2. I can't sing.
In tune. I can't do that.
Never could. I've tried, and still do, when the earphones are in and everyone's out. But I've always known, from when I was a little kid. I never needed anyone to tell me. Though they did.
*
Can't remember when I first realised I couldn't sing in front of people. Maybe as soon as I started school, at four and two thirds. It just didn't seem a natural thing to do, and I didn't have any confidence when I tried it, so I never raised my voice. I didn't even sing in church, and as for Happy Birthday, that well-known litmus test: not a prayer.
When I was seven, a school report refers to my singing as 'Satisfactory'. All downhill after that. At eleven, my status was rubber-stamped once and for all.
In my last year in primary school, I went to the Reading schools music festival - but only as a spectator. If you were a musical school, you sent kids who played instruments. But most of them sent a choir, from the top class. Every school was allowed 30 kids. They were strict about that. Thirty and no more.
There were 31 in my class.
You couldn't make this up. I even lost a sing-off, to someone I described as a polish foghorn in an article I wrote for When Saturday Comes.
That was just comic shorthand, to keep the article short. Leszek Liberda didn't have a voice like a crow. But I seem to remember him sounding about the same as me, thin and nervy. Interesting what singing in public can do to you - because socially Les was a real star, confident and very funny, reminded me of another Leslie, Crowther from Crackerjack. The school trip I spent with him at Kew Gardens was so good I started writing a book about it! Leslie and I at Kew Gardens. There's a title.
We had that whole day together, and now we were paired in adversity. If everyone else in the class was so clearly better than the two of us - christ, just how bad were we?
I mean, in my annual report I got a C for singing, meaning Fairly Good. There were D and E below that: Fair and Weak. I was fairly good but bottom of the class? Maybe my voice was hidden in communal singing.
Anyway, how did they decide, I hear you ask. How did the sing-off work?
Most of the teachers in that school were nuns. They lived in the Visitation Convent next door, a teaching order who came over from Belgium. It was still there decades later, but nun numbers dwindled, the last two left in 2005, and the convent was turned into flats like everything else
In my last year, our class teacher was Sister Mary Aidan, a redoubtable geordie who kept control without trying to, with no bombast or cruelty and just enough of a twinkle. I don't know if she taught me much (your last year in primary, you're ready to leave), but probably - and I liked here enough to stay in touch. I found out her real name was Florence, Auntie Flo, and we had some good natters, this handmaiden of God and the lifelong atheist even as a kid. I visited her till she was in her nineties and couldn't remember who I was (my dad went to her 100th birthday party).
But maybe she could've handled the sing-off better. Or not held one at all.
The whole class, the remaining 29, had to turn their backs, sit right round on their chairs and face the back of the room. Then Leslie and me took turns at trying a few lines of some song or other. I'm pretty sure he was a unanimous choice. Not for the voice so much, but because he was so popular.
A humiliating experience for a primary school kid? Yeh, a bit - but not for long. I already knew I couldn't sing, so this was just confirmation. I went to Reading town hall and watched the music festival, but I didn't wish I was up on stage. Choirs are bollocks and singing really wasn't my thing. Not getting picked as the school's representative for a book quiz - now, that stung. I went to that too, and I know I would've done better than the guy they picked, a mate of mine but not so much of an anorak. Huh.
*
Could I have been better? Could someone have improved my voice?
My niece was a good singer-songwriter even in her teens. She wrote a song for my wedding, and I went to hear her at her school. She was the star of the evening, but a lot of other kids did something too. Sang a few verses, played an instrument. The music teacher looked a crusty old git, but I liked the fact he insisted they all had a go, no escape, didn't matter how good they were or not. And everyone applauded everyone else. What if I'd had a teacher like that...?
There again, maybe you can't help everybody.
There was a voice coach once, a woman who dealt with singers from major rock bands. The Clash sent theirs along, but he defeated even her: 'I couldn't do much for that Mr Strummer'. And Joe Strummer was a lot better than me! One live gig he even exhorts the audience to 'Sing in tune, you bastards!' Bang go his punk credentials.
Even that crowd would've turned on me. Sing in tune yourself, tosser. But I can't do that. I've no idea how it's supposed to work. Same with tuning a piano or guitar.
And I'm not the only one. Bear with me while I bring in my man Morley.
*
Robert Morley was a well-known character actor, from the 1930s into the 80s. He was fat and bald, with unlimited chins and a plummy voice, so he tended to play self-important authority figures for comic effect. But he played them really well. Watch him as an MI5 boss in When Eight Bells Toll, which should've made an action star out of Anthony Hopkins. Morley is suitably pompous ('Bloody RAF and their damned cheese rolls!'), but a serious leader and surprisingly good in the field. Back in 1938, he was impressive as the doomed king in Marie Antoinette. I remember watching his inept speech in that, and I've just discovered the role won him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. Not surprised.
In 1972, we shook hands on a stage.
That was my last year at the vile boarding school my dad sent me to. No way could he afford the fees - but he worked in one of those big victorian mental hospitals, and someone there pulled some strings. Thanks a fuck.
He didn't send me there for a better education. I was at grammar school in Reading. But when I was expelled from there (for shoplifting felt tips, imagine that), he saw his chance. My punishment for stealing pens I couldn't afford was a four-year stretch. The victorians penalised the poor, but even they didn't expect the poor to punish their own.
My dad tried to get my brother and sister put away too. Mum stopped him but couldn't save me. I honestly think he may have wanted us out of the way so he could have his boyfriends to stay.
Having a gay father is fine, a topic of conversation at least (I'm lucky to have been born!) - but not a dad who condemns you to four years in an open prison. Some people expect you to forgive that.
My last speech day there, I picked up some prizes. The school had only 120 boys, so if you had a grammar school background, among guys who'd failed their common entrance...
I won the sixth-form awards for french (not hard, since I was the only one doing it!), english, and history. My prizes were books I chose. When Robert Morley handed them to me, he asked if I'd read them - then said 'Of course you have. You wrote them yourself, didn't you!' Nice one. He also gave me the house tennis cup I'd helped to win.
But what really endeared me to him was his speech.
When we heard he was the guest speaker, everyone groaned. That posh git giving us a homily about public-school values, laced with interminable tales of films he'd been in. Can't wait.
But someone had inside info.
It's not like that. Robert Morley hates fee-paying schools!
What? Can't be. With a plum voice like that?
I was at the back of the marquee with the rest of the sixth form. This was their last day at school, whereas I'd be coming back for a term to do the Oxford entrance exam. I'd moved up a year, so I was younger than them.
Robert Morley's first words, bless him, were 'This school should be closed down!' Oh joy.
You rich parents, he said. If there were no public schools, you'd have to send your children to state schools. And when you saw the shape they're in, you'd spend your money on them, not on exclusive places like this.
Sadly, it didn't catch on. That school's still going and working people vote for Old Etonians. But we agreed with every word that day, clapping and whooping at the back while the headmaster in the front row visibly squirmed, the megalomaniac cunt. A great moment.
Sadly, it didn't catch on. That school's still going and working people vote for Old Etonians. But we agreed with every word that day, clapping and whooping at the back while the headmaster in the front row visibly squirmed, the megalomaniac cunt. A great moment.
Robert Morley went to school at Wellington College. He'd only go back there, he said, if he could burn it down! When he bought a racehorse, he called it Class Struggle! Naturally he turned down a knighthood.
Fine, you may say. Surprisingly well and good. But is there a point to all this? What's Robert Morley got to do with music?
Well, I saw him on a chat show once - and he was explaining how he couldn't sing. Didn't do it in films. Naturally my ears prick up.
Singing in tune, he says. It makes no sense at all. You hit a key on a piano, and I'm supposed to replicate that with my voice? How? No logic at all.
Man after my own heart.
John Otway remembers him too. They acted in a William Tell episode together. Shame it wasn't aired, because they'd have been a unique pairing. According to Otway, Morley was 'a great character who dominated the room and held court - but deservedly: he was a great raconteur.'
Robert Morley used to visit Walls Carnival Stores in Reading, my home town, where we bought fireworks and stink bombs and clown noses. He died in Reading, too. Admitted he liked to eat too much, and gave his hobby as 'conversation'. Maybe he was my real dad.
He'd have made an ideal singer for the band I was thinking up.
*
Another icon shared my view too.
When I joined the Wisden website team in 2001, I worked alongside Camilla Rossiter, whose dad, the actor Leonard Rossiter, was two all-time great comic characters of the 70s. Rising Damp was another Steptoe, while Reggie Perrin was very different and just as brilliant.
After he died, Camilla wrote a long piece about him. Apparently he liked to be good at everything he tried. Squash three times a day, for instance. One thing he didn't master, couldn't understand, was music.
At the start of his first piano lesson, the tutor starts by hitting one of the keys. And gets a similar response to the one I saw from Robert Morley on TV.
Len. This is middle C.
Rossiter, after a pause for thought: Why?
Aaah. Sounds just like me.
*
Fast-forward to 1981 and I'm in the crowd at Wembley.
When they knocked the old stadium down and replaced it, crowd figures went through the roof at the new place, even though ticket prices did too. From the Seventies to the end of the millennium, you'd never have got 89,000 to come and watch Kazakhstan, or nearly as many for San Marino. Back then, only 15,000 turned up for Chile in 1989 (John Fashanu was making his debut, so fair enough), and crowds of under 30,000 weren't unusual.
The capacity was 92,000, but I was part of that only once, for a crucial World Cup qualifier. Other times I was one of only 33,000 for a friendly in 1996 - and not many more in May 1981.
That was the second 0-0 draw with Wales I saw live, both as boring as the scorelines suggest. The section I'm in tries to gee up the home team by starting the Eng-land Eng-land chant. I join in. But it's the one where you have to hold a note - Ennnnnngland, Ennnnnngland - and the note I hold isn't the right one, apparently - because people turn round to see who'd making the noise.
Imagine that. Big bruisers with their knuckles scraping the ground, wondering who's that singing out of key. Fuck me, what's the world coming to?
At school, one of the music teachers was a Captain Davies, who used to put on records like Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini and give us a cheery 'Good tune this, innit?' No wonder music was never my thing.
But he'd played the flute in orchestras and earned a diploma from the Royal Academy of Music - so he had an ear. The school report he gave me: 'Quite intelligent. but not at present very musical.'
Quite intelligent?!
*
All this gives you some idea.
I couldn't hit a note and I'd had the idea in the first place: just the man to start a rock band that played badly on purpose. And I already had another member in mind.
Don't know why I thought Blond Steve couldn't sing either, but he confirmed it. When I told him this meant he'd be the lead vocalist in the band, he snorted again but said he'd give it a go - maybe because he thought it would never happen.
I'd be relegating myself to backing vocals, happy to let him front the band - because I'd also be playing an instrument. And you can imagine what that sounded like.
*
For very different reasons, my two trips to Rome, in 1974 and '75, when I was nineteen and twenty, were complete disasters, one of them an emotional fucking gutshot. One of those visits, probably the first, I decided I'd buy a mouth organ.
I didn't intend playing it in public. I was just tying to get away with something. Again.
Back when I was eleven, I'd persuaded my grandad, who was a sculptor, to let me use some oil paints and a precious square of canvas, so I could paint a seascape. Brown cliff face with a bit of green for the grass on top, blue sea, paler blue sky: so easy it would paint itself.
Naturally I didn't take long over it. By the time I finished, the front of the cliff, which covered the left-hand half of the canvas, looked like a turd. My mind's eye refuses to remember the blues. And my lovely grandad wasn't especially encouraging. The italian for 'What the heck do you call that?' I was mortified but not downright distraught. Seemed there were things in life that might need some effort. Didn't like the sound of that.
Same with the mouth organ. Learning the guitar seemed really hard, and they were big to lug around. I liked the image of a troubadour with an instrument he could carry in his pocket. A novel I wrote many years later, one of the main characters played the mouth organ.
I thought I'd be able to get a tune out of the one I bought. How hard could it be to blow into something?
It was a harmonica, not a blues harp. A big silvery thing, about six inches wide, with a lever on the left-hand side, presumably for changing the key (whatever that is, as Robert Morley might've said). I tried the lever a couple of times but it was hard work and I couldn't hear any difference, which you'd think would be a warning sign. But that was alright: I was never going to play it in front of anyone.
Until.
About a year later, around the same time I was conceiving this rock 'n roll Sinfonia, I had my usual holiday job as a ward orderly in my dad's mental hospital. Some of the student nurses planned to go busking in Reading town centre, to raise money for a kids' ward. I'll join you, said. I play mouth harp, you know.
They told me where they'd been rehearsing, and I took my near-neighbour Martin Walsh, whom I'd known since school and hung around with for years, even after he moved to Italy to work as a translator. He brought his acoustic guitar along.
We heard the rehearsal before we saw it. The other side of a wall. We climbed over it and sat around outside. My harmonica joins in with the songs they're singing, matching the rhythm of the acoustic guitars. I thought I was doing alright - until one of them said maybe we should try it with just the guitar for a while!
He was a student nurse on my dad's ward. Chris Something, intelligent and friendly, so he was polite tonight.
Now, I knew what he getting at. But instead of taking the hint and putting the mouth organ away, I asked if he was criticising my playing, ho ho. No no, he insisted, and I chugged along for the rest of the session. Wasn't till we left that Martin Walsh gave me the hard word. You can't just make any old racket. You have to harmonise. A real telling-off, which I deserved for thinking I could wing it.
It didn’t get any better. When we went busking, Chris suggested I didn't sing either! All I did all day was shake a can while the others played and sang Cecilia by Simon & Garfunkel a million times. For some reason unknown to anyone, I decided to wear a pillowcase over my head to look like a member of the Klu Klux Klan! I'd worn the same thing, with a sheet round me, at a fancy dress do at the hospital. A lot of black people worked there, and Reading was a very mixed town - so why did I think it was a good idea? Well I clearly didn't think at all. And no-one ever told me to take it off, which makes it worse.
Anyway, with that pillowcase over me, I accosted a couple of people I knew. A guy I'd been to school with, who recognised my voice - and Mr Audsley my old art teacher at the horrible boarding school, a really nice man with a limp and slight speech impediment. He didn't ask how I knew him but told me he didn't make much money so he wasn't keen on making donations! When I said he should get the school to pay him more, he did stare for a moment before giving me some coins.
Not being allowed to use the mouth organ or sing - that should've been another degrading experience. But I already knew I couldn't do either, so it was perfectly OK. And we made a fair bit of money for the hospital. I must've shaken that tin in rhythm.
*
This all adds up to an ideal pedigree.
I couldn't play my chosen instrument, and various sets of people hadn't wanted me to sing. Perfect credentials for my role in the new band. At some stage, I replaced the lever harmonica with a small blues harp. And I did play it on stage, so there.
Anyway, now we've got the nucleus of this deliberately bad rock group. And you could say the two of us looked the part. A scottish blond like something out of Sweet, an italian with very long hair that went out of style three years earlier.
I even planned the odd song, make them as crap as we were. The end chorus of Hey Jude, which is already fucking interminable, expanded to twenty minutes or more. Maybe butcher something by Dylan, who played mouth organ as excruciatingly as I did.
Across from the lake, Worcester College had a music room, a square box with full-length windows and room for an audience of a hundred or more. We weren't going to pull in that many, but if we made the poster funny enough, explained that all proceeds went to charity, and kept the entrance fee low enough...
At the time, a sit-down pizza in Oxford cost 50p. Yes really. In romantic surroundings at St Michael's restaurant. Tickets to proper music events at college were 20p. We'd charge half that. The best value in rock.
So our line-up and only gig were forming in my mind. But you can't have everyone in the band being rubbish - that's just a cacophony. Remembering the Portsmouth Sinfonia, I understood the need for some proper musicians. As it happened, I knew three. And all of them did end up in the same band, though it took a while.