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son. Harald has kindly allowed me to use the interview here. In it, Jan describes Cliff as ‘very quiet’ and ‘normal’ except for his insistence, even from a very early age, on being ‘his own person’. Playing with kids outside was ‘boring’. Cliff preferred his own company inside, reading books and playing music. ‘Even when he was a tiny little kid he would listen to his music or read. He was a big, big reader and he was very bright; in the third grade they tested him and he got eleventh grade comprehension.’ Ray said their only major concern was when Cliff didn’t start walking until he was a few weeks shy of his second birthday. ‘But the doctor said, “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just smart enough to know that mom and dad will carry him around.”’ He laughed.

Already musical – he had begun plonking away at his parents’ piano when he was just six – Cliff was a quiet, studious youngster, good at most things, though never a show-off. There was also a typically stubborn, Aquarian side to Cliff. Even as a small boy he knew what he was prepared to stand still for and what he wasn’t – and nobody was going to persuade him otherwise. Says Jan, ‘He was always popular and had a lot of friends. He was a very kind, very gentle kid but always his own person.’ Playing Little League baseball for the Castro Valley Auto House team, he was known as a big hitter for a boy his size. Later, at Earl Warren Junior High, and then Castro Valley High School, he worked at weekends at an equipment rental yard called Castro Valley Rentals, where the older workers took to calling him Cowboy after the cheap straw hat he always insisted on wearing (it was either that or get his precious hair cut and Cliff wasn’t doing that at any price).

Cliff was just fourteen when he began jamming with his first semi-official band, EZ Street. Named after a strip joint in San Mateo, Cliff later characterised the music EZ Street made as ‘pretty silly, actually…a lot of covers, just wimpy shit’, as he told Harald. It was invaluable experience for the teenager, though, the band performing often at the International Cafe in nearby Berkeley. EZ Street also featured guitarist Jim Martin – visually and personality-wise something of a cross between Cliff’s outside-the-box musical scientist and James Hetfield’s raw, frontiersman persona – who would later go on to become the musical lynchpin in late-Eighties rock-rap innovators Faith No More. As Martin once observed: ‘Most of what you see on stage at a rock show, whether it’s a thrash metal gig or some heavy hip hop club, it’s all about fantasy. The thing about Cliff was he was real. He wasn’t acting out the part just to be in some band, he really was that guy. He never saw himself as a star. He was always just another one of the guys.’

By the time Cliff had graduated from high school in 1980, the Burton character was already fully formed: a bell-bottomed, denim-wearing, H.P. Lovecraft-reading, piano-playing, homebody who liked his beer and Mexican food, and loved his pot and acid. A self-contained free-thinker who drove a beat-up 1972 VW station wagon – nicknamed The Grasshopper – in which he liked to mix his Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes with Bach concertos and cantatas, his favourite pastime was hanging out with his friends Jim Martin and Dave Donato, going fishing and hunting, or just sitting round smoking pot and playing Dungeons and Dragons into the small hours. ‘He’d stay up all night and sleep late,’ remembered Jan. Dave and Jim would often be there, too. In the middle of the night Cliff would fix them all munchies-defeating omelettes. ‘He loved to cook all this stuff,’ said Jan, ‘[but] he’d very seldom wake us up. He was exceptionally considerate and loving.’ He was painfully honest, too. ‘Sometimes you’d think, “Oh, Cliff, I wish you weren’t quite so honest.” No little white lies for him and sometimes that was kind of embarrassing,’ she laughed. ‘We were talking about that once, and he said, “I don’t have to lie for anybody. I don’t want to lie.” And that’s how he felt about it. God, I think he hated lying more than anything.