Alan, anybody who's looked at the titles of any of your memoirs will know that
you're a music fan, particularly a Beatles fan. We are here at Abbey Road Studios. Is
this a little bit like coming to church for you?
It is! Like a cathedral.
I particularly wanted to launch, not just at Abbey Road but Studio 2 where The Beatles did
the vast majority of their hits. So it's a marvelous marvelous place to
launch and you feel, any one of my generation, and I think subsequent
generations because the Beatles you know transcend, go from
generation to generation; we are bound to feel a thrill as you
walk in here. This place changed the course of popular music and arguably
changed the course of history.
Music as a sort of guide of history I'll come to a
little bit later actually but this new memoir of yours is very much focused
on music and you have a journal, you're you're a keen journal keeper. But
there is this thing about music isn't it - it links to memory and when
you hear a song it immediately takes you back to a place. Did that mean that this
book was almost easier to write than any of the others?
It's a very good point. You know if you get involved in memoir, so my first childhood memoir,
This Boy won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje prize which is for evocation of
place. And that's what memoir's all about. And in a sense you don't really need the
diary too much, I've kept a diary since I was about 25, because the music does kick
off all those all those memories. So you know my first real girlfriend, Susan
Kelly, went to a wedding they played Can't Buy Me Love. First time I ever heard
it, you know that, bang, is the link. True Love by Bing Crosby and Grace
Kelly with my mother listening to two-way family favorites on a Sunday
lunch time and suddenly the smell of kind of roasting meat, roast lamb, comes
back. It's an amazing evocation and it's always, it's a crucial part I
think of most people's lives but it's been particularly crucial part of my life.
You just mentioned True Love there and there's a great chapter where
you describe your mother sitting alone in the house listening to that song and
it's a great image because of course she wasn't so lucky in love, your mum,
but there's a very poignant image of her sitting there listening to
this song that sort of encapsulates...
As she's trying to cook the Sunday
dinner with my father who was, the word feckless could have been invented for
him. He was down the pub, would come back boozed up, sometimes violent, but there was
this little moment on a Sunday lunch time as she was kind of preparing for
him to come back from the pub and preparing the dinner when two way family
favorites is playing and they had something called the bumper bundle which was the
most requested record by either the British forces overseas for their
families or their families for the Armed Forces and it was True Love.
And she loved Grace Kelly my mum, she loved the pictures, getting dolled up
on her own every week, going to the Royalty or the Odeon. And so I remember her
stopping cooking, sitting down with the kind of dirty old dish cloth in her hand
and just wanted to listen to that. She wasn't on her own because I was
observing it, but I was 7, she was shushing me and my sister to be quiet
while she listened to this music and it is poignant because
there's a line in it 'you and I have a guardian angel on high with nothing to
do' and as I say in the book a guardian angel for my mother would not have been
underemployed. She had a serious heart condition, she had a feckless husband, she
lived in the slums, she worked doing cleaning jobs that she
shouldn't have been doing because with a heart condition,
you know, she died very young so that memory is very precious and very
associated with Grace Kelly.
That sense of her doing a lot for the two of
you, for you and your sister is so strong. And she got you your first record player
so these records that your father actually had brought back from the
market hadn't he, for a pound, but you had no record player but you still
loved playing with them. But when you got that record player that must
have been a transformative moment.
Shellac 78 discs, as brittle as a biscuit as I say in the book.
And we just kind of curated them for ages until my mum won I think it was
between 70 and 90 quid which is quite a lot of money and she put down
payments on all these things and most of them got taken back, bits of furniture
and all that, but the two things that survived were a Dansette record player
for me and my sister, which was my sister's really. And for me a guitar off the
catalogue, an acoustic Spanish guitar. And those two things were crucial to us. She
also insisted, I don't know how she did this, but I was
mad about Lonnie Donegan - she took me to see Lonnie Donegan at Chiswick Empire.
My sister was mad about Cliff Richard, she took my sister to the London
Palladium where he was doing some kind of matinee. So you know through all
those struggles she'd try to make sure we had something. And you know it's
what most parents do except our father wasn't interested at all, he'd gone
when I was 8, But she, you know, a single parent, nobody talked about single-parent
families then. She compensated you know for both parents.
Let's talk a bit about your music. You had a band, The Vampires. Was it very much a dream
that you were gonna sort of make it as a band?
Absolutely. Yeah, in fact a book is covering the
25 years that I was convinced I would be some way involved in music. Either as a rock
and roll star which I really wanted to be or as a songwriter. So, the book covers
that period and The Vampires was a school boy group but lots
of people, you know, at school at that time, started off with skiffle, where you
could pick up a washboard or you know a bit of elastic and call it a double bass.
Everyone was picking up instruments and it was brilliant. And once the Beatles
started I mean that revolution that kind of wafted in from the Mersey just got
everyone wanted to play in bands. And so The Vampires was terrible. As I say I
wasn't a very good guitarist but I was the best guitarist in The Vampires
and we had a drummer who was playing on bloody Tupperware bowls at first. But
that gave way to The Area which was the first proper group where we went out and
played in front of people and we advertised for two musicians
in the Melody Maker and got two fabulous musicians to join with the three of us
to make up The Area. And we had a whale of a time, it was such fun.
And there is a heartbreaking moment when the instruments are stolen
Well, that is why people have been denied my rock-and-roll charisma because first of
all, The Area, they nicked all our gear, but I'd taken my guitar,
my precious Hofner Verithin, home that night. But they got my amplifier that I paid on HP
for two years. And then I joined another group The In-Betweens and they
were doing, we were doing very well. We talked aboutus going on tour, record
contract and all that. Multiracial band which was very unusual for '67 - we got all our
gear nicked, including my Hofner Verithin. So by then I was coming up to
18, I'm gonna get married, I got married when I was 18. I thought I've
got to find a job, proper job to earn some money - became a postman.
You mentioned your band was a multiracial band, quite unusual at the
time, and one of the chapters in your book looks at Ghost Town by The Specials and
it's really interesting because it's a song which actually was reflecting
something about society at the time .It's in a period leading up to the riots that
happened not just in London but across the country and we were talking earlier,
we mentioned earlier about sort of music as a reflection of what's going on in
society. Because music is culture and culture reflects what's going on.
Through the sweep of your book you get a real sense of that because you feel the
different types of music, what the message is in them. I wondered
what it's like to witness that over the years and maybe even what you
feel about what's happening with music today and what that means.
Well, I'm trying to portray what it was like to live it in real time. So you know
everyone talks about the 60s and The Beatles and The Stones. And The Stones have
just gone on tour again! I saw them in '64 first of all
in the Wimbledon Palais and they're just on a world tour. It's incredible longevity. But
most of the people going to see them now are seeing them secondhand. You will see
because you're far younger than me. It's great that all that music still goes on
and the Beatles and people are listening and buying Beatles songs, But I'm trying to describe
what it was like living at the time. And if you play those Beatles songs back and
you go through the assassination of Kennedy and the Vietnam war and,
you know, the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion and all
those kind of liberal laws okay and you listen to the Beatles in the background
it's almost like it was made to go with the newsreel. And
interesting what you say about Ghost Town. I mean not often does it happen
where the two things collide so perfectly because you know the record
business, you're thinking of these things well in advance. Ghost Town must have
been recorded and planned to be released six months before it was. And yeah it was
released just at a time when there was all that tension in Brixton and Toxteth
and Handsworth and right across the country. They just captured the moment.
And then the video of the guys kind of coming into a strange town and you know
people fighting in the dance halls and all that, it made it absolutely perfect.
Not often it hits the nail so cleanly on their head, but you're right, it is the
sweep of history reflected in culture and music.
A perfect way to finish this interview, Alan, thank you.
Thank you very much