Stardust Memories Read online

  Whimsical humour is the essence of McGough’s outlook on life. No one who has seen the Scaffold (and he writes most of the material as well as being a member of the group) can be unaware of the absolute lack of cynicism and nastiness. No one gets hurt in Scaffold humour. Life is seen through a fancifully absurd screen and translated into pithy verbal extravagances.

  Now twenty-nine, he has been a full-time member of the Scaffold since ABC-TV saw them performing at Liverpool’s Hope Hall (now the Everyman) during a workshop session of jazz, poetry and humour and signed them for a twenty-six week contract on the late-night show Gazette. That was in 1963.

  At that time he was an assistant lecturer in English at the Mabel Fletcher Technical College, which is interesting because he failed ordinary level English Literature at St Mary’s College, Crosby, didn’t take it at A level, and studied French and Geography at Hull University.

  The other two members of the Scaffold are John Gorman, who owns a boutique called ‘Through the Looking Glass’, and Michael McGear, Paul McCartney’s younger brother.

  ‘We didn’t follow up our success in Gazette, and our agent tried to make us into all-rounders like the Bachelors. Then we joined Epstein’s organisation, but that didn’t work either. Now we’re with someone else. There were no hard feelings when we left.

  ‘We’re going to the West End after Easter, and then it will be up to us whether we make it or not. Yes, the West End should sort us out. Often when you don’t get anywhere you find someone to blame. Either it’s the producer or the agent … you know. But this time it will be up to us. If we flop it will be our own fault alone.’

  At about the same time as the Scaffold’s debut in the West End, McGough’s first novel, Frinck—A day in the life of, will be published.

  ‘It’s basically about this bloke called Frinck who’s a bit of a loafer and layabout, and layer and loafabout, and who gets mixed up in the pop world. He’s a folk singer, but very soon the bottom falls out of the market and he’s back in Liverpool where he started. Very short, just a mini-novel, really, although it has about fifty chapters.

  ‘This is my secret. Every time I started writing I began a new chapter, even if I only wrote two lines. Then at the end of the week I might have written about seven chapters. That way I got some sense of achievement and progress.

  ‘There are two other books, too, with which I’m concerned. Penguin are publishing one called Mersey Sound and there’s another one called The Liverpool Scene. Both are anthologies, with poems by Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and myself.’

  He has a room in the same house as Henri in Canning Street, a small neat bedsitter with a rouge ceiling, a wall done in what he calls Clayton Square yellow, and a crucifix in the corner by the light switch.

  ‘I didn’t start to write until I was at university. I was a late developer and when I went to university I just studied the subject I got the best results in at A level. No one ever suggested doing anything else. I suppose I grew up while I was there. I enjoyed it tremendously. There was a nice genteel, middle-class pace to it.

  ‘It taught me a new way of living. You know, what wines to drink, that sort of thing. And then I came back to Liverpool and found that no one drank wine because they couldn’t afford to. It was all false but nice. I learned a way of living which I couldn’t attain when I came back home. But I didn’t leave there with any professional ambitions. That was why I drifted into teaching.’

  Suddenly, the pub has become a confluence of those drinking and those fighting for a drink. Beards and birds everywhere, little cuties in moth-eaten fur coats duck as pints are passed over their imitation Sassoon hairstyles, and eye make-up begins to smudge as the smoke brings tears to their eyes. The bar is packed: students, lecturers, musicians, boys from groups, actors, sculptors and artists; precocious sixth-formers looking for a Left Bank limelight, discotheque dollies who have wandered into the wrong pub by mistake and girls whose only function is to be with their men; everyone sways with an intellectual and libidinous furore as the evening wears on and the glasses are drained and refilled.

  Rober McGough talks on. ‘Money can sometimes be a problem. As a rule we do at least one gig a week, and we get an average of £60 for it. But the money goes to our agent first and it may be months before we see it. So it’s good to have a job two days a week teaching liberal studies at the art college, because it provides a regular salary. At the same time I like the discipline of being involved with people who want to know things. And it gives me time to write.

  ‘I’ve been writing a play for the Everyman recently. I started doing it about a month ago and I wrote it all down in a blue exercise book. Then I went out one night and lost the bloody thing. I hardly had the heart to get going again after, but it’s more or less finished and opens on March 15. It’s called The Commission.’

  He pauses to wave hello to some friends who are on the other side of the bar. ‘Wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t come to the pub every night. I see Liverpool 8 as a village, with its village churches — the cathedrals — and its taverns. All my friends come here, so that must be the attraction. Yes, I’m like an intellectual docker.

  ‘I usually work in the morning for a few hours, then go to the Kardomah for something to eat, and then maybe have a walk round town. Being a poet has its drawbacks. For instance, I don’t just stop working when I put down my pencil, like an engineer when he puts down his spanner. In a way I’m working when I’m just loafing about, because I’m observing and thinking, and that’s what poetry is really about.’

  Sitting there in his denims, scarlet leather waistcoat and crocodile skin shoes, and with his long hair hanging thick over his ears and thinning at the front like a mature cherub, he looks every inch the poet.

  ‘When I was young I didn’t like having my hair cut, and when I got older and didn’t have to I just let it grow. Then I found that long hair became associated with certain types of people. Like wearing a uniform. I was living an image and people could identify me as belonging to a certain group of the population.

  ‘But in Liverpool you can’t exist just by having long hair and saying you’re a poet. Not like you can in London anyway, where they pat each other on the wallet and keep up an endless round of literary cocktail parties. In Liverpool you have to be able to talk football as well.

  ‘When I go to London all the fellas are tall and good looking and all the girls are leggy and beautiful. And they don’t want to know unless you have lots of money. I feel I want to be like them, but I can ignore it when I’m up here.’

  We sit silently for a few moments. The nightly ritual is almost played out and new couples are forming and going out of the doors together, and old relationships are breaking. A very pretty girl with her hemline barely fringing her bloomers is leaning cosily on the arm of a weedy boy with half a moustache, leather cape and calf high boots.

  ‘I don’t think Liverpool 8 is a totally amoral community,’ he says. ‘There is a morality here, but it’s less hypocritical than in suburban society. I suppose the things I believe in are unfashionable. You know, love and gentleness and all that.’

  POSTSCRIPT Today Liverpool 8 is known for the urban riots of Toxteth of 1981, but in 1967 it was a Merseyside enclave of musicians, artists, writers and actors. When John Lennon had been at art college he had lived there, while all the many famous actors who worked at the Everyman had flats and bed-sitters in the Victorian streets behind the Anglican cathedral. Roger McGough is now a highly respected poet who lives in London. He has recently written the lyrics to an American musical based upon Wind In The Willows. His fellow members of The Scaffold have had mixed fortunes. Mike McGear made a couple of attempts at a solo career, and recently published his own biography of the McCartney family; while John Gorman has had only limited success in television shows like OTT and Tizzwazz.

  October 1967

  Jimi Hendrix

  ‘Jimi Hendrix,’ they told me — lying to a man — ‘is so sincere about his music that one o
f these days he will probably make a human torch of himself on stage.’

  Not believing any such absurd romancing for a minute, but nevertheless anxious to meet a man whose friends were prepared to plan such a horrific demise on his behalf, I called to see him over his milk and menthol-tipped breakfast.

  Everyone with a television set must know who Hendrix is by now. He’s the fellow who looks rather like a black Mick Jagger: the one with the electric hair and fuzz-topped companions. He has made four records and had four hits since coming to Britain from Greenwich Village a year ago, and he calls his trio The Jimi Hendrix Experience. (Their first album was called ‘Are You Experienced?’)

  He says he is twenty and lives with his manager and his manager’s wife in a Marble Arch flat. It’s a big apartment — on the fourth floor of a modern block — and apart from the bathroom where there’s that celebrated picture of a naked Frank Zappa of the Mothers of Invention sitting in the loo, it’s just what you’d expect for the average young married couple earning upwards of five or ten thousand a year.

  It’s tasteful and conservative — that is, apart from Jimi’s quarters. In a room that looks for all the world like Mephis-topheles’s parlour, with crimson curtains, sheets and carpets, he’s collected a fascinating eyrie of talismans and charms. There’s a giant panda, peacock feathers, a three foot rag doll, magic Rip Van Winkle slippers and a tiny cloaked Swedish Superman. And suspended above the double divan bed are five huge granny shawls which hang like monstrous vivid spiders’ webs and clutch at a candled chandelier straight out of Jane Eyre. The walls are draped in splendidly ornate Chinese and Japanese canvases, and there’s an Oriental jar of dead flowers on the sideboard.

  ‘I dig dead flowers,’ says Jimi in his great dark-brown voice, crushing one as he speaks between his thumb and forefinger. And he giggles like a boy who’s trying to shock.

  He’s wearing tight tangerine pants, a blue and white flowered shirt and a black jacket with a patterned pageant of white doves.

  ‘You can learn from dead things, you know,’ he says. ‘In my music I’ve learned from everything, mainly from my life.’

  So far his life has been traumatic. He was born in Seattle, Washington, and for much of his childhood spent a great deal of time commuting up to Vancouver to stay with his grandmother, a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. (Ethnically he’s also part Mexican, but mainly Negro.)

  ‘My mother and dad used to fall out a lot, and I always had to be ready to go tippy-toeing off up to Canada. My dad was very levelheaded and religious, but my mother used to like having a good time and dressing up. She used to drink a lot and didn’t take care of herself. She died when I was about ten. But she was a groovy mother.’

  At fourteen he left high school because his father needed his wage. ‘Dad was a gardener and it got pretty bad in the winter when there wasn’t any grass to cut,’ he says.

  By the time he was fifteen he had left home, and he hasn’t been back since.

  ‘I have a half-sister of nearly six called Genevieve who I’ve never even seen. There may be more by now. I must call my dad. He’s married again. I sent him some money but he sent it back. Perhaps I’ll call him today.’

  After leaving home he had his hair straightened in the best Nat ‘King’ Cole manner and took up playing guitar and bass with some of the sleek mohair-sheened rhythm and blues groups. For a while he played with Little Richard, and then with the Isley Brothers.

  Drafted at seventeen into the 91st Airborne Division of the U.S. army, he left after thirteen months when he hurt his back jumping out of a training aeroplane 10,000 ft over Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He then went to Greenwich Village and played in some clubs, and it was there he met Chas Chandler who is now his manager.

  It was in New York that the Hendrix guitar style developed as an individualised composite of Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Dylan and the Beatles. And there, too, the Hendrix hair-do, which has set a trend for thousands of little ravers all over London, came into its own.

  ‘When I was a little boy I used to hate having my hair cut and would try to avoid my dad whenever it got long. I’d sneak in and out of the house and try not to be noticed, but eventually he’d always spot me and sit me down in the hall under the lamp and shave it all off until I looked like a skinned chicken. And then the next day at school all the kids would laugh at me.

  ‘I guess I’ve always been conscious of my personal appearance because I have big ears. In five years’ time I might be bald.’ And he tugs at the tumbleweed of steel wool covering his head. ‘See how it comes out. That’s because I’ve been overworking.’

  At the moment Jimi and his two Experiences are just finishing off their second album, ‘Axis — Bold As Love’, in which he further demonstrates the highly individual guitar patterns which have won him the top award as the musician of the year in the Melody Maker Pop Poll.

  The image that Jimi Hendrix, the pop star, presents to the outside world is strangely at variance with Hendrix at home.

  On television he can look mean, as though he were deliberately baiting parents, and his act, in which he plays his electric guitar with his teeth, is considered sexy and provocative — not least by the extreme Right Wing American women’s society, the Daughters of the American Revolution, who got him taken out of the Monkees’ tour of the United States last year. But in private he is polite and likeable.

  ‘My dad was very, very strict and taught me that I must respect my elders always. I couldn’t speak unless I was spoken to first by grown-ups. So I’ve always been very quiet. But I saw a lot of things.

  ‘A fish wouldn’t get into trouble if he kept his mouth shut.’

  POSTSCRIPT Jimi Hendrix was found dead less than three years later in the London flat of a girlfriend. The cause of death at the inquest was given as inhalation of vomit following barbiturate intoxication. The inquest returned an open verdict. Hendrix was more than just a guitarist. Even before his death he had become a cult figure, and his image personified the scramble into psychedelia of the late sixties.

  November 1967

  Chris Farlowe

  There’s a little bit of the Third Reich along an arty-tarty alley and up some stone steps behind the Angel, Islington — a stall full, actually, of the ornately embellished impedimenta of Nazi puissance.

  Everywhere there are swastikas: scrawled across great blushing flags, carved onto hundreds of dagger handles, on gilt standard tops, above the runes and skull on the shroud-black SS uniform, etched into the beige sides of desert water vessels, sculpted on sword sheaths, fashioned in silver on policemen’s cockades, moulded in gilt on officers’ caps, crowning in a dull bastard metal the Mothers’ Cross (awarded for services on the labour bed), and painted in white on the black party button for women.

  It all belongs to Chris Farlowe, pop singer. Cockney Chris Farlowe, who, with his group the Thunderbirds, had that sensational hit ‘Out Of Time’, and whose latest record ‘Handbags and Gladrags’ will also be a hit.

  ‘I reckon all the gear on this stall must be worth about £10,000,’ he says.

  Farlowe has had his stall in the flagged antique passages of Islington for just eight months now. He started it as a hobby, but he has a keen eye for business, and he says his turnover is fantastic.

  ‘I got interested in the war when I worked for the LCC as a carpenter after leaving a technical college in St Pancras. There was this man there who’d been in the war and he was always talking about it.

  ‘Then when I was singing in Hamburg I saw an Iron Cross in the window of a junk shop. I just had to have it. And that was it. I just started collecting.’

  At his parents’ home in Islington he now keeps a personal collection of over one hundred and fifty daggers, and he’s built up his Nazi antique business to being one of the biggest in Europe, he says. Already his stall, on the top floor of an arcade, isn’t big enough, and he’ll be looking for his own shop soon.

  ‘I’ve no political motives for selling it at all. I’m a Conservative,
actually. Occasionally we get people up here who start saluting at the pictures of Hitler, and asking if they can try on the helmets and uniforms, but we throw them straight out. We cater purely for collectors.

  ‘Then we sometimes get people who say it’s horrible and should all be burnt and forgotten. But it’s history. How can you forget history? It’s part of human life.

  ‘The other day we had an American lady in and she was shocked when she saw it all. I asked what she was doing in the war and she said she was in New York. I said, “Look, I was here in Islington, and our house was bombed out twice. I was only four but I can still remember the sirens in the forties.

  ‘And then she asked me why I was selling it and I said because of the money, that’s why. Just for the money.

  ‘See this stuff here. Get £60 for that SS uniform. Helmets are from about £3. Car pendants from £3 too, and see that general’s sword there … £30.’ And he turns with obvious satisfaction towards his elaborately garnished ornaments of madness.

  Farlowe was born in Berkhamsted — his mother was evacuated there in 1940 — but he’s lived all his life in his parents’ large Victorian house in Islington. His father is a printer with a national newspaper, and his mother is a supervisory cook at a school. He is an only child.

  His fiancee is his manager: ‘She’s a very ambitious girl and wants to go a long way in pop management, so there’s no question of marriage at the moment.’

  Farlowe is a chummy, working-class lad, a tough ex-schoolboy boxing champion, and he’s never shaved in his life. (’I asked the doctor what it was all about, and he said I was just a very lucky man. One in a million.’) When he was eleven he was a boy soprano and sang ‘Silent Night’ at the Royal Festival Hall. Now his voice sounds as though it’s been strained through the wrong end of a megaphone.

  ‘I was dead choked when I couldn’t go into the army. I missed National Service by only about five months. But I didn’t want to sign up because I’d just started singing as an amateur. I think I would have liked the army, though. I was always interested in history and battles. You know, like Agincourt and all that. And I was always fascinated by swords and weapons.’