Necrophenia

  A cool image.

  I think, again in all honesty, that it was simply ahead of its time.

  The girls of Southcross Road School, class of 63, were simply not ready for Glam Rock.

  Glam Rock and cheese.

  It wasn’t a great combination.

  We had to get changed into our stage clothes in the boys’ toilets. This wasn’t a big deal at the time, or later. Bands on the way up always have to get changed in the gents’ at gigs, until they are big enough to play bigger gigs. Gigs that come with changing rooms. And with changing rooms come groupies and champagne and riders on contracts and all the fun of the fair. And we knew this. Deep in our rock ’n’ roll hearts we knew it. That first performance, we were ‘paying our dues’. That’s what musicians did on the way up. And we knew it.

  And so we got changed in the bog.

  I recall, oh so well, what a struggle it was to get my lipstick on. Rob kept nudging my arm and going on and on about a ‘pop-cheese fusion’ and how we were ‘breaking through preconceived boundaries and crossing textual horizons’. That we were in a ‘get-some-cheese’ situation.

  Neil was having some doubt about his outfit. His mother, who was very big on the local ballroom dancing scene, had run it up on her sewing machine and there were a lot of sequins involved. More sequins than the rest of us put together. So that would be at least five sequins!

  Neil was having some doubts about the twinkliness of these sequins. He’d always thought of himself as going on stage as a kind of Roy Orbison lookalike - black shirt and trews and big on the big black sunspecs.

  ‘It’s pink,’ said Neil. ‘It’s all in pink.’

  And it was.

  Mine was all in green. And, according to Captain Lynch, green was a colour much favoured by the Sumerian Kynge Georgius.

  Gold would have made more sense, but my mum didn’t have any gold fabric. ‘Gold is for toffs,’ she informed me. But she did have plenty of green. Because my father had recently taken employment with a company that manufactured billiard tables and was always coming home with a duffle bag stuffed with green baize offcuts.

  And billiard balls.

  And walking with a strange stiff-legged gait caused by the introduction of billiard cues into his trousers.

  Regarding trousers, the flared trouser was only then on the point of becoming fashionable and I like to think that in our way, upon that night, which was the twenty-seventh of June in the year of nineteen sixty-three, that we, The Sumerian Kynges, helped the flared trouser to enter the fashion consciousness of the nation.

  And indeed helped the mullet haircut, which we also pioneered, to gain worldwide prominence and acceptance in the days to come.

  Mind you, if I’d known then what I know now, I would never have gone on stage that night. Because (and I know, just know, that you are way ahead of me here) that performance, that night, played its part in hastening the oblivion that would eventually lead to me almost saving Mankind.

  Shall I tell you how it happened?

  No?

  I’ll tell you anyway.

  6

  The school hall smelled of plimsolls.

  In the days of which I write, all school halls smelled of plimsolls. Plimsolls and the armpits of the young. Not that I have a preoccupation with armpits, or with the smells thereof. Don’t get me wrong - I mentioned mine in an earlier chapter because they were smelly. I mention armpits again now only because the school hall smelled of them.

  Nothing sinister. Nothing weird. Please don’t get me wrong.

  The school hall also smelled of teenage girls. And that is a smell most men of the heterosexual persuasion . . . warm to, as it were.

  The Sumerian Kynges were warming to that smell. Which wasn’t easy as we were waiting to go on stage in the school kitchen. We had glammed ourselves up in the boys’ bog and now we stood, shuffling nervously (but looking cool), scuffing our winged heels (I would describe those but I don’t have time) and cradling our instruments.

  And warming to the smell of teenage girls.

  Whilst having our nostrils assailed by the stench of rotten cabbage. Why all school kitchens always smelled of rotten cabbage is anyone’s guess. Our school cook, Mrs Simian, never even served us cabbage, rotten or otherwise.

  But I digress.

  Well, no I do not. I am setting the scene.

  I set this scene because it is important to do so. I really do want you to know just what this was like. It is a long time ago now, but the memory remains fresh, whilst many others have long ago grown rotten.

  Like cabbage.

  The school kitchen was painted in cream gloss paint, which made the walls look like slabbed butter. The utensils were huge. And this is not due to the fact that we are smaller when young, so everything seems big. These were big utensils, seemingly borrowed - or stolen - from a giant’s castle. The utensils were huge and the pots, great aluminium jobbies in which the foodstuffs boiled and gurgled over flaming gas, were of similarly gargantuan proportions. You could have got a whole sheep into any one of those great aluminium jobbies. Or a pig. Or a horse. If you sawed the hoofs off.

  And then there were the school plates. Thick white china. And you never saw one get chipped, or cracked, or broken. Even when you dropped them - accidentally, of course. As I so regularly did. Just to see, as it were. Just to see.

  The plates rose in giddy stacks, in racks to the left of the butlers’ sinks. Fine old stoneware butlers’ sinks, where Mrs Simian and her harridan horde of dinner ladies (whom I, for one, felt absolutely certain constituted a coven of witches, if ever there was one) lathered up and dug in deep.

  The forks were shabby, though.

  But then forks always are. It takes great care and attention and dedication, too, to clean scrupulously between the tines. And I have to confess that I have, on numerous occasions over the years, had to send my fork back to the kitchen because it had been insufficiently lathered-up.

  So yes, from the kitchen, the grim cream-glossed school kitchen.

  Into the brightly lit hall.

  That smelled of plimsolls and also of young women.

  And no more mention of armpits.

  The end-of-term school dance was a major event. The major event in the minds of many. These minds belonging in part, if not all, to fifth-year boys who were leaving school that month.

  It would be the last opportunity to pull at school.

  At a school dance where it was free admission. Unlike dances and discos to come. Naturally there were other major events - sports days, open evenings, exams. But curiously, I for one never had the faintest interest in any of these.

  Into the brightly lit hall.

  Brightly lit and brightly décored, too. Every year a theme was chosen by a committee formed of prefects. And therefore, in my humble opinion, hardly a representative committee. This sleek elite would sit about in their common room; oh yes, they had a common room, although only a small one, which doubled as the band room. But they would sit about on the Cameo Mason Celebrated Percussion Safe and choose the theme.

  This year the theme was Space Travel.

  Last year the theme had been Space Travel. As it had been the year before. I was informed that this year the prefects had actually chosen Women of the Orinoco Basin as the theme.

  But it had ended up as Space Travel. As it always did.

  Because Mr Jenner, the music teacher, who let the prefects use the band room as their common room, always had the casting vote.

  And Mr Jenner really loved the subject of Space Travel.

  And so it was a brightly lit and lavishly décored Space-Travel-themed school hall that The Sumerian Kynges had now entered, through the door that led to the school kitchen. And it was a full and crowded hall. And there were a lot of teenage girls amongst this crowd. And I knew, just knew, in my rock ’n’ roll heart, that they were just dying to get a piece of The Sumerian Kynges.

  Although, of course, they were not, as yet, aware of this.

  An
d so the scene is as set as it can be.

  And Mr Jenner mounts the steps.

  These steps are those that rise to the left-hand side of the stage (looking from the audience, that is). The very top step is quite small. Mr Jenner often commented that this was ‘one small step for a man’, but happily not tonight.

  To those who viewed him upon this night, Mr Jenner was not a God amongst Men. He was, in the common parlance of the day, a bit of a short-arse. And, in secondary school terms, one of the very last of his kind - ex-RAF, with medals to prove it, tweedy and ink-stained, given to mortar boards and scholars’ gowns. Always with sheaves of music tucked under his arm. A hurler of chalk dusters. The man who conducted the choir. His head was too big and his feet were too small and he smiled when he spoke of Space Travel.

  There was a mic up on that stage. The school microphone. It was a Telefunken U Forty-Seven. Every school had one of those. A few years later, no school had one, because with the rise of the minicab, the Telefunken U Forty-Seven had a penchant for picking up the signals of the cab offices and broadcasting directions for cabbies, to the great merriment of assembled students.

  I was just dying to sing into that mic. We’d had to rehearse micless, and there was to be no amplification other than that mic, which meant that I was going to have to hold it near Toby’s uke when he did his big solo.

  Fearing as we all did that Mr Jenner would announce us as ‘the school pop group’ or something equally uncool, Rob had penned an introduction that would introduce, as it were, the term ‘Rock God’ into popular culture.

  That one, I note, lasted. While the other one - ‘Cheese God’ - apparently did not.

  Mr Jenner walked up to that mic and tap-tap-tapped upon it. If something was to be achieved by this tapping, we, cowering (uncoolly, if I remember) all beside the stage steps, didn’t hear it.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. The crowd went ‘boo’ and ‘hiss’. Not the kind of thing you could get away with on a school day. But this wasn’t a school day. This was the school dance.

  ‘Calm down. Calm down.’ Mr Jenner affected a light-hearted mien. ‘I know you’ve all come here to let off a little steam.’ We watched Mr Jenner from the side of the stage. He was going to read out Rob’s introduction, wasn’t he? He had stuck it straight into his trouser pocket when Rob had given it to him. He hadn’t even read it through. And now—

  Mr Jenner did not take the introduction from his trouser pocket. He had words of his own to say.

  ‘These young gentlemen have rehearsed very hard,’ said Mr Jenner, ‘and I know that you are really going to shake, rattle and roll to their happening sounds. Please give them a really big hep-cat welcome: the school pop group, The Rolling Stones.’

  I looked at Neil. And Neil looked at me. And Neil looked at Rob and Rob looked at Toby and Toby in turn looked at me.

  ‘I’ll get him for that,’ said Toby. ‘You just see if I don’t.’

  7

  The Rolling Stones weren’t that bad, I suppose.

  Because, after all, it was their first ever gig.

  The one that never gets a mention in biographies, authorised or otherwise. The one with the original line-up. With Wild Man Fosby on tea-chest bass and Mick Jagger’s sister on uke.

  And Bill Wyman on uke. And Mick Jagger on uke and vocals.

  My uke. And my microphone.

  In case the reader is experiencing some degree of confusion here, allow me to explain, for it was my intention to create this confusion in the hope that it would in some way mirror the confusion that I and my fellow members of The Sumerian Kynges found ourselves in at the time.

  We thought that Mr Jenner had simply got the name of our band wrong when he was introducing us. But not a bit of that. He wasn’t introducing us at all. He was introducing The Rolling Stones. A band that he had himself been coaching in the evenings. With the ukuleles that we rehearsed with during school time.

  And Mick and Keith and Brian and Mick’s sister pushed right past us on the left-hand stage steps (looking from the audience), snatching our ukes from our hands as they did so.

  We were not pleased about this at all.

  Toby was in a blue funk!6

  ‘I’ll kill one of them,’ he said. And he pointed to one of The Stones at random. Brian Jones, I believe it was. ‘I’ll kill him!’ said Toby.

  Rob made calming gestures with his ukeless fingers. ‘It will all be all right,’ he told Toby. ‘They can be our warm-up act. Get the crowd going. Remember, they’re on before us. They are our support band.’

  Toby thought about this. And so did Neil and so did I. I don’t know exactly what conclusions the others drew, but I was happy enough to have The Rolling Stones as my support act.

  And so we stood and we waited. In the shadows beside the brightly lit stage. And we watched The Rolling Stones.

  They were an R & B band then. In the days when R & B meant R & B. As opposed to whatever it is that R & B means nowadays. Which is not the same thing at all. So to speak. So The Rolling Stones did quite a lot of the blues.

  They did ‘Love in Vain’, the Robert Johnson classic. And they did some Chuck Berry. They did ‘Johnny B. Goode’. And that is a classic.

  They didn’t do any George Formby at all. Which I personally felt was a shame. I thought they missed a golden opportunity there, what with such an abundance of ukes and everything. But I didn’t really care. We had plenty of George Formby numbers in our repertoire. In fact, we were almost exclusively a Formby-orientated rock ’n’ roll band.

  ‘I notice,’ noticed Neil, ‘and I notice that I did not notice this before, that Michael has quite long hair. It covers his ears and also his school-shirt collar.’

  We nodded.

  ‘Your point is?’ Toby asked.

  ‘Long hair is for girlies, surely,’ said Rob. ‘Long hair, well shampooed, “because you’re worth it”, so to speak.’

  ‘I think I’ll try and grow mine,’ said Neil. ‘Just to see how it looks.’

  ‘You will look like Guy Fawkes,’ said Toby. ‘You are already the only schoolboy I know who sports a goatee beard. Do not add to your notoriety by styling your hair like that of an effeminate anti-parliamentarian. ’

  ‘I don’t wish to look like some Muff Mary Ellen. I’ll shave my head tomorrow,’ said Neil. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’

  And he did.

  And in so doing unconsciously invented a look that would later find favour with The Village People.

  ‘I do hate to say this,’ said Rob, ‘but The Rolling Stones are rather cool. Although it is a rubbish name for a band. They’re playing a lot of Robert Johnson - they should have some sort of Demonic name, but with a bit of a regal quality to it, like ours.’

  ‘Their Satanic Majesties,’ Toby suggested.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Rob.

  And then suddenly The Rolling Stones had finished. We didn’t clap them, of course. How uncool would that have been? Neither did we cheer. Not that we could have cheered had we wanted to.

  You see, we’d had to talk quite loudly while The Rolling Stones had been playing. Shout, really, in order to make ourselves heard. So we had rather sore throats. Which would not help my performance.

  The Rolling Stones came off stage to considerable applause, and we Sumerian Kynges suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a bit of a crush. Most of the teenage schoolgirls of Southcross Road School’s fourth and fifth years seemed rather anxious to make the personal acquaintance of Michael and his band. We found ourselves getting all pushed about. But we did get our ukes thrust back into our hands, so we elbowed our way onstage.

  And Mr Jenner wasn’t there. He’d gone. Left the stage by some other steps. Steps we knew not of. And that was the last time I saw Mr Jenner. He vanished mysteriously quite soon after that.

  I always wondered what became of him. Nothing good, I hope. Some years after that, when The Rolling Stones became famous (and yes, of course I know what happened to them), I saw a photo of
them standing with their manager Andrew Oldham. And I recall thinking that if Andrew took off the sunglasses that he always wore, he’d look the dead spit of Mr Jenner.

  Whatever. Because we were now on the stage.

  And I ‘one-twoed’ with vigour into that mic.

  And I introduced the band as the Rock Gods that we were. Or soon would be. And I counted in our first number. And we played. How we played.

  And I’ll bet, just bet, that if there had been anyone left in the school hall, anyone who had not followed The Rolling Stones out into the playground, where they were apparently signing autographs and deciding which fourth- and fifth-year girls they would be taking on elsewhere, then I bet, just bet, that had there been anyone remaining to watch us play, then that someone would have been really impressed by our musicianship and stagecraft. Even though my vocal renditions were a tad countertenor-ish.

  But there wasn’t and we played to an empty hall.

  And when we were done, Toby reiterated his intention to kill one of The Rolling Stones. ‘Drown his head in a bucket’ being the expression that he used.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ said Rob as he retuned his ukulele, for he had done some fearsome finger-work, ‘I’m thinking that perhaps I am not cut out for the crazy world of rock ’n’ roll. I am thinking that I might just go into advertising and become a copywriter.’

  ‘Not quite so fast,’ said Toby. ‘Playing to an empty hall is part of paying our dues. It will not happen again, you have my promise on this. And let’s look on the bright side - the fact that the hall was empty means that no one will ever know how truly rubbish we were.’

  I looked at Neil and Neil looked at me and Neil looked at Rob and et cetera and et cetera.

  ‘We were pretty rubbish, weren’t we?’ said Rob.

  ‘We were excruciating,’ said Neil.

  ‘I was good,’ said I.

  ‘You were the most rubbish of all,’ the blighters said. In unison.

  ‘Perhaps I could go into copywriting also,’ I said.