Life [34]
The hippest guy at Sidcup Art College was Dave Chaston, a famous man of that time and place. Even Charlie Watts knew Dave, in some other jazz connection. He was the arbiter of hip, hip beyond bohemian, so cool he could run the record player. You’d get a 45 and play it and play it, again and again, almost like looping it. He had the first Ray Charles before anybody else—he’d even seen him play—and I first heard him during one of those lunchtime record breaks.
Everybody then was going for looks. You can’t tell that yet from the photograph of the class of ’59, my induction year; things were only just beginning. The guys look conventionally dressed in V-neck pullovers, and the teenage girls are dressed to look like women of fifty, indistinguishable from the few women teachers. In fact, everyone, of both sexes, was wearing black sweaters far too long for them, except for Brian Boyle, who was the archetypal mod, who would be changing his clothes every week. We wondered where he got the money. The half belt’s back, the Prince of Wales check and the bouffant hair, and then he got a Lambretta with a little fucking furry squirrel tail on the end. Brian may have single-handedly started the mod movement, which was art college and south London in origin. He was one of the first to go to the Lyceum and to get the mod gear. He was in a frenzied fashion race at the time—the first to ditch the drape jacket and put on the short boxy one. He was definitely ahead on footwear, with pointy shoes instead of round ones, winkle pickers with Cuban heels—a big revolution. Rockers didn’t get to the points until later. He went to the shoemaker and got the points extended four inches, which made it very difficult to walk. It was intense, kind of desperate, this never-ending fashion flash, but funny to watch, and he was a funny bloke too.
I couldn’t afford squirrel tails. I was lucky to have a pair of trousers. The opposite of that fashionista stuff was your rockers and your motorbike racers. Nobody could quite put their finger on me. Somehow I managed to have a foot in both camps without having to split my balls. I had my own uniform, winter or summer: Wrangler jacket, purple shirt and black drainpipes. I got a reputation for being impervious to the cold, because I didn’t vary my wardrobe much. As for drugs, it was before my time, except for the occasional use of Doris’s period pills. The thing people had started taking was ephedrine, which was horrible, so that didn’t last long. And then there were nasal inhalers, which were full of Dexedrine and smelled of lavender. You took the top off it and rolled up the cotton wool stuff and made little pills. Dexedrine for colds!
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The figure I’m standing next to in the school picture is Michael Ross. I can no longer listen to certain records without Michael Ross coming to mind. My first public performance was with Michael; we did a couple of school gigs together. He was a special guy, extrovert, talented, up for all risk and adventure. He was a really gifted illustrator, taught me many tricks of how to work pen and ink. And he was into music big-time. Michael and I liked the same kind of music, something that was available for us to play. That’s why we gravitated to country music and blues, because we could play it with just ourselves. One’s enough, so much better with two. He introduced me to Sanford Clark, a heavy-duty country singer, very like Johnny Cash, came out of the cotton fields and the air force with a US hit called “The Fool.” We played his “Son of a Gun,” partly because it was the only thing the instruments would bear, but a great song. We did a school party, somewhere round Bexley, in the gymnasium, sang a lot of country stuff as best as we could at the time, with only two guitars and nothing else.