FOR BIG DOUGIE KING
15 August 2006

Kos is a Greek island off the Turkish coast. The Aegean View is a holiday complex on Kos. Most of the clients are Dutch. Lastminnute.com sold us a two-week package here. I’m lying on a sun lounger by the pool. Members of my family are in the pool; others are gorging themselves on the ‘free’ cola (not Coke) served at the poolside bar. From somewhere I can hear the distant strains of We Are The Cheeky Girls as sung by those Cheeky Girls. In my head I am trying to marshall thoughts about the vast and sprawling subject of the rock band and why it is now a dead form.

I have carried some of these thoughts around in my head, unmarshalled, for decades. They may have gradually evolved, percolated, even imbued the subtle flavour of the sherry barrels they have been lying in for 33 1/3 years. Is that last one an analogy too far?

In April 1973, 33 1/3 years ago, when I was just about to turn 20, I first started to think about the rock band as a cultural force in our society, and why it was the only art form worth considering in modern Britain at the time. The trouble was, I was already thinking of the rock band in a historical sense. Something whose moment as a living form had already come and gone. I was already feeling a sense of nostalgia for it and there was still a part of me that hoped for a new lease of life for this played-out form. Maybe not a new messiah but at least a band that showed that there was a different way to do things. 

I was in my first year at Liverpool Art School doing a Diploma in Art and Design (Dip AD) in painting. It was the Easter break of what was to be my last year. As part of the course we were supposed to deliver an essay on a general studies topic and another one on a history of art topic. The titles of the two essays I felt driven to write were Liverpool As A Mythical Place and The Rock Band As A Cultural Force And Artistic Form. I also had this other title Why Andy Warhol Is Shite. I loved this one as a title but didn’t know which of these two proposed essays it suited most, or maybe it was a title that could be used to cover both of these subjects and a load more shit that I wanted to tie in. As a title for a book, Why Andy Warhol Is Shite has stayed with me over the years. I hope to use it one day for a book that has the subtitle Liverpool Versus The Rest Of The World, and when the book is done and published I will hand it in to Liverpool School Of Art as my belated essay.

Although I thought long and hard over this Easter break in 1973 about the subject matter, I don’t think I got more than a page of notes down on paper. Other things had been happening in my life in Liverpool that seemed to prevent any concerted bouts of essay writing. In this chapter I hope to get some of those unmarshalled thoughts on paper.

By the time of this particular Easter, I had long since stopped buying or even listening to records by rock bands (long, in the terms of a 19 year old being two years). It had been about three years since I had bought a music paper. In those days it would have been Melody Maker – the NME was yet to have its renaissance as the thinking young man’s rock paper.

Maybe it was the distance between being a consuming fan of rock at 16 and a mature 19 year old who by then had read some books that enabled me to at least think about rock with some sort of an overview. It was also this still-unfocused thinking that has informed me, in part, ever since, whether as manager of Echo And The Bunnymen, a member of The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu or instigator of The17.

As I reported in the opening chapter of this book, when I was on the ferry heading for Sweden, Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles was the first record I ever bought and subsequently it was bestowed the mantle of being my all-time favourite record. This first-time purchase was followed up by me being totally consumed by The Beatles. I bought everything. Even the four-track EP that you could only get if you sent off for it with four wrappers of Wall’s ice cream, and the EP wasn’t even by The Beatles, but four acts they had signed to their Apple label.

Now I wasn’t bothered about what The Beatles had for breakfast or what their middle names were, or even what they thought about. It is what The Beatles did as a collective unit which captivated my imagination. Now the stuff I am going to tell you may have been documented in hundreds of books already but the only book I’ve ever read about The Beatles is the Hunter Davis one that came out in 1968. I read it the week it came out and then promptly forgot everything I read.

Before Strawberry Fields I was not particularly interested. Although they were this worldwide phenomenon, to me they were just another form of light entertainment for the masses. I would have far rather gone fishing than listen to The Beatles. After Strawberry Fields they embodied a new medium or art form through which everything that seemed vital in the modern world of Britain in the latter part of the 1960s could be expressed. This new medium was the rock band. At the age of 19 and soon to be 20, the wise and thinking me thought this new medium, the rock band, pissed all over painting, sculpture, film, photography or whatever else was on offer in art schools at the time, as a way to express reactions to the world as you found it. But enough of the me at 19, almost 20 and the overview thing and back to The Beatles and me as a 13 year old.

Back then in 1967 my father was the minister of a Scottish Presbyterian church in Corby, a new town in the English East Midlands. Eighty-five per cent  of the population of Corby was Scottish. I won’t go into the historical reasons why, it just was. My father was minister of St Ninian’s, a brand new church that had ten years to pay off something like 50 per cent of the building costs. The other 50 per cent, I guess, had been met by the Church of Scotland headquarters back in Edinburgh. Raising cash to pay off the debt was the main focus of fundraising activities in the church.

I had an idea. I got it while sitting in the art room at Kingswood Comprehensive on a Friday afternoon in May 1967. There was this park near the middle of Corby. We called it the Glebe. I reckoned you could get 20,000 people on the Glebe. That figure was based on me going to see Leicester City play at Filbert Street and if they could get 20,000 in there, we could easily get 20,000 on to the Glebe. If we booked The Beatles to play outdoors on the Glebe, we could sell 20,000 tickets even at the extortionate price of ten shillings (50p) each. People would buy them to see The Beatles. 20,000 at ten bob a time would be 10,000 quid, which to me sounded like a king’s ransom. We would pay The Beatles £1,000 which I guessed must be more than they usually got for a night’s work. So that would be £9,000 profit. Enough to clear what was left of St Ninian’s building debt.

It all seemed so obvious and simple as I sat in the art room painting a picture of a pirate ship being strafed by the sort of helicopters the Americans were using in Vietnam war we saw on the TV news.

OK, so I don’t actually remember what I was painting in the art class that particular Friday afternoon and I’ve just made that up. But what is worse is I’ve had to cross out a whole page of writing where I had started making up all this other stuff about when I got home and tried to phone Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager, to book The Beatles. That is the trouble with this sort of writing, this myth-making of your own life. The temptation to embroider the facts is always there. I am usually able to resist that temptation but of course I am selective with the facts, only choosing the ones to use that somehow in my head bolster the case for The17 and me looking good. Or at least interesting.

When I started writing the bit about me ringing Brian Epstein’s office all this dialogue started streaming from the end of my pencil. It suddenly became so easy. There was no longer any struggle trying to remember the facts, I could just make it all up. Maybe I should jack in all this The17 stuff, forget about thinking about music and where it should be going, and become a novelist instead. My fear is that if you catch me out, making up one tiny thing, then you won’t believe any of it and the whole thing will fall apart.

So what happened is this. I spent the weekend thinking about it and decided I should ask Big Dougie King. Dougie was the biggest lad in the class by what seemed about a foot. Once Dougie got the ball on the rugby field nobody else had a chance. Big Dougie also knew everything there was to know about pop music. At the age of 14 he was running a mobile disco, at 17 he was running his own record shop. The last I heard of Dougie he was a DJ on a local radio station playing the hits and chatting the chat.

That Monday morning I went into our class, 3T, and said to him, ‘Dougie, I am going to put a concert on in the Glebe with The Beatles, do you want to be the DJ?’
I was then going to ask him if he had any ideas how I could contact The Beatles to book them. But before I could ask, Big Dougie came back with ‘What are you talking about, Bill? The Beatles no longer play concerts. They played their last one last year.’
‘What? Why?’
‘So they can concentrate on making records.’
Not for a moment was I disappointed that I could no longer stage the proposed concert by The Beatles and cancel the church debt. What happened was that I was overcome with this overpowering sensation about The Beatles. For some reason this seemed like one of the most exciting things I had ever heard. The Beatles had not only made a record that sounded like nothing I had ever heard before, but they had turned on its head the whole reason musical ensembles of any sort, as far as I knew, had for existing: to play music live, for people to hear. There is no way I could have explained at the time why this was such a massive shift in the ground rules, I just found it ridiculously exciting.

I know you must be thinking this is ridiculous – a 13-year-old boy gets excited like this if his team wins the cup maybe or even getting his first snog, but not on learning that a band was not playing live. Just one sentence from Dougie King and the idea of a band that played concerts seem so passé. Through that day – or maybe not that day but over the next few weeks and months – I started to think that if I ever had a band, they would not play concerts. It would free the band up for being so much more than mere purveyors of light entertainment.

From that time in May 1967 through to the summer of 1969 everything The Beatles did seemed to be something that to my knowledge had never been done before, like releasing singles that were not on albums, releasing albums with no singles, or even without anything on them which sounded like singles. They went to India and played sitars, celebrated and absorbed its culture when in the past Britons only went to exploit it. They grew moustaches when having a moustache had not been in fashion since the 1920s. They made records that started with the French national anthem. They released a double album. A double fucking album, with just a white cover and no name. Every song they wrote sounded different in every way to every song that had ever been written. They released a double EP with a booklet and it tied in with a film they had made themselves and it went out on telly on Christmas Eve. They made a single that was seven minutes long. They wore stupid clothes and did not care. They were going open a shop that only sold white things. They employed an inventor. Their manager died. They told the world all you need is love. And all you need is love, nothing could be truer. Then they played live. The Beatles live again for the first time in four years, but on top of a building where no one could see them but me because it was filmed so we all got to see it. And when they finished playing this song on the top of the building one of them said ‘Did we pass the audition?’ and this was one of the funniest things ever.

And then they became boring. They released Abbey Road and it sounded good, polished and there were some great songs but they released a dreary single from it. I wanted The Beatles to announce to the world on 31 December 1969 that they were going to end. Not split acrimoniously but reveal their job was done. But they didn’t. Instead they went on and released Let It Be. To me it sounded like a record by an ordinary band that wanted to do ordinary things like go and tour and release singles to promote the album. And the cover looked like it could have been by any band from anywhere. And they split up and it was dull and tawdry and they were a used-up, spent force.

There were plenty of other bands that I was into for an album or so, but their careers seemed so dull. Their ambitions seemed no wider than sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll and breaking America. None of them seemed to want to expand the horizons of what a band could be. In interviews they just talked about progressing musically or about how big an influence Muddy Waters was. Then there was decadence. I hated decadence. Decadence is what I thought we were all against. Snorting cocaine and swilling champagne was what old-school lovey actors did and not what young revolutionaries should be doing. Getting wasted seemed so boring compared to getting up early in the morning and doing something that had never been done before.

As I wrote in an earlier chapter about Fluxus, I thought some of what John Lennon did with Yoko Ono was exciting but that did not last. I gave up on rock bands then as a force for change or even as something of interest. They all seemed so dull, so willingly toeing the party line even when they put on makeup and played with sexual stereotypes. It was all the same but with different costumes.

If I needed music to listen to or tap my toe to, American rhythm and blues or country and western singers provided it for me, but I wasn’t looking to them to stimulate my imagination, only to provide a soundtrack to whatever else I was up to.

Which takes me up to the Easter Break in 1973, when I was supposed to be writing the essay. The art history that I was learning about in the extensive library at the Liverpool School Of Art seemed irrelevant to the world as I experienced it. Even the pop art, not much more than a decade old, now seemed irrelevant. I had been to see this huge Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate the previous summer. Although spectacular, images of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and a young Elvis seemed to be from a different age not just the previous decade. The work also seemed to be designed to appeal to the frivolous and rich. Hence my title, Why Andy Warhol Is Shite.

The art that me and my art school colleagues were trying to make all seemed as irrelevant as what Andy Warhol had been doing, but in a different way. We were all so earnest about our goals. As soon as you stepped outside of the front doors of the art school and into the real world, our art made no sense. It connected with nothing. Not that I was for some modern equivalent to what Stalin thought that art for the masses should be like, but I wanted art that connected with real life rather than just the history of art that existed in the Art School library.

Also, being a young idealist of some vague sort, the idea of making one-off art in the future for some rich patron was a no-no. As far as I was concerned my now well-worn copy of Strawberry Fields was the greatest work of art of the 20th century. And it had cost me less than ten bob. The fact that there may be a few million of these around the world no better, no worse and no different to mine made it a better work of art. As did the fact it didn’t need to be signed by an artist to make appreciation of it any more complete. And it was made by four blokes who had no proper further education, may have known little of the history of art or had any thoughts about their place in it.

I was not advocating that The Beatles should be worshiped or even copied, what I wanted to advocate in this unwritten essay was that the rock band was the perfect medium to express the things that needed to be expressed, to explore the modern world, to reach an audience way beyond the confines of the audience that existed then for modern art. Remember this was decades before the whole Brit Art/Tate Modern explosion of appetite for contemporary art.

And you didn’t need to have detailed knowledge of its history or a refined sense of aesthetics to get it, you just needed to live in modern Britain and be vaguely aware of the world around you. And it wasn’t only about what was on the record, the actual music, it was the whole way the band placed themselves within society: the record sleeves, the TV appearances, the things they didn’t do.

I planned to argue a case that on every housing estate, in every village across Britain bunches of lads were forming bands, or at least planning on forming bands, each and every one totally different from all bands that had gone before. I was going to argue the case that never before in our history had bunches of young men from any background been able to do this. They needed no class structure giving them the nod, no City and Guilds qualifications let alone a degree, no academy to hand out the validation. Whatever validation was necessary would come from the people. Complete and total democracy.

But to reuse the vague analogy I used at the beginning of this chapter, I never marshalled the thoughts. Maybe if I had done, I would have been forced to come to the conclusion that it was a dream that did not reflect the reality. The only reason why The Beatles could do any of the things that they did was because they had already become so commercially successful that there was nobody in a position at that stage in their career to stop them following their whims.

The vast majority of rock bands that got anywhere were more than happy to fit the predictable formula of wanting to shag loads of girls, take drugs, conquer America, be better musicians and release albums that sounded almost like the last one they did but took longer to record. To me this was as uninteresting and narrow minded as the career of any successful postwar British artist like Graham Sutherland or Henry Moore or Jacob Epstein. Even the long hair and flared satin trousers that most of these bands sported seemed conservative in some perverse way – none of it was ever surprising.

There are a couple of other things that I have just thought of that I should slip in here. Like musicianship. When The Beatles were at their creative zenith, their musicianship was not the point. It was not the thing that was being measured. It was their ideas that made things work. Their willingness to take risks, not being one thing all the time – in fact they seemed to be a 100 things all at the same time.

My family are now telling me that it is time for lunch and asking me why I have to keep writing in my notebook. Most of the other dads are in the pool having fun. My lunch is the same every day: tomatoes, cucumber, olives, feta cheese and stuffed vine leaves. It’s an all-in deal. Suits me fine.

After lunch I read through what I have written so far and I’m worried that I may be about to lose the thread, if I haven’t not already lost it. The kids are back in the pool, my neighbour on the sun bed next to me is reading a Dan Brown book in Dutch and now I’m thinking about the Rolling Stones.

There was always that cliché that you had to be either into The Stones or into The Beatles, if you were a bad girl you were into The Stones and all that. Obviously The Stones were sexier, had the threatening vibe. I also have to admit that, given the choice, I would rather listen to a Stones compilation of 1960s hits than a Beatles one. To take it further, I would not recommend listening to Beatles records to anyone. Bands that take their musical influence from The Beatles have a tendency to be the most boring of any particular era like ELO or Oasis. To get what The Beatles had to offer the world, you had to experience it as it unfolded at the time. And that is the way it should be. All art and all music should be of the moment and experienced in the moment.

There is something else I want to get down on paper about The Beatles before one of my children insists I get in the pool with them to play water polo or something. This something is maybe the most documented thing about the phenomenon that was The Beatles and it was something I didn’t appreciate when I was between the ages of 13 and 16, when they were everything to me. Before The Beatles there was nothing like them. Yes, before The Beatles there were rock ‘n’ roll bands, beat combos and pop groups but they seemed to exist primarily as backing bands for a singer or play songs made popular by somebody else. They relied on novelty. Solo singers or individual bandleaders had always been the major stars, the serious players, the ones who went platinum. The Beatles were the first group that seemed to be from somewhere, and that somewhere was not a cosmopolitan or capital city. They seemed to be about something. They wrote their own songs, even if their songs were not that good in the beginning. They sang in their own voices, they did not pretend to sound like black American singers. They definitely were not a backing band for some pretty boy pop singer. They didn’t even rely on having an obvious front man in the band. That last point gave them an internal dynamic that we all related to. It wasn’t Paul McCartney and his backing band or even John Lennon and his band. Ringo was as important to the dynamic as any of them, or he was as far as we were concerned.

The Beatles were the first rock band. They presented a new form to our world, a new way of expressing ourselves creatively to the world. Without The Beatles, The Stones would have just been another band that had a couple of hits with R&B covers. They would’ve never attempted to write their own songs.

Before the 20th century the working and peasant classes in Britain had their own culture, their own music, their own stories, their own heroes and their own myths. Once the mass media started to grow and flourish in the 20th century with cinema, radio, magazines, popular songs and, lastly, TV, the working and peasant classes were supposed to consume the new media. Their own culture was left to wither and die or, if they were lucky, tamed, tidied up and sold back to them. It was a one-way transaction in the sense we had to consume what was fed to us in exchange for handing over our hard earned wages. The working and peasant classes had little or no input into what was available, although they were used at times as puppets to front whatever the media was doling out to give the masses something to identify with.

The Beatles were the first, in Britain anyway, to take control of their own creativity. Maybe not quite the means of production, but there was no denying they were for real. As I have said before and I will say again, they sang their own songs, talked in a way we related to and were soon making their own decisions.

Is what I am saying making sense or am I just on one and going up my arsehole with it all? I mean it’s not as if The Beatles were leading some people’s revolution. They wanted the wealth, the big houses in the country; the private education for their kids (except McCartney). The Beatles were perfect example of the whole being far more than the sum of their parts. As individuals they were weak, flawed and dull.

Being bigger than the sum of their parts was the other big lesson I learnt from The Beatles, or at least in theory. Back in 1973 the history of art as I had learnt it, from the renaissance down to the present day, was all about the individual and the struggle with the inner vision (of course the patron’s wishes had to be taken into account but …). The same was true of serious music, it was always the story of the great composer forging the new music of their day. Even in opera where librettists were used, they were just considered an employee of Verdi or whoever. It wasn’t until the rise of the American popular song and the musical that you get any sort of equal billing and collaborative thing going on.

‘Yeah? What about Gilbert and Sullivan?’

I will ignore that question and get on with my polemic.

The Beatles taught me that the rock band as an art form could work in a different way. To work properly the rock band had to be collaborative. That was one of its main strengths. That is what it had over the artist-as-individual at his easel or lump of marble.

The trouble was – and maybe it is why I never got the essay written – this was all theory. I hadn’t got a fucking clue in reality. The only people that I knew who had ever been in bands were some of my school mates who played in a covers band back in Corby, one of whom went on to be the drummer in the band St Cecilia who had a hit with Leap Up And Down (With Your Knickers In The Air).

I could play guitar a bit but had never been in any sort of band myself. I was going to be turning 20 in less than two weeks, too old to even consider trying to start one. And anyway, I didn’t have the confidence. As much as my theory went against the whole virtuoso thing that had taken over rock music, my lack of any sort of guitar-shop-assistant-virtuosity would have inhibited me from trying to form one.

So that was that. The essay did not get written, rock music was dead and I had a new vocation to be the next Jack Kerouac. But that’s a whole other story.

I will come back to this and how if it wasn’t for those unmarshalled theories back in 1973, I would not be trying to do this 17 thing now.

Post Script. It is now a month or so since I wrote this and I have been going through it, correcting spelling, checking facts and editing. In doing this I decided to put Dougie King’s name into Google to see if I could find out what he was now up to. The last time that we spoke was some time in the 1980s when I did a phone interview with him. He was working on a local radio station somewhere, Peterborough I think. I found hundreds of entries for him, but then found one that told me Dougie had died of a heart attack back in 2004. Dougie was a great inspiration to me at the time. He was the only person in our class who seemed to have the courage to do things beyond what you would expect of teenage lads living where we did. That memory has stayed an inspiration for me down through the years. At some other time and place I would like to think that I would write more about what that inspiration was and how it continues to work.