THE BIRTH OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL
20 December 1958 – 18 August 2006

There is a man with thimbles on the ends of his fingers. I liked putting my mother’s thimbles from her sewing box on my fingers. This man is sitting on a chair. On his lap is a washboard. We have a washboard at home but we never use it now because my mum has a Bendix washing machine. The man is not washing clothes or even darning socks. He is rubbing the washboard up and down with the thimbles on the ends of his fingers. This makes a loud noise.

There is another man. He is standing up. In front of him is a tea chest. I have a tea chest in my bedroom to keep things in. I like tea chests. I like the smell inside them, the smell of tea leaves. The smell of tea leaves is my favourite smell. A stick as tall as the man is fixed to one of the corners of the tea chest. The man is using one hand to hold this stick. There is a string that goes from the top of the stick, where his hand is, all the way down into the tea chest. The man is using his other hand to hit the string. This makes a sort of sound but I can’t hear it properly because another man who is standing closer to me is making a lot of noise.

The other man standing closer to me has a wooden thing on his chest. This is a wooden thing I have never seen before. It has one bit that sticks out and he holds in one hand. The main bit is a sort of a box with a hole in the front of it. But it is the sort of box you couldn’t put anything in. It doesn’t have corners but does have curves. There are strings that go from the end of the bit that sticks out to past the point where the round hole is. This man is using his other hand to hit the strings. This makes a noise. He is also shouting. I don’t know what he is shouting about but sometimes the words sound like The Rock Island Line is a mighty fine line.

The noise these three men are making is very loud. I don’t know if it is music but it might be. There is no tune, only shouting. But the noise they are making is making me want to jump up and down. I am jumping up and down and I am shouting too. I try to shout The Rock Island Line is a mighty fine line, like the man.

My name is Bill and I am five. I am at a Christmas party. I am in primary one. Mrs Gilchrist is our teacher. It is 1958. In five days it will be Christmas. I hate parties. I hate having to play party games. I hate the pink and yellow dresses that girls wear at parties. I hate the tie and stiff collar that I have to wear. I love party food.

This Christmas party is in a prison. The three men are prisoners. They have done something very bad. That is why they are prisoners. If I do something very bad, I will be a prisoner too. I want to be a prisoner and make a loud noise and shout The Rock Island Line is a mighty fine line.

Nineteen years and five months later there is a man with sticks in his hand. He is sitting on a chair. In front of him is a drum kit. He is banging the drum kit with the sticks as hard and as fast as he can. His name is Phil Allen. There is another man. He is standing with a bass guitar around his neck. He is playing one of the four strings on the bass as hard and as fast as he can. He doesn’t play any of the other strings. His name is Kev Ward. If you met him today you would call him James. There is a third man. He has a Gibson 330 hanging around his neck. He bought it second hand in 1970 from a shop in Denmark Street in London for £120. It is tuned to an open E. He is banging out a very basic riff and shouting into the microphone ‘Big in Japan, we are big in Japan’. In front of this man people are jumping up and down and shouting back. This man is me. I had turned 24 three weeks earlier.

My farther was a missionary in the Transkei in South Africa between 1950 and 1955. I was born out there on 29 April 1953. They headed back to Scotland in time for Christmas 1954. He became the minister of a church in Newton Stewart, Galloway in the southwest of Scotland. Part of his duty as the minister of this church was to be the chaplain for the local prison. It was an open prison called Penningham. Each year they had a Christmas party for the staff’s children.

As I said, I hated parties. But I had to go. I still hate parties. I used to try and run away from them. I still find myself running away from them. The memory of this particular party has stuck with me. In some way I knew it was important to my own myth of the way a life unfolds. Nothing is made up. I had never seen a guitar before or even heard one. We didn’t have a TV. Scottish folk music back then never used the guitar, it was all fiddles and accordions. The only other instruments I knew about were those in the pipe band, the organ at church and the piano at home. What I heard at this party sounded so loud. So exciting. Even louder and more exciting than when I saw Pete Townsend smash his guitar up, Keith Moon kick his drums over while Roger Daltry sang My Generation and Roger Entwhistle stand stock-still while plucking his bass in August 1969. The thing is, these prisoners would have had no amplification. Nothing more than the natural sounds their improvised instruments made. The singer would not even have had a microphone. The Who would have had the loudest amplification then known to mankind.

Sitting in the back of my dad’s car as we drove back from Penningham Prison to our house in Newton Stewart that night after the party was the first time I started to think about music, what it does and how and why and how else and where else it could be done. And why not in my bedroom?

Screaming ‘Big in Japan, we’re big in Japan’ into a microphone in front of people jumping up and down was happening less than a fortnight after the 5 May when Clive Langer had told Phil Allen, Kev Ward and me to form a band. We were in Bretton Hall College, somewhere outside Leeds, playing to a bunch of students. We were supporting some friends whose band just changed their name from Albert Dock & The Cod Fish Warriors to The Yachts. We had written three songs: Clive’s In America, another one and the one called Big In Japan. When we finished, the students that had been jumping up and down wanted more so we played what was then a punk standard, Louie Louie and then the Big In Japan one again. This time all these jumping up and down people were shouting ‘Big in Japan, we’re big in Japan’ too.

We had driven from Liverpool to Bretton Hall together in one van. Both bands. Three in the cab in the front and the rest in the windowless box in the back. On the 2-hour drive back, Henry Priestman and JJJ Campbell of the Yachts kept us amused in the almost pitch-black claustrophobic back of the van. They are both very funny men, too funny to be in a serious power-pop band that had ambitions to go places. But however amused they kept us it couldn’t stop my mind from thinking about music and what was music for and how and why and what was a band and what it could do and when. And why not now?

I had tried to stop thinking about music since I had failed to write my essay about Why Andy Warhol Is Shite and had given up my chances of being a future member of the Portsmouth Symphonia in 1973.

Of course stopping had not been completely successful. I had thought about Stravinsky’s Rites Of Spring quite a bit. I had wondered why, although I hated classical musical on principle, this particular piece of classical music affected me in such a strange way and I thought about its structure and how atonal music affected the senses in different ways. I thought about the records of Hamilton Bohannon and why they worked and how he made them. And what made the interlocking guitar parts on Clean Up Woman by Betty Wright work so well. And why labels with strange names and cheap graphics from towns and cities in the southern states of the America made all the best records. But mostly I thought about how the whole concept of the rock band as the people’s art form had shrivelled and died and that all the bands that existed seemed so unambitious that they thought being a pub rock band was a radical alternative.

Then I saw a picture of Johnny Rotten and thought ‘That looks different’. I heard The Damned sing New Rose. And everything changed. Suddenly everything seemed possible, as it should have been all along. Anybody could form a band. Everyone has something to say, everyone could play two chords. Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex was my female icon for a new age. I believed.

Kev Ward was a year older than me. He had been at the art school. In some ways we were similar. We both naturally thought of bands as concepts that a lot of ideas could be expressed through. He definitely did not think of bands as merely a source of employment for musicians.

Our band became known as Big In Japan. It evolved, it changed, people joined and people left. We wrote dozens of songs, played scores of gigs. We became proficient. We became almost famous. But the better we got, the more like an ordinary band we became. Like any other OK band hoping that a major record company would sign us and turn us into pop stars of sorts. I had stopped thinking about what a band could be and how everything could be different every month if not every day.

I had traded in my ideals to be just a member of a band and I wasn’t even very good at being a member of a band. I was the one who ended up writing the most conservative songs, the songs that sounded most like average power-pop, the most retro ones. The decision to knock it on the head was a great relief. It freed my head up to think of a way forward to explore the possibilities of music and music-making and what music could mean for me and the different ways that it existed in our heads. Being in a real band meant I had no overview. I found myself thinking more about getting the van booked and how tight we were and trying to please the audience than making the world a different place or at least make things happen so that others could see the world in a different way.

But before I wind this chapter up there are a couple more things I want to get down.

In August 1977 I went off to spend ten days in Brittany with my then wife. In that time Elvis died. I’ve written about Elvis’s death and what it meant to me elsewhere so I won’t here. The other thing that happened while I was out of the country was that Roger Eagle who ran the club Eric’s in Liverpool and who was to become our manager asked the band to go into a local studio and record the song Big In Japan, the one that had proved such a hit with the students at Bretton Hall and our subsequent gigs. They did, using Clive Langer as a stand-in for me. When I got back and heard about this and that it was to be our first single I was … I was going to say devastated but that would be too strong a word, but disappointed isn’t the right one either. I thought it sounded shit but I was in no position to say so seeing as I was the one who had gone AWOL to France. It sounded weedy and small. I had allsorts of ideas that I wanted to try out when we got to record it. It was to be an epic, not quite Born To Run or Bohemian Rhapsody but something that took liberties with the rigid form that punk had already become.

Not a month has gone by in the past 29 years that I have not spent some hours imagining what the rerecorded version of Big In Japan by Big In Japan would sound like. Some months it is sounding like a Giorgio Moroder classic, other times like Led Zeppelin, or it is purely orchestral. Usually the fantasy involves sampling parts of the original recording. I know in reality this would be a pointless exercise and only serve my own vanity. It would also go against all the ideals that I want to explore with The17.

The other thing I wanted to get into this chapter is about Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Holly Johnson, who replaced Kev Ward as our bass player in Big In Japan, went on to front Frankie Goes To Hollywood. During those few months in 1984 when Frankie Goes To Hollywood, in all their glory, had three consecutive global number ones they presented to the world a radically different type of band. They seemed to tick every conceivable box for a band existing in that era. Then Holly bailed out at just the right moment as the seconds were closing on their 15th minute.

And lastly I wonder what happened to those three skifflers doing time at Penningham Prison. Did they go on to become repeat offenders or future members of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band? Penningham Prison closed down in 1999. If it was still open, I would be wanting to do the prison SCORE for The17 there.