What Does This Button Do?

I seized one of the fold-up chairs and hit him with it, and he just staggered backwards and then walked back down the hill, straight through the empty lines of chairs normally used for old ladies to sit by the bandstand.

Fuck, I thought. This is like the Who. But it wasn’t really, and the DJ on acid said so on his radio programme that night.

Nevertheless, with our new-found notoriety I pressed hard for playing our own material and a name change. Paradox was too wishy-washy; we needed something legendary.

‘How about Styx?’ I suggested.

‘Isn’t somebody else called that?’

‘Oh, they won’t notice,’ I stated confidently.

Our second appearance at the Broadfield was also our swansong, but our first as Styx. We even had badly photocopied handouts with wiggly letters, made by sticking individual letters to paper with glue, but not quite in a straight line. The tambourine was now polished aluminium, and it twirled around, but you had to be careful in case it severed the blood vessels around the base of your finger.

I was trying to be cool. Picture this: lumberjack shirt (because Rory Gallagher wore one), waistcoat with lots of badges on it, and Hush Puppies. Lock up your daughters, South Yorkshire.

We had one self-penned song, called ‘Samurai’. The lyrics were not mine, but a fellow sixth-form poet who contrived to combine the Samurai with vultures and to rhyme flesh with crèche in the same line.

‘Cool,’ I said. ‘Er, what’s a crèche?’

We decided to split up on a high, citing commercial pressures plus the fact that the two guitarists had summer jobs wearing wooden clogs and cleaning out steel furnaces, which paid rather better than the three quid we got paid in our final appearance.

Among all this, it was easy to forget that I was meant to be taking my final exams. I had done little studying; actually, I had nothing to study. I had a box of history notes; economics I thought was a load of rubbish made up by academics to create jobs for themselves; and English was fun to create, but oh my God, just the cover of anything by Jane Austen made me want to eat my own leg rather than drag my way through it.

Anyway, I sat my A levels having not read a single book for the English exams or opened many textbooks for economics. History I reckoned I could probably blag because I was actually interested in it, which was probably a good thing because I would be spending three years of university ostensibly studying it. I can’t remember what I wrote, but incredibly I passed all three with the lowest possible pass grade, an ‘E’. Even more incredibly, I had an offer from a London university who wanted me so badly that they only required an ‘E’ grade in two out of the three subjects.

Thus, with no wasted effort, I entered the halls of academia: Queen Mary College, University of London.

Minibusted

I was in London, with an agenda, an aim but no plan, and a Government grant putting actual money in my pocket. My first problem was surviving the day I arrived. I was immediately summoned to the head of the history department, Professor Leslie. He held up the piece of paper with my A level grades.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ he demanded.

‘Ah, well. I did have a little problem.’

‘What … problem?’

‘Well, you see, I was chucked out of school and had to home study.’

‘Why? Why were you thrown out?’

‘Er … drinking,’ I offered.

He pointed at me, and his eyes looked like giant gobstoppers behind the twin television screens that were his glasses. He also had an alarming resemblance to Mr Toad.

‘I have got my eye on you,’ he declared. ‘My spies will be watching you. A student needs only a bed, a chair, a desk and a suitably illuminated light.’

‘Well, thank you very much,’ I replied and, breathing a sigh of relief, I headed directly to the student union bar, where a fantastic pint of Bass lay in wait, priced at a quarter of the cost of beer in a pub. Happy days.

I had a plan cunningly concealed from my parents, and in truth even from myself. They were puzzled by my choice of a history degree.

‘What use is that?’ they asked.

‘Useful in the army,’ I replied. But the thought bubbles around my head told a different story.

I had a plot: anything to get out of here, and if I am going to be a rock singer, it must be London – but I can still join the army if it all falls apart. And here I was, almost out as soon as I’d arrived. I sipped my pint. Priorities, I thought. Number one, virginity. Must lose it, and fast.

I put an end to my military ambitions once and for all by joining the London University Officers’ Training Corps. I won’t dwell on the subject. I turned up to the drill nights and they were dreary affairs compared to running around the Northumbrian desolation of Otterburn with machine guns and steelworkers. It was more a gathering of chinless wonders intent on dressing up in ill-fitting uniforms and boots that had never seen mud.

I soon fell in with a lot of drunks, a very mixed crowd, and discovered they were called medical students. This, I thought, was the beginning of the end for virginity. So I began a career washing coffee cups late at night after the pubs shut, in the mistaken belief that doing useful things might make a 19-year-old dental student swoon. Eventually she did swoon, but not before I discovered that she was a virgin too, and worse, could recite chapter and verse the pharmacology of birth control. This removed the frisson of pure lust, but replaced it with a comforting reliability based on sound clinical practice. Practise we did, though.

That taken care of, I set off in search of rock ’n’ roll and the secret of the universe. And it was only Friday afternoon.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to spot musicians, especially rock musicians. Either wandering around in a daydream or driven by a burning ambition, they are often given away by guitar cases, drumsticks or a copy of Melody Maker turned to the classified adverts in the back. As quaint and faintly ridiculous as it sounds now, Melody Maker was the only serious magazine for adverts of musicians wanted, gear for sale, studios available, van for hire and all things rock and musical.

It was a broadsheet, and basically black and white. Interlopers like Sounds magazine had colour centrefolds of newspaper-grade quality – large sheets of toilet paper in order to try to make inroads into Melody Maker’s circulation.

So I just spotted a Gibson SG being carried, out of its case, by a slight, curly haired guy.

‘Hiya. Nice guitar. What kind of stuff you into?’ I asked.

‘Priest, Sabbath, Purple.’

So in the space of 30 seconds we had a band. Martin Freshwater was his name and he knew a bass player called Adam. Then we unearthed Southend’s very own Jon Lord, Noddy White.

Bits of Noddy looked like Noddy Holder of Slade, hence the name, and I never found out if he had been born with another one. Noddy taught guitar, had a double-neck bass and six-string combo, and an organ that didn’t sound nearly as impressive as it looked. All we lacked was a drummer.

Steve was the only non-student, and I have utterly forgotten how we found him, but he lived in Catford and had more drums than I had ever seen in my life.

We found a large room in the disused kitchens of the halls of residence, set up some kit and made a noise. The walls were tiled and the stainless-steel sinks created a natural tinny reverb, so the whole experience was like playing inside a biscuit tin.

I asked Noddy to show me how to play guitar, and I slowly crabbed and clawed and contorted my stubby fingers into the requisite shapes. Immediately I started to write, and the first thrill of creation soon turned to frustration without the ability to create form and structure.

I never forgot the initial joy, the thrill of that moment of inception, of meaning. Even if it only meant something to myself, and even if it ultimately was deemed rubbish. There was a purity in the art of creation. By now, we had worked up a small repertoire, and all the material was our own. We were basically ready, or so we thought, to get some gigs.

But we needed a name.

Names are vexatious things. They can unwittingly define and doom a band to perdition, or, even worse, to be damned by faint praise.

A name creates the tightrope that every band walks. Rock music walks that tightrope for eternity: too pomp, too punk, too serious, too laughable, too out of tune, too technical – none of it matters as long as you stay on the tightrope. In fact, it’s exciting to watch as you wobble.

But it’s hell if you fall off.

In 1977 punk was in full flow, and Queen Mary College, Mile End, the East End, was smack-bang in the middle of it. The Pistols’ secret gigs, the Jam, Bethnal – a punk band with a violinist. What’s in a name?

We played way too fast, and the more excited we got, the faster we played.

‘Speed?’ Noddy suggested.

‘Speed?’ I queried.

‘Yeah. Cos we play too fucking fast.’

None of us, and I mean NONE of us, had any idea that speed was a drug, and a rather popular one for a culture that hadn’t discovered – and anyway couldn’t yet afford – cocaine. Beer was the only drug in town. In the student union after 5 p.m. there was a gaggle of music fiends who stood by the jukebox and fiercely disagreed every day about the same things. They shouted at each other and remained friendly at the end of it. Future world leaders and football supporters, take note.

The union bar contained all shades of red, from light pink in high heels to communist scarlet, with blood-stained hatchets to bury in the heads of the filthy capitalist oppressors. As an avowed contrarian, I stood up and opposed a few of the more silly motions in public debates. It was worth it, just to wind up these po-faced and self-important arbiters of student political opinion.

The Socialist Workers Party rep was always polite but intense – a duffel-clad class warrior. We would have entertaining arguments before he decamped to plot the coming apocalypse, leaving me with the thought that I was on the list.

‘The Titanic,’ ‘I reminded him, ‘also had a list, and look what happened there.’

There were, however, departments in the student union that actually did things, as opposed to talking about doing things. Entertainment seemed absolutely the place to go. The entertainment officer was elected by students, along with his or her deputy, and essentially became a student-union-funded concert promoter.

Queen Mary had, and still does have, an extraordinary facility, the Great Hall. Built in the 1930s as the People’s Palace, it had one of the largest proscenium stages in London. Now it has been modified as more of a multi-purpose space, but back in 1977 it was still a theatre with a seated balcony and a large floor, which, for gigs, was devoid of chairs.

I started out as a volunteer by pushing boxes around and loading in and out for various bands. I assembled the ‘Atomhenge’ for Hawkwind, and these days I drink in my local pub with the drummer, who is now one of the UK’s leading authorities on waste recycling. At the same show were the reformed Pirates, minus Johnny Kidd himself, of course, who had been killed in a car crash some years before. The guitarist, sadly now deceased, was called Mick Green, and he is pretty essential listening for any guitar player.

Variously, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Lone Star, Racing Cars and Supertramp all adorned the People’s Palace stage. The BBC used it for a series of Sight and Sound in Concert broadcasts, and all the shows were open to the public. I did a bit of everything, from front of house to backstage and security – and a lot of truck loading.

From the sold-out psychedelia of Hawkwind to the smell of dirty old cookers and musty carpet was a reality check, but in our little rehearsal biscuit-tin Speed built up a repertoire that was an interesting but very odd mix. If we were a garden of sound, we would have been a mangled tornado of dead leaves and twigs, with the occasional daffodil visible through the browned gale-force fugue.

My two self-penned, very primitive guitar riffs were called ‘FBI’ and ‘Snoopy’. I possessed a large stuffed version of the cartoon character created by Charles Schulz. Snoopy abuse was a prominent feature of the show. I wish I could tell you why.

Our first gig was at the Green Man in Plumstead, where we played to not a lot of people. Snoopy was disembowelled and we played extremely fast and largely out of tune.

It went down a storm and the promoter gave us a residency once a month.

To get to and from gigs, we stole – er, borrowed – the college minibus. It had seats and windows, so the seats had to be removed and the bus loaded up out of sight, then rapidly driven through the gates before somebody realised that the windows were full of Mr Fender, Mr Marshall and a big stuffed white dog with a black nose.

After all the gear was in, there was no room for people, so we had to travel by train. We would then sneak back after the gig and replace the seats before dawn.

My first year at university wasn’t half bad. I saw a lot of bands and played in a band. I learnt to play bad guitar, wrote my first songs and did gigs. Time to move on, up and in – or maybe that should be down and out.

Going to the Dogs

If my account sounds strangely devoid of much in the way of historical studies, that’s because as I progressed to my second year, I wasn’t even turning up to most lectures. Very occasionally, I would drink two or three pints at lunchtime and wend my way into my medieval history tutorial. My tutor was a very nice old lady, and I think she might actually have experienced most of The Cambridge Medieval History she so adored. I can’t remember anything about Charlemagne or Frederick II, but I do remember that the sunshine was very bright and interfered with my daydreams as it streamed through the hazy window that framed her silhouette.

I was now the full-on entertainment officer. I had an office, went to committee meetings and I had a budget. Most crucially, I had a telephone with an outside line and a hotline to every agent in town. Suddenly I had a freshers’ week to organise: booking bands, discos and all that good stuff.

I think I ended up with Fairport Convention as the main event, and the whole week was extremely profitable. I made about 20 per cent on top of my expenditure. I was hauled before the committee and told I was a ‘disgrace’.

‘This is just exploitation of the student body,’ I was informed.

‘So you want me to lose money as a general moral principle?’ I enquired.

After the inquisition, I gave the problem some thought. I had never seen Ian Gillan – one of my vocal heroes – so I phoned up his agent and booked him. Money no object, I said. In return, I suggested, might there be a few pub gigs he could point in my general direction? Speed was fun but constrained. To borrow a song title from my future, I had a ‘Burning Ambition’.

The telephone, of course, gave me the ability to respond to adverts in Melody Maker. One in particular seemed promising: ‘Vocalist required to complete recording project.’ I phoned up. Just one problem: ‘Do you have a tape?’ Of course I didn’t. The guy I spoke to was a recording engineer and also the bass player. It was free studio time, and I had never been in a studio in my life. The influences, though, sounded like a shoo-in for me: Purple, Sabbath and, delightfully, Arthur Brown. He, Ian Gillan and Ronnie James Dio are probably the three singers you could refer to and say, ‘Aha! I see where Dickinson nicked that from.’

I should recount my history with Arthur Brown, one of England’s wackiest performance artists, and one of rock music’s most insanely talented voices. The first time I saw him was at Oundle when I was 16. Kingdom Come was the band, and the album was called Journey. The concert was, for me, a mind-blowing shamanic ritual. I have never tried acid or mushrooms or any hallucinogen, but with Arthur that night I didn’t need to. Deep, deep analogue-synth sine waves scooped your eyeballs up and planted them in stereo where your ears should be. The single screen of blobs and lights and stars compressed time to a singularity.

Then Arthur hit the stage dressed in face paint and a gigantic headdress, standing like an Aztec king before a gigantic tripod, and raised his hands in sacrifice and intoned, in a dark, extended baritone, a command to strip the rust from your soul: ‘Alpha waves compute before eternity began …’

Who cares if it sounds like hippy bollocks? I can tell you I thought I had seen a glimpse of God that night.

In 1976 Arthur had a band with no drummer. On top of that tripod was not an altar, but a Bentley Rhythm Ace drum machine. Arthur wasn’t sacrificing or blessing us; he was fiddling with the analogue tape loops of each individual drum, all of which ran at different speeds, and he was probably cursing frequently in frustration. No one but a madman would even have attempted it. There was a lead guitarist and a bass player, and two keyboard players, with every kind of analogue synth going, VCS3, Theremin and Mellotron.

Somewhere in the midst of this falling-into-a-musical-black-hole experience, two fellows came on stage dressed as brains to be beaten with a stick, and men danced around dressed as traffic lights. Inspired and deliciously potty.

‘Fire’ is the best known track of Arthur’s, and this alone is enough to secure him a place in rock’s pantheon, but all of his albums with Kingdom Come and as the Crazy World of Arthur Brown are worth exploring. Pete Townshend was the associate producer of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown – the whole idea of the Who’s Tommy came from it – and it’s a concept album, one of the first, about a man’s descent into hell. When he opens that door, well, you guessed it: ‘I am the god of hell fire, and I bring you, fire …’

There was a black voice trapped in Arthur’s body, because he could strip the paint off walls when he sang blues standards like ‘I Put a Spell on You’. That night I saw him, Arthur planted the seed for what I describe as ‘theatre of the mind’, with music the proscenium arch and your brain as the stage.

Anyway, back to my immediate problem – I didn’t have a demo tape. I would have to improvise. In my second year in London I had moved my lodgings away from South Woodford – a bland, characterless university halls-of-residence tower block that overlooked the motorway – to somewhere slightly more challenging, but so much more interesting.

The Isle of Dogs is the U-shaped bend in the Thames that features prominently in the credits of EastEnders. In the late seventies it was a desolate, windy and decaying place. Tower blocks sat alongside thirties council flats and houses, all built for the thousands of workers who once populated the London docks. In Tudor times it was a marsh and a refuge for criminals on the run from nearby jails. Because of the tidal flow a wall was built, which gradually formed the shape we all know and love. Water-operated mills were built on the wall, hence the Millwall, which ran down the west side of the Isle. Before basins were scooped out of the mud to form the docks, Henry VIII released wild dogs onto the marshes. He was fed up of spending money on chasing criminals, so he made sure the dogs were fed up in a rather more unpleasant sense.

Tate & Lyle still has a sugar refinery there, and tucked away, on Tiller Road, was the ground-floor flat that was my new abode and the location of my first demo recording. I had a flatmate, but I didn’t see much of him, as he would disappear into his lair and only emerge at odd hours of the night. He had long hair, an Afghan coat, goatee beard and John Lennon glasses, and he giggled a lot to himself for no reason I could fathom.

There was an upright piano left stranded in one bedroom. Clearly not the object to sling in the back of the car when your days at university are over, it had a mostly operating keyboard but sounded like a load of dinner gongs being hammered with tortured dissonance. I had a cassette recorder, and only one cassette. On one side was a series of awful easy listening, and on the other I had recorded some Monty Python. Cassette fiends will recall the curious rituals involved in taping over pre-recorded commercial cassettes. I got busy with a piece of Sellotape and then fiddled with the innards of the recorder, and eventually had my cassette poised and paused, standing atop the piano.

I didn’t bother playing the piano, because I couldn’t. I stepped well away from the tiny built-in condenser microphone and just yelled a lot, wailing through scales and letting off a nasal shriek with a couple of different vibratos as it faded away.

I put it in the post, to the PO box listed in the advert. With it was a note in red biro: ‘Here is the demo. If it’s rubbish there is some Python on the other side for a laugh.’

With that, I resumed normal operations. Go to college. Open the post. Avoid going to lectures. Sort out a rehearsal. Daydream a lot. Drink three pints at lunchtime. Go to tutorial. Remember nothing. Make some phone calls to agents. Wait an hour for the 277 bus. Eat something. See the girlfriend. Pub. Bed.

‘There is a message for you,’ I was told a couple of days later, when I showed up to the entertainments office. ‘This guy phoned back about a tape or something.’

I grabbed the message: ‘Call Phil on this number …’

I dialled ‘this number’, and a friendly, enthusiastic Brummie voice answered: ‘Yeah, I really liked the tape. You were doing some mad melody ideas. A bit like Arthur Brown.’

It was 3 p.m. By 6.30 I had found my way to the studio. It was homemade in a garage. Lined with egg boxes and foam it was Abbey Road as far as I was concerned. For a small pro-am studio it was quite well equipped. It had a small drum kit in situ, and lots of cables, pedals and stands to weave past on the way to the vocal booth. I had no idea about recording. I understood what a tape recorder did, and I understood a bit of what a mixer did (mix, right?), but of multitrack recording, I had no clue.

The idea of headphones was totally new; a monitor mix was an undiscovered country.

Phil played me the backing track. The guitar was pretty cool as well, I thought: a little bit Peter Green, early Fleetwood Mac, ‘The Green Manalishi’ feel. The song was called ‘Dracula’, and it had some corny Carry On/‘Fangs for the Memories’-style lyrics, but played absolutely deadpan serious. Try ‘My only sense of humour is in a jugular vein’ and ‘Your neck is on the menu tonight’ as a taster and you get the idea. I started to sing, having learnt the song in the control room. Phil leaned forward and pushed the talkback button: ‘Erm … how long have you got?’

‘All night if you want,’ I replied.

I could see him leaning back to dial a phone number.

Phil played bass and had called his big brother, Doug, who played drums. Together, we all listened back at four in the morning. I had never double-tracked, or harmonised with myself, but I did that night: three-part ascending choir vocals, big doubled choral pieces. If only the owner of the three-bedroomed semi whose garage it was knew what he started that night.

‘We’d better start the band, then, I suppose,’ said Doug.

I was most impressed by the fact that they had a battered blue transit van. It performed parcel deliveries by day, and at night it would turn into the most exotic four-wheeled magic carpet, transporting our merry souls to la-la land until dawn, when we all went back to the pumpkin patch with the rest of humanity. But before we could sprinkle fairy dust into that petrol tank, we had to find a guitarist.

So an ad was put in Melody Maker: ‘Guitarist wanted for pro recording band. Good prospects.’

My God, I came over all a twitter. Pinch yourself, Dickinson, here comes the Big Time.