"My Amazing Adventures Growing Up In Boomtown Britain"
1951 to 1975

My First Memories1951:

     I was the third and last child of Margaret and Stanley Goodman, born at home on a beautiful spring morning (apparently), on the day of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race and the weekend of Easter. Dad was out doing a regular spot of overtime as a toolmaker – I guess times were still hard then, we’re talking 1951 when food rationing was still in force, not long after the massacres we call World War II.

    When my Dad came home he held my tiny hands in his and made the prediction that "these were the fingers of a musician". – he certainly wasn’t disappointed on that one. I’ve lost count of the instruments I look after, love and play. Bass guitar was my main bread-earner for many years but I also dabble in guitar, sitar, flute and keyboards. And now, at the start of the 21st Century, I specialise in a mix of ancient and futuristic instruments – star drums, dimension beams, theramin, ocarina, kalimba and marimba to name but six…

    The first memory I recall was waking to find a birthday card with the number ‘1’ on it next to my bed. so I guess I must have been one year old. I suppose I could have been two or three and my parents were into a bit of recycling – who knows? I also remember being in the pram and someone handing me a threepenny piece. I held it for a while and distinctly remember the octagonal shape. One day soon after this I came close to being crushed under a lorry when my big sister Val let go of my pram whilst looking in a shop window - thankfully someone stopped me in the nick of time. ( I don’t remember this bit, but Val sure does.)

    I also remember Val reading me Noddy stories at bedtime and freaking me out by putting on a sinister voice when it got to the ‘dark, dark woods’ bit. "It isn’t very good in the dark, dark woods, in the middle of the night, when there isn’t any light – in the dark, dark woods" etc. This was one of the first Noddy books to be banned I later discovered, as it also featured Noddy and Big Ears being kidnapped by gollywogs who then strip them naked and leave them tied together in the woods! I think the more disturbed I became at hearing this, the more big sister Val enjoyed it. She's always been a bit outrageous. She was the first to wear luminous green socks to school, which brought about a total ban on them. She also got herself in the papers as ‘the Punk Granny’, but that story will unfold later.

    I remember my parents carrying me up to Stonehenge (there was no fence then) and laying me on the altar stone. We had probably stopped there on the way back from one of our trips to Devon. I was quite high up and remember staring at the stars, while the rest of my family danced around me making silly noises. (Mum was probably merry on cider- a rare occasion indeed.) Looking back to that event, I find it fascinating that they may have unwittingly conducted an initiation ceremony as old as the hills. I can`t remember being freaked out by the ordeal, in fact it felt great. Fifty years in the future I attempted to recreate that moment, but the boys and girls in blue say "NO CAN DO".

     My pre-school years were, in retrospect, very peaceful. Afternoons sitting on Mum’s lap enjoying ‘Listen with Mother’ and ‘Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites’ (the BBC’s Uncle Mac managed to make a career playing the same dozen songs week in and week out, usually with ‘Sparky and his Magic Piano’ - a bit of early psychedelia there - and ‘Three Billygoats Gruff). I loved the sound of that valve radiogram and as soon as I could reach the controls, experimented with them. I always turned the bass EQ up to full - although it only went up to seven in those days - and on shortwave you could create endless Frippatronic type sounds. I guess this was one of my early musical instruments, along with the usual bog paper and comb.

    My first real introduction to the marvels of pure electrickery came one day when I was about three. It had been decided that I should have my own bedside lamp. I sat and watched Dad wire it up and connect a push button switch. He pressed the button and voila – light! He then summoned me over to do the same. "There you go son, just press this button here." I did, and was blown clean off my feet by an electric shock. On closer inspection Dad found a rogue strand of wire sticking out of the switch. It took me a while to realise that it was all an accident and not a new weapon of torture Dad had created in order to punish me. With hindsight, I can see that it was probably from that moment on that I began to question orders from adults. I should have known better from a previous nightmarish situation that my Dad got me into, but that was so traumatic for me that I totally repressed it, only to uncover it some 30 years later. Read on and all shall be revealed!

    One of the earliest dreams I remember came to me one night when I was about three or four. I had already seen Walt Disney's 'Fantasia', with the dancing brooms and spooks. I had also attended church and observed and taken in the Christ archetype. In addition, I had gone to Sunday school and heard a few stories about angels and serpents. The dream began with me sitting in the bath, waiting to be got out by my Mum. The water was getting cold and I started calling out for help. No one came - in fact it felt like I was the only one at home.

    I finally got out myself and stood on the top landing shivering. Suddenly the hatch to the attic above me opened and out of the darkness came a sort of ghost parade. White floaty ones, skeletons, a hatstand walking on its three legs and similar scary apparitions. I stood rigid as they passed by me in single file and proceeded down the stairs into the lounge. I felt compelled to follow. When I got there they were all sitting down on the settee looking up towards the bay window. The curtains were pulled and shafts of golden light filtered in between the cracks. As I looked up to see what they were looking at, I was struck by a most beautiful life-like vision of Christ on the cross. The half light was reflecting off the beads of sweat and blood that ran down his body. His head hung low, but suddenly he raised his eyes and looked straight into mine. With his last, dying breaths he spoke to me almost in a whisper. I couldn't understand what he was saying. To get a better listen, I moved closer to him, but as I did so this giant snake, which I hadn't previously noticed wrapped around the base of the cross, woke up and with exposed fangs and forked tongue lashed out at me. I stepped backward and fell on the stairs just as his tongue stung me. At this point I awoke with a jolt, feeling an immense, fork-shaped pain on my arm. It's incredible to think that one so young can have such extraordinary dreams. I wondered for years what Jesus was trying to tell me. In the end I concluded that he must have been saying, "Mind the bloody snake!"

   
For what seemed like endless days, cuddling Mum, living in a fantasy world of my own, the back garden was my domain. In the centre was a cherry tree, planted for me on the weekend I was born. By the age of four, I could climb right to the top. We had a whole heap of fruit and vegetables growing there, to which I could help myself. Once I had learnt (the hard way) not to eat the tomatoes until they were red, things were great, apart from the army of red ants who fascinated me - and me them, obviously, for they tried to eat me. Mum had the solution – boiling hot water. I had to administer the deathblow though. I don’t think I have ever gotten over it. Here I was, an innocent 4 year old bringing death and terror to a whole colony of fellow beings. Not my idea of a picnic, unlike Barry Parker who lived at the end of the road and was the first to introduce me to pulling legs off spiders and watching them twitch.

    From the safety of the garden I could sail the Seven Seas in a craft made from a milk bottle, two bamboo sticks and an orange box. The same orange box that used to be my sister’s bedside table and bookcase – later to become part of my boxcart. One day, fascinated by the big fluffy clouds overhead, I felt a desperate need to touch them. Standing on tiptoes I couldn’t quite reach. Ahha! Use one of the bamboo sticks I thought. Still not high enough. I know, stand on the coal bunker with the stick. Almost there. Now, if I can just fix the two sticks together - on tippytoes….. At this point Mum appears to witness the spectacle. Maybe I was doing what most children do. Mum was right there with me. "Those clouds are real high," she said "you’ll need a thousand sticks to reach them." Now if I’d been bright I’d have thought; ‘A thousand sticks? Okay, well I’ve got two, so there’s only another 998 to get…" But instead I thought, ‘A thousand? Blimey, that’s more than ten! Cloud poking’s not for me," and went off with my wooden sword and shield to kill some imaginary dragons instead.

My First Invitation From The Crystal Palace
   
    At the end of our garden, next to an old disused well, were several apple trees. I used to climb to the top of them and peer off into the distance and watch the planes coming in to land at Heathrow. This particular day, I spied a tiny speck in the distance heading my way. I didn`t take my eyes off it for a moment and as it got closer, I realised it was a balloon. I wanted that balloon more than anything and willed it to come to me. It did, too! Right into my hands. What’s the odds against that happening …? But there I was holding the balloon with this label tied to it. I took it straight to Mum who informed me that it had been set off from Crystal Palace Park about 30 miles away (as the balloon flies). We had to fill out the form, send it back and wait for our prize.

   
I`d almost forgotten about it until one day when I was playing in the front garden, the postman stopped and enquired if I knew the whereabouts of a certain "Davey Crockett Goodman?" Well, I couldn`t lie, I had the beaver hat on. "It`s me" I said gingerly. "Well this must be for you then." From his bag he took out this silver long barelled six shooter, complete with dummy bullets. Wow, now I can really be a sheriff ! Mum would never give me any clues as to where the gun came from but I guessed it was the Crystal Palace balloon prize. Twenty five years later I moved to Gipsy Hill - just a mile frrom Crystal Palace - lived there until August 16^th 2002. I found it a magical place and on April 1^st 2000 I collaborated with some fellow ‘eco warriors’ to save the park and woods from the commercial developers - and greed and ignorance - of Bromley Council, but this story has yet to unfold completely.

    Another day, whilst playing in the garden in the fog, or smog as it was in the days before smoke-free zones, I encountered a kitten who seemed lost. Inspired by a lion tamer I’d seen at the circus, I made myself a whip from the privet hedge and proceeded to tame the beast. We developed loads of tricks that feline and I, until the call came from the kitchen – "David, time for supper!" I couldn’t bear to be parted from my new playmate, so I put the orange box over the kitten, knowing he would be there in the morning. That cat made such a noise it woke half the neighbourhood. Dad finally discovered it in the middle of the night and ended its captivity. From then on, whenever I encountered it in the street, it used to cross over and would never look me in the eye again. Poor cat

    One game I really liked to play was turning the clotheshorse into a tent. It worked a treat down the alleyway at the side of our house. I had the bright idea to climb on top of it and make like a tightrope walker. I lost my balance and slipped, landing with one leg either side of this wooden pole, which cut up right between my legs. My Mum heard the thump and came to my aid. Nothing was broken and there was no blood, so we guessed it was okay. Three days later at bathtime my Mum noticed that my balls had inflated like balloons. I had ruptured the urine canal and was retaining my waste water inside. I was rushed to hospital for two emergency operations. The first one was to insert a tube into my groin, connected to a plastic container pinned to my pyjamas. I had no control over whether I peed or not and would sit there fascinated watching the bag fill with yellow water. The second operation was to insert a small plastic pipe to replace the ruptured part. Both were successful and it all still works today! This injury may of course be the reason why to date, I have never fathered children - to the best of my knowledge anyway. I've enjoyed practising though. Maybe I should take some tests to see if it’s possible.

Anyway, Mum and Dad thought they might lose me over this and were extra kind to me afterwards.

    Oh, to revisit those golden days of childhood once again. They seemed like they would never end. But looming on the horizon was SCHOOL. Okay, give Mum her due – she held me back as long as she could and got an extra season out of me, but finally the big day arrived.

My First Day At School

     1956, saw my first day at school. I’d gone along earlier for a medical, and standing naked in front of three strangers was a bit weird, but it was school, right? - and that’s what happens there. My Mum gave me a lift on the back of her bike and handed me over. I was ushered into the playground whilst she went back outside to talk to me through the ten foot high fencing. There must have been a dozen of us, all in a similar situations. When the bell rang and Mum cycled off, my heart sank. I’m not sure if I cried then, but I’m crying now writing about it. Fortunately, Barry Parker, my mate from up the road, was already initiated into the rigmaroles of school life as he’d started three months earlier. He offered to show me the ropes, like which toilets work properly and where to find a good, reliable supply of spiders. My middle sister, Marg was in the junior school next door too and we occasionally communicated through the fence. I managed to survive that first week and come the Friday afternoon, the adventure really began

    After school dinner, we would stay in the main hall for circle dancing and folk singing. Then a kind of guided meditation and finally, off to Room Seven for music. We were all given percussion instruments of some kind and encouraged to play together. Then there was the recorded music. ‘Peter and The Wolf’ is all I can remember, but that was good enough for me. From that day on I was always keen to be in the school band or choir.

     I grew to love my early school days. I was blessed with some pretty cool teachers, who showed us love and the marvels of nature. In fact life for me is an incredible, infinite blessing. I come from a long, long line of fornicating survivors. Ask yourself this question – how many eggs were produced by your mother? Maybe 360 or so. How many sperm were produced by your father? Gillions I guess. Times that by all the generations of your evolutionary past and you’ll find the chances of your own existence are beyond imagination. To be alive is something like winning the lottery every day. I often wonder if my parents planned me. Maybe after two girls they kept going until they got a boy. Or maybe they just wanted to get good mileage out of the luxury pram they brought for the firstborn, the wheels of which went on my boxcart.

    My theory is we are a direct result of that one sperm and egg. I just can’t seem to get my head around the reincarnation concept. For a start, if we have been alive before, we can’t remember it. What is unique to us all is our soul if you like. It’s me, Dave Goodman writing these words and you reading them. If we were to imagine that this soul could return in another body it would suggest a finite number of souls. Well that’s ridiculous, how many would you suggest ? Or if we imagine an infinite number of souls, well, it’s hardly fair for some to experience several lifetimes while others have none. I rest my case. Perhaps I`ve missed the point of this very popular and dangerous idea. 'Life after death' is another popular concept. Nice idea - but don’t bank on it! No – life is a fucking miracle (recurring), with or without the afterlife and reincarnation and it’s to be delighted in for delight’s sake. My own theory is that we, as a species, will return to natural/cosmic law and eventually evolve from a tribal community to a global one that’s in harmony with ‘the everything’.

    Infant school wasn’t without its punishments, of course. And I got a taste of this when we were having our first phone installed at home. Maybe we’re talking around 1957 here. Mum gave me a penny and a number and instructions and told me to ring her from the call box outside school on my way home. Whilst doing this, some busy-body prefect girl from the big school around the corner decided I was up to no good and reported me. The next day I was punished in front of the whole class. I was made to stand on the desk and pull my socks down and then teacher struck the back of my legs with two rulers. I protested my innocence to no avail. I guess not many people had phones then and not many six year olds placed calls. When I told my Ma what happened she was furious. The next day in class the headmistress came in with my Mum right behind her with arms folded and a livid look on her face. The head apologised to me most profusely. My Mother wouldn’t budge until she considered justice had been done. I got quite a buzz out of it and learnt that authority could be questioned.

 1958 Junior School

    Alas those exciting, formative years in the infant school eventually came to an end and I was about to enter the more competitive and disciplined world of Junior School. Southville Junior School in Feltham, Middlesex to be precise. The games were more rough - British Bulldog on a regular basis, until there became too many injuries and it got banned.

    One of the teachers, Taffy we called him, used to have the nasty habit of pulling your sideburns. Another used to begin by throwing chalk at you and progressed to chucking the blackboard rubber. There were regular mass canings and bundles.

    No matter what the weather, we were always sent to the playground for our breaks. Some winters were so cold you could ride your bike down the frozen river to school. Winter seemed to go on for months and months. We were lucky in the school food department. Meal after meal of the most delicious and healthy nosh – and the desserts – mmmm - tasty.

     I was always somewhere in the top half of the A class, but through lack of interest and laziness (according to my teacher) I under-achieved. Sometimes I made a bit of a fool of myself. I was once asked what colour skin I had? Well, I had a long look at it and replied "Sort'a yellow, Miss." "Goodman, you dunderhead! It’s white of course!" The whole class had a good laugh and ridiculed me for a number of weeks. Perhaps I was a bit jaundiced that day. I nearly said pink!

    Another time we had to write our name on the front of these large art folders. I had been studying sign-writing from my trusty Children’s Encyclopedia, so in large 3D, 3-colour lettering, I painted my name. I was so proud. When it was my turn I presented it to teacher, who held it up for all the class to see. Everyone, except me, immediately spotted the mistake! I’d left the ‘D’ out of Goodman! "David ‘Gooman’ – is that what you’re calling yourself these days?" How embarrassing! Still to this day I get called ‘Gooey Gooman’ by some of my old friends.

    At school, for the first time, my dress sense came into question. The deal was, as long as you wore the regulation blazer and cap, the rest was your choice. Dad must have been doing loads of overtime at that point, because I was being bought lots of clothes and was selecting most of them myself. I usually went for bright colors and had orange, purple, pink, bright green and red shirts and ties. No matter which combination I wore, Taffy the teacher would comment on my lack of color-sense. "Orange and green should never be seen." he’d say, or "I’d rather be dead than seen wearing pink and red." Considering he wore the same drab clothes every day, in hindsight I think he was jealous (in fact, he later chipped my tooth with a rounders bat. It was an accident – I was batting next, after him, and when the ball came to his left he swung the bat, whacked me in the face, knocked the ball for six and got a home run before he even realized what he’d done.)

     I loved to swap things in the playground. For 3 months of the year we used to get the fairground kids. You could swap your Dinky toys for rings and knuckle-dusters, even flick knives. One boy came to school with a rather impressive collection of old coins. They looked ancient and had a mammoth, a dugout canoe, the moon and the sun on them. He gave one to each of his close friends, me included. I was determined to own the whole set and swapped whatever I could to get them. Eventually I had five. I showed them to my parents who agreed they looked very old indeed. My Mum happened to point out that there had been a break-in in a local museum and some coins had been stolen. We decided to ‘lay low’ for a bit and then take them to the British Museum for valuation. The big day came. Father and son set off for the British Museum with dreams of owning valuable treasure. We arrived and were sent to a colossal door at the back, where we had to knock and wait. Eventually we were ushered in and escorted through a number of large, locked doors. I became increasingly excited. Finally we reached an extraordinarily ornate room containing a huge wood and gilt desk, behind which sat the man who would put a price on my, (or rather, our – they were now a family treasure) coins. He smiled and asked me to produce the coins. I couldn’t find them. In fact, I had left them at home! What an ordeal! So embarrassing that we could never bring ourselves to go back again!

    Actually I did return about 30 years later. By then you simply took stuff to a counter on the side and received an answer in minutes. They turned out to be Mysore Indian, around the 18^th century, maybe of some value to a collector but of no great interest to the museum. When travelling in Goa many years later I saw almost identical coins for sale for a few pounds. I still have them and a good few others.

    Another treasure of mine was a tiny cat’s whisker radio. You just clipped it onto one of the drainpipes in the playground, inserted an earpiece and you had instant, free radio. Having an engineer for a dad was really handy if you wanted gadgets made to order. He made me a special trick – ‘the disappearing sixpence’. Most impressive. You put a threepenny piece and a sixpence inside a matchbox and shake it about a bit. You say the magic word and abracadabra, the sixpence has vanished! Very impressive. What really happens is that the threepenny piece is hollowed out on one side and amazingly the other coin always ends up inside it.

    Dad also helped me make ‘the leaking perfume bottle’. Fill it with water and give it to your friends to smell. So long as they hold it the correct way round as they remove the top, a small jet of liquid will flow out of the front of the bottle and wet the victim. It wasn’t a popular trick and I soon learnt that you had to be selective about who you played it on.

    One candidate was the school dullard John Eggerton – or Egghead as he was affectionately known. The way the trick worked was due to a fine hole drilled in the front of the bottle near the bottom. With the cap on pressure kept the water in, but once removed it was free to soak the person holding it. Egghead was fascinated by this and having grasped the principle, went on to make his own. He lost a couple of Brylcreem jars hammering a nail in with a brick to create the hole, but was successful in his third attempt!

    One sunny afternoon when I was up the apple tree, Frances Archer, a very prim and proper lass from across the road, came into the garden and looked up to me in the tree. ‘Have you ever seen a girl's willy?’ she asked. I wasn't too sure whether I had seen one before or not. I had two older sisters and I'm sure we used to bathe together. Anyway, the invitation seemed too good to miss. ‘Go on then. Let's have a look’. She pulled down her knickers and there was nothing there but a hole. Nevertheless, it was sufficiently interesting for me to suggest that Geoffrey Atkinson, who lived on the corner, might like a peek. We all managed to climb over her locked side gate and get into her dad's shed. She showed us both again. "Okay - now let's see yours." she demanded. Well, how could we resist? Geoffrey, who was a year older than me, got his out and it started to go stiff. This sort of infant behaviour developed throughout most of the children in the street. A lot of the kids' parents would go out to work during the school holidays, leaving us free to get up to all sorts of mischief and madness. Doctors and nurses was a favourite - "Okay, get your clothes off and lay on the couch so we can examine you." The girls would demand. It's a shame in a way that this sort of behaviour didn't continue into our teenage years but, in fact, we grew out of it as quickly as we got into it. Once we'd had enough of examining each other's parts we never mentioned it again

    About once a month, on a Saturday afternoon, I would go to my Gran's in Hounslow. She lived at one end of the High Street. There I would meet up with my cousins John, Jennifer and Thomas. We formed the Golliwog Club. To become a member you had to steal the Golliwogs off the Robertsons Jam jars in the shops. There were only so many times you could get away with this before you were caught. We became very good runners and knew all sorts of back routes and hideouts. Once you had a certain number of paper Golliwogs, you sent them off for a metal badge. There was a whole set to collect. Cricketers, banjo players, golfers, whatever. There was even one who smoked a curious looking pipe. Anyway we weren't stopping till we had the whole set. Another thing one had to do to become a member was to unscrew the numbers from people's gates and change them around. Any sevens we found we kept. Our clubhouse was Grandad's shed and he gave us an old trunk half-full of memorabilia and our own key to the lock.

    As the years rolled by the Golliwog Club became very enterprising. We hit on a scam of writing to sweet and soft drink manufacturers, claiming we were doing a school project and asking how many Milky Bars they sold a year etc… It worked wonders and as well as receiving very polite thank you letters, we would often get a box full of goodies. We once got a gross of Lucozade. I tell you, that stuff really does give you energy! We used to down about three bottles, then run at full speed from one end of the High Street to the other. The art was to dodge the people without stopping. Occasionally someone ended up on the floor. We became really good at it and timed ourselves from the clocks at either end of the street.

    Much of my Dad's childhood took place on Hounslow Heath. He knew every nook and cranny of it. He claimed he knew the whereabouts of Dick Turpin's secret hideout. He drew me a map of the heath and placed an X where he suspected the hidden treasure was. Other landmarks included a 'snakey pond' and a 'forty acre tunnel'.

    I took the map to school, where it captured the imagination of many of my classmates. Before I knew it there were a dozen of us being led around the heath by my Dad. We were using the map for navigation and sure enough, there were the snakes in the pond and there was the tunnel. En route to Dick Turpin's hideout one boy discovered a lady's shoe in the long grass, then another, then a few items of clothing. This particular mystery ended when we found a pair of naked bodies rollocking in the long grass. Suddenly this was much more exciting than the treasure hunt and we sat there in silence and watched for as long as we could, before Dad came looking for us. He stumbled right into the copulating couple and apologising most profusely, dragged us away. When we asked him what they were up to he just replied that they were "Sowing their wild oats." Barry Parker had a different theory. "They're shagging and trying to make babies." he said with his usual discretion. Most of us preferred my father's explanation. "Someone has to plant the oats," said Timothy Diggins, "otherwise we wouldn't have porridge, then we would get cold in the winter and die." Personally, I couldn't wait till I was old enough to sow my own wild oats. It seemed like great fun.

    After much searching and backtracking, we actually found the steps leading down to Dick Turpin's hideout. Unfortunately, they had been bricked up half way down, apparently by the soldiers from the army camp opposite. This might well have been the real Dick Turpin hideout. Local legends ran wild with stories of him hiding up a chimney or in an old pub nearby. I wonder whether it was ever properly excavated. Years later I returned, but alas I couldn't find the 'entrance'. It has now been covered over by a major housing estate. Who knows what treasures may still lay buried beneath…?

Experimenting with Big Sister's Tape Recorder
Bill Hailey, Joe Brown, Buddy Holly, The Rolling Stones

    Some of my early musical influences came from my big sister Val. She called herself a 'bohemian', although I'm not sure if anyone really knew what it meant. She hung out with a pleasant but mischievous gang who listened to Bill Hailey, Joe Brown and Buddy Holly. They used to talk in catch-phrases like, ‘Whatcha know Daddyo?’, ‘I scream for ice-cream’ and ‘See you later, Alligator’. They regularly got drunk on cider at the weekend and would experiment with new ways of getting high, like mixing sugar with coca cola and drinking it with a spoon (don't knock it till you try it!). They used to hang out in Richmond and in 1962-63 they’d regularly see a band called The Rolling Stones there, in a local pub called The Railway. I could have taped the Stones then, as my Sister Val had got a tape recorder for her birthday. She used it mainly to practise her elocution. It's quite a shock when you hear yourself recorded for the first time. You see, we come from Feltham ‘know wot I mean?’ Apparently it has the laziest accent in the UK. A lot of Eastenders came to Feltham after the war so it's a pretty mixed area, accent-wise. It's like we mumble, apparently, and leave bits off words most of the time although we all understand each other perfectly well. When one steps out into the big wide world though, one has to learn to talk again if one wishes to be understood (well, you did in those days, anyway). I was actually approached once, on board a ferry on a school outing, and picked out as someone who had come from Feltham and who possessed a classsic example of the accent. The chap was a professor of phonetics or something and it was him who pointed out what a bone idle accent it was we were using.

    Anyway, as well as using her tape recorder to improve her speech, Val also had a strange collection of tapes she had recorded off the radio. It was all very avante garde, a pastiche of cat sounds heavily effected with reverb and echo. This used to scare the hell out of me, but the good thing was I got to use the recorder. It didn't take me long to discover you could turn the tape round and hear things backward. I used to learn a whole sentence backward then record it. Then I'd turn that tape over and see if you could understand it. I also discovered that ‘God in Heaven’ backwards sounded like ‘Never need dog’, and if you recorded a sneeze and played it backward it sounded like a guillotine in operation. Further discoveries included sticking a piece of tape over the erase-head, which resulted in you being able to do a crude bit of multi-tracking. You couldn't hear the previous track until you played it all back. It was impossible to know whether you were in time, of course, which led to some interesting effects mid the endless tracks of shortwave radio ambience.

    Another effect I had in my homemade, improvised recording studio was the overflow pipe in the bath. By running an extension cable from my bedroom, I could place the mike right up against the overflow hole in the bath. If I turned the volume right up I could hear for miles. Somehow the pipe seemed to amplify the outside sound. You needed to be careful when planes approached because you could deafen yourself on a quiet night. I could hear my sisters talking right the way to the end of the street. By the same token, if you shouted down the hole, your voice would come out amplified and I would often confuse my sisters if they happened to be nearing the house at bathtime. Another great thing about the overflow pipe was that it added a strange phasing effect, especially if a vehicle passed or birds flew overhead. I wonder what happened to all these old tapes?
 

    It came to the time when I had to sit the Eleven Plus exam. The results of the Eleven Plus determined, essentially, how your life and career would develop. I believe it was something like the top fourteen kids from our year would go to a Grammar school and the rest of us would be shunted off to a local Secondary Modern. I came 14^th and a new girl, Linda Jones, who’d recently moved in from Wales came 15^th. Her parents argued with the powers-that-be that if she could do so well when she had only been at the school for six months then she should be upgraded. She was – to 14^th place – knocking me off the Grammar school list. For some reason my parents didn’t put up that much of a fight, so off I went to Longford Secondary Modern. Coincidently, I remember meeting her some years later, after she’d just seen a band called John’s Children. Mark Feld was the singer and she claimed she was having a fling with him. Not long after that Mark Feld became Marc Bolan – who crops up again in these pages in some very strange circumstances - and Linda became pregnant. Being in the club meant she had to give up her grammer school place anyway – the place that you could argue was rightfully mine. Ah well, these things happen.

1962 Senior School

    Longford Secondary Modern was even closer to home than my two previous schools, about half a mile I guess. I had a bit of an idea what to expect, as I used to pass the school each day on the way to my old one, and I’d also heard many stories, some quite alarming. The unofficial school uniform here was jeans and t-shirt in the summer – which was pretty rare in ’62 - and jeans and denim jacket in winter. The building housed boys and girls, but we were segregated by an imaginary line which ran through the middle of the building. The line didn’t really spare the girls our attentions, or vice versa, nor did it save anyone from the bullies. I’d been warned about the Bully Boy Mafia and advised to stand up to them from the start to prevent my life becoming hell. I took this advice seriously and on my first day, when Billy Clarke, Bully Number One, cornered me in the bogs and growled, "Give us yer dinner money or else!" I was prepared. I had written and learnt my response, which included telling him about my three older, psychotic, axe-wielding brothers, who would chop him up and feed him to our four Doberman dogs if he as much as touched me. In the circumstances this speech didn’t seem like such a good idea, so I began to improvise instead.

"Can you play the harmonica?" I asked him. He unclenched his fists and scratched his chin.

"No. Why?"

"Well, would you like to learn?"

"Er… yeh, okay."

    So I took out my much-loved blues harp. "Give us a go then" he demanded. Now I was making real progress. A way to a man’s heart really is through music, I thought to myself. He gently took it from me, put it in his pocket then walked off and that was the last I saw of it. I later heard he swapped it for a packet of fags. He never did pick on me again though.

    In the centre of the school playground were five long air-raid shelters, which were supposedly boarded up. Each one had been taken over by some school gang or other. There was a drinking and smoking club, a casino, a torture chamber, an alleged wanking den and, as for the other, well I never did find out what went on in there. To get in you had to be at least in the fourth grade, plus undergo the most horrible initiation ceremony known to man. Before I reached the fourth form the air-raid shelters were demolished and so the mystery lives on. There was no shortage of rumours about No. 5, from an entrance to a tunnel that led to the girls’ showers, to a recruiting office for a secret society which was in direct competition with the Freemasons to a private school for tattoo artists.

    There were a lot of high jinks that went down at Longford and I’ve often wondered how the teachers let the kids get away with it. The truth was that they had no choice. The kids ruled and no matter how many times they were caned, they still caused it. The year before I started was the famous incident where the kids had had enough of one of the teachers and held him by his legs out of a top storey classroom window. Needless to say, he had a nervous breakdown and was never seen in the school again. During winters there, whenever it snowed the playground became a battlefield with snowballs flying right, left and centre. Over the years this activity had developed into quite an organised sport. First you made slides by getting water to freeze on the ground. They would become so slippery and shiny that you could actually see yourself in them. Next you split into two groups - the 'sliders' and the 'bombers'. The bombers got busy making a stockpile of snowballs, while the sliders talked tactics. The object was to get from one end of the slide to the other without being hit by a snowball. If you were hit, you'd have to join the bombers, if not you'd keep on sliding. I guess anyone in their right mind would have realised the dangers of playing this game, but at our school it was actually overseen by the teachers.

    We had a retired headmaster, who we believed actually lived in the school tower. He had a limp and used a walking stick, so we called him Pegleg. His special duties included administering his own sadistic brand of caning to the unruly and to blow the whistle to end these 'winter sports'. The first time I witnessed this I couldn't quite believe what had happened. Pegleg hobbled out into the middle of the playground and a deathly hush ensued. He braced himself before taking out the whistle and giving it a long, hard blow. On this cue he was bombarded from every side by snowballs. The First Years were quick to join in, me included. I think I may have seen some teachers join in too. Pegleg stood there in defiance, waving his stick around, fending off as many snowballs as possible, whilst still blowing the whistle at a deafening volume. I thought the whole school would be punished for this, but apparently it was some kind of yearly ritual. The one chance to get back at Pegleg for a whole year's caning. He even seemed to enjoy it a little. After surviving the trenches of World War One, I guess a few hundred snowballs seemed like confetti. One of his other duties was to stand in for absent teachers. We soon discovered that if you were in this situation, your best bet was to try to turn the subject around to the Great War. If you could manage this, then you could just sit back and listen to Pegleg's endless stories of the heroism and stupidity of this bizarre period of history.

    I was gullible enough to fall for one of the stock jokes the prefects had lined up for us greenhorn firsties. "Have you seen the amazing way the light comes into this book cabinet?" "No - let me see." The next think I know, the cabinet door closes and it's put on its side. I barely have enough room to breathe. Trapped in total darkness, with my collar sticking in my throat. Very unpleasant. Don't panic, I told myself, you'll be let out eventually. I now knew what it felt like to be held in capitivity. A few years before this incident, a boy who lived in the next street to me had been locked into a wicker basket at school for a joke. I think he spent hours in there, and legend had it that he had a fit and died.

    Most of those early senior school years were spent keeping out of people's way, making new friends and learning the ropes. If you could claim some quiet corner of the playground and just hang out there with your mates you might avoid unwanted attention. I occasionally used to get out my new harmonica and play one of two tunes my dad taught me while sitting on his knee, from about the age of three. ‘She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain’ or ‘When The Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbing Along’. They're still the only two songs I know on the mouth organ, but I could, and still can, improvise a little blues. One day I was spotted playing it by one of the prefects. "Oi! Goodman! Come 'ere. The school's starting a band and you're in it." Before I could protest, I was informed that I'd be allowed to skip French in order to practice. "Great! When do I start…?"

    The school had just been awarded a total budget of £60 to start a brass band. We bought two cornets, a euphonium and a trombone. We also enlisted a student who had his own trumpet and could actually play it. I started out on the cornet then switched to the trombone when I'd found out that we were to be joined by a second trombonist from the girls' school. She turned out to be spotty, but an able musician. Now the only problem with this band was that two thirds of us couldn't actually play our instruments. Mr Davis, who'd taken on the task of knocking us into shape didn't seem too perturbed. "We've got a whole year to get a set together, then we're going to enter the county school band competition." I liked his enthusiasm. The fact that only two of us could read music didn't put him off either. He already had the set worked out for us. 'Colonel Bogey', 'Where's that Tiger?' and 'Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines', just for starters. As we didn’t have enough time to learn the rudiments of music first, we jumped straight in at the deep end. The teacher would sing to us our individual parts while we looked at the music. He did it so many times that we learnt it parrot-fashion. We then wrote the valve and slide positions underneath the respective notes on the music. Cheating, I know, but we didn't half get our act together quickly! Fair enough - there we were a year later, entering the Middlesex Schools Music Competition. The first time a secondary modern school had entered.

    The week before, we went into extensive rehearsal and on the morning of the competition we gave our first public performance to the dinner ladies. It was Christmas time and spirits were high. We went down a treat and they had a whipround and raised a good few bob for us. Soon we were in teacher's car speeding off to the gig , stopping off on the way in the pub for several sips of Dutch courage. Most of us were only 12 or 13, but there we were being offered sips of the teacher's beer. A very good move in hindsight, because it put us in the right mood to play. What a ramshackle bunch we were - no uniform and a handful of beat-up old instruments with holly and tinsel tied on them. All the other schools had complete orchestras in starched white shirts complete with black trousers and cummerbands. The luck of the draw meant we were to go on last. We sat through a few sets and I noticed how bad an orchestra can sound just by having one or two dodgy players. The teacher took us outside and began psyching us up. "We can win this you know. The competition isn't that stiff and it’s judged by audience reaction."

    Eventually it was our big chance. We declined the offer to sit down like all the others and instead came to the front of the stage and played in front of the curtains. We didn't even need the music now as we'd learnt our parts by heart. It must have been our laid-back manner that made a light relief from the stuffiness of the grammar school bands, from the moment we walked on stage we got a cheer. There was no stopping us now. As soon as we hit them with our opening number, 'Colonel Bogey' we had them clapping, stamping and whistling. We became real performers, breaking into a nifty little dance routine. Our second number, 'Tiger Rag' was one of my favourites. Its got a singalong chorus which goes "Where’s that tiger?" half a dozen times in succession, interspersed by this rasping trombone slide - I really milked this one! Finally, our piece de resistance, 'Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines'. It was a current hit movie and everyone knew the theme tune. I tell you, the whole house was rocking and on the final chorus, to our amazement, a whole squadron of paper airplanes were launched from the back of the hall. What we hadn't known was that some of our teachers had arranged for pupils to have the afternoon off and encouraged them to come along and give their support. I'm not sure whose idea the paper airplanes were, but it worked a treat and we won. With the £250 prize money we soon expanded into a 12-piece mini-orchestra. What I learnt from this experience was that audiences go for showmanship, attitude and hooky melodies. One doesn't have to study an instrument for years before giving enjoyment to others, and finally, if you are intending to enter a music competition, get as many of your friends as possible in the audience and make sure they all bring paper airplanes!

    The next few years at school passed fairly unadventurously. The air raid shelter foundations were replaced by a new school wing and the school tried to introduce a new uniform, but gave up when over half the pupils refused to wear it. A few more teachers had nervous breakdowns or took early retirement – or both - and old Pegleg died. The school band kept going from strength to strength, until one day our music teacher had a heart attack. A replacement was found and the band played on. The new music teacher had an idea. His predecessor, who loved the Planet Suite by Holst, was now out of hospital and recovering at home. Why didn't we learn a piece from the Planets to play for him? He chose ‘Mars; The Bringer of War’, probably because it translates well for a brass band. Once we were rehearsed, we arranged to meet with our instruments outside our old teacher's back garden, in order to sneak in and strike up with 'Mars'. What a great surprise this was going to be! We were about 33 bars into the piece when his wife came running out flapping her arms and begging us to stop. "I think he's having a relapse! Can you please leave now!" He never did return to school and no one ever mentioned him again.

    My parents seemed pretty adventurous when it came to summer holidays. The summer of '62 saw us load up the Ford Consul with camping gear and set off to Italy via the Alps. What an adventure! Camping alongside the beautiful lakes of Switzerland. Getting lost in the backstreets of Venice. One particular treat was the Cola you could get in Austria. Vivi Cola and Avri Cola as I remember. These potions were the real thing and still had a little bit of cocaine in just like the Vicwardian originals. I think me and my sister Marg must have averaged about three or four bottles a night. I just seemed to have an abundance of energy and became expert on the more difficult slot machine games. Yeah - those early holidays abroad were well cool. What an adventure for a kid of 12.

Chiswick Empire
Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Wee Willy Harris

    One day that Summer I was taken by my parents to Chiswick Empire with sister Marg, to see Cliff Richard and the Shadows. There were a few support acts, but the only one I remember right now was Wee Willy Harris. In hindsight, he might have done better if he’d changed his name to Big Willy Harris... Anyway, we were there as a treat for Marg for her birthday. She sat there, quite calmly through the support sets, and even through the Shadows opening numbers, but when Cliff walked on the stage, she, and just about every other teenage girl in the audience, went berserk! Total mania! Screaming, shaking and probably wetting her knickers. I'd never seen anything like that. Dad seemed most puzzled and concerned. After the show we queued up backstage to see if we could get to see the great man. We did, but first we got soaked by some joker throwing a bucket of water - well, that's what I hope it was - out of the dressing room window. My Mum was disgusted by this and threatened never to go there again, and she never did, because it was knocked down six months later (I don't think my Mum was responsible for the demolition though.).

     My middle sister Margaret passed her Eleven Plus, went to grammar school and then rebelled against it by becoming a bit of a beatnik. Once she gave up eating conventional food altogether and instead ate rose petal sandwiches for several days. She always had some abstract painting or other on the go at home and listened to Woody Guthrie and early Bob Dylan. She used to smoke a pipe and I'd often hear reports of her being drunk on the way to school and having a go at fellow passengers on the bus for being ‘too straight’.

     During one school holiday I was using my bed as a trampoline. I would climb up on top of the airing cupboard and jump down onto the mattress, bounce up and nut the wall. We all used to do this, right? I'd discovered that the closer you land to the side of the bed, the higher you can jump. On my eleventh jump I miscalculated and gashed a great hole in my shin on the metal bed frame. Margaret was in the other room and came running in when she heard the thump. "Are you okay?" she enquired, "Yeah" I said, lying and hiding my bleeding leg behind the other one. I ran a bath and got in. In no time the water was red. You could actually see my shin bone. "Marg help!" I cried. She quickly took me to a neighbour, Mrs Hill, who should 'know what to do'.

    The cut was long and deep and at the top was a V-shaped piece of loose skin. Mrs Hill wanted to cut this off completely – "Come on," she commanded, scissors at the ready, "it won’t take a minute" - but my sister wouldn't let her. Instead, she borrowed a pushchair and pushed me about three miles to the hospital, where they cleaned it and sewed it up. If the piece had been cut off I don't think it would ever have healed. But it did and that summer the Goodman family were back out travelling around Europe, camping on lakesides and generally having a groovy time. Me and my sister knocking back the Vivi Cola and playing endless games of badminton. Dad had a new cine camera and was busy making home movies.

    We went for a second opinion to some special hospital. When they examined it they pronounced that it was 'osteomylitis'. Suddenly the word popped out from the squiggles on the Austrian findings. I was booked in the next day for treatment. I was carried home, (Dad had stopped trying to make me walk) and put on the couch. My parents had to go off somewhere and left me watching telly. I became really engrossed in Dr Finlay's casebook. This was a drama series set in the 1920s, where each week the doctor is involved with a particular patient and at the end of the episode he tells Janet, his assistant, about the case.

    This week it was about a famous footballer who kept getting an excruciating pain in his leg, especially just when he had a chance to score a goal. Eventually, he had his leg amputated to stop it spreading. Most tragic for a young star soccer player. Right at the end, when Janet asked Dr Finlay what it was, he turned to her and said (and I'll never forget these words) "It was osteomylitis Janet." Well, as far as I was concerned I was losing my leg tomorrow.

    There I was, at home alone and I was beginning to panic. It all fell into place. This is why my parents were acting so strangely. The already knew and just couldn't break it to me. My folks eventually came home to find me in tears. "What's up?" they asked. "There was this football player on Dr Finlay who had a bad leg and they cut it off and he had osteomylitis and that's what I got and I don't want to lose my leg." I blubbered. My Mum had to stop herself from laughing. That's before penicillin could cure it she told me. Well, I'd never heard of this nurse called Penny whatever, but if she could save my leg she was alright by me. The truth was, there had been a mention that if it didn't clear up there might have to be an amputation, or at least a scraping away of the bone. Fortunately for me, after 64 shots in the backside of the magic medicine, the swellling went down and the pain receded. After 6 weeks in hospital I was back home.

    I must say I quite got into hospital life. Daily visits from present-wielding friends and family, time to read endless books, bottom massages from friendly nurses and those painkillers. It was quite a trauma coming home, especially as my bike had been lent to a friend and come back broken. My parents had taken the opportunity to clear out a load of my old toys and even given away my train set. To top all this, when I eventually got back to school, my trombone had been given to a new band member. The only good thing was that I was now excused from sport and could convert this free time into extra Art lessons. We had a flamboyant art teacher called David Holmes, or Homo as he was nicknamed. He was actually caught soliciting in a Leicester Square toilet and suspended, but after he got married to an opera singer he was reinstated by popular demand. I learnt a lot from him about pop art and classical music. We developed a long friendship and he certainly never propositioned me. Or if he did I didn't notice. He really helped me to indulge myself in experimenting with shape and colour. If I expressed an interest in creating a 14 ft square painting, he would help me get the materials sorted out.

    Woodwork was another favourite lesson of mine. After the obligatory making of picture frames, candlestick holders and a footstool, I was allowed to build an electric guitar. I'd never even played one by this point, so with every lesson the excitement grew. So much love went into this axe. I got as far as designing it, salvaging some old wood from a dilapidated church and beginning to build, including putting on most of the frets. Unfortunately I never finished it. At the end of the year I had to choose between woodwork and metalwork. The father's footsteps syndrome took over and I chose the latter. It meant I had to hand over my guitar to another student to finish. I don't know whether he finished it. I wonder if it exists today, or if it's rotting in the earth from whence it came.

    Metalwork seemed a much more macho form of self-expression. Once instructed in the basics, the more able of us were allowed to help build this flying machine that Mr Henderson, our metalwork teacher, had designed. He had taken up the gauntlet laid down by Oxford University, to build a two-manned, bicycle-powered aircraft that could fly a figure of eight. His first design was based on an old tandem with aluminium and varnished tissue paper wings. On its first flight the whole thing collapsed into a pile of mangled metal and paper. Undeterred, it was back to the drawing board and a totally new design emerged. And so on, and so on. This project kept students active and amused for years to come. One day about 12 years later, I heard on the news that he actually got it off the ground and did half a figure of eight.

    Geography was a subject I initially found a bit boring. All those facts and figures about this country producing this much timber a year etc. All that was to change after one Christmas - when I was bought a weather recording station. With my new interest in barometers, isobars and strato cumulus, I suddenly became the blue-eyed boy of Mr. Davis, the geography teacher. I was given the duty of going each morning to the central courtyard of the school (which I didn't even know existed). To unlock this cupboard which housed the weather recording equipment. I then took down the readings. Rainfall too had to be measured and I had to calculate the relative humidity. To do this you had to put a little wet sock onto the end of the thermometer and spin it around your head. (honest!) This daily duty meant I could miss out on the more boring part of assembly and get back just in time for the singing (if you could call it that).

    I also managed to get permission to come into the assembly hall at lunch time to play around on the piano. One day, while plonking away on the old ivories, a posse of fifth formers came in and proceeded to wire up the piano to an explosive device which they had concocted. The next day was April Fools day (typist's note - It Is Today!!) and this looked like the practical joke to end them all. They must have had a tipoff as to what hymns were planned for the morning's assembly, because someone had managed to work out a special note which would only be played at the end of the last tune. (F# 2 octaves above middle C as I remember.) An electrical contact was placed across the note and striker, then wired up to a battery connected to a home-made magnesium flare. With any luck, on the closing bars of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ there would be a huge bang that would send everyone onward.

    Next day at assembly you could sense that virtually every pupil present was aware of the impending prank. The anticipation was almost unbearable. I knew exactly where the explosion would come and could hardly bring myself to sing because of the excitement. Those at the front of the hall near to the piano had already started covering their faces and putting their fingers in their ears. Why none of the teachers reacted to this abnormal behaviour I'll never know, but it was April Fools’ Day and people did act strangely. Finally, when that high F# was struck, the detonator ignited and an explosion (well more like a fart really) came from inside the piano, followed by a huge cloud of blue smoke. So much smoke in fact that the sprinklers were activated and the whole assembly got a good soaking. Panic ensued and children and teachers were running in all directions. To further complicate things, our sprinklers were connected to the girls' assembly room next-door, and so they got wet too.

    Later that week, when the mess had been cleaned up, the head gave us a good chastising, but no one was singled out and punished. I think they secretly admired our skill and imagination and this was just the sort of thing they used to get up to at teacher training college. We were often being told stories of their prankster antics, many of which formed the inspiration for our own. Yes - the great piano explosion of '63 would go down in the school history as one of the grandest April Fool jokes imaginable, only to be rivalled several years later by the 'mini on the roof' prank', where the old pulley in the school tower was renovated and used to winch the deputy head's mini car onto the roof. The problem wasn't so much getting it up there as getting it back down. It was up there for weeks before a plan was finalised to remove it. During this period we had visitors from rival schools just to marvel at the spectacle.

    Fighting seemed to be an important part of growing up. Everyone at one point or another seemed to indulge just to establish some kind of pecking order. One day I figured the time had come to take the plunge into senseless violence. Instead of going straight for the bully, I thought I'd pick on one of the smaller pupils first. Instead of him being intimidated by my presence, he was well up for a round or two of fisticuffs. Up went the cry of "Bundle" and suddenly we were surrounded by a heaving mass whose only desire was to see blood. All this took me quite by surprise and as a total novice to real fighting, I backed off, but my tiny opponent wasn't having it and chased me around the playground to much humiliation. No blows were struck and my reputation as a warrior took a nose dive.

    To regain credibility I decided to pick on the tallest member of our class and a fight was set to take place after school, alongside the Longford River. The chap I'd picked on was not one of the most popular members of the class and had only a few close friends, whereas I was quite high on the popularity stakes and had dozens of kids rooting for me. So there we were on the riverbank, eye to eye, fist to fist. Neither of us really wanted a fight, we had just succumbed to peer pressure. "Go on, smack him in the gob, kick him in the balls, bite his nose off," and other such words of encouragement came from the crowd. Neither of us was prepared to strike the first blow and the crowd were getting restless. It soon became obvious to both of us that if we didn't hit one another soon someone else would. There was a pile of rotting apples dumped nearby and these were soon being hurled at us as tokens of encouragement. My oponent took his eyes off me for one moment to glance at the river, which was all there was between this madness and freedom. He seized the moment and jumped into the river to wade across under an increased bombardment of apples. "Quick Dave - get him, don't let him get away" I felt I should show some sign of bravery, so I leapt after him with all my might, missed and landed head first in the river. He managed to make it to relative safety over a ten foot high wire fence and I just sat there waist deep in the water, watching my scarf float down the river, thinking to myself - this fighting lark sure ain't for me.

1964 Small Faces

    One day whilst hanging out with my cousins and fellow members of The Golliwog Club at Grans in Kingsley Road Hounslow, we stumbled upon an early rehearsal of the Small Faces. They were practising in Ian McLaghan`s parents' front room. When they spotted us mooching around outside, one of them came out and told us the name of the band. "We're the Small Faces ain't we" It was the perfect name for these cheeky sleeky mods. They were pretty damn good and we'd sit on outside for hours listening to them go over the same songs again and again.

    The Golliwog club disbanded when I was about eleven, when my grandparents died. Maybe somewhere in a box in a shed in Kinglsey Road Hounslow there is a complete set of Golliwog badges along with my Grandad's medals for bravery.

The Stones
Sam and Dave, Marianne Faithfull, Marquees

    My older cousin John Greenwood got some tickets to take me and my other two cousins, Jennifer and Thomas, to see the Stones on tour with Sam and Dave, Marianne Faithfull and the Marquees, featuring the guitar virtuoso Steve Cropper. The venue was a cinema in Chiswick. A great package tour if ever there was one. Brilliant songs, "Green Onions", "Knock on Wood", "Hold on I'm Coming", "As Tears Go By". The only problem was that when the Stones came on you couldn't hear them above the screaming. We tried to make our way to the front of the stage, but were kept in our seats by two women holding torches. What rebels we were. I'm glad I saw the Stones in this era although I didn't hear them. We also tried to get tickets for the Beatles, but all the girls got there first.

1965 The Who

    I first saw The Who at Southall Townhall. It was a much larger venue than I usually went to to see bands. The support band were a dinky little combo called Max Ace and his Syncopated Rhythm Masters (I think). They put in a tight jazzy bluesy set. They had set up in front of the curtains and produced a pretty full sound considering they only had small amps and nothing was miked up. The place was packed, mostly with moddy types, all showing off their latest handmade Burtons suits. What really stood out for me in this mass of two-tone tonic mohair, were two guys who seemed as if they came from another planet. They both had long, curly hair, colourful, ornate, baggy clothes, beads, bangles and headbands - finished off with golden sandals and ankle bells. Suddenly my high fashion point of reference had changed. These dudes were the top peacocks of the show as far as I was concerned. It's a wonder they didn't get beaten up really, considering how different they looked. For some reason the bovver boys gave them a wide berth. Maybe it was their 'godlike persona' or the fact that there was no reference point with which to compare them. Looking back, I guess they were just two guys who'd been out to India and assimilated some of the fashion and culture. But this was certainly a taster of things to come.

    A voice bellowed through the PA. "We've just had a phonecall from The Who. They've broken down and won't make it tonight." An almighty sound of disgruntlement went up. "Instead…we're gonna hand you back to the very excellent Max Ace and his Syncopated Rhythm Masters." Our boos and hollas were suddenly drowned out by a mega loud riff and drum storm echoing out from behind the curtains. The riff I recognised as the opening bars of Martha and the Vandellas' "Heatwave". The curtains pulled back and there were The Who in all their splendour. You can imagine how pleased the crowd were now. A neat bit of reverse psychology!

    Moonie was a maniac and had his own separate rostrum, the like of which I'd never seen before. There were so many sounds coming from the guitar I thought there had to be another guitarist hiding behind Townsend's amp stack, and got right up to the stage and craned my neck round to see, but there wasn't. They did the 'bouncing the guitar off the stage' and the 'kicking the drums over a bit'. They were sensational, no doubt about it.

Summer Holidays

    Summer holidays came round again. Each year now, the same four of us used to get together. There were Scott and Dennis, who lived nextdoor but one to each other a few streets away and were in the same year as me at school. John Wright, with whom I went to infant and junior school, but parted from when he passed his eleven plus and went to grammar school. Each summer we would devise some project or other to occupy our time. We would build camps in the woods and have competitions to see who could build the best balsawood boat. One year we made a huge raft out of a giant tractor tyre and attempted to sail down the river to sea. We got about 3 miles before the river went underground and we had to carry the raft home through the High Street dressed in just our swimming cossies. Most embarrassing. This particular year was a good one. Before the holidays I'd put my name down to take home the school acoustic guitar. Dennis' dad had made a few speaker boxes for a local band and been paid with a snare drum. John had decided to spend his savings on a chord organ - £7 I believe - and Scotty was keen to get a guitar. As I had already worked out a few basslines on the school acoustic ("Shaking all over" by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and Poison Ivy by the Stones), I elected to play bass. Well, its only got 4 strings right? So it's got to be easy. We spent the holiday listening to music and rummaging around junk shops. We got an old military bass drum for a couple of quid. Scott bought a lovely electric guitar, a Guyatone as I remember. He nearly killed himself with it, by wiring a 13 amp plug directly onto the end of the jack lead. He plugged it in and Kapow!! He nearly melted the strings. No one told him he needed an amplifier too. By the end of the summer we knew 3 songs, "Green Onions", "Louie Louie" and "Johnny B Goode". The fact that they were each comprised of the same 3 chords didn't put us off. We knew 3 chords - A, D and E and this alone probably entitled us to play at least a third of all the songs known to western pop history. Now we would be popstars, girls were becoming more interested. (we hoped).

My First Summer Holiday Job

    I guess my parents thought it would do me some good to do a bit of real work during the school holidays. Local to us was the Champion Spark Plug company and they needed cheap labour during their summer closedown. Me, Scott and John applied and got in. For some reason the others got all the cushy jobs and I got the rest. The first thing I was required to do was paint all the factory piping. Air pipes were blue, electric red, gas yellow and water green. To do this I had to balance on top of a fifty foot high ladder with a paint pot in one hand and a brush in the other. On the first day I dropped the paint, which landed on top of this huge machine and ran into its innards. The machine had to be completely dismantled and cleaned, costing them a lot more than they were saving by using us schoolkids to paint their stupid pipes. Miraculously I never got fired ! The next job they gave me was testing box upon box of these reject spark plugs. To do this you had to place them one at a time into a copper ring, stand well back, then hit this button to send 50,000 volts across it. If the porcelain was cracked you could see a miniature lightening bolt come from it. If it was okay it would come from the top. As a safety precaution the button would switch off automatically after 3 seconds. The inevitable happened - tranced out by the repetition I hit the button and put my hand in. I now know what it feels like to be in the electric chair. That 3 seconds seemed like it would never end. I could actually smell burning flesh. When it was finally over I got up and kept walking - not even returning for my wages.

The Zambesi
Zoot Money's Big Roll Band, Graham Bond Organisation, The Steam Packet , Rod Stewart , Long John Baldry the English Birds, Ronnie Wood, Brian Auger Trinity, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, PP Arnold, The Nice, Keith Emerson

    My parents were fairly liberal and allowed me to go to clubs to see bands, although I was only 14 and you were supposed to be 16 or 18 to get in. Out of our gang, only John Wright was also allowed to go. We used to travel all over in search of the latest new sounds. One local club was the Zambesi, above a car showroom at No 1 Hounslow High St.. Here we danced our socks off and saw such bands as Zoot Money's Big Roll Band, Graham Bond Organisation, The Steam Packet (featuring Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry), the English Birds (with Ronnie Wood), Brian Auger Trinity, PP Arnold backed by The Nice with Keith Emerson on organ, Hendrix and Floyd. The list goes on. To think we got all these 'soon to become legends' in a club that was full with only 100 people. All on a Wednesday night for three shillings and sixpence (about 18 pence in today's money). I remember seeing John Mayall's Bluesbreakers there and going up to the guitarist twixt sets (you had to play at least two in those days). I told him what a great guitarist I thought he was. "What's your name?" I asked "Eric" he said "Eric Clapton.

"FRINTON BASSETT BLUES 1966

Left to right: Scott Whetton, John Wright, Dennis Smithers & Dave Goodman

1966 Early Sex

    My first real initiation into sex was when Dennis the drummer rang me to invite me round to meet his neighbour, Anne Dickenson, Dickison as she became known. We spent the afternoon fondling her breasts and anything else we could get hold of. She sort of became a fifth member of our gang and many a summer's afternoon was spent half naked, romping around in the fields with her. We used to time one another, 15 minutes each. Poor old Anne. But she didn't seem to mind and in fact became the envy of her friends. She was a great networker and introduced us to many of her female acquaintances, who in turn expected the kind of attention we lavished on her.

    Having Anne Dickenson in our gang meant that we got to know some of her classmates. There was Vicky, Vera , Dawn  and Jan  (who looked like a young Marianne Faithfull and was a sort of distant cousin of mine). Quite often we would all bunk off from school for the afternoon and hide out at my parents' place, where I would supply their endless craving for nicotine with duty free fags my Dad brought back from a recent visit abroad. We would lounge around on the settee listening to music, while keeping warm by the fire. While I was out of the room one day they hatched a plan to rape me. I thought this was an excellent plan, but wasn't quite sure what to do next to get the proceedings underway. Jan thought that I should be tied up and blindfolded, Anne on the other hand thought they could each spend 15 minutes with me in the back room (the tide had turned). Vera said she would be quite happy just watching. We all agreed it would probably be best if we got drunk first. I proceeded to mix us a cocktail, by taking a tiny bit from each bottle in the drinks cabinet, so it wouldn't be detected. There were green drinks, yellow drinks, blue ones and even something with a worm in it. By the time I'd removed a thimbleful from every bottle we had nearly a pint glass. I stirred it up and the whole thing turned purple. We passed it around taking huge gulps each. Jan was the first to pass out, followed closely by the rest of us. I spent the remainder of the afternoon cleaning up vomit. So much for the orgy. I'd missed my chance and this situation was not to repeat itself for a long time to come - but that's another story.

   
The trouble I had with early relationships was that I was a bit slow. Instead of doing the sex thing on the first date, I would gradually build up to it. This wasn't good enough for most of my girlfriends and I was regularly getting dumped for my seeming lack of interest in these matters. Some girls even lost their virginity to another, whilst waiting for me to make the move. One such girl was Camelia. I was first introduced to her by Jan at the local fairground. She was bubbly and vivacious with long flowing dark hair and olive skin to match. Her mother was Brazilian, with a fiery temper and not to be crossed by all accounts. I fell instantly in love with her and we started courting. Her mother's first words to me were "Don't even think about fucking my daughter unless you're gonna marry her." Now I was in no hurry to get married, but her daughter was in a hurry to get fucked. Fed up with waiting for me to do it, she got Jan's brother Lee to oblige instead. In case I hadnt heard about this act of infidelity through the grapevine, Jan had scratched it in large letters on the local bus stops - 'Lee fucked Cam'. Those words are still burnt into my heart. Nevertheless we went out with one another off and on for about another ten years, giving me plenty of time to get my own back. A tragic relationship, but not without many happy memories.

    Camelia had a twin brother named Caruzo. We'd only get to see him once a year when he was allowed off the naval training ship HMS Arethusa. Their father, whom they had never met, was a captain in the Royal Navy and this entitled Caruzo to a place at the college from the age of eleven. When he was fifteen he gave it all up and joined the merchant navy. We used to look forward to his visits home, when he would bestow us with exotic gifts and tell the most unbelievable stories about life at sea.

     My sister Marg left grammar school and did a few years at medical tech before becoming a dental nurse. She used to bring home half used phials of novacaine and mercury for me to play with. Was she trying to kill me? With her first wages she put a deposit on a little motor scooter. Whenever I got the chance, I'd ride it up and down the garden. I could nearly get it up to 30 mph before I had to slam the brakes on to avoid crashing into the back wall.

    My own bicycle had been heavily modified into a track bike, with studded tyres, cow horn handlebars and front suspension. Due to the fact that it had a fixed back wheel, there was no need for brakes. Brakes were for wimps and they just slowed you down. I knew a whole load of dirt tracks where I could go and race me bike. As we were getting older, we were becoming more interested in motorcycles. One day me and the gang - Scotty, Dennis and John, found an old motorbike for sale at the scouts jumble sale. We got it for seven shillings and sixpence. It was a BSA 650cc side valve with rigid back suspension. Totally wrong for track riding but that didn't stop us. We took it home, took off all the unnecessary bits and went scrambling with it. This bike was only meant for a flat road and when I hit the first ramp it took off into the air and came crashing down with me on top. I still bare the scars. We then experimented with smaller bikes like BSA 125cc Bantams and Triumph Tiger Cubs.

    At one point we acquired so many old bikes that we used to strip them down and rebuild them, sticking bits from everywhere. We gave them names like 'Trisba's' or 'Nortumph'. A creation of mine which really worked was an old stripped down Lambretta scooter. I took all the faring off and fitted cowhorn handlebars. It was perfect for dirt track riding and a hit with the girls. Although none of us were officially old enough to ride on the roads, we nevertheless could travel miles and had a whole network of back alleys, riverbanks and fields to help us get around. One day two policemen on bicycles raided our camp and confiscated the bikes as we couldn't come up with the correct paperwork. I didn't care too much as I was just coming up to 16 and my Mum had offered to buy me a secondhand three-wheeler called a Bond minicar. To start this vehicle you had to open the bonnet and press your foot on a lever. To go backwards you opened the car door and used your legs. My Mum was actually using this vehicle as a bribe to stop me from going out with Anne Richardson, our gang mistress.

    It did the trick and ties were severed. With her new found freedom she hawked her body ever further afield and one day became pregnant. She claimed I was responsible but the dates just didn't seem to work out in my head. If she took me to court I had an army of volunteers who offered to stand up and claim that they too could be the father. No one ever came forward, although one of her brief encounters emigrated to Australia rather than face the ordeal. The baby was born funnily enough on the 29^th March, my birthday. It was to be called David if it was a boy or Davida if it was a girl! In the end she was named Debbie. Anne soon got married and took the name Game.

    Convinced that baby Debbie was nothing to do with me, I gave the matter little thought until one day my Mum arranged for Debbie to visit us when she was about seven. From the moment I met her I felt we were bonded. She had a resemblance to my family with dark hair and a dimple. I still to this day don't know the real answer to this mystery. Debbie, if you're out there and want to talk!

    Living about 7 doors up the road from me was a bloody genius by the name of Colin Gardener. He knew all the Chuck Berry riffs and would teach them to us at half a crown each. He even taught us Chuck Berry riffs that Chuck didn't know, just to liberate us from every ounce of pocket money he could. Even when we'd run out of dosh he would teach us on credit, had contracts drawn up and made us sign our names across the Queen's head on a stamp - just so everything was 'proper'.

    Colin was a real help and would sell us his old guitars and amps on tick when he upgraded. He was conducting experiments in chance and probability and would map the data on his bedroom wall. Everywhere you looked in his room were tiny ticks and crosses which must have meant something to him I'm sure. He once played 10,000 games of patience to see if there were patterns forming. During these experiments he would wear the same clothes and never wash ("It's for good luck" he would say) but it didn't stop us from coming to our weekly music lessons.

    One of the wackiest experiments he conducted was what has become known as 'Sod's Law'. If something happens to go wrong, then it will do so in the worst possible way. Like if you drop a piece of toast the odds are for it landing on the buttered side etc. He enlisted our help with this one. If we did the dropping the toast bit once we did it a thousand times. We had to walk around the room blindfolded and see what the odds were against knocking over a valuable vase or stepping on a much cherished record. The experiments became more and more ludicrous as his imagination ran wild. After months of research into 'Sod's Law' he had to conclude that it didn't exist. This depressed him for a bit, but one day he woke up and screamed "Eureka!" He'd had the realisation, he'd seen the light. Of course it exists. It exists and he had the data to prove it. Of course, any experiment setting out to prove the existence of 'Sod's Law' would also be subjected to it and therefore fail. It takes all types, as they say, and the last I heard of him he owned a goldmine in some remote country I'd never heard of.

    Our new fad with the band didn't subside and at the close of summer, our drummer's dad, Fred, offered to be our manager. We had some songs (mostly Chuck Berry), and we had some groupies. Anne, Jan and Cam - all we needed was a name and some gigs. Oh - and a PA and a van wouldn't go amiss.

    The name came to me one day whilst reading a book. There was a military base in Scotland called Frinton Bassett. That playbreak I tried it out on Scotty and Dennis. "Frinton Bassett - what do ya reckon?" "Dunno - how about The Frinton Bassett Blues Band?" "Do we know any blues?" asked Dennis. "Is Chuck Berry blues?" "Not really" replied Scott "That's rhythm and blues." "The Frinton Bassett Rhythm and Blues Band? Sounds a bit long" I say. So we opted for Frinton Bassett Blues. We have the name - how about some gigs?

    The local youth club was our first choice. Okay, let's start saving for a van and PA. We were now taking ourselves seriously and went into extensive rehearsals. We started out in Dennis' front room. Our amplification at this point was my little 10 watt bass amp. Somehow, we all managed to plug into it. We needed more songs and the easiest way we found of learning them was to send our girlfriends into the local music shop to nick the sheet music. Dangerous lives, huh? My cousin John Greenwood was some three years older than me and mod incarnate, complete with shiny new(ish) scooter. He got me into loads of clubs when I was 13 or 14 and he was around when the fashion started for adding something of your own to shirts and t-shirts. When moddy types began to put road-sign logos and huge initials on their t-shirts – I found ‘D’ to difficult to bother with so I had ‘M’ instead – John opted for ‘J’ on his and very smart we looked too until we went into the wrong dive. Everyone shut up at the sight of us and chairs began to be scraped back, hands turned into clenched fists. It seemed they’d been expecting an attack from two local thugs called Mick and Joe and they’d assumed that John and I must be them. Luckily the confusion was sorted out before we had to check into casualty. Such things did occasionally happen back then . Lots of young kids would carry catapults and little knives and their older brothers would sometimes take this a stage further. I once saw a gang of scally would-be mods-whose tiny leader was brandishing a loaded harpoon-gun as he demanded that a youth club deliver up some kid who supposedly owed him money. He even got the few coins in question and the last I saw of him he was waving the harpoon-gun in triumph as he marched down the High Street.

Our First Gig

    We were finally ready for our first public performance. I was so nervous I couldn't even face the audience and on the very first note I tugged at the strings so hard I broke two and had to go home for replacements. We did it and there was no stopping us now. One good thing about being in a band was that you could bypass all that macho hardnut crap and instead, get the bullies begging to be your roadies. Back at school, I somehow got Scotty into my extra art classes and between us we used to design and print posters and T shirts for the band.

    Our art teacher, Homo, started coming along to our gigs. Embarrassing us all by dancing right up to the stage in his cloak. The next holidays he leant me some LPs to listen to. "Just promise me you'll listen to it all at least once." Was his only request. "Well that won't be too difficult," I naively thought to myself. Wrong! He'd lent me some of Bella Bartok's more obscure weirdness for string quartets. The music manages to build up into an incredibly tense atmosphere, only releasing the tension momentarily before driving you ever further into sonic madness. I guess that was the start of my early psychedelic period. As well as turning us on to this strange music, he also showed us some methods of obtaining some pretty far out artistic effects. What you can do with mixing oils and paints, candlewax and dying and my favourite - tie-dying. I actually bought an original Grandad T shirt and tie-dyed it long before it became fashionable. I started to grow my hair long too, also ahead of fashion - we're talking about '65 here.

     For a while our band, the Frinton Bassett Blues were allowed to practise at school. This brought us extra notoriety and an extra member by the name of Alan Cook on lead guitar. Our repertoire at this point was "My Generation" and "Can't Explain" by the Who, "Louie Louie" and "Well Respected Man" by the Kinks, "Sha la la la lee" and "All or Nothing" by the Small Faces, "House of the Rising Sun" and "We've gotta get out of this Place" by the Animals and "Last Time", "Walking the Dog", "Around and Around" and "Under the Boardwalk" by the Stones, who I guess were our absolute favourites. Every time any of these bands released a new record it was a major event and as soon as the sheet music was on the stand we had it in our ever-expanding repertoire. On top of this we 'threw' in a few Chuck Berry songs - "Maybelline" and "Route 66", and we were venturing out into soul - "Knock on Wood", "Hold on I'm Coming" and "My Girl" as I remember. We also changed our name to The Frinton Bassett Blues and Soul Band.

    We all took turns at singing lead vocals and on occasion would actually harmonise with each other. Fred was turning out to be a great manager. He was getting our faces in the local papers on a regular basis. We also put on our own events, raising money for 'Action for the Crippled Child'. This good idea was Fred's. He also got us playing in hospitals and special schools. Fred reckoned we needed a lead singer and after a few auditions hit on Stevie from a rival school.

THE NEW FRINTON BASSETT BLUES BAND 1966

Left to right: Alan Cook, Scott Whetton, Stevie Crawford, Denis Smithers & Dave Goodman

    What this meant of course, was that we were reaching a larger crowd. The next additions were Roy and Pete Watson on saxes. They too came from Stevie's school. With the brass line up we started doing covers of instrumentals like "Al Capone" and "The Guns of Navarone". Dat early Blue Beat and Ska man! We were now The New Frinton Bassett Blues and Soul Band.

    At one of the Frinton Bassett gigs our guitarist Alan Cook nearly killed himself with the classic cross-polarity electric shock. You see we plugged the PA into one side of the stage and the backline amplifiers into the other. They both worked perfectly fine, but because one of the sockets had the red and black wires reversed it was a lethal accident just waiting to happen. And it did. When Alan touched the microphone with one hand and his guitar with the other he got 240 volts right across his chest. The problem with this kind of shock is that it won't let you go. Unlike more conventional shocks, which throw you back, this one is a real killer. There was Alan writhing on the floor, skin welded to the mike and guitar, minutes away from death. Realising we had to get the mike away from him, Scott tried to kick it aside. Instead he kicked him in the face. With sparks and blood flying the audience surged forward, thinking it was part of the show. Fortunately our manager Fred did some quick thinking and leapt onto the stage and pulled the plug just in time. When the applause had eventually died down, Alan got up, dusted himself off and once the electrics had been correctly sorted out, finished the set with us. After this spectacle we continually got requests to repeat it. We never did, in fact we purchased a test meter and used it religiously to make sure that nothing like it ever happened again.

    Each year the Middlesex Chronicle would run a competition to see who was the most popular band in the area. This area encompassed Chiswick, Hounslow, Feltham and Staines. People were stopped in the High Street and asked who their favourite bands were. We'd only been playing together for 2 years and we came second. The following year we came first. The prize was a day (well 4 hours more like) in a studio in Chiswick called Modern Sounds. We cut an acetate with our version of "Hold On I'm Coming" (complete with 4 letter obscenities) and a self penned ditty called "Just Like That". I still have a copy and it still sounds crap.

    I wasn't sure how long we could keep it together as a band. Members were falling in love, getting engaged and planning to marry. Stevie came off his scooter and had a brain haemorrage. He was completely out of action and took years to recover. I took over lead vocals and as my voice hadn't yet broken properly, it wasn't long before it was wrecked. We had a brief spell with a guy called George, who was half-Maori, but in no time at all he went mad, tried to rape Fred's wife, smashed up our van and put a curse on us all.

    Before long I was poached by a rival outfit called The Bluesville Soul Band. As well as having this brilliant guitarist Kenny Sermon, they had more gigs and made more money. One day Kenny and I sat down to listen to some new music I had brought round to his house. ‘Music In A Doll’s House’ by Family, ‘In Search of The Lost Chord’ by the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd’s ‘Pipers At The Gates of Dawn’. We smoked a few joints and really got into it. Kenny had never heard music like it – or smoked stuff like it – ever before. And at the end of this magical, musical journey, Kenny was in a real trance, all he could manage to say for hours on end was "Wow". It took weeks of psychiatric help to get him out of it and he's never quite been the same since...

Christmas Happening

    The Christmas of 66 was to be my last at school. The following summer it was to become mixed and the imaginary line would disappear. To mark this splendid event, the boys and girls planned to combine efforts and create a Christmas happening. Longford school would unite and hopefully make the grand gesture. Mr Thomas, our English teacher was quick to react and suggested that it could be based on the creation myth - maybe we could call it Alpha After. He had already drawn a symbol Ç and had strong support from his wife, also an English teacher nextdoor. Mr Davis the music teacher suggested our band, The Frinton Bassett Blues might like to perform in it. This is how it worked then. The screen between the boys' and girls' assembly rooms was thrown back and the two halls became one, making a large space in which an imaginary club called Alpha After was created. We were the houseband. On the other stage there would be an ensemble made up of members of the school choirs and bands. Theatre would happen around the room. This was yer original hippy happening mate.

    David Holmes, our art teacher took the opportunity to display some of his students' art and we were asked to put our best work onto 8 x 4 foot boards. A piece of music was being composed for the creation play. There was even a team for special sound effects being trained up. Thunder was to be created by hitting metal lockers with sticks. The school anvil was brought in too and sounded like a bell when struck. There was a hugely controversial scene written for the play by the Thomases. To depict the creation of life and the evolution from the animal kingdom, an orgy scene was planned. No one would be naked, they would just look that way in the half light. There was no shortage of volunteers for this part. You had to wear a pink body stocking (see, I thought we were pink) and roll around on the floor with members of the opposite sex. The ethics of this were much debated and in the end letters were sent to the parents of those involved - but no one seemed to object. The local paper thought it was a good way for the students to get to know one another.

    Every piece of lighting and sound equipment the schools owned was brought into play. There was also to be a dance routine involving a vicar, policeman and catburglar. Some deep moral tale no less. Virtually the whole school was involved in the creation of the Alpha After Club Ç. Suddenly there was an incredible buzz around the school. I actually got to design the poster. The whole thing was a total success and full every night. What a great way to end the year!.

POSTER PICTURE

Early hippydom

    With the advent of records like "Painter Man" and "Making Time" by Creation, "Eight Miles High" by the Byrds and "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play" by Pink Floyd, we were soon striving to emulate these new sounds ourselves. Dennis our drummer had started an apprenticeship as an electrician and one of his first home projects was to build an early synthesiser. The fact that it had only one note and you had to turn it on and off with a switch didn't stop us using it. With this new sound we were suddenly composing our own songs. Well, I think we wrote one. But when he built in the second note to accompany the first there was no stopping us

Pink Floyd

    My first awareness of Pink Floyd was through their posters. Very warpy and colourful. With their name and posters like that you knew they weren't going to be another rhythm and blues or soul band. Off we went, expecting to witness something quite different. This was the first band I had ever seen using mikes on the drums and their use of echo and reverb was sublime. No one was quite sure how to dance to their music, so instead we all sat on the floor. This created a very different atmosphere from the normal everyone trying to outdance one another. We actually began talking to each other and sharing our drugs (purple hearts and reefers mainly).

    We noticed some art student types at the back of the hall who seemed comfortable dancing to this kind of music. It was the first time I'd seen what was later to become known as 'idiot dancing'. You could get lost in this music and we did.

Pirate Radio

    Pirate Radio Caroline had just started plugging Floyd's first single "Arnold Layne", which had been banned by the BBC. When their first album "Piper at the gates of Dawn" came out, I used to take days off school to go and listen to it in the booth in the local record shop, until I'd saved up enough money to buy it. I actually bought a copy in mono and it was years before I discovered the delights of the stereo version.

    Then one day that was it. No more school. I felt a bit uneasy. I didn't have long to wait until I was learning again though - I had been accepted into an apprenticeship and would soon be attending technical college.

Jimi Hendrix, Troggs, Beatles

    It was probably during his first few months in the UK that Jimi Hendrix played at our local Zambesi Club. I mean - no one I knew had heard of him. He strolled in and saw us all sitting around a table in front of the stage. He enquired as to whether this was a card game we were having or not? Without even knowing who he was, his presence was a bit awe-inspiring and we just mumbled into our Pepsi. This lack of response sent him off into the dressing room, well, broom cupboard actually. He didn't reappear until it was time to perform, although he did open the door at regular intervals, allowing strange smelling smoke to bellow out. His amps were pretty awesome too. Three purple Marshall 4 x 12s, the likes of which I'd never seen before. He also had two Marshall amps wired into one another. I know, because I went on stage for a closer inspection later. There was a wire coming out of the speaker socket from one, straight into the input of the other, which was set on a very low volume, but sounded mega-loud. I guess this acted like a kind of early overdrive sysem. I was so impressed with this sound that I got Scotty to wire his amp up to mine in the same fashion. It sounded brilliant set on volume one, but when we turned it up to two - it blew up. Hendrix was absolutely brilliant that night, though. We had never heard sounds anything like this coming out of a guitar. The volume alone was ten times louder than any band I'd every heard before. He started with God Save the Queen and his set included the Troggs' "Wild Thing", the Beatles "Daytripper" and ended with "Star Spangled Banner". He did everything he became renowned for with his guitar - playing it with his teeth, setting light to it, fucking it and finally putting it through the ceiling. He then collapsed at the end of this brief half hour show and had to be escorted off stage. I suspect this was a ruse so he could get off to another gig. We followed him out and watched him climb into the back of his very own chauffeur-driven psychedelic Bedford van, complete with Persian rug and armchair screwed to the floor. (The rest of the band had another van.) He sat in the Bedford with his guitar still round his neck and began to play as he disappeared into the night. I've seen him in concert many times since then, but I still reckon this was the best.

1967 Exam time
Hendrix

    I only sat for two GCE O levels - art and technical drawing. The rest were CSEs. The art exam was fun. The same 8 x 4 ft board I made up for the Christmas happening was to be my presented work. It was hard to know what to put on it. Apart from my giant circles painting (which was hanging in the main entrance, hiding a crack) I'd mostly been making posters or T shirts for our band. David the teacher suggested that if he could get the school to buy some silk, I might like to print with it.

    We also hit on this Warholian idea of producing a two tone image of Hendrix and recreate it twenty-one times on one painting. Each one would be a different combination of two of the colours from the rainbow. All this and more I did. I'm afraid I rather upset the still life artists who'd been busily sketching away all year to fill their 8 x 4ft exhibition. The silk print came out very abstract in gold, turquoise and purple. David the teacher took it from me after the exam and had it made into a shirt, which I've since seen him wear with pride on many occasions. On top of all this I exhibited a few of my posters along with the Alpha After Happening one. Technical drawing was the other subject I had a bit of a passion for. I could somehow grasp and remember what seemed like very complex processes, like how to draw a three dimensional spiral with just a compass, ruler, set square and tee square. Most of my exam results were unremarkable and my class teacher said, in my school report, that, "If I paid as much attention to my school work as I did to my Frinton Bassett Blues brand then I would be a star pupil!"

    I got top marks in both Art and TD, though, and could have gone to art college there and then but the "following in father's footsteps" syndrome was clicking in again. I'd already applied for an apprenticeship as an engineer/draughtsman with several of the top local companies. As for making a living from music, well that could only be a pipe dream, couldn’t it?

 F**k Art - Let's Dance
The Creation

    Scotty (our guitarist in the Frintons) had a novel idea for his art O level exam. Instead of dressing his 8 ft x 4 ft board beforehand, he left it blank and planned to paint it during the exam assessment. Then the review panel could see an artist at work. He'd already been experimenting with the style of modern art where you splash multi-coloured paints on, blow feathers on the wet paint, ride your bike over it, make coloured handprints, walk on it etc. etc. This piece he planned was to be his best. He fixed a paintbrush onto the end of his guitar and filled two water pistols with different coloured paint. He also brought in his trusty old Dansette record player, which he painted up specially for the occasion. When the exam started he put on this song called "Painter Man" by the Creation (a splendid psychedelic popsong). He then went to town and in no time at all he'd covered the board in a multitude of colours and textures. The song played over and over as the painting evolved. Scott wasn't bothered about whether he got good marks as he had already decided, like me, to have an engineering career. Once the examiners had left, the hall was opened up to the rest of the students, for them to peruse these articles of fine art. Scott continued painting and quite a crowd gathered. His final act of creative genius came when he turned the music up full and painted across his masterpiece in large pink letters - "Fuck Art - Let's Dance" we danced. Oh how we danced !

 Pyrene Co Ltd
Pink Floyd

    Out of several hundred applicants, ten of us were selected to begin a five year apprenticeship. Our starting wages, as I remember, were £3.8s.4d. We were placed under the wings of Mr Luffy, who we decided looked like an owl with his round glasses, beak like nose and silver curly hair. We had a secret call that went up every time he entered the factory. Toot toot - toot toot.

    Pyrene was a huge complex on the Great West Road in Brentford. My father had worked there as a tool maker and I remember being taken to a Christmas party there when I was about 5 or 6. It had a large distinctive art deco stairway into the main entrance, flanked by two large lions. Our first task, (once we'd been dressed in our regulation green apprentice overalls) was to file this crooked block of metal into a perfect square within one or two thousandths of an inch. We then had to polish the surface so you could see yourself in it. It took weeks to complete. One thing that got us through this tedium was singing. One day as we were busily filing away we hit on a rhythm. I started singing "The Gnome" by Pink Floyd. "I want to tell you a story about a little man, if I can." Suddenly almost everyone joined in (apart from Jock who'd just come down out of the highlands of Scotland and may as well have come from another planet).

    It was brilliant, it turned out that we all virtually had the same taste in music. What was more, nearly half of us were musicians. There was Tony (Bully boy) Pickworth from Chiswick, who was an ace drummer and spent a brief period with the Frinton Bassetts and would later go out with Anne Richardson. There was Johnny JoJo, whose bench was next to mine. He was a singer and just launched into another Floyd singalong, "I've got a bike, you can ride her if you like". Jock, it turned out, played the bagpipes. Not very well at first, but that didn't stop him from trying. Frankie came from a long line of musical comedians. He would entertain us with funny ditties on his dad's banjo ukelele. (banjelele?)

    A vacancy came up and I managed to get Scotty to fill it. It was brill being a first year apprentice. We made our own tool boxes, scribbing blocks, screwdrivers etc and from the stores we managed to liberate the likes of screw cutting dies, abra files and center punches. I never did get the 'long weight' or 'sky hooks' though.

`    My Dad bought me what must have been the Rolls Royce of micrometers - the Myson 0-1inch. When I showed it to our captain Mr Luffy (Toot toot) he called the toolmakers over and they passed it around carefully to one another, marvelling at its magnificence. To me a micrometer is a micrometer! It measures things for you and as long as it worked what's the difference? Well this bunch of seasoned toolmakers obviously thought there was one, and when they handed it back to me advised me to guard it well. Next Mr Luffy formally introduced me to them as Stan Goodman's son. At this several stood back and shielded their faces, while others looked and pointed up to the pipes running overhead. My Dad had had a love/hate relationship with Pyrene and had been sacked on three occasions and reinstated twice. Most of these toolmakers had worked with Dad and the stories started unfolding. My Dad was forever losing his tools and often insinuated that someone else may have taken them. Becoming tired of his behaviour in the tool room they planned a practical joke in revenge. When he was out of the room they took his much-loved micrometer (a Myson like mine). When he returned he was furious and singled out one particular chap as the culprit. This fracas nearly led to blows until the Foreman eventually shouted out - "Stan - look above you." Dad looked up to see his micrometer hanging from the pipes above his head. "You should've seen your dad's face they said "We had to laugh".

    One of the reasons my Dad got the sack was that he was blamed for a major cockup on a huge machine tool he helped make. He had followed the draughtsman's plan to a T, but the tool was useless and had to be scrapped. No one else would take responsibility for this error, so clutching the plans Dad went upstairs to where the white collar brigade worked, looking for justice. The workers on the factory floor rarely entered this domain. The white collar workers had their own canteen, toilets, washrooms, longer holidays and more pay for less hours.

    Dad stormed into the design department and demanded to know who was responsible for this error. It must have been the rage in his eyes, for suddenly one young draughtsman bolted from the room. Dad was soon on his tail and chased him all over the building. Eventually my father cornered him when he slipped on the stairs and extracted a confession from him. No blows had been struck, but the draughtsman had bruised his legs and arms when he fell. My Dad's behaviour was deemed unacceptable and he was fired. This caused a toolmaker's union strike and he was soon reinstated with a warning.

    After the first year no more new apprentices were taken on. There was talk of a takeover and already sections of the company were closing down. We first years were sent into different departments for 3 months at a time. Pyrene Co Ltd specialised in fire fighting equipment with a sideline in car bumpers. Up to this point virtually every fire extinguisher in the British Empire had been made by them.

    We also had our own fire fighting team, run by a retired Scots fire chief by the name of Logi. I became a member and once a week we would practise running out hose pipes and aiming them at targets. There was an annual competition for this sport and we always won. The reason for our success? We practised uphill.

    It was around this time that the movies ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and ‘St Valentine's Day Massacre’ were popular. This led to a new fashion and we were now shopping in Oxfam for old 1930’s overcoats and trilby hats. Some of us (me included) even used to carry around a fake Colt 45 handgun to complete the illusion. This was all a bit pathetic really, as I didn't even have a car and was often getting chased down the road by rival gangs who had their eyes on my hat.

    Some of my friends' older brothers took the gangster fad even more seriously and began planning raids on banks and post offices. I'm not sure if any of them succeeded in carrying them out but the trend came to an abrupt halt one day, when a posse from the Feltham Hill gang broke down outside the Police station, wearing stockings on their heads and carrying a sawn off shotgun. They were arrested, jailed and briefly became local heroes despite their stupidity.

1968 Car Maniac

    I passed my driving test the day after my 17^th birthday. I had 2 formal driving lessons and many informal ones from Dad. He'd been letting me drive his car for yonks, in carparks and disused aerodromes - under his supervision of course. The day I turned 17 my parents bought me a secondhand Hillman Minx. It had already been souped up with twin carbs and a skimmed head. It cost £40. It would get up to a ton easily but not-so-easily slow down again. I felt free and would cruise around looking for friends to give lifts to. I soon swapped it for Kenny's (our guitarist in the Bluesville Soul Band) Ford Anglia.

An accident waiting to happen

    The Ford had much better brakes, but bald front tyres. Unfortunately, before I fully acknowledged this crucial fact, I had a head-on collision on a nasty accident-prone corner. Camelia and her younger brother Symeon were in the car with me. I was taking the corner too quickly (we were rushing to pick her mother up) and lost control. Those last few seconds before impact slowed right down. I figured that if there had been a way to avoid disaster I would have thought of it in this temporal shift. But there wasn't, the car was out of control and heading towards a small van coming the other way. Fortunately only our wings collided and we bounced off each other. Suddenly the surreal slowness and silence gave way to mayhem. People were running in all directions. I thought the car was about to explode and tried with all my might to open the crumpled door. While I was doing this I had a bizarre apparition of a man in a wetsuit, dripping with water, looking over the hedge opposite. Finally I got the door open. Camelia was being brave and said she was okay, but her face was badly cut with broken glass and a front tooth had been knocked out. Symeon had banged his head on the back of the seat. In the other vehicle there was a couple and their baby, who'd been held in the front seat by its mother. The father threatened to do nasty things to me if his child was badly hurt. Soon the ambulance arrived and took everyone away, leaving me and two written-off vehicles awaiting the arrival of the Police. They came and took measurements and pointed out my badly balding tyres. They could have thrown the book at me, but for some reason let me off with a caution. I got the car towed back to our garage, where I stripped it down and rebuilt it onto a new body (eventually).

    Dad took me to the hospital to pick up Camelia and Symeon. On the way in I encountered my victims (the couple and baby) they seemed relieved that their baby's injuries were minor and pointed to one of the cubicles where Cam was having broken glass removed from her face. Unfortunately a piece got left in and I'm told, still gives her a problem today.

    Finally we had to face her mother. She made my father promise that I would marry her. No one would want her with a scarred face. It was my fault so I should do the right thing. That was her argument. I didn't argue with Dad at this point and as the scars healed the matter of marriage faded. I never wanted to repeat this experience and modified my driving accordingly.

Boffin

    Around this time there was a potentially cataclysmic catastrophe at the BP petrol storage facility at Heathrow Airport. Whilst filling a petrol tanker there was a spark and the tanker caught fire and exploded. If the containers, which held millions of gallons, went up too, then half of Middlesex could have been wiped out.

     Our company was keen to develop an outside CO2 fire extinguisher system, to combat any similar disaster in the future. I was assigned to this boffin as his assistant and between us we set about building the beast. It was a glorious summer and outdoors was the only place to be. We had been given a piece of land up at the back of the factory to conduct our experiments in outdoor fire fighting. First, I had to build a large square frame out of scaffolding. In the centre we placed a big oil drum with holes in, over a metal trough. The principle of CO2 systems is that of smothering fire and starving it of oxygen. We had been building these systems for indoor application and they worked really well, but outdoors was a new venture. Boffin had it designed on paper and now I had to build it. With hundreds of yards of piping and flanges, valves and joints, I managed to follow the plans until one day it was ready for its test drive.

    Situated about twenty yards from our area was an old disused petrol tanker, full of crude petrol. We took about ten gallons of the stuff and poured it into the container at the centre of our contraption. The petrol filtered out of the holes into a second container, where it was ignited and the whole thing was engulfed in flames. To extinguish it, you hit a lever on a large cylinder of compressed CO2 powder, which gushed out in all directions and put out the fire. That was the theory - and Bingo! it actually worked.

    Invitations were sent out to all the bigwigs to come and see Pyrene Co Ltd's new innovation. There were representatives from BP, Esso and a whole contingent of Japanese. The works archivist was in position, ready to film this momentous occasion. As a precaution, retired Fire Chief Logi and his fire fighting team were standing by, armed with a foam hose. Fellow apprentices were given the afternoon off to come and witness the spectacle.

    I was instructed by Boffin to fill it up - this time with twenty gallons of petrol. "Let's really make an impression." he said. So thirty gallons it was. The fire was lit and in no time at all there was an incredible inferno. I went to hit the lever to extinguish it, but Boffin stopped me. "Let it build right up first." he insisted. The heat was incredible. "Okay, now hit the switch." I did and the fire soon receded to a faint glow. That was close I thought. Just then a gust of wind materialised and blew the cloud of CO2 away towards the car park. Suddenly the fire was off again, this time even more ferocious. We had a smaller backup cylinder which in a vain attempt, I operated, but the fire was raging too fiercely.

    Many businessmen were sandwiched between the fire and the fire station and were unable to move. A call went out to Logi and the boys and soon we were all being sprayed with foam. This only made things worse, due to the fact that the firemen were fifty foot below us in a gulley and had no idea where they were spraying. They were just spreading the fire and covering our guests in foam. To avoid the heat, smoke and foam, me and a few friends got behind one of the large metal rubbish containers nearby. The concrete was getting so hot it was sort of exploding. We crouched there in fits of laughter. "This is just like World War 3" someone exclaimed. Several businessmen escaped by jumping down the embankment of the underground train line, which ran along the end of the complex. I looked up to see the company archivist staggering backwards on a roof which had now caught alight. To give him his due he was still filming. I glanced across and noticed the petrol tanker close by and thought "Blimey, this could blow at any moment."

    Logi and the boys finally got the fire under control. The company suffered incredible humiliation over this. It was on the TV and in the papers. It cost the firm thousands in compensation for damaged suits. As the CO2 powder was slightly corrosive and had landed on vehicles in the car park, somebody put in for a respray, had it approved and the whole company followed suit. If one single event had dug a grave for the company, then this was it. No blame came in my direction at all, but Boffin got his marching orders.

1969 Pyrene Closes

    Shortly after that the company was bought out by Chubb. Virtually all the staff were made redundant, but not us apprentices. For contractual reasons Chubb had to find us suitable alternative apprenticeships.

    During this period no one cared whether we came in or not. We had to go in to collect our wages, which were now up to £7 7s 4d. We used to go in anyway, just for the adventure. There were only about six of us left and we virtually had the run of this empty factory and all its outbuildings. We strategically placed pallet trolleys all over the place and used them like giant scooters. When you arrived at the main entrance, you could hop on one and ride it all round the factory. We'd have races and devised a course that ended up going through these rubber doors at the far end of the factory, down a ramp, through the yard, round the corner, then down again towards the gatehouse. To stop, you had to aim it at this grass bank and hope for the best. To begin the course again you placed the trolley in the lift, went up a few floors and there you were back at the start again.

    I had started taking all the notice boards down and was turning them into speaker cabinets. We must have searched every inch of that factory. We found the underground air raid shelters, which still had the gas masks hanging up in them. Very spooky. We also found the control tower which had an intercom linked to each department. One day we took some instruments in, turned on all the speakers and had a jam. The security guards seemed to enjoy it. Mr Luft (Toot toot), who was supposed to be looking after us, spent most of his time at the works club house getting pissed, with one of the few remaining receptionists.

    Another game we devised was ‘Battle Stations’. In one room there were piles of shredded paper used for packing. We used it to soften the blow when diving off the first storey landing. We'd tape cardboard boxe onto ourselves, like armour. We'd make swords from the plastic syphon tubes used in the extinguishers. On top of all this we had ropes hanging from the rafters, so we could swing between platforms, occasionally diving onto the shredded paper on the way. "Let the battle commence!"

    The Flying Trapeze was another invention of ours. Once all the massive machines were removed from the factory, it left a huge empty space with just an electric pulley system, running from one end to the other. There was a large hook on the end of a chain, which went up, down, sideways, forward and backward. We fitted a rubber tyre onto the hook, which you stepped into. You could manipulate the controls yourself . It was like flying. At fifty foot high you could travel the length of the factory, which must have been 1000 foot long.

    Eventually we were all to be trans