Peter May - Runaway

All remnants of the war were swept away by it, too. Rationing, national service (although the draft was still in force across the Atlantic), the stuffy old BBC Light Programme, short hair, collars and ties. There were pirates out in the North Sea playing rock and roll. Anyone with any spark of musical talent wanted to pick up a guitar and play.

I was desperate to be in a group. To stand up onstage and play guitar and sing about love and loss, and this world that shifted beneath my feet. I had music in my head all the time, and it wasn’t long before I found like minds and like talents among my peers.

But I hadn’t always been in love with music. When I was six my parents sent me to piano lessons, taught by a spinster lady called Miss Hale who lived in a semi near Tinker’s Field, just five minutes from our house. I hated it. I remember sitting in her semi-darkened front room, playing scales on an upright piano, the sound of kids on the swings coming from across the road. C, D, E, F. And now chromatics. And if I made a mistake, having my knuckles rapped with a twelve-inch ruler, even as I was still playing.

I didn’t last long there.

Next, I was sent to the Ommer School of Music in Dixon Avenue, which was a good twenty-five-minute bus ride into town. Such was my parents’ determination that I should play. I spent four years travelling back and forth every Tuesday night for lessons. In the dark, in all weathers, and on my own. Kids would never be allowed to do that, these days. I remember very clearly sitting in a café in Victoria Road waiting for my bus home one winter’s night, drinking an American Cream Soda ice-cream float and watching Mr Magoo on a black and white TV set high up on the wall. A man came to sit beside me, and when I told him my bus wasn’t due for a while he suggested that he might give me a lift home. But I had been well warned. So I told the owner of the café, an Italian gentleman, who informed the man in no uncertain terms that he should sling his hook. And that Italian stood at the door of his café and watched me on to the bus that night, and every Tuesday night from then on.

But years of Saturday morning theory classes, of practising in winter-cold rooms, or on warm summer nights when other kids in the street were out playing rounders, eventually took their toll. I hated music, I told my folks. I was stopping lessons and never going back.

Then came the Beatles. I remember that first hit single. ‘Love Me Do’. It got to Number 17 in the chart in October 1962, and it changed my life. I can only imagine my parents’ consternation when, six months after giving up the piano, I sold my kilt and my train set to buy a guitar, and was playing it till my fingers bled.

And it’s amazing how like minds are drawn to one another. By midway through 1963 I was playing in a group. All of us at the same secondary school, and just fifteen years old. A couple of the boys I had known from primary school, completely unaware of their musical talents. The others were friends of Maurie.

Maurie was one of those two childhood friends. Luke Sharp was the other (I know! I don’t know what his parents were thinking).

They could hardly have come from more different backgrounds. Maurie’s father was a successful businessman. His great-grandfather had arrived in Glasgow at the turn of the century in a wave of Jewish immigration from the continent. His family settled in the Gorbals, establishing a thriving business in the rag trade, and within two generations had gone from running barefoot in the street to buying a detached home in the wealthy south-side suburb of Williamwood.

Luke’s parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and when I think back on it now it seems a miracle to me that he was ever able to join the group. He was one of those individuals blessed with an extraordinary ear for music. He could listen to anything once, then just sit down at the piano and play it. He had been sent to piano lessons so that he could play the Kingdom songs sung by the Jehovah’s Witnesses at their meetings. Although, in truth, he didn’t need lessons. And when he wasn’t playing or practising, most evenings and weekends he would be dragged round the doors by his parents. Something, I was to learn, that he hated with a vengeance.

It was only at school that he could play the music he liked. And he haunted the music department, playing jazz and blues, and astounding the head of music by being able to perform some of Bach’s most complex fugues by ear.

It is also worth mentioning that Luke was little short of a genius. He had been top of his year three years running and, had he completed his final year, would certainly have been Dux. Today they would probably claim he was autistic.

I first heard him playing one lunch hour. A Scott Joplin ragtime piece. I’d never heard anything like it. An amazing left-hand rhythm punctuated by a complex, jangling, right-hand melody. It drew me along the corridor to the practice room at the end, where he sat playing. I watched, mesmerized by his fingers dancing across the keys. When he had finished, he turned, startled, to see me standing in the doorway.

‘I never knew you played the piano,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘You’ve never been to the Kingdom Hall.’

I had no idea what he meant then, but on an impulse I said, ‘Want to be in a group?’

I’ve heard it said that a face can light up. Well, Luke’s positively shone.

‘Yes.’ He had no hesitation. Then, ‘What do you play?’

‘Guitar.’

‘Sing?’

I pulled a face. ‘Not very well.’

He laughed. ‘Me neither. Why don’t we ask Maurie?’

‘Maurie? Maurie Cohen?’ I couldn’t believe he meant the plump Jewish boy who’d been in our class all through primary.

‘He’s got an amazing voice,’ Luke said. ‘He just auditioned for Scottish Opera, and they want him to train with them.’

‘Then he won’t want to sing with us.’

‘He might. His parents won’t let him do the Scottish Opera thing. They think it’ll distract him from his studies. And they have plans for him, you know?’

Maurie just about bit our hands off when we asked him. And he was much more interested in singing pop than opera, anyway. He thought his parents would be more inclined to indulge him if they saw it as a hobby rather than a career path. And in the end, it was his father who bought most of our equipment.

Our first practice was scheduled a week later in one of the music department rehearsal rooms after school. Me on acoustic guitar, Luke on piano, and Maurie on vocal. We had a list of songs that we’d been learning. Maurie had all the words scribbled down in a notepad. But he turned up with a boy I didn’t know, though I’d seen him around the playground and the corridors. A lad from the downmarket end of Thornliebank. He was kind of tall, and good-looking, with a mop of curly brown hair.

‘This is Dave Jackson,’ Maurie said. ‘Good guitarist, but he wants to play bass.’ He turned to the boy, who stood sheepishly clutching his guitar in its soft carry-case. ‘Tell them why, Dave.’ He grinned. ‘Go on.’

Dave looked embarrassed. He said, ‘I read somewhere that it’s the low frequency of the bass guitar that makes the girls scream.’

We all burst out laughing.

Except for Luke, who said, ‘Well, no, it’s entirely possible that the speed and pressure of a low frequency could have that kind of effect. Although it’s not the sound that has the frequency, it’s the means of making it that does. Sound is a pressure wave through the air—’

And we all threw things at him. A duster, bits of chalk, Maurie’s notepad.

Our laughter was interrupted by the arrival of a good-looking boy with thick, dark hair that tumbled over his forehead, like he was a Beatle himself. Even in his school uniform you could tell that he was powerfully built. And you knew at a glance that he was the kind of boy that the girls would just follow around like little puppy dogs. He was hefting a bass drum, and he set it down in the middle of the room.