LITMIR.BIZ

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underneath. Being but measly third-formers, Ossie and I had to put up with wearing our school uniforms, and were bitterly envious of Ian’s real rock chic. The assembled boys, used to sermons from our begowned headmaster, Puddyfat, lapped it up.

      After our triumph in the school hall, I’d visit Ian’s house in Stoke Newington, where we would jam around the sitting room’s upright piano while his tiny Jewish mother served us tea and encouragement. Here, we would write songs together for what would soon become my first proper band. Ian had started working Saturdays at Howarth’s Music in Camden Passage, a middle-class area dominated by antique shops where I’d witnessed the hippy commune in 1968. By the early seventies the London hippies had moved their spiritual home from San Francisco to LA and accordingly had swapped sandals for cowboy boots, Afghans for jean jackets and Love for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The Western front had arrived in London and chilled-out desperados with tight denims and pasty faces roamed the knick-knack stores of the Passage. A few of these lonestars, when they weren’t drinking over rollups in the Camden Head, centred themselves around Paul Howarth’s shop. Two of them, Ian Fox and Mickey Ball, were looking to form a band and both fell upon Ian Bailey. Of course, Ian wanted to include his schoolmates, and within a few days, Ian, Ossie and I were rehearsing with these guys in the cramped basement of the shop.

      Mickey, with Zapata moustache, played bass. He was an old mod turned urban cowboy who loved soul, while Ian Fox, on second guitar and whole-earth beard, was strictly a country cockney, and being the most organised, became leader. He introduced me to Little Feat and the Doobie Brothers, Southern-fried funk that I loved to play on my guitar. Actually, the confusion between the two Ians I’m experiencing as I write was the same for us in rehearsals and led to Ian Bailey’s renaming. At that time Jess Yates (whose daughter Paula I would meet in just a few years) was a household name for his Sunday evening religious programme, where he sat smiling behind his organ. Ian Fox took to calling Ian Bailey ‘Jess’ as a tease, and, sounding more cowboy, it stuck.

      Our first public performance was on the pavement in front of the music shop during the Camden Passage festival in October 1974. Our set included a Beatles song, a Herbie Hancock instrumental and an Average White Band number; it lasted half an hour and when we finished we started again. But what made that cold night particularly auspicious was the appearance of two guys from school who’d come down to watch, hang out and help us with the gear. Both were called Steve.

      Steve Norman was a good-looking blond boy that I vaguely knew from my class at school. He was learning to play guitar and I’d spotted him in the music room watching me once as I sang ‘The Highwayman’, an Alfred Noyes poem that I’d set to music. The other Steve, Steve Dagger, was in Jess’s year. He was obsessed with music and its history, especially Motown and the Small Faces, and was the first mod-revivalist I knew. Along with his Chelsea boots, Sta-Press and matelot top, he sported a blond, mod haircut that made him stand out from the crowd. An only child and a fellow son of a printer, he lived in a high-rise in Holborn. Fervently left wing, Steve had views upon everything musical and political, and although he was subdued and thoughtful, his company would become inspirational.

      The gig was a local success and after some additions of Kemp/ Bailey numbers to the set, Ian was out looking for gigs. The Same Band was typical of Ian’s dry sense of humour and given that we were anything but unique, the name he chose suited us. Pub rock was happening, and the pubs were full of bands wanting to be the Band—Ducks Deluxe, Brinsley Schwarz, BeesMakeHoney—all playing American-style boogie. So we added ourselves to the list and the Pied Bull near Chapel Street market and the King’s Head in Upper Street became our usual stages. But most of all, we rehearsed. And made our way through drummers.

      Ossie could never turn up on time and after grander and grander excuses culminating in a lie about a burst blood vessel in his arse, we relieved him permanently of his drum stool. The next drummer seemed to be Camden Passage’s main drug dealer, which kept him busy between sets but left him a little vague about arrangements. And then Mickey retired at thirty—at twice my age he must have been feeling the strain. Ian took over on bass and I became the only guitarist. Still hovering on Roger Dean’s floating mountain, I wrote a Tolkien-inspired ballad called ‘Lothlorien’. It was born out of my latest inspiration—folk.

      With Steve Norman I’d started visiting a folk club at the Florence pub near Upper Street, a real finger-in-the-ear, knit-your-own-beer sort of place. The English folk scene was going strong, and although it was a home for nervous, intellectual introverts, I had a deep feeling for the music, even getting up one night to sing my ‘Highwayman’. The early seventies folk revival seemed to come from a general desire to return to the loyalties of a simple past, a reaction to the sixties op-art future and Wilson’s ‘white heat’ utopia that never came. And by early 1975 it definitely hadn’t arrived in our street.

      The Kemps were still in their rooms in Rotherfield, with no bathroom and one outside loo shared between three families. My parents, far from interested in middle-class folk nostalgia, were desperate to get the luxury that their friends in high-rise places had, and they quite rightly craved an avocado bathroom suite, a warm, dry loo seat, and maybe even a small area outside for greenfly to gather. When my memory is lit by the candlelight of Ted Heath’s Three-Day Week, the place takes on a certain Dickensian nostalgia, but in reality the enforced Victorian living conditions only added to the coldness and grimness of our situation. In any case, my brother and I were getting a little too old to share a bedroom, and had to satisfy our daily desire for teenage privacy in the damp shed of that smelly yard toilet.

      The opposing walls above our beds reflected our separate interests in a kind of face-off of passion.While mine was hung with a growing collection of stringed instruments, Martin’s was a riposte of kung fu posters. Martin, who played football for Islington and had had a trial for Arsenal, was much sportier than I was, and he invariably beat me in our occasional fisticuffs. And so his burgeoning showmanship found its stage on the football pitch, with his deft attacking touches enhanced by a customised pair of football boots that he’d painted sky blue and lined with fake fur from Mum’s sewing bag. He balanced this with some wonderfully intelligent acting—being given the chance to co-star in Glittering Prizes, a drama for television starring Tom Conti—and being offered a place at the other Islington grammar school, Central Foundation.

      Although 138 Rotherfield Street meant a sparse and cramped existence, it was a rock of love for my brother and me to venture from and return to, a place of safety where we found confidence and therefore a growing success in our lives. My parents, on the other hand, deserved better.

      My acting career with Anna had fallen away, owing mostly to my growing lack of attendance because of my obsession with the band and music, although I did keep my thespian leanings going at school. A teacher called Roger Digby, a large bearded bear of a man who played a squeezebox and Morris-danced in his spare time, had the inclination to pull together some ambitious school productions. The first was The Boy Friend, where I charlestoned as Bobby Van Husen, and the second was an even camper musical, Salad Days, in which I was given the lead.

      Things weren’t going so well with the Same Band, though. Flicking through the music papers one day, we saw a gig listed for none other than the Same Band. But it wasn’t us. A trip to meet them was made. The confrontation went something like this:

      ‘How long have you been the Same Band?’

      ‘We’ve been the same band since school.’

      ‘No, how long have you been the Same Band?

      ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve been the Same Band longer than you have. I’ve never heard of the other Same Band.’

      ‘But we are the Same Band. We’ve done lots of gigs. You can’t have the same name as us—people will think we’re the same band!’

      ‘What?’

      ‘We can’t have the same name. One of us has to be another band.’

      ‘Another Band? That sounds awful.’

      Pause.

      ‘Oh, whatever…Shall we toss a coin for it?’

      We lost.

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