IT’S A MIGHTY LONG WAY DOWN ROCK’N’ROLL

Glastonbury 2009. I watch the festival coverage on TV every year and, as I push back into the clamshell comfort of the sofa, two powerful reflections come onstream simultaneously.  In no order of priority they are:

1. I am so very glad of the onward march from primeval domestic technology that means that I have a choice as to whether to thrash around under canvas in the rain or nurse a glass of Mouton Cadet inside a house made of bricks.
2. I am so very glad that at an age that might be four times that of any randomly selected member of the mosh pit in front of the Pyramid Stage, I can still be just as excited as ever by bands and singers new to me.

No exception this year. So far it’s been Friendly Fires, The Maccabees and VV Brown. Electrifying, all three, with roots buried deep but new shoots flowering in abundance. Bill toppers for Friday, however, were the reformed Specials. Ska-powered, punk-edged political pop from the early ‘80s, newly relevant as, once again, the racists are in our streets and at our hustings and democracy is getting a kicking, not from the electorate but from the elected.

Later tonight and headlining tomorrow, past and present coalesce with performances from, respectively, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash and Bruce Springsteen. Past because of the portfolio of anthems that all have contributed to the overall rock-and-roll canon; present because unflagging creative momentum has carried them through, untouched by the fidgety shifts in the surface patterns of popular music but constantly present within the authentic developments that urge the music forward.

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Consider further. For so many of us, music acts as a sort of soundtrack to life and we are all very covetous of those sounds that mean most to us.  Maybe it’s simply a matter of a piece of music providing a current back to a key moment in life contemporaneous to the music so that when it’s heard the essence of that moment is relived.  Or maybe the music carries some deep personal significance: the revelation that a well-turned lyric can have all the force of poetry, or the realisation that great political truths can be encapsulated in a simple song. 

The crucial factor is that the last three generations since the War share a largely unreflecting, maybe even a largely unconscious sense of music as a phenomenon of cultural unification.  Boundaries of class, age, nationality, intellect, personality are breached by popular song and dance.  Like a net, that commonality of musical perception and experience binds us together as was never the case within and before the first half of the last century.  Whether one sees the emergence of The Beatles as symptom or cause in all this is largely irrelevant. The fact remains that by the mid-1960s young people across the Western world were united across barriers that hitherto had served as cultural absolutes, containing them securely within their own zones of social and cultural functioning. 

And it was whilst in the midst of this set of rather arid socio-cultural ponderings that I had my little eureka moment - the realisation of one fundamentally important aspect of being the age I am that is of unique value.  It’s simple and undramatic: I was there at the beginning of the voyage, have travelled the journey uninterrupted ever since and anticipate its rich and fulfilling continuation for many years yet. More specifically and personally, I can recall with absolute clarity that brief but revolutionary time within which the world dissolved from musical black and white into glorious, garish Technicolor.  For me it happened thus…

In the mid-‘50s I was a timid, hypersensitive child of eight, plucked by my parents from an entirely ordinary state primary school whose standard red brick walls, linoleum corridors, white-tiled cloakrooms and asphalt playground filled me with fear and loathing.  In despair, they sent me to a tiny progressive school some 15 miles from suburban Kingston-upon-Thames and there, in happy rough-and-tumble chaos, I boarded for 5 years.  Freedom for we kids was pretty much total, but, kids being naturally conservative, we imposed order on our days, evenings and nights and we led relatively conventional lives.  One staple of the evenings – unusual in Britain at that time – was an hour or so in front of the television.  We watched more or less indiscriminately – documentaries, news broadcasts, quiz shows, nature programmes, whatever was on offer in those days of only two channels. 

However, I remember with particular clarity what passed for musical entertainment on the box in those monochrome times – big bands led by beaming men under patent leather comb-overs and wearing white tuxedos, fronted by female singers with vertical hairdos and flared skirts like lampshades.  The brass section would rise like artillery and fire off a salvo, followed by the saxes, and behind, pumping away on a Guild Savoy or a Hofner President, would be a seated guitarist with a Clark Gable moustache.  From time to time a vocal group – four finger-clicking men in under-the-collar bow ties – would chip in with a syncopated standard before we were returned to the unctuous grin of the baton-wielding bandleader.  Sweeping around the floor and past the static camera, catatonic couples, brylcreemed and lacquered, quickstepped joylessly.  The entire process generated as much excitement and had as much meaning for our small group of teens and pre-teens as the 6.00 PM TV news.

And then in 1956 the world changed utterly.  I have a series of fragmentary but vivid memories now: news items about riots in cinemas – seats slashed by young men in drape jackets to the harsh, honking strains of Bill Haley and The Comets; wild-eyed, plaid-shirted adolescents thrashing guitars in cellar clubs in Soho; an hysterical girl sobbing over and over to a baffled middle-aged interviewer the unlikely name ‘Elvis Presley’.  Then it was all of us in a bedroom gathered around a tiny Dansette record player watching shellac discs the size of dinner plates flopping onto the turntable, crackling briefly & then releasing messages from the other side of the universe.  The Everley Brothers, Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Tommy Steele, Lonnie Donegan… We looked at each other in mingled fear and fascination.  Even at that tender age we knew that nothing would ever be quite the same again.

Between that time of cultural revolution and now, it’s all snapshots – brief, bright moments frozen in time, each somehow defined by its musical soundtrack…

•    Aged 12, Paddy Neustatter and I climbing the beech tree in his enormous garden,  me asking him whether he loved Lindy Rutter and hoping that he’d say no because I did, with a passion. And the jangling of Buddy Holly’s ‘Words of Love’ floating down the garden from Paddy’s sister’s bedroom…
•    Staying for a summer fortnight in the Branch’s tiny cottage in the Malvern Hills and the thick, fat Louisiana sounds of Fats Domino’s ‘Blueberry Hill’ on a wind-up gramophone,  incongruous amongst rural English hollyhocks and roses round the door…
•    Aged 14, at another boarding school on a cold Yorkshire night, the end-of-term Christmas Dance and me outside in the snow, heartbroken again, staring through the Ballroom window at Pat Waters slow-dancing with Peter Kirkup to Elvis singing ‘Don’t’…
•     Aged 15, four of us sitting side-by-side on French teacher Roger’s sofa, listening to Leadbelly singing ‘Midnight Special, and new doors opening and new lights shining in…
•    Aged 16, listening to Jimmy Saville on Radio Luxembourg late at night under my bedclothes, willing him to play’ I’m Going Home’ by Gene Vincent, the only piece of vintage rock’n’roll in a desert of anodyne early ‘60s ballads…
•    Aged 16, losing my cherry in the dark and clammy tack room to which only Geoff and I had access (it having been seized by us for just this purpose) while Big Bill Broonzy sung about ‘The Glory of Love’ …
•    Aged 18, trying to keep my cigarette alight under the dripping rhododendrons in the pouring rain, 10 of us listening to Saturday Club on Tim’s portable transistor radio - ‘Love Me Do’ with Lennon’s harmonica sounding to me just like Delbert McClinton’s on Bruce Channel’s ‘Hey, Baby’ the year before…
•    Aged 18, sitting on the back door step at school in the early sun just before breakfast, having collected the morning papers from the village on my bike, with a copy of New Musical Express open on my lap, gazing disbelievingly at a grainy photo of five ugly, piratical youths with outrageously long hair sneering towards the camera. I sensed danger, ‘revolution in the air’…
•    Aged 18, at home, strung between school and whatever next (like I really cared), staring moodily at the TV and suddenly thunderstruck by sight of a skinny, shock-haired, boy-hobo sitting on a bottom stair hacking away at an acoustic guitar and singing about a swan on a river gliding by – Bob Dylan’s fleeting appearance in a long-forgotten TV play during his few weeks in London.  Instantly and fanatically, I wanted to become him.  I’m waiting still…
•    Aged 19, a jam-packed Sunday night at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, a foot away from Clapton and the rest of The Yardbirds steaming their way through Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’, and and mods in tonic suits hanging and swinging from the roofbeams like sloths gone crazy…
•    Aged 20 and handing out leaflets in Carnaby Street for my ‘new age jug and skiffle’ band’s first gig and seeing The Who hustling out of the Granny Takes A Trip boutique into their Austin Mini jeep, all targets, union jacks and sharp to die for suits.  After the gig that night we dropped the banjo, kazoos and acoustic guitar and went electric…
•    Aged 22, cowering in the corner of the vast dressing room at Alexandra Palace, venue of the legendary ’24 Hour Technicolor Dream’, my band (The Nervous System) lowest on the bill, watching a tripped out and terminally catatonic Syd Barrett being lifted bodily from the dressing room and onto the stage to play just about his last gig with Pink Floyd…
•     Aged 22, leaning over the squalid little bath in my cold-water flat in South-East London, washing my hair in coal-tar soap because I couldn’t afford shampoo and suddenly straightening up in delirious shock (and banging my head on the shower attachment) as I heard Hendrix on the radio blitzing his way into ‘Hey, Joe’ for the first time…
•    Aged 23, drifting into stoned slumber at 3.00 AM in our reeking squat after a gig in the West Country, with just-purchased ‘Sergeant Pepper’ playing over and over and into our hallucinogenic dreams with the record player on repeat mode…
•    Aged 23, swinging into One Stop Records in South Moulton Street, off Oxford Street, with a pair of £5.00 notes from a gig the night before, in search of the latest Stateside imports.  Leaving in a state close to spiritual ecstasy with Love’s ‘Forever Changes’, Captain Beefheart’s ‘Safe as Milk’, Kaleidoscope’s ‘Side Trips’ and The Byrds’ ‘The Notorious Byrd Brothers’ under my arm.  I have them all still…
•    Aged 25, a humid summer night, me alone in the tiny suburban flat in which my new wife (as of tomorrow’s wedding) and I would live, listening to Crosby, Still and Nash singing, ‘Wooden Ships’ and preparing myself for the Real World, the one through which my parents glided with such ease and for which – love notwithstanding – I was so unprepared...