Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [14]
The first time Billy K – plain Barry Fulton before the big time – felt the full weight of an electric guitar he was four years old. He toppled it from the metal stand in the lounge and dragged it by the neck across the kitchen floor. When his alcoholic father swore, Barry dropped it clanging to the floor. He ran screaming from the room with a scarlet handprint across his backside.
Mick Fulton left and the guitar stayed. His mother kept it as a divorce trophy, letting dust settle on the polished gleam. The day her panel beater boyfriend carried his suitcase up the stairs, she tossed the 1962 Les Paul into the loft.
Barry hated music class. He whistled ‘Three Blind Mice’ on the recorder at the pitch of screeching bats. The music teacher ordered him to play properly or leave the room. He kicked over a xylophone and walked out. His creative talent was spent playing football, or fighting. He often came home from school with cut knees and torn trousers. Reports noted he swayed between ‘moody self-exclusion, and demands to be the absolute centre of attention’.
Life changed course when he broke his leg. Dared to leap from the assembly hall roof before an audience of hundreds, he tied his coat into a cape and flew. The adrenaline surge from the screaming girls and awestruck boys enabled him to stand up and walk away with a shattered tibia.
Home alone with his itching cast, he watched TV for days. On the hunt for hidden porn he opened the stepladder and hopped into the loft. When he hauled himself into the musty space, the ladder toppled. He found the electric guitar but no naked women. He sat with the cast leg on a beam, the guitar across his lap. He picked tunelessly, twanged nonsense through the empty house. From a cardboard box, he pulled out Frets and Folk Hits – Learn to play the guitar. He clawed his hand and arranged his fingers as instructed. He warbled ‘Michael row your boat’ before his stepfather came home and knocked him to the floor. Compared to the numb burn in his fingertips, the slap was nothing.
Everyday for the next month he climbed into the roof and played the guitar. He flipped the guitar upside down, tinkled with the bridge, picked at a single note for hours. He struck chords and held the thrum a centimetre from his cheek, feeling the air ripple his inner ear, tuning his being to the sound of six, shivering strings.
His first concert was for his first girlfriend, Michelle Brook. She sat on his bed, hypnotised by the bad boy in soft focus. ‘It was something magical,’ remembers Michelle. ‘Barry was so beautiful that day. We skipped school and ran across the fields to his house. Nobody had any idea he could play the guitar, he was seen as a bit of a thug really, well, until he started strumming.’ In his cramped bedroom, Barry felt the power of performance, the boy shaman and his first follower.
Now sixteen, he stole every spare second of the day to practise. Riffs and licks turned to songs. His early lyrics were musical accompaniment rather than literary statement. He wrote ‘Chemical High’ before he’d taken anything stronger than an aspirin. Once the pariah of his music class, Barry was now its star pupil, a shining example of delinquent tamed by the power of song, composition and application. He acquired the beginnings of Spanish and Flamenco styles, learned how to read music, to decipher the dots, lines and bars into rhythm and sound.
The night he slipped into his first gig at the Dog and Gun, he arguably discovered rock ’n’ roll. He stood next to the amps. His skin prickled in the surge of hissing current. The walls perspired with the