I Never Understood My Failings Then

Between Marx and Marzipan

Chapter 8

I Never Understood My Failings Then

We weren’t so much doing the crossword, Sonia and I, as wasting time talking, waiting for sudden inspiration. We often did this, sometimes the two of us, sometimes with a few others. We’d be able to get about five or ten clues before we dried up. The Telegraph was the easiest, then the Guardian, then the Times. Some of the guys back at the Hall, like Denny for instance, could whip through the Telegraph in about ten minutes. Me and Son’ got stuck at about ten clues. You’d spot the easy ones right off – they seemed to come round every other day. Gradually you would understand some of the language like Home Counties is always “SE” and a flower is a river cos it flows. But I guess back in October we were both quite fresh. My old dears read the Telegraph, but I hadn’t done the crossword until that year. I’d usually buy the paper around lunch time and if I happened to see Sonia, we’d go into the New Ref to drink tea and mess with the crossword. The New Ref was cleaner than the Coffee Bar and had higher tables so you could lean on them and write, but it had no character whatsoever. I think that’s why people went there. It was best between about two and three when all the good boys and girls were working and only a few people couldn’t find anything better to do than sit in a great expanse of clean dining tables and dining chairs.

She was alright, Sonia. I could talk to her. We had a lot in common, it seemed, apart from the crossword. So we’d pushed the paper aside and I was telling Sonia about everything she was missing in music. How Roxy Music were true artists. How Rod Stewart was true soul, at least on his earlier albums. “Soul” is like “RocknRoll” it just means good music. I once told a guy who didn’t like Lyle Lovett that he had no soul. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was deeply religious. I mean totally religious. And he took it very badly. I don’t know why he should believe it when I said he had no soul, but after that he lost it. I saw him a few months later wrapped in a newspaper and a blanket outside Holborn tube station, trying to scrounge pennies. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned Lyle Lovett. It happens. Where was I? Oh yeah, well Sonia maybe had soul, but not enough, so I told her how Eddie and the Hot Rods were the new Stones. No really: if you compare something like “Come On” which the Stones did with “Get Out of Denver” or “96 Tears”, they’ve got the same innocent youthful energy and the same heavenly rhythm. I did that once in my room – played them over and over back to back right up at 11 on the volume and got such a crowd come round to whinge including the warden and all the third years who wanted to work.

See Sonia had come up to University listening to stuff like Joni Mitchell and Carole King, so I had to put her right. Now in those days I hadn’t heard Joni Mitchell. I didn’t know what a superb album Blue is. I hadn’t heard James Carr or Kaleidoscope. I hadn’t come across Patsy Cline or Phil Ochs or Sky Saxon or The Creation or any of a number of true stars. I hadn’t even heard Astral Weeks, for Christ’s Sake, surely the Best Album of All Time. But of course I knew enough to be able to dictate to Son’ what she should be listening to. You see, Sonia may be a nice kid, but she needed putting right musicwise. So, as I knew more than she did and had better taste it was my duty.

I was heavily into the Velvet Underground back then. Still am. But you had to be then. For a start, if you called yourself a real Bowie fan, it had been essential to like the Velvets from about 73 onwards.

I guess it was 72 when I got into Bowie and Roxy. That was when Virginia Plain and Starman came out. Until then I’d been listening to Motown. Those two really woke me up. One of the guys at Youth Club had bought the Ziggy Stardust album and we listened to it over and over, singing Five Years, Soul Love, Starman, Ziggy Stardust, all of em throughout the night. The thing that struck me was that this guy had written all the songs – I couldn’t get over that, cos you know that didn’t happen with Motown. Of course it was the same with Roxy Music. I used to group Bowie, the Velvets and Roxy Music together. In fact I tried to make a tape of them. I even thought about putting Cockney Rebel on – just Sebastian plus a couple of tracks off the second album, probably because I thought Steve Harley was trying to be Bowie. I tried to make that tape, but there were always too many songs to fit on. I guess the thing that links Bowie, Roxy, and the Velvets, even now, is that none of them belong to anything else I’d listened to. It was all from another world. Take Roxy Music. Take Ladytron or Strictly Confidential. Andy Mackay’s oboe sounds so weird, so ethereal, so foreign. As if from another place and another time. 1962 or twenty years on. The simplicity of For Your Pleasure, just a straight drum pattern, Ferry’s voice over the top, then some magical keyboard sparkle or tremolo guitar. Tremolo guitar was always my weakness like a simple tune. And they could RocknRoll. When they got down, Roxy got down to some pretty intoxicating beats. Not heavy metal, but wild unhinged rhythms you could lose yourself in. The Crazy Music drove you Insane. This Way.

The best Roxy was from before Eno got slung out for crimes against the boss’s ego. Well, Roxy were Ferry’s band. Apparently, he auditioned for King Crimson but didn’t get in. After that, he gradually collected a few mates around him – this was from about 1970 & 71. Folk like Dave O’List from the Nice, Andy Mackay who knew Brian Eno, Paul Thompson. Phill was telling me the other day that Ferry made a tape and gave it to John Peel. Peel’s producer, John Waters, not knowing Ferry was the singer told Ferry to his face he really loved the singer’s atonal voice. Peel started playing them and the rest was easy, their first album was a classic, the second was nearly as good. Then Ferry’s ego went into overdrive. He decided to make a solo album entirely of covers, which had a few cool tracks on it like River of Salt and Baby I Don’t Care. After that yer man Ferry tried to write pop. And he succeeded up to a point – if you listen to Sunset, or Song for Europe, or later stuff – but they weren’t special anymore. My Roxy tape has mostly early stuff on. Plus some of Eno’s solo stuff. He went off following his nose wherever it took him – pop like Seven Deadly Finns, ambience, mood music. You can still listen to most of Eno’s stuff now, especially the third album.

Ladies & Gentlemen: For Your Pleasure, the Roxy Music Tape

Virginia Plain
Pyjamerama
Ladytron
The Pride and the Pain
Out of the Blue (Live version on Viva)
Do the Strand
Seven Deadly Finns (Eno)
Strictly Confidential
Editions of You
If there is Something
Baby’s on Fire (Eno)
Sea Breezes
Dead Finks Don’t Talk (Eno)
Some of them are Old (Eno)
Golden Hours (Eno)
Wild Weekend (Andy Mackay)
St Elmo’s Fire (Eno)
Chance Meeting (version on B Side of the In Crowd)
Remake Remodel (version on B Side of You Go to my Head)
Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall (Ferry solo)
You are my Sunshine (Ferry solo)
For Your Pleasure

Even though there’s nothing from the last album, I was still listening to them a lot. When it came out in the autumn term of my first year, my record player was down, so I hawked it round the girls I knew looking for someone to play it for me. The live album came out in the summer of 76, so that kept the memory alive a little longer. Especially the live version of Out of the Blue which took off and soared on the back of the violin away from the mundane, back to the weird spooky haunted and alien world of their debut.

Bowie wasn’t from round here either. Listen to Future Legend (which you had to be able to repeat word for word) or Sweet Thing from Diamond Dogs and you’ll find you’re not in Kansas anymore. Of course, Bowie played all of that up to the hilt with his Ziggy gear and his Aladdin Sane stuff. And we bought it. Best gig I ever went to was after my O Levels in 73 when Bowie played Birmingham Town Hall. He played all night. The band was all together. I missed the last train home and had to call me dad and ask him to pick us up. He wasn’t happy. I got grounded for years after that, but it was worth it. I was seeing Rosie Jones at the time and sent her home to catch the last train with one of me mates so she wouldn’t be stuck with me all night. I never heard the end of that either.

With Bowie, after Starman came out in 72, we all bought up his old albums. He’d been going since 65 or 66, first as a mod, then doing cheap pop, then mime. He’d made three or four albums before Ziggy starting in 70 with Space Oddity. They were all re-released. They all charted. The whole country got into them. They were close enough to be recognisable and good enough to keep listening to. Some of them were straight songs, some were strange. Strange & Fascinating. A strange fascination, fascinating me. After that gig in Birmingham, he had to break up the band. We were devastated, but he came back as some-one else. Did Pin Ups and Diamond Dogs. When Diamond Dogs came out it was £1.68. I didn’t have any money, so I went straight home, dug me Mam’s front garden and demanded a pound an hour so I could buy it the next day. The next year he abandoned RocknRoll, and we left him for a while. My tape didn’t have anything from Young Americans or Station to Station on it – I didn’t get into them until later.

That one you can still listen to.

As for the Velvets, I’d picked up Transformer and Berlin when they came out and also bought meself the first Velvets album pretty quickly. I got into an argument with me brother over which one of us owned the second album we’d bought from some girl at school. Wouldn’t surprise me to find out the girl and her sister had the same argument in reverse. I started buying up John Cale’s albums too. Paris 1919 is by far the best, especially the side with Half Past France on it and A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Such haunting beauty in the music and the lyrics as well as in his voice. No wonder Lou Reed got him to do the spoken bit on The Gift. The deep sonorous Welsh accent seems so out of place on vinyl – must have been a lot weirder in the States. On the other hand Guts is RocknRoll with a dark side, like his version of Heartbreak Hotel. Someone said that if Heartbreak Hotel hadn’t been written, John Cale would have had to invent it, by which I think they meant that he re-invented it – not as a lonely heart, but like Jack Nicholson in the Shining – Since his Baby’s left him so have his marbles. Only with Cale the track starts sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssince my baby left me. I had this crush on a girl who worked at Menzies record counter at home. She’d got black hair and strawberry lips in the way only girls with black hair can have strawberry lips. Or maybe that was the name of the colour of her lipstick. She looked just like the drummer out of the Sweet. I’d see them on Top of the Pops and gaze lovingly at Mick Tucker. I’d walk into Menzies and hear the singer shout “Are you ready Steve” in my head. They were both beautiful. Even now I can’t hear Ballroom Blitz without remembering her face. I’d go in and get her to play stuff I wanted to buy or just wanted to listen to. That was where I first heard Guts and Heartbreak Hotel. We’d play tricks on her, like asking her to play something off the second side of Diamond Dogs and having her turn up the volume for when the Chant of the Ever Circling Family came on. One of the guys got her to play Star Star from Goats Head Soup but after that she didn’t see the joke.

Funny thing with the Velvets is I bought Loaded last, which is strange because it’s the best one. Well, maybe it isn’t but New Age and Sweet Jane are classic tracks even though they got screwed up before they made it onto vinyl. You get much better versions on the 1969 live album. And then of course there’s Nico’s first album which has both Lou Reed and John Cale on it. It’s both folky and psychedelic. It’s one of those albums, I guess like Astral Weeks, that doesn’t fit where you expect it to and invents a style all of its own. With Van Morrison it’s the mix of jazz and blues and soul and Irish folk and pop and strings. With Chelsea Girls it’s folk and John Cale’s caterwauling violin and the dissonance of the Velvets and Nico’s scary gothic voice. Which, if you add in Lou Reed’s amateur, but compelling, guitar solos, pretty much sums up the first Velvets album and the second.

Perfect Days, The Velvet Underground Tape

Perfect Day (Lou Reed)
Guts (John Cale)
What Goes On
Some Kinda Love
Pale Blue Eyes
These Days (Nico)
The Fairest of the Seasons (Nico)
I’ll Keep it with Mine (Nico)
Sweet Jane
Rock and Roll
New Age
Sunday Morning
Waiting for My Man
Satellite of Love (Lou Reed)
Hanky Panky Nohow (John Cale)
Child’s Christmas in Wales (John Cale)
Half Past France (John Cale)
Venus in Furs
I’ll be your Mirror
Heroin
All Tomorrow’s Parties

Like I say, if I did it now, I’d put on the 1969 album’s version of Sweet Jane & New Age. And I’d probably add I Can’t Stand It and Ocean from one of those missing in action compilations of unreleased stuff that floated up a few years ago.

So here I was in the New Ref, sprouting off about the Velvets like I was trying to get them to buy me a drink when Mary appeared.

It had been a week and a half since I’d seen her that night where she’d had those folk in her room arguing. She had something about her that made you turn round, even though she was a leftie. Just by walking into a room, her face, her smile, her presence would make you look up. Now, like I say, I’m not really into politics, and there do seem to be a few too many loony lefties around here, and we can do without the ideology thanks, but I guess I was inclined to make an exception in some circumstances.

Mary must be having a bad hair day or something because she’s getting at Sonia about reading the Telegraph, even though we don’t read it, we just try to do the crossword. Sonia looks at her and asks her what’s up. Turns out she’s wound up about some Spanish essay she’s got to write. Man, these art students always have to write essays. You won’t catch me doing any of that. I wasn’t going to bring that up, on account of it seems like she’s in a bad mood and that’s something I don’t think I can deal with. But she softens and my upbringing comes out and I offer to get her a cup of tea.

“No, I can get it myself you know. You don’t have to treat us like second class citizens” she says in her wonderful accent.

She has softened because this is said with evident good nature, so as to tease. But I don’t know what she means by “us” and I can’t tell whether she means, ‘go ahead and get me the tea please’ or ‘we’ll get along fine if you don’t push your male chauvinism round here’. That’s one I never learned to spot while I was at University – some girls would get really wound up if you hinted at anything sexist and that included opening doors never mind paying them into gigs and films. So I took the easy option and sat still. She twisted my ear a bit more and to tell the truth I half enjoyed it.

“Is that how you were brought up then, to open doors and such?” she asked.

“It’s only good manners. I’d do it for a bloke just as soon as I’d do it for a girl.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You might open doors, but you wouldn’t get Neil a cup of tea, would you?” (Too bloody right I wouldn’t.) “And you either say boys and girls or men and women. You can’t say men and girls.”

I hadn’t realised what I’d said. “What did I say then”

“You said blokes and girls. And don’t start telling me that you meant the same. You try and come up with some slang for women like “blokes” or “guys” and see if it isn’t derogatory.”

I was struggling. At school we used ‘broads’, ‘dames’, and ‘wenches’.

“Angel,” I said, looking her straight in the eye, smiling, trying not to blow it. “I couldn’t come up with something derogatory for you if I tried all night”.

You could tell she was half maddened, half flattered. Her sense of humour won through. See how much charm I had back then. I could tell. That wonderful moment when her face changed and blossomed from the cold castigation she tried to live to the warm smiling friendship that came naturally. She allowed herself to drink in the compliment for a second, and acknowledged it by telling me to Get Away.

That being a draw, she moved on to class. Now class to her was a big deal. It controlled how you talk, who you mix with, what you wear, the lot. To me it was something people on TV talked about too often. But, as Mary told us, she was Working Class and Sonia and I were Middle Class and as such although we could talk with each other, we could never understand each other and there was nothing we could do about it.

Now according to Mary, class is determined by income and occupation. Not your income, but a function of your parent’s income (chiefly your dad’s), their parents income (chiefly your grandads’), and so on, obviously diminishing with each generation. It’s this legacy effect that stops people from moving between the classes too rapidly.

Mary’s stuck in the working class on account of her dad used to work in some factory in a place near Merseyside. Apparently, there was this fire burning on top of some tower. Oil refinery or something. You could see the light from this fire for miles around. Especially in the night. I don’t know, maybe they were burning off gas or whatever. Anyway, Mary’s Dad had told her that if the light ever went out, the world would end. He lost his job soon after, though she never said what happened to the light.

And what class am I? Most of my ancestors were peasants if you go back 100 years. A couple more pulled pints in various places. Add to that a chippy and a smithy and what am I? The answer is safely middle class because me dad and his dad owned a shop.

But what does it mean? Mary was telling us how class determines your habits, your outlook on life, and so on. People hang around with other folk who have the same habits and the same outlook on life. Take Greyhound Racing or Pigeon Racing or Horse Racing or Pheasant Shooting. And more, because the culture & the values that she had, like love and freedom, were different from mine, my discipline, my manners, my offering to buy her a cuppa. These habits are ingrained throughout your life, right from the time you’re born. The most important aspect outside your home is your school if you’re well off, otherwise it’s your mates. But once you get to our age, you can’t change. You can’t mix.

Orwell was middle class, but he worshipped the working class. Read the Road to Wigan Pier and you’ll see how he held the mineworkers in awe. He felt inferior because he didn’t have their strength. What he also says is that he could never belong, he could never mix, even though he was staying in their houses. That was 40 years ago. Haven’t we come anywhere since then?

But for Mary it’s worse than that. Mary viewed class in the simple, classical, sense. As an economic grouping perpetually in opposition to another group. In her case, her class is defined by this oppression. And suffers from it. Even my ancestors who worked the fields didn’t suffer as much as hers who’d worked in factories.

Now I was thinking that this was a bit over the top, because from where I was sitting, I couldn’t tell who was which class or what. For a start, everyone wore jeans and sweatshirts. And for another start, everyone from the halls lived in rooms that were the same size and nobody had much different in them except for different albums and posters.

Granted, class may have divided the nation, but at Southampton we all seemed to be there on merit. And there was no correlation between class and merit. That was its strength. And besides, was I really so middle class? I couldn’t tell. So, I told her you’d never catch me racing pigeons or horses or greyhounds. It’s like I’m not middle class, I’m sometimes Eddie and the Hot Rods class, and sometimes I’m football class. More specifically I’m terrace class, not seat boy class. I stand and shout and cry and cheer and jump with the rest.

But years later, when I was earning, I got a seat near the half way line. It cost more than standing but was a better view. Perhaps she was right. With all our middle class stiff upper lips, our politeness, our decency, we protect ourselves, we isolate ourselves from the excesses of our system. We don’t see the beggars or the homeless. Or we imagine them as crooks and thugs. We don’t see the suffering in the abandoned mining villages or in the dockyards. We choose not to. We spend our lives chasing status, reading our colour supplements which tell us how to aspire. We consume and consume and acquire and acquire in order to prove ourselves better.

But Mary could tell, she could feel our indifference, because she’d felt it all her life and it was no surprise that I couldn’t.

So, there you have it. I’m doomed to open doors for women for the rest of my life and Mary is doomed to distrust people who do. I was born on the wrong side of the river.

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Between Marx and Marzipan

Chapter 8