Record Play Pause

  RECORD PLAY PAUSE

  Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist

  Volume I

  STEPHEN MORRIS

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Constable

  Copyright © Stephen Morris, 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-47212-619-1

  Constable

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  To my darling wife, my beautiful daughters and the memory of my parents

  CONTENTS

  PART 1: REWIND

  1 BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED

  2 HOME AND ABROAD

  3 THE SWINGING SIXTIES

  4 EDUCATION

  5 LITTLE DRUMMER BOY

  6 ISOLATION

  7 THE GREAT VINYL ROBBERY

  8 LIFE IS A CABARET

  PART 2: FROM WARSAW TO JOY DIVISION

  9 WARSAW

  10 DRUMMER AND DRIVER

  11 FIRST SONGS

  12 GIRLFRIENDS

  13 ‘JOY DIVISION, NEVER HEARD OF YOU’

  14 AN IDEAL FOR LIVING

  15 HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER

  PART 3: TOMORROW’S WORLD

  16 THE SOUND OF THE FUTURE

  17 THE MANAGER

  18 THAT MAN OFF THE TELLY

  19 A FACTORY SAMPLE

  20 THE NIGHTMARE JUST AFTER CHRISTMAS

  21 UNKNOWN PLEASURES

  22 NOT NECESSARILY COMMERCIAL

  23 MUSIC ON THE MOVE

  24 CLOSER

  25 A DAY AT THE MUSEUM

  26 STARTING OVER

  27 NEW YORK NEW YORK

  PLAYLIST

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ILLUSTRATION AND PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

  PART 1:

  REWIND

  It must be about four in the morning by now, still dark anyway. I can’t make out the red glow of the digital readout on the clock. I’m not awake by choice.

  Perhaps it’s jet lag. Twelve hours in the air flying east across nine time zones is enough to confuse anybody. You’d think I’d be used to that by now. Over thirty years in the racket is surely long enough to have grasped the basics.

  The sushi supper blowout can’t have helped. But you can’t come to Tokyo and not overindulge in raw fish and wasabi at the earliest opportunity. Sashimi in the hotel’s highly elaborate wood-panelled traditional tatami dining room, starkly contrasting with the hi-tech neon glow flickering on the other side of the darkened glass. Close your eyes and you could almost forget you were on the fifty-second floor. Almost.

  It could be that stopping my sleep. Vertigo. Height makes my head spin and my knees go wobbly. I can feel myself begin to plummet.

  ‘The Park Hyatt offers beautiful views of Mount Fuji or Shinjuku’, the itinerary says.

  It also says we’re playing at the Fuji Rock Festival in a couple of days. So not here for that long.

  Maybe it’s this room. It’s a smart, modern hotel room in a chic expensive hotel with an extremely well-stocked minibar – three different flavours of designer crisps and two jars of sophisticated-looking nuts – three buttons to open and close the curtains and a range of fiddly ‘mood lightings’. The current setting is PITCH BLACK with a bit of a dim glow from the bathroom. It took quite a bit of trial and error to get it just right.

  But neither the complicated lack of lighting or the lovely crisp white sheets are doing their trick tonight. Which is very unusual: out like a light anywhere in the world is the normal course of events.

  OK, best thing to do would be think of something else other than sleep, that usually works. Put your mind somewhere else and see what pops in. Dreams hopefully.

  Right, here we go.

  How did I get here? That’s always a good question. Think of that, take your mind off it. Try and forget they have the odd earthquake here.

  * * *

  Best go back, all the way back, see what you can drag into the present.

  ‘What’s the first thing you can remember? Your first real memory?’

  Go on, try it – it’s a good game. Fun for all.

  This object in the fields mystified the young me. Was it a witch’s altar or a beacon for flying saucers?

  A sunny day. White, very bright white light. I think I’m lying in a pram looking up through a fine net at the sky. I’ve just woken up. There’s a butterfly bumping into the net and fluttering about on it, maybe it’s stuck, flapping about. Huge and very scary. It seems like it wants to attack me.

  I’m in the garden at the back of my parents’ house on Gawsworth Road in Macclesfield. A house bordered by green fields, a quiet road and a bus stop.

  I don’t like this butterfly. I want it to go away, I want to get out and get away from it. I can’t, so I start crying loudly.

  Later. Not sure how much later – more than a couple of years.

  Waking one rainy spring morning. The dark grey clouds are low in the sky. Must have been pouring all night.

  Outside there’s a commotion.

  A cacophony.

  Peeping over the ledge of the bedroom window, I see a herd of cows right outside. Too close. I run downstairs and there are cows outside the kitchen window too.

  The house is surrounded by big black-and-white bellowing cows. They’ve broken down a fence and escaped, they want to explore. The big back lawn is a flooded mess of mud and cow shit. I can’t understand how this has happened.

  Cows are supposed to be nice docile things. This lot look angry.

  1

  BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED

  Gawsworth Road, Macclesfield.

  That’s the place, our back garden. That’s me on the right, recumbent, sulking – always reluctant to have my picture taken, even then. It was a Sunday morning when Mum took that snap with her Kodak. That’s my Sunday face.

  We are on our way to church, Amanda and me. That’s Amanda on the left. She’s my three-years-younger sister.

  We are waiting to be dragged off by our Auntie Elsie to the harvest festival at St Andrew’s Church. This was where, I was told, you took things to be distributed among the poor and needy.

  That’s a basket of things, tins of fruit (tinned pears, at a guess) and such, that I will later very reluctantly pass on to the poor and needy. You can tell my heart’s not really in it from the picture, can’t you? What a slob.

  I had a bit of a strop on that day. Sundays always used to put me in a bad mood. Being dragged off to church when I could be doing something much more interesting was bound to be a bit of downer, wasn’t it? Well, Sundays were always like that. I remember that basket was bloody heavy even without the tin opener, which I thought would have been a useful addition to its contents.

  On the bench under the basket of bounty there is a small rusty metal plaque with a few lines from D. F. Gurney on it:

  The kiss of the sun for pardon,

  The song of the birds for mirth,

  One is nearer God’s heart in a garden

  Than anywhere else on earth.

  I don’t k
now why but I thought that God himself had made that wooden bench. I once tried carving my initials in it with an amber-handled screwdriver.

  That’d teach God.

  See that worn-down, muddy bit of grass above the step? It’s at the exact spot where I realised I could ride a bike – one minute I was falling over and the next I was off pedalling furiously down the lawn. That was it. A boy on a bike spelt freedom. I was off down the road all the way to the bus stop and then the paper shop on the Weston Estate; next stop the Big City. Or at least the not-so-bright lights of Macclesfield. But first I’d have to pass the Cycling Proficiency Test. Qualifications always get in the way. I didn’t want to get into trouble with the two coppers who lived across the way. They’d stopped my friend Geoff from up the road and warned him about riding without lights and a bell. The reckless lives we lived on Gawsworth Road, in Macclesfield.

  The area had been a rural idyll around the 1920s – just a few houses surrounded by acres of pasture.

  ‘I remember when all this used to be just fields,’ my grandma used to say on her weekly visits.

  By the time I arrived on the scene the greenery was getting a little depleted, swallowed up by a new housing estate with a little row of shops: newsagent, chemist and launderette. Turn left out of our gate and you were in some kind of suburbia; turn right and you could get lost in fields and woodlands.

  Sorry, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. We’ve not even been introduced, have we?

  My name’s Stephen – Stephen Paul David Morris to be precise. I was born on 28 October 1957 at some ungodly hour in the morning, but I do like an early start. Don’t like to see a morning wasted, well, not now anyway. Back then it was another story. So much time to be wasted.

  I was born blond and christened in a dress; Paul Anka topped the hit parade with ‘Diana’. I was oblivious to all that back then, of course.

  My parents were Hilda (b. 1923) and Clifford Morris (b. 1912). Dad was really called George Clifford but he avoided using the name George at all times. George was his father’s name and he did not like his father one bit. My grandfather George was a bit of a one: a swine or a black sheep. After producing nine children, he decided enough was enough. He slung his hook and departed one Christmas night, leaving the family high and dry with no forwarding address.

  It was very difficult to get any information from my father about the runaway George. He had served in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and came back from the front with revolutionary views. Besides that, he was a randy so-and-so and a scrounge. He was also, so my father told me, an anarchist!

  My grandfather and his chums would meet in a local alehouse and drunkenly conspire to blow up Macclesfield municipal gasworks. Where he would have got the equipment to accomplish this terrorist act is anybody’s guess. Ninety years later, Tesco did the job for him.

  History does not with any certainty recall what became of my would-be revolutionary grandfather. He really and truly vanished off the face of the earth. Not many people have pulled that one off. There was some talk that he left to fight for the Bolsheviks in Russia, which would have been a strange move for an anarchist. There was one rumour that he may have got as far as Australia, and another that his adventure took him to glamorous Congleton, 8.7 miles away, but none of this has ever been verified. Even the internet shrugged.

  Grandad George had left his wife Elizabeth Ann and a bunch of kids to fend for themselves. This would be in the early 1920s. ‘Times were hard’, so my father’s stories of his early life went. Brothers and sisters sleeping sardine-like or hot bunking. It was a struggle for Elizabeth Ann, living off lodgers and laundry. Clifford doing his best to be a breadwinner from an early age, delivering newspapers and oatcakes. Flitting from house to house along the same terrace in Hibel Road. My father may have hated George so much that he never used his name, but I liked the idea of my grandad – a vanishing anarchist, man of mystery, black sheep.

  Clifford started a trend among the Morris family: all his brothers went under aliases. Johnny was oddly christened Jack and was the musician of the clan – clarinet and saxophone were his thing. He played in local dance bands, including the Ambrose Dance Band, while Dad aka Cliff put on the dances. He was ‘playing second fiddle’, he said, giving me the mistaken impression that he had some hidden musical talent. My father always loved music, though. Duke Ellington was his man. He loved the Marx Brothers, too. Who doesn’t like that?

  The Ambrose Dance band in action.

  That’s Johnny on tenor sax, far left. What an ace drum kit!

  Eric, the youngest brother, was also known as Spanker; whenever there was any trouble, the finger would always be pointed in young Eric’s direction. Ever the scapegoat, he took his punishment manfully, hence the moniker. He reminded me of television’s Sgt Ernie Bilko (Phil Silvers), always looking for an angle, a scheme or a shortcut. The other siblings were Evelyn, Nellie, Irene aka Renee, Hilda (no, not my mother), Colin aka Clonky and, strangely, another unfortunate George.

  My father used to entertain Amanda and me with improbable stories of our family’s history. As well as tales of my comedy-villain grandad, he told us about the Morris family’s underground forced rhubarb factory and other unlikely but entertaining tales. My favourite yarn, though, was ‘The Tale of Great Uncle Jack’.

  Jack, so the story goes, went to serve Queen and Country fighting the Boer in Africa. The younger me presumed that these were of the hairy porcine variety. Jack contracted a mystery illness, which, for reasons that were never made clear, he couldn’t see an army doctor about. Instead, he decided to seek the help of a local witch doctor. ‘No Jack!’ his comrades implored him. ‘Not the witch doctor!’ But Jack would have none of it. Off he went alone in search of the native medicine man. Just like Grandad George, he was never seen alive again. Another Morris, vanishing into the ether, just like that. I think I found the idea of soldiers fighting giant pigs more frightening than anything.

  Natives, witch doctors, soldiers in pith helmets fighting possessed pigs – I had no idea my leg was being pulled.

  I’d been told frequently that I had what they call a ‘vivid imagination’ and was ‘very highly strung’.

  This last phrase puzzled me greatly. I was certainly an anxious individual and a natural-born worrier but what was this reference to string? It didn’t make sense – maybe a grown-up thing. Like ‘How long is a piece of string?’ which was the answer to most of my questions. What was this adult fixation with string?

  I liked dark things (what growing boy doesn’t?). Grisly murders, ghosts, vampires, werewolves – that sort of thing. Most of this was fuelled by comics.

  Mum would take me and Amanda to visit our maternal grandmother, Sarah, every Saturday without fail. Grandma was a large, solemn lady, who wore bombazine and had her hair pinned tightly in a bun. I hated my grandmother’s dark and dingy house. The curtains were always drawn and there was a dark presence in the house: my Desperate-Dan-bewhiskered grandfather, Fred. A veteran of Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, he got through the First World War without a scratch only to be badly injured in a motorbike accident as soon as he got home.

  Fred was confined to a bed in the small front room. He’d groan when we arrived as Grandma tried to cover up the steel and leather callipers attached to his legs. He didn’t like being disturbed. His threat to me was that I would be locked in the coal hole for waking him. I didn’t much like the coal hole. Fred would need shaving, though, and whether he liked it or not (he didn’t), come Saturday my mum or her sister Elsie would shave his whiskers.

  The house was cold and dismal. The hourly chimes of the ticking clocks were the only break in the silence. The saving grace was that at the end of the ordeal we were treated to a visit to Horace Bracegirdle’s newsagents to get the latest comics.

  Horace was a large, florid man of Dickensian appearance. He was missing half an ear – a dog had taken the other half, my mother said. That put me off dogs for a long time. His assistant, Jill, was comp
letely the opposite, tall and pale, with her height exaggerated by a permanent neck brace. She spoke with an odd Swedish accent; she’d had too much vinegar on her chips, my mother said. This was confusing as I liked vinegar and it never did me any harm. Horace’s shop also possessed a top shelf of smut, such as Health and Efficiency naturist magazine – all very tame today but in the early sixties this stuff would blow a young chap’s socks off. Amanda and I were shepherded away from these, obviously, to the haven of Horace’s confectionery tray.

  There lay the highlight of my week: A. & B. C. chewing gum. Well, not so much the chewing gum itself. That was pretty much inedible.

  ‘It’s made of dead horses,’ my mother would warn in a doomed attempt to dissuade me from my addiction. Amanda got a quarter of the much safer humbugs.

  My interest was more the picture cards that came with the gum. They probably tasted better, but I didn’t care. I was a fevered collector of these cards, which I swapped with my friends. Some of these, such as the ‘Outer Limits’ series, scared me witless; and some, such as the gory Second World War battle series, were banned at school for their depictions of brutal death and violence. These were highly prized for their shock value. But my favourites were always the Batman series. I was desperate to collect the entire set and, despite swapping cards and chomping through a mountain of the pink gum, there was always at least one card that eluded me.

  Still, there were always the comics themselves to pore over – that’s what we came here for, wasn’t it?

  I loved Batman, the Mighty Thor, Iron Man and good old Spiderman. They lived in the USA where the colours were bright and things actually happened. Deranged mobsters, fantastic beings from other worlds and evil scientists would wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world, only to be defeated by the superpowers of our hero. I had noticed that there was a distinct lack of super-powered citizens in Macclesfield; in fact, the whole of Great Britain was an uncanny skills-free zone. There was derring-do of another form, though, as illustrated in the pages of the Victor and Commando comics. OK, they were in black and white, but the (allegedly) true stories of plucky Tommies fighting off hordes of evil Jerries, whose superior firepower was no match for our tea-drinking boys’ cool courage and guile, were educational and oddly fascinating. I wondered if any of my many uncles were in the elite fighting forces of the Second World War.