‘Fucking groovy Brian,’ says Ged, adding a little empathetic, hippy vernacular.
‘Tops,’ says Julian.
Brian informs us that, ‘She drives like a bitch man.’
Quite how a bitch drives, I am not too sure, other than this is one loud bitch. On the positive side, there is plenty of room in the back for our equipment, though Brian does complain about his troublesome slipped disc and is therefore unable to help with the lifting. And this is our roadie? Nevertheless, the kit is soon all on board, and the suspension and ball joints appear to be holding firm. We pile in to the vehicle and hit the road, heading for the girls’ changing room at Alderhouse School. I keep all available fingers crossed that the chassis holds up as we bounce down the road like dried peas in a biscuit tin.
I have been a pupil at Alderhouse for nearly seven years, during which time I have witnessed a transformation of its modus operandi from the iron discipline of a nineteenth century Eton to the laissez-faire of a hippy commune. A bowl of brown rice and a joint have replaced the cane and the stick. Some traditionalist teachers resent and reject this change as a bad idea gone wrong; a bit like the advice of Hitler’s art teacher to drop the landscape painting and take up national politics. One such Luddite is the history master Mr. Earnshaw, known to the pupils as Dracula because of his resemblance to Bella Lugosi. This is the guy who runs the School Youth Club, though quite why this miserable, child-despising man further tortures himself through this extra-curricular activity is a mystery on par with why so many in the population love On The Buses with the unswerving adoration of Billy Bunter gazing at a plate of iced ring doughnuts.
When we arrive at the school and drive through the entrance, we spot Dracula getting out of his Ford Anglia in the makeshift car park of the boys’ yard.
Above the racket of the Bedford, Ged shouts, ‘Dracula.’
The master looks around in vain to spot the culprit. We park next to his car, grab some of our gear, and follow him towards the sports hall, the scene every Tuesday for the Youth Club. It is a largely dreary affair for all concerned but arguably better than roaming the streets of Wallasey in search of a bag of chips, a pinball machine, and an optional smack in the gob from the residue of skinheads still in the area. On offer are drinks of Jusoda, Blue Riband biscuits, a game of table tennis, and pop music playing on the stereo. Julian has been able to wangle things so that we can use the adjacent changing rooms for rehearsals. We have naturally chosen the girls’ side.
We lug our equipment through an exterior fire door, past the steel lockers and showers into a rectangular shaped room, the perimeter of which has a continuous wooden bench and a series of clothing hooks. On one of these, I see a navy blue pump bag with the embroidered initials FU, presumably not an aggressive message but the property of head girl, Fiona Urquhart. I have to tell myself to concentrate on why we are here... to play music.
About fifteen minutes later, we are ready to start. I sit on my wobbly stool with an unobstructed view of the surrounding walls, a sea of concrete blocks as grey as a summer sky in Grimsby. The changing room is so austere; it makes a Soviet nuclear bunker look like the Palace of Versailles. Things start with Brian as a one-man audience, puffing on a rolled-up cigarette as he meditates to our performance. The first few notes confirm our worst fears. The acoustics are atrocious, with the prison-like walls and floor doing nothing to sanitise our raw sound. We blast out the new numbers we have learnt in the last week from the likes of Free, Led Zeppelin, and Peter Greene's Fleetwood Mac, but we are not happy.
Yet things take a turn for the better, when at the sound of the opening chords to 'Down the Dustpipe' by Status Quo, three girls appear at the door from the Sports Hall side of the room. Two of them are wearing identical white cotton dresses emblazoned with Disney characters and have the same shoulder length, blonde hair. They are giggling in the slightly hysterical way that teenage girls do when over excited. The third, dark haired girl, clothed in a short skirt and low cut top, has the facial expression of a corpse. Her look is doubly off-putting, because she is staring straight at me. I turn my head to avoid eye contact and see Ged responding to the presence of a few chicks by strutting around and waving his guitar neck from side to side as though trying to get rid of a nasty smell. Julian carries on plucking his bass, impervious to our newest fans. The one in the short skirt then heads in my direction and takes residence next to the bass drum. She stands there glaring at me until the end of the song.
The two blondes clap a little, but my ‘admirer’ continues to be an extra from Night of the Living Dead. She leans across and tries to take my drumsticks. In my struggle to keep hold of them, she slips and falls to the ground at the very moment that Dracula appears. He gives me an accusing look, as if I have pushed her to the floor.
‘Come on girls, back to the youth club please,’ he says, all the time still eyeballing me. The girls acquiesce. He allows his gaze to take in the whole scene before him, and his sense of disapproval is plain to see. ‘What the hell do you think you are doing in here?’ he snarls.
‘We have permission sir.’ I default to the old grammar school deference of pupil to teacher.
‘Permission?’
‘Yes,' says Julian, 'from Mrs. Moretti the Home Economics teacher who happens to be a neighbour of mine.’
A flicker of recognition is discernible in his reaction. His bottom lip and nose twitch upward like a bulldog. It momentarily takes the wind out of his sails, but he recovers quickly. For once, Julian’s charismatic way with his elders is impotent. Perhaps holding a bass guitar neutralises his super power.
‘I could have you arrested you know.’
‘What the hell for?’ says Ged, his heckles rising.
‘For perversion.’
‘For what?’
‘You have no right to be in here, where young girls of this school change and shower.’ He lingers far too long on the last word.
‘Sorry?’ says Ged, who seems to be mentally rolling up the sleeves of his Ben Sherman shirt in readiness for a fight. Two years ago, Ged was a bit of a skinhead, resplendent in white drill parallels and Doc Marten boots. The shirt is the one lasting legacy from this era, though a chocolate and lime coloured tank top is now the accompaniment. ‘And precisely which law have you deemed us to have broken?’ Ged has turned into Perry Mason.
He hesitates before countering with, ‘The same one as those anarchists from that Oz magazine.’
‘So, let’s get this straight.’ Ged puts down his guitar. ‘Playing Status Quo songs in here is a breach of the Obscene Publications Act 1968?’
Ged usually enforces his point of view with brawn rather than brains, so this challenge is particularly impressive. Dracula is defeated, but Julian takes on his usual role of diplomat.
‘Listen my man,’ he puts his hand on the teacher’s right shoulder, and the vampire look-a-like reacts as if our bass player has smeared something unmentionable on his cable knit sweater. ‘We’ve just about finished our rehearsals, so we can clear our equipment away, and perhaps next week we will choose the boys’ changing rooms instead.’
Julian’s charm has asserted itself and won the day. Mr. Earnshaw saunters out, though not before shooting a withering look in my direction.
Brian has been sitting on a bench all this time in a kind of trance. He comes round. ‘Your playing was a gas man, a real gas, way out, but you need another guitarist, a rhythm guitarist. I know this cat that plays a bit. I could ask him if you want.’
He has a point. Our sound does need to be a bit more expansive. When Ged goes into one of his guitar solos, Julian and I do not have the necessary to keep it anything other than a tuneless noise in the background.
‘What do you think chaps?’ says Julian.
I recall the advice of Jimmy Jet at the Town Hall, “Keep it a trio, so there’s less to share the stash.” I discard the thought immediately. We are not in this for the money. I agree to Brian’s suggestion, though Ged just shrugs, perhaps seeing another guit
arist as a threat to his standing in the band. We ultimately agree that it cannot do any harm to audition this ‘cat’. I am just hoping he is house-trained and does not smell of piss.
We pack away the gear into the van, the chassis barely able to carry the weight. Brian once again looks on, rubbing his back with an exaggerated wince. However, there is no quick getaway for us. When our roadie turns the key in the ignition, the engine refuses to start. We return to the youth club for a drink, leaving Brian to have a fiddle under the bonnet.
On re-entering the sports hall, Ged disguises a shout of ‘Dracula’, prompting Earnshaw to look up with suspicion. We evade a flying table tennis ball on our march towards the tuck shop, where we discover the revelation that Wagon Wheels are on sale. Then I see her again. There are two girls about my age staffing the tuck stall, and although Julian is soon in deep conversation with one of them, I concentrate on the Italian looking beauty with the chestnut hair and hazel eyes from the listening booth in Strathconas.
Ged whispers to me. ‘Bloody hell, she’s gorgeous.’
I am nowhere near as confident as the other lads are when it comes to the chicks, but I can usually join in with the innocent ‘boy fancies girl’ chitchat, though not today. I catch her gaze, and she smiles warmly at me. I immediately turn away dripping in self-consciousness and take pitiable refuge in the purchase of a Wagon Wheel. The only snippet of information I gleam during the transaction is her name, when I overhear her friend call her Sofia. Snacks purchased, we retreat to the ‘discotheque’, mainly to avoid the violent shots from the table tennis game in progress.
We walk past newspaper cuttings on the wall of Kevin Keegan and Joe Royle, adjacent to the posters of Slade and Rod Stewart. T Rex starts playing through the speakers. This is a popular choice, and soon there are many congregating on the dance floor. I am to one side of those grooving, feeling low after my inability to engage with this Sofia. I cast surreptitious glances in the direction of the tuck shop and feel a twinge of dismay that she is showing no reciprocal interest in me. Indeed, there are a few blokes flirting with her, and she seems to be enjoying the attention. Any pang of envy, however, is short lived. The solemn looking girl in the mini-skirt from the changing room is suddenly leading me towards the dance floor. Despite the winks of encouragement from Ged, I am distracted, at least until I hear the Moog synthesiser opening to 'Son of My Father' by Chicory Tip. From nowhere, I have an unexpected outpouring of nerve.
'Fuck it! Fuck the pretty looking girl on the tuck stall! Who gives a shit?' These internalised thoughts lead to an uncharacteristic lack of self-awareness. 'If she’s not interested in me, then I’m not interested in her. I'm going to dance with this girl and have some fun!’
It is an unfortunate feature of my dancing technique that I lack control over my arms, which have a tendency to flail wildly with a will of their own. Tonight I have to face the consequence of this handicap, when at the start of the second chorus I floor my mini-skirted partner with a vicious Sonny Liston upper cut. She hits the lino with a thud. The music has to stop, and it is with some relief that I watch her slowly get to her feet. Dracula Earnshaw then races in to investigate.
‘Daddy,’ she cries.
Daddy? What does she mean Daddy? I am confused.
‘He hit me Daddy, he hit me!’
I know immediately that I would have a fairer hearing if charged for treason at a Ugandan court presided over by Idi Amin. Dracula looks at me with disdain trickling from every pore. I offer no resistance. When he demands, I leave the premises. As he escorts me out of the sports hall, I see a critical Sofia staring at me intently. I open my mouth to utter a defence but nothing comes out.
It is a small crumb of comfort to find that Brian has fixed the van. Suffice to say, despite my innocence, the atmosphere on the way home is a bit strained. I stare out of the porthole window at the rear of the vehicle and see the stars in the night sky, musing that my hapless dancing has lost us our practising venue and earned the disapproval of the lovely Sofia at the same time. This is some way from a night to remember.
*
It is the following Saturday evening, and I am walking through the streets of Wallasey with Julian on our way to the blind date at the 99 club. I am nervous, but at least I am dressed for the occasion. I have bought new loons after the burning of my split-knee cricket pads at the Town Hall fiasco, and this time I have gone for sober navy blue, a colour complemented by the air force shade of my RAF jacket, newly arrived from the mail order section of the Melody Maker. I am feeling smart, and that is at least something as I head into the unknown.
The 99 club is a converted cottage hospital with large windows and a front door the size of the entrance to Wormwood Scrubs. Outside, two shaven-headed doormen appear to have done time themselves. My confidence drains in a second, but Julian's maintains his cool.
‘Good evening gentlemen,’ he says. The bouncers look in my direction and are about to turn me away when my friend interjects. ‘This is Tom, my guest.’
His uncanny power over authority figures shows no signs of letting up, further evidenced by the submissive behaviour of these heavies who almost fawn as they shepherd us into the building. The venue itself is a dive, as decrepit on the inside as the outside. I can hear 'Brown Sugar' by The Rolling Stones playing as we walk down the worn, carpeted stairs and through a doorway into what appears to be a ballroom. It is dimly lit with a small bar to the left, chairs and tables around the outside, and a disco on a small stage to the right. There is a clear divide of the sexes in the room with the girls on one side and the boys on the other.
I grab Julian by the arm. ‘Can you see them?’ I am failing to suppress my anxiety.
‘Calm down Tom, this is going to be a good night, trust me.’
We approach the bar, and he orders the drinks as I scan the room. I soon spot the platinum blonde Amanda, dressed in a particularly tight black dress. She looks stunning. Next to her is a girl who is not quite in the same league, though is nonetheless very pretty. This must be Brenda. I try to control my stirrings.
‘Julian, Julian.’ I shake him by the upper arm. ‘Amanda's over there, trying to get your attention.’
He turns around and hands me a glass of lager and lime. ‘So she is my man, so she is.’
‘Yes, yes!’ I scream silently with joy.
Amanda breaks away from the female tribe and heads towards us. Unfortunately, the girl next to her walks away in the opposite direction. I am just about to muster the courage to get her attention with a wave, when I become disconcerted. Amanda is not alone. A big girl has joined Julian’s date on the short walk across the floor. She is carrying a full pint of bitter and is dressed in black leather. She has legs the size of telegraph poles and enormous tits strapped in by a lattice arrangement that makes them look like vicious guard dogs locked in a cage. The closer she gets, the more I chide myself for yielding to the uncertainties of a blind date... again.
They are a few feet away, when I whisper frantically. ‘Bloody hell Jules, surely that isn’t Brenda.’
‘I’m so sorry Tom, I just thought....’ his words trail away. It says much for the appearance of Brenda that the normally indefatigable Julian Lord is lost for words.
‘Hi Julian,’ says Amanda. She smells gorgeous as well.
‘Amanda, you look magnificent,’ says Julian, effortlessly turning on the charm.
‘This must be your friend Tim.’ She turns her enormous blue eyes to me.
‘Tom,’ I correct, a little too abruptly.
‘Hi Tom.’ She looks to her side. ‘And this is my stepsister Brenda.’
Her bloody stepsister, I might have known it. I stand there dumbfounded. All the while, Brenda has been weighing me up and licking her lips. I feel like a leg of lamb at the feet of a hungry lioness.
‘Nice to meet you Brenda,’ says Julian.
‘And nice to meet you too,’ she replies in a pitch low enough to sing 'Walk Tall' by Val Doonican. Turning to me, she takes my puny drin
k and places it on a ledge next to her pint. ‘So you’re Tim.’
I do not correct her. ‘Mmm.’ I sound so timid.
The next thing I am being bear hugged. ‘God you’re so cute! Isn’t he cute Amanda? He looks about three!’
She kisses me on the lips, bombarding my senses as her tongue probes its way into my mouth like the mole from Thunderbirds. She pushes her enormous chest into mine, and although I attempt to extricate myself from the hold, I am trapped. When she surfaces for air, I find her scrabbling around in a frantic search for her glasses that have fallen off her face during the clinch. She finds them just as Black Sabbath’s 'Paranoid' explodes from the speakers.
‘Come on Timmy, it’s time for a dance.’
This is an instruction, and traumatised by the youth club dancing fiasco only a few days earlier, I am in no position to put up any resistance. The fact that I can see Julian and Amanda doing their thing and getting on famously proves that Brenda and I are not alone on the floor. We are, however, the only couple dancing a ‘slow dance’. I gyrate, not in time to the bounce or rhythm of the song, but in a vain effort to remove Brenda’s two-handed grip on my buttocks. Ozzie Osborne bellows as she grabs at my flies, an action that finally provides enough adrenaline for me to disengage from this imprisonment. However, my race to the safety of the bar falters. Brenda effortlessly takes hold of the lower right leg of my navy loons. They tear at the knee, so that one leg is a loon and the other, a culotte. Then I fall flat on my face.
I lie prostrate on the dance floor before raising my head slowly to observe a sea of faceless bodies laughing and pointing. Yet one face has a crystal-clear expression. Wearing the same shy, slightly perplexed look, and sipping a Babycham or something, it is Sofia. I cannot believe my misfortune. Propelled by deep shame and embarrassment, the speed of my exit out of the 99 Club is so fast that I have probably just qualified for the one hundred metres at the forthcoming Munich Olympics.
There are to be no more blind dates.
4. Sofia
I am with my sister Caroline. She is three years older than I am and moved out last year when she married Peter, a man of so few words that Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name has verbal diarrhoea by comparison. She is the archetypal elder sibling who is far too domineering for her own good, but I value her opinion beyond anyone else in the family, which is why I have decided to tell her my news first.