chosen, as selfish teenagers do, to go out with my friends despite Mum asking me to go to Granddad’s with her.

  He was buried three days later and me and Pam viewed his open coffin. I really needed to see him again. He looked beautiful, the same kind, soft face I’d always known. I felt I’d betrayed his kindness at the end of his life. As they lowered his coffin into the ground, I let out a loud groan of grief from deep within me; it sounded like my heart was breaking. My mum was inconsolable and my dad was amazing in comforting her. The atmosphere when you lose someone so close is suffocating. All you want is for the sadness to end, for someone to make it all ‘unhappen’. On returning home from the funeral I wrote in my diary to Granddad, ‘I’ll always remember the way you used to say my name. It had a kind of magic in it all its own.’

  I felt unequipped to deal with death and desperate to do something that would ease the heavy weight of loss. Then I remembered Bridie’s church. I went one afternoon when it was empty. I lit a candle for Granddad and said a little prayer.

  Life went on, we all went back to work and Grandma Rarity came to stay and spend Christmas with us. That helped Mum a lot and she told me to go out and have a good time, not to allow losing Granddad to spoil my Christmas.

  24 December 1968

  I nearly got bloody raped.

  I resumed my nightlife at Disco, getting drunk and having fun, changing one boyfriend for another, and committing myself to none. Then Rogan, the kingpin Disco hard case, took a fancy to me. I didn’t mind. Even though he had a fast turnover of girlfriends, he was also gorgeous and appealingly enigmatic. But it didn’t last long. I wasn’t servile enough. I stood him up a few times and refused to officially ‘go out’ with him (be his). Besides that, I was still a virgin, and with no reliable form of contraception I wasn’t about to risk getting pregnant.

  I’d arranged to meet Rogan on Christmas Eve but I was late getting to town and he went off thinking I’d stood him up again. I was with Maz and Jo and we met up with some guys we knew, piled into a van together and set off to a party. We ended up getting thrown out, but the night was still young so we made our way back to town to consider other options. One of the guys suggested we all take a taxi to his father’s bingo hall. Other friends had gone before and had a great time blasting music through the big PA system. The hall had previously been a cinema so it was a vast space, but we were corralled into a smallish area where a load of booze was laid out and we all proceeded to get a bit drunk(er). The whole set-up didn’t feel right and I suggested we three headed to the loo together to talk … about leaving. My gut instinct was correct.

  As we came back out, the three guys jumped us. One, called Steve, got me – and more than he’d bargained for. I fought and punched him so hard he put his hands up in surrender. ‘All right! All right!’

  I called out to Jo and Maz, and told the guys to unlock the door and let us out. We walked to town and got a taxi home.

  1 January 1969

  Started 1969 a virgin, hope to end it in the same way too!

  I never made it.

  1969 was a pivotal year in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. I hadn’t stayed long at my office job – I left as soon as my laboratory technician post at Saltshouse High School came through. My wages rose to £8 a week. I never told Dad: I just paid him his mandatory £2-a-week board.

  The prep room where I worked was positioned between the biology and chemistry labs to provide immediate accessibility. Preparing the work for the students was often interrupted by teenage boys crawling into my room, looking up my (very mini) skirt, all the while pleading that they were just looking for their dropped pen. I was given a typewriter and access to a Banda spirit duplicating machine for putting together and printing science worksheets. In between duties I spent my time drawing and typing up poetry and Leonard Cohen lyrics, which I pinned on my bedroom wall, overlaid with coloured gels from the lab cupboards. As part of my new job I’d been enrolled on a lab technicians’ day-release course and had met a different and exciting set of people – artists, writers and musicians who had formed their own band. I finally felt like I’d entered a world that I had an affinity with.

  When one of the teachers at Saltshouse High School started getting a bit too ‘hands-on’ with me, I left that job and moved, in the same role, to my old school, Estcourt. Going back was a mistake. Most of the same teachers were there and I still felt deferential to them and uncomfortable socialising with them. I’d stay in the labs all day, even taking my tea and dinner breaks there. I was at a junction in my life. I hated work, had two very different sets of friends and ran two social lives in parallel, which at times crossed over but were ultimately incompatible. I was out six nights a week, going to gigs, parties and round people’s flats, increasingly with my friends from Hull College and University.

  I was closest to Snips and I sensed in him a similar restlessness to my own. We wanted more. And we both turned out to possess the necessary determination to get it. He was a musician, always singing and playing guitar in the college refectory or anywhere the mood took him. He formed his own band, Chest Fever (and later worked with Chris Spedding and Andy Fraser as lead singer in Sharks, plus Steve Marriott, Ginger Baker and more). I went to the band rehearsals in an old church hall, where Snips’s friends Chas, Rick and Oddle worked on the band’s oil-slide light show. The whole crowd of us would go along to the gigs, loon-dancing in front of the stage to the final number, an extended jam version of Bo Diddley’s ‘Mona’. The drums and rhythmic guitar were the driving force and it was a great tribal vibe – our tribe. That’s where my love for the physicality of live sound and the raw power of rhythm began.

  We were a mixed bunch of individuals, recognisable by our askew hip style, from Rick in a shirt and suit jacket to Tusca with his head of Afro-style ginger hair, big glasses and ankle-length coat. He looked like a cross between Woody Allen and Harpo Marx, with a stuffed parrot attached to his shoulder as he’d walk along in ‘Keep on Truckin’’ style (inspired by a comic strip by Robert Crumb). I considered the guys to be friends, kindred spirits, and never thought of taking it any further, even though some made advances on occasion, like when we consumed the cheap wine Merrydown (known to us as ‘Get ’Em Down’) or dropped ‘Randy Mandies’ (Mandrax).

  Through connecting with Snips and the others, I went to different gigs than I’d been used to, mixed with actively creative people and heard the music that would have a significant influence on me – Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Velvet Undergound and Nico. Listening to Pink Floyd transported me in sweet surrender to another place, stirring my deep-seated emotions, evoking very different feelings to the visceral sounds of the Velvets and Beefheart. Protest and folk music was a big thing too. We’d gather at someone’s flat, where there was always someone singing, playing acoustic guitar, bongos or mouth organ. But hearing women like Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick and Nico was a revelation. They were singing about change, about their world and their emotions. I’d found a place where I felt I could belong.

  I’d meet up with everyone either at the Gondola coffee club or our usual, the Black Boy pub, where many different groups met. It was there one unsuspecting night in April 1969 that I met Steve B., my first infatuation, the first love of my life, the person with whom I turned on, tuned in and ultimately dropped out – and lost my virginity. Quite a cluster of firsts and all in a relatively short space of time.

  My relationship with Steve B. proved to be the crucial turning point in my life. My world opened up in
ways I’d hoped for but never thought possible. The words ‘groovy’, ‘man’, ‘far out’, ‘plastic’, ‘bad scene’, ‘don’t bring me down’ and ‘bad trip’ entered my vocabulary. It was 1969. The hippy movement had already happened in America and the music had filtered through to the UK, bringing with it a wondrous glimpse of a collective experience of liberation from expectation and the conventional lifestyle Dad had mapped out for me. The Mamas & the Papas, the Doors and the song ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’ encapsulated the sentiment of the Summer of Love. I spent the next two and a half months with Steve in a love dreamworld, going to see the Who, with Pete Townshend smashing up his guitar, Free, Jethro Tull, and blagging our way into gigs whenever possible. We’d often take off in Steve’s car to Tunstall on the coast, light a bonfire, smoke joints and sit on the beach for hours, babbling stoned nonsense. After we dropped off Jo and Steve’s friend Ian, we’d sit in Steve’s car abandoning ourselves to the most intense sensuous passions and talk into the early hours.

  But the 1960s spirit of ‘free love’ got in the way of our deep feelings for one another. We both played the ‘no ties’ game. That, and Ian and Jo insensitively playing gooseberry way too often, meant our relationship was doomed to falter.

  On 2 August 1969, my parents went on holiday for a week. While they were gone, I took the opportunity to sneak away with Steve, Ian, Jo and the rest of our group, including Snips, Oddle, Chas and Ez. We headed for Plumpton Festival and the four of us were then going on to Torquay for a week, where we hoped to score and sell enough dope to fund our trip. That’s where I took acid (LSD) for the first time. I spent the weekend drifting around the site in a tripped-out haze, with a huge smile on my face. I remember coming across other people in the same zone as me and we’d hook up for a while in silence, smiling at one another then moving on. I stood beside one guy, our arms around each other, watching Soft Machine and Pink Floyd. The music seemed to fill the entire space from the stage to the edges of the field and up into the sky, enveloping me in blissful waves of ecstasy.

  I didn’t see much of Steve and Jo but I remember lying with Ez on a mattress in the band’s van (a converted ambulance). We were both tripping on purple haze and patting the mattress, watching coloured spirals drift into the air. Then someone came running in, screaming that the mattress was on fire. Those mesmerising spirals were the smoke from the burning mattress that had been set alight by an abandoned joint. We moved on to a tent, tripping out at the beautiful shifting markings (dirt) on the tent walls. Such is the perception of the world when senses are heightened beyond comprehension.

  We then went on to Torquay to stay at Jo’s sister Jan’s flat. As we arrived, there were clothes strewn everywhere: Jan was busy packing to take the hippy trail to India. When we woke the next morning she’d gone. That night was the last time I slept with Steve. All four of us went to the beach, mooched around and made contact with the dealer we’d been told about. We handed over our equal share of the dope money to Steve and Ian, and me and Jo nervously waited for them to return. When they did, we looked in awe at the rich black opium-streaked cannabis in Ian’s hand. It was the size of a small bread roll. We immediately rolled some joints and enjoyed our newly acquired stash, setting aside a fair-sized portion to sell later.

  I never did know what happened to it or the proceeds from selling it. By that point I was feeling excluded and at best tolerated. Ian and Jo seemed to purge themselves of the hostility and resentment they’d apparently been feeling towards me and I became a target for their jokes and jibes. Steve just laughed. The weeks before we’d set off on our holiday, Steve and I had been talking of breaking up and had agreed to see how we felt when we got back. My world seemed like it was beginning to fall apart. On our long drive home, Steve’s car broke down. The ‘big end’ had gone, and it was left for scrap. Rather like our relationship.

  As we decanted all our belongings, it felt like I was removing myself from a great friendship, a sad, farewell unpacking of every awakening that vehicle had facilitated. The car in which I’d lost my virginity was now gone. For the week or so after our trip I hardly spoke to Steve, and the distance between us grew until it all came to a head one night when he dropped me home. As I stepped out of the car on to the grass verge, he flew out of the driving seat, threw me to the ground and knelt astride me, screaming in my face to say something, anything, to him.

  ‘I have nothing to say to you! Get off me before I knee you in the balls.’

  There was no official split between us. I was busy with more pressing matters.

  I’d been dreading returning from Torquay. My parents had arrived home from their holiday while I was still away, to find me gone. My dad went berserk when he saw me. I’d ‘flounced’ off without his permission. It was the last straw: he threw me out.

  Luckily the schools were still on holiday so I didn’t need to go back to work for a few weeks and could use that time to try and sort something out. My dear friend Bridie helped me look for somewhere to live. We went to a strange boarding house, a lot like the house in the film The Lavender Hill Mob, complete with little old lady and frilly curtains everywhere. I remember being freaked out by its spookiness at the same time as thinking I could hide away here and not see anyone, just be in my own nest. It never worked out. Les came to my rescue again and I went to stay in the spare bedroom at his house, six doors down from my family home.

  During the upheaval I heard less and less from Steve and Jo, only that they became a couple for a while. I spent more time with Les, Snips and the crowd. On 22 August we went to a great all-night festival at Burton Constable Hall, just outside Hull. It was the start of the three-day Humberside Pop Festival put on by Hull Arts Centre to raise money for their new building off Spring Bank. But it wasn’t really what I would’ve called ‘pop’, with psychedelic light shows, bands like Third Ear Band, Pretty Things, (Mick Ronson’s) Rats, Chicken Shack and the Nice, and films such as Dalí’s surrealist Un Chien Andalou, Wholly Communion featuring Allen Ginsberg, and Spike Milligan’s The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. I can remember wandering from the cobbled courtyard and riding school to the various gigs and films. So much to see and hear, and all for the princely sum of £1.

  The next afternoon we all met up to watch Snips’s band Chest Fever playing at the East Park free open-air festival, along with Brave New World and Barclay James Harvest. There was a lot happening in and around Hull; it was a hive of creative activity and it felt good and energising to be among those involved. Hull Arts brought some great events to town and were involved in instigating the opening of the Phase Two club in the Bluebell Inn (where COUM would later perform). There were folk concerts with Ralph McTell, Michael Chapman and Roger McGough, but also ‘extras’ like Dylan’s Don’t Look Back documentary, and Ron Geesin.

  *

  I frequented Spring Bank, where a lot of older hippies and dealers lived, who I’d got to know during my time with Steve. I’d go to Dougie and Claire’s or Bobby and Dee’s. Bobby was drop-dead gorgeous in a Jim Morrison, pure-sex way. He had an ace motorbike that growled as he hit the throttle and roared off down the road, with his long blonde hair blowing freely. I’d spent many hours at his place, firstly with Steve, lying in each other’s arms, stoned and listening to Love’s Forever Changes. But it was from Dougie and Claire that we and others scored acid. I heard later that Dougie became an acid casualty, which freaked me out as I’d started having flashbacks myself.

  One weekend a number of us decided to trip together. We’d kind of buddy up for trips, tending to take acid with those we trusted. There were a lot of stupid mind games that went on in the late 1960s. Some thought it proved how hip they were if they could conduct ‘highbrow’ debates and outwit or confuse someone else – even while tripping. I thought such one-upmanship was pretty pathetic and a waste of time. From previous acid-trip mishaps, we’d learned to ensure we were in a safe environment when we took it, usually someone’s house. On this occasion, a crowd of u
s had gone to trip together at a friend’s flat, and I secreted myself in a bedroom, away from noisy fellow trippers, with John Bentley, who had joined Snips’s band and our circle of friends, Jo and a couple of others. Me and Jo were listening to the Beatles’ Abbey Road, laid on a double bed and seemingly melting into the dark-blue velvet cover, emotionally overwhelmed by the beauty of the music and hallucinations.

  John was looking through a book of Salvador Dalí paintings when suddenly he slammed it shut with a bang. ‘That’s it: the bird just flew off the page.’

  We adopted the phrase ‘Nothing ever happens’ as our default reset whenever we had any mishaps or confusions during trips. That way we could dismiss them and carry on. Nothineverappens also became the name of Snips’s next band, with John on bass guitar.

  The first and only time I took mescaline was in Snips’s flat. About four of us dropped it together and we decided to make ourselves some soup. Ha! Of course, anyone who’s tripped knows that it’s difficult to maintain attention on any one task for very long – especially when bubbling, red tomato soup is involved. It looked amazing and three of us were stood around the cooker, transfixed by this wonderful redness that was spreading everywhere. We followed it as it finally spilled over on to the floor, upon which our attention was immediately diverted to hallucinatory pastures new – the strange pattern of the kitchen lino. The geometric design became an optical illusion that soon had us freaking out. The black-outlined squares turned into a grid and all the other markings became something deep and sinister that lurked beneath. We were all desperately trying to get off the grid and on to solid ground – the carpet. That’s when we realised we’d lost track of the soup. We were lucky someone came to our rescue and turned off the gas – and we were lucky again when someone came to our rescue some months later when we all dropped a tab of acid and headed for the Lawns Centre, Cottingham, to see Pink Floyd.