Eric Clapton – conservative, staunch royalist, country gentleman. He reached his 60th birthday a week or so back & celebrated it, I have no doubt, with a few dry sherries in the rural splendour of his Surrey mansion. I met him once, decades ago, at a time when the notion of racking up even half that tally of years was an inconceivable prospect. So I raise a glass in salute (a pale Amontillado, my choice) & offer up this thin little tale.
And since, as cliché assures us, truth is stranger than fiction, assume that the account that follows is but a paler version of life & times when nothing mattered more than what you wore…
FUNKY KINGSTON
Tales from the Thames Delta, 1964
“Bring it to Jerome”, we sing as we shuffle down the line for Friday wages. “Bring it to Jerome” - & Johnny shakes his little brown envelope like The Duchess as I sling chords, Bo Diddley-style, across an imaginary square guitar. We head for the car park at a run, dodging round the 9-to-5ers trudging home to a cooked supper & a popping gas fire. Johnny & me, we’re going to pick up Anne-the-Man & Thick Mick & head for the Kingston mods’ GHQ, The Crown by the Apple Market. Our routine is fixed as well: too much Merrydown cider followed by midnight chorusing in the churchyard followed by oblivion & most of Saturday lost under the eiderdown.
Johnny leans on the horn at around 7.00. I look out of my bedroom window but the old Ford Thames van is just out of sight. I place it by the plume of blue smoke & the guttural chunter of a holed exhaust. I check myself in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door. Looking good. I’m wearing my pink shirt - fly-front, inch-&-a-half deep tab collar, from Man Boutique in Eden Street - under the rolled-edge-lapelled silver-grey herringbone jacket (Cecil Gee). Black knitted inch-wide nylon tie with a loose Windsor knot. Knuckle-chord black hipsters & the Annello & Davide Cubans, bought last weekend in Brewer Street. I run the knife-handled steel comb carefully across the fringe to get the fall just right & then take the stairs two by two.
Thick Mick’s in the back of the van, stretched over the spare tyre. He’s fiddling with a 20-pack of Camels, trying to get one to jump into the breech by flicking his thumb against the bottom. Johnny told him weeks ago that it really impresses the birds & he’s been practising ever since. Johnny’s bird Anne-the-Man is sitting in the front seat. She’s had her hair cut even shorter & she looks up at me through panda-rimmed eyes. She’s called Anne the Man because she wears her hair in a flattop crew-cut. And that’s where the masculine resemblance begins & ends. A tough option: she’ll have to sit on my lap as Johnny throws us around the five minutes of suburban avenues on the way into town. Which works out pretty well for both us, as it did last Friday. Like then, I ease myself out of the car & walk sideways the few paces into the public bar. Johnny gets them in & Anne looks everywhere but at me, like butter wouldn’t melt. Thick Mick feeds the jukebox. He’s excused buying rounds because he always gets the order wrong so we siphon off his coinage in kind. Soon the bar pounds to The Pretty Things’ ‘Rosalyn’ & we get started on the night’s business.
By 9.30 it’s Mod Central. You can’t move for mohair, Shetland wool & tattersall checks. Toshak elbows his way through the faces & nudges Johnny along the bench. He’s wearing his maroon bluebeat hat & a Fred Perry shirt & he’s smoking a Black Russian. He leers down the line – Johnny G., Anne the Man, me & Mick - & shaking his closed fist like a Latin percussionist, he lets slip a black bomber. It bounces once on its triangular corner & Johnny snatches it on the ascent & slips it between his teeth. Soon we’re all humming like bees & not a coin has changed hands. Toshak’s generous with his medicaments, but the price you pay is a temper that turns on a sixpence. He’s been banned from every other pub in Kingston, & most in Richmond & Twickenham too, for causing an affray.
Things jump into top gear when it’s my round. I’m up at the bar waving my ten bob note like a bookie’s runner with a bet & I bump into a geezer on the turn with a couple of pints. Not much gets spilled but it’s on the new shirt. I look down; I check the damage. Cold & wet enough. Time to look up & make my play. Now, I’m not an aggressive sort of guy; I went to boarding school; I’m going to college in the autumn. But the shirt’s new & there are protocols. Just before I go eye-to-eye, I take in a 3-ply midnight blue, 3-button tonik suit, cut by a master & then hand-stitch finished, wrapped around a Ben Sherman Oxford button-down & a polka-dot slim jim tie. This guy’s The Face. How come I don’t know him personally? But I do – from a distance. We all do. It’s Eric ‘Slowhand’ Clapton, lead guitarist with The Yardbirds, the band who took over at the Railway Hotel when the Stones went into orbit & who now play down the Richmond Athletic Ground where we go every Sunday. It was my mate Ealing Steve who wrote ‘Clapton is God’ in indelible laundry marker across the booking office window in Richmond Station over the road from the Railway Hotel. Now municipal walls across Kingston & Richmond are telling the world like it’s the second coming.
Time freezes, like on Doctor Who but in colour. In the thumping silence I notice that his Ben Sherman’s carrying more light & bitter than my fly-front & my pill-dry mouth dries out some more. I can feel a shit-eater’s smile tugging at the corners as I compose my speech.
“Oh, sorry, man”, Eric says, putting the glasses down on the bar. “I wasn’t looking. Here”. And he tugs out a blue polka dot handkerchief from his breast pocket & hands it to me. I’m holding it like it’s a fragment of the true cross & he’s only turning back to the bar & ordering me a pint, “…and whatever your mates are having”.
So that Sunday night as usual we all head down the Crawdaddy in Hooray-Henry country, the Richmond Rugby Club. I cop a pillion lift from Toshak, the Lambretta Loony. We two-wheel drift into the car park alongside a pair of tooled-up Vespas, all headlights & squirrel tails. Toshak kicks the stand away from one & they both tip over. Outside pill-consumption he’s got a real problem with cultural excess. Says it brings the cause into disrepute. A true zealot.
We pick up Johnny & Anne waiting by his clapped out old van & sashay down the outside of the long queue. Flash Harrys, all five of us, we step between a couple of schoolboys & the very classy bird taking the money & stamping the hands.
“We’re on Eric’s guest list, doll,” says Toshak, his hat tipped forward & his Madras cotton jacket swinging from his crooked forefinger. “Toshak, Johnny H., Anne the Man & The Tryer”. (Beatle fringe = Friar Tuck = Try A … The name stuck. Johnny’s a real comic). We swing into the half-full rugby club bar. Nearly all righteous faces with just a sprinkling of art students in beatnik duds & weekend trippers in Millet’s parkas & catalogue hipsters. The empty space is still more rugger bugger’s romper room than a throbbing R&B venue, for all that Marvin Gaye’s giving us ‘Can I Get A Witness?’ over a crappy house sound system. Toshak goes to get some beers in; Mick’s picking up 19 Camels he’s just launched all over the floor; Johnny goes for a piss before the band fires up. And Anne looks at me for the first time that evening. She’s got one of those lopsided smiles that go with a head tilted down & to the side & eyes looking up. She doesn’t say anything, just gives the slim-jim a tug & kisses me full on the lips. Thick Mick straightens up with a geriatric grunt; Toshak ambles over with 5 light ales between his fingers; Johnny returns from the bog, shifting his tackle into position behind his Big E 501 Levi's; Anne studies the ceiling with her baby blue panda-rimmed eyes; I am alone with my thoughts.
Within the hour we’re in another world. It’s like being tied to the rail tracks in a tunnel with the Midnight Special a second away from impact – 4D sound & the train keeps a-rollin’ as five live Yardbirds hammer through the rave-up section of ‘Smokestack Lightin’ ‘. My £5 shirt & £25 jacket cling to me like a sausage skin. Sweat transpires through the packed, heaving crowd. The legendary ‘H’ (no one knows his real name) is out front conducting his dancing fools from the edge of the stage. The boozed out & the blocked climb onto shoulders, skinny naked torsos weaving. The real amphetamine kiddies grab the underside of the exposed RSJs holding up the ceiling & swing over the bobbing heads like crazed capucine monkeys. The tribe has gathered & it roars its solidarity as the band drives on. I close my stinging eyes & go with the pulse of the music. My arms are loosely draped over the shoulders of Anne the Man in front of me (whose arms are looped loosely over the shoulders of Johnny G. in front of her). We all move as one as Eric sends whiplash solos cracking out through the smoke & the steam. Rock and roll, drugs &, in a long distance sort of way, sex. About as good as it gets. Someone ought to write a song…
GLOSSARY
“Bring it to Jerome” = by Bo Diddley, a song much favoured by R&B bands. It stays in one key throughout.
The Duchess = one of Bo Diddley’s back-up musicians.
Bo Diddley = aka Elias McDaniels, Chess label R&B renegade & a staple source of songs for the early UK R&B bands. (He played a homemade square-bodied guitar).
Merrydown cider = a cheap & fatal brew.
Annello & Davide = highly fashionable shoemakers, catering originally for dancers.
The Pretty Things’ = with The Yardbirds, The Rolling Stones’ only credible rivals.
Blue bomber = amphetamine pill.
Ten bob = ten shillings, or 50 pence in post decimalisation coinage.
Crawdaddy = the club from which The Rolling Stones climbed to fame, now the territory of The Yardbirds.
Lambretta = motor scooter.
Tooled-up Vespas = motor scooter burdened with several extra headlights & a squirrel’s tail dangling from a whip aerial mounted on the rear of the bike.
Millet’s = a chain army surplus store.
Parkas = baggy anoraks, favoured more by the second wave of post-punk mods.
Hipsters = hip-hugging trousers, French in origin.
Blocked = under the influence of pharmaceuticals.
11:48:45 PM 
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