1 Gambolling Baby Boomers
Birth of a Rock’n'Roll Child
I was born Friday 7 October 1955 at the tail end of West London’s Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate.
My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton. Built by Norman Richard Shaw, Bedford Park was the world’s first Garden Suburb. By the 1880s it was a Bohemian center for intellectuals and artistic free-thinkers its residents going on to include most famously the great Anglo-Irish poet WB Yeats. The painter Arthur Pinero was another resident; as was the actress Florence Farr, who like Yeats was deeply involved in mysticism and the occult.
Some time after the dawn of the next century the area had - significantly perhaps - declined to the extent that bus conductors would shout out “Poverty Park!” when their vehicles stopped on the Bath Road. However, the foundation in 1963 of the Bedford Park Society led first to the government’s listing of 356 houses, and then much of the estate becoming part of the Bedford Park Conservation Area. During my boyhood it was still demographically quite mixed, but well on the way to being completely gentrified. Working class future hard nut Roger Daltry had moved there from Notting Hill a little time before we did, although he’d been born (in March 1945) at the Hammersmith Hospital in nearby Shepherds Bush. A few years later he formed a Skiffle group The Detours which eventually mutated into The Who, one of several English bands that conquered America in the late 1960s with a furiously hedonistic music and philosophy.
By ‘63, I’d been at South Kensington’s French Lycée for about four years and my brother (born on the 2cnd of May 1958) had since joined me there. The sixties’ social and sexual revolution was already well under way; and yet for all that, seminal Pop groups such as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five - even the Beatles themselves - were quaint and wholeseome figures who fitted in well in a still innocent Britain of Norman Wisdom pictures and well-spoken presenters on the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, sweet shops and tuppeny chews. It wasn’t until the Rolling Stones achieved national infamy that the new Pop they’d first called Beat started to present a serious challenge to the moral establishent of the UK, and so perhaps start to evolve into the far more threatening music of Rock.
On the day I was born - 7 October 1955 - Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad reached the age of 58, and Scottish psychologist RD Laing, 28, while Beat poet Amira Baraka, revolutionary leader Ulriche Meinhof and Falklands hero Major Julian Thompson all hit 21. The future Colonel Oliver North celebrated his 12th birthday, Judee Sill her 13th, Paul Weyrich his 8th, Vladimir Putin his 3rd.
It was a day marked by an event which had a colossal if largely unrecognised influence on the evolution of our culture, when at San Franciso’s Six Gallery about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. All went on to be leading lights of the Beat Generation, as did Jack Kerouac the shy Canuck from Lowell, Massachusetts who attended but didn’t read, preferring to cheerlead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. His “On the Road” published two years later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse and friend Neal Cassady remains Beat’s most famous ever work. After the Six Gallery reading, the Beat movement which’d existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, with the Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.
1955 was also the year in which Rock’n'Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, although it’s “The Blackboard Jungle”, which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock’ n’ Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets’s “Rock Around the Clock”, over the film’s opening credits. Originally a rather conventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights, Haley’s version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be the same after it. In August Sun Records released a long playing record entitled “Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill”, featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to become Rock’s single most influential figure apart from the Beatles.
Then James Dean died in September after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause” emerged about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the motion picture industry’s defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon ever. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.
Many theories exist as to how the staid conformist fifties could’ve yielded as if my magic into the wild Dionysian sixties, some convincing, others less so. For me, if a little leaven is present in a theory for me it leavens, or spoils, the entire lump, even when much of it may be sound. As I see it, the Western cultural revolution of the last half century or so was not a sudden, unexpected event, given that tendencies hostile to the Judaeo-Christian moral fabric of our civilisation reach all the way back to the Enlightenment from which so much anti-Christian thought stems. That said, their true source was the Serpent’s false promise to Eve that through defiance of the Creator of the Universe she and Adam could be as gods, knowing good and evil, and which is at the heart of all vain, humanistic philosophy.
What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant gardists, especially since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of the dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools.
And yet for all the change that raged around me in the sixties, my own little world of the leafy suburbs of outer west London was an idyllic one which’d hardly changed from the day that I was born when the spirit of Victorian morality was still more or less intact in Britain.
Tales of Tasmania, Manitoba (and a Child’s West London)
By the time we moved to Bedford Park, My father had several successful years as a classical violinist under his belt, and so was in a position to ensure that my brother and I enjoy a far stabler childhood than his had ever been. He’d been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania, and raised in Sydney as the son of one Carl Halling from Denmark, and an English mother, the formidable Mary. She came into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London and sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, but she was always known as Mary to my parents, brother and I.
According to Mary’s sister Joan, her maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which’d dominated the south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or discarded branch. If Joan was right then I’m related by blood to many of the most prominent royal and aristocratic figures in history, perhaps even all of them.
These would include her namesake Lady Joan FitzGerald, daughter of James Butler the first Earl of Ormonde, and alleged ancestress of Diana, Princess of Wales. Lady Joan herself was the grandaughter of Edward the 1st of the House of Plantagenet - who was “The Hammer of the Scots”, and the king who expelled the Jews from England - while her mother Eleanor de Bohun was descended from Charlemagne, the greatest of all the Carolingian Kings who may’ve been Merovingian through his great-grandmother, Bertrada of Prum.
The Merovingians and the Carolingians were two dynasties of Frankish Kings who supposedly believed in their divine right to rule, and there’s been alot of writing devoted to them in recent decades, with even some Christians contributing to the wealth of literature centred on the purported historical destiny of the mysterious Merovingians. For my part I prefer not to delve too deeply into this, especially when non-Biblical sources are deployed to add credibility to arguments, which is understandable given my background as a collector of mystical and occultic works. I’m not much one for endless genealogies leading to a babel of confusing and contradictory beliefs. But I’m getting seriously off the subject.
Mary grew into a beautiful young woman, with dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and an exquisitely sculpted mouth. After losing her fiancé in the First World War, she married an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson, and they had two children in quick succession, Peter Bevan, and Suzanne, known as Dinny.
At some point between Peter’s birth and that of his younger brother Patrick, she travelled with her husband to Ceylon - now Sri Lanka - to find work as a tea planter. There she met a Dane with a deep love and knowledge of the spiritual traditions of the East, the mysterious Carl Halling. What followed next I can’t say for sure but I’ve been led to believe that at some point after becoming pregnant with her third child, Mary fled with Carl to the island of Tasmania where ny father was born, although he was raised - as Carl’s son - in Sydney, New South Wales.
It was in Sydney that Carl contracted multiple sclerosis, after which Mary made some kind of living as a journalist and teacher, while an increasingly sick Carl went on a desperate spiritual search for a miracle cure taking in Mary Baker Eddy’s mystical Christian Science sect, but sadly it was all unavailing and Carl died just before the outbreak of World War II. According to his wishes, he was buried in his native Denmark, although by then he’d allegedly taken out dual citizenship, as had Mary.
All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick as a violinist, Peter as a cellist and Suzanne as a pianist. By the time Pat was nine years old he was already the soloist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, with all his wages according to him being redirected by Mary into the family account. Soon after Carl’s burial, Mary set off for London with her three children in order that they might further develop their musical careers. Pat studied at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and joined the London Philharmonic 0rchestra while still a teenager during the Blitz on London, serving in the Sea Cadets as a signaller, and seeing action as such on the hospital ships of the Thames River Emergency Service.
By this time my mother the former Miss Ann Watt was already a highly accomplished and successful singer of both classical and light music, notably with Vancouver’s legendary Theatre Under the Stars. She’d been born Angela Jean Watt in the city of Brandon, Manitoba. However, while still an infant she’d moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of east Vancouver. Grandview’s earliest settlers were usually tradesmen or shopkeepers, in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. My own grandfather James Watt a builder by trade had been born in the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Her mother Elizabeth was from Glasgow, Scotland, having been born there to an English father from either Liverpool or Manchester, and a Scottish mother.
She was the youngest of six siblings, namely Annie-Isabella, Robert, James, Elizabeth (who died in infancy), Catherine and herself, and the only one of her extended family to emigrate to the mother country - although Isa’s only son Don was resident in the UK for a good many years in the early’70s -which she did shortly after the end of the war. She could just as easily have ended up in the US, but a ticket came up for her to travel by boat to the UK and she couldn’t resist it.
Within a short time of arriving she met my father through their shared profession, and they married in the summer of 1948. Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, and so I was born at the former Goldhawk Road site of Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, which has since been moved to nearby Du Cane Road, Shepherds Bush.
I was an articulate and sociable kid from the word go, walking, talking early just like my dad before me, but agitated, unable to rest, what they might call hyperactive today. And at some stage in the early to mid sixties I became a problem both at school and home: a disruptive influence in the class, and a trouble-maker in the streets, an eccentric loon full of madcap fun and half-deranged imaginativeness. But less charmingly I was also the kind of deliberately malicious little hooligan who’d remove a paper from a neighbour’s letter-box, and then mutilate it before re-posting it. My striking thinness was offset by the crew cuts my dad liked my brother and I to sport, and the fact that we were routinely dressed in lederhosen can hardly have moderated our unusual appearance.
I divided my time between the Lycée and my West London stomping ground of Bedford Park, Chiswick, Hammersmith, and soon. From a very young age I took Judo classes at the Budokwai in South Kensington, where one of my teachers, a former British international, said he always knew that it was Saturday when he heard Halling’s voice. I was known as Alley Cat by the other kids at the Budokwai, after my surname of Halling, and it was a pretty apt name when you think of it. Later, I took classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, but if I thought I was going to raise Cain there I had another thing coming, given that its owner was a one-time captain of the British international team who’d served as an air gunner with 83 squadron during World War II, later holding Judo classes in Stalag 383. He was a formidable but fair man a little like my future housemaster at Pangbourne and I worked well with him, going on to study Karate which I was still doing as late as 1973 more of which later.
But I was never happier than on those Wednesday evenings I served as what would today be called a Cub Scout in the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack, where I was less of a menace than pretty well anywhere else. I remember the games, the pomp and seriousness of the camps, the different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair during the mass meetings, the solemnity of my enrolment, being helped up a tree by an older boy, Baloo, or Kim, or someone, to win my Athletics badge, winning my first star, my two year badge, and my swimming badge with its frog symbol, the kindness of the older boys.
Beatlemania came to London in 1963 and I first announced my own status as a Beatlemaniac at the Lycée in that landmark year, the very year I think I took a dislike to an American boy Robert who later became my friend. I used to attack him for no reason at all other than to assert my superiority over him. One day, he finally flipped and gave me a rabbit punch in the stomach, but Robert wasn’t punished…perhaps because the teacher had a strong idea I’d started the trouble in the first place.
By the end of the year a single new group The Rolling Stones started threatening the Beatles’ position as my favourite in the world, although I was initially disappointed by what I saw as a rough and sullen performance of “Not Fade Away” on Top of the Pops, having heard so much about them. However, during a musical discussion I can still see in my mind’s eye, possibly in ‘64 with some of the new breed of English roses - who may’ve been wearing Marianne Faithful tresses and even mini-skirts and kinky boots - I proudly announced that the Stones were my favourite group in the world. I loved the way a martyred Mick Jagger sang “Lady Jane” on black and white TV with surly, ever-defiant lips surrounded by frenzied girl slaves as if she was a pagan deity and he her prostrate votary.
One of the girls was a loyal Beatles fan, another a lover of British Blues band the Animals, and she acted cooler than the rest as if the Animals were somehow superior to mere Pop acts like the Fabs and the Stones. But then Mick and co. had begun as a Blues band too…only to become side-tracked into the world of Pop.
There was a point in the mid ’60s when I was dubbed Le Général by my long-suffering form teacher at the Lycée in consequence of what she perceived as my supremacy in the playground with regard to a tight circle of friends, and my leisurely arrogance in the classroom.
Certainly I was not above organising elaborate playground deceptions. One involved me pretending to banish one of my best friends Richard Woodhead from whatever activity we had going on at the time. Richard played along by putting on a superb display of waterworks which had the desired effect of arousing the tender mercies of some of the girls who duly rounded on me for my hard-heartedness; but I refused to budge. Richard was out. Of course it was all a big joke, and Richard and I had never been closer.
I can remember going around to his house to lounge on his bed watching “The Baron” or “Adam Adamant” before staying the night, just as he stayed the night at mine; and in ‘67, by which time my wardrobe included a paisley shirt and a pair of purple cords -to say nothing of the obligatory peaked cap - he spent a week with me in the wilds of Wales as part of a course known as the Able Boys. This was a combination of a simple sailing school and what could be termed outward bound activities which involved us living in tents and cooking our own food under the supervision of “mates”. I spent one week there with Richard, and another with my cousin Rod, about whom I’ll be saying a good deal more later on in the memoir. Suffice to say for now that he was the son of my dad’s brother Peter, and lived just opposite us in Bedford Park with his dad, mother Marge, and little sister Kris.
If I was Le Général at the Lycée, back home I saw myself as the leader of the kids whose houses backed onto the dirty alley that led all the way down to Robert Bartholemew’s on Esmond Road.
One fateful day I crossed the road to announce a feud with the kids of the clean alley, so-called because unlike ours it was concreted over rather than being just a dirt track. It was to cost me dear. Soon after the feud had thawed I went over to pal around with some of the clean alley kids who I now saw as my allies, although their leader still held a grudge. I realised this when I started taunting one of their number and he whispered to a crony that if I picked on this kid one more time he was to start a fight with me right there and then. Needless to say, I ignored this warning and before long a vicious scrap was under way and I was getting the worst of it with a large clean alley crowd egging my nemesis on. Finally I agreed to leave, and as I shamefully cycled off someone kicked my bike so that it squeaked all the way home in unison with what I remember as being great heaving sobs. My brother, who’d been the only one to stick up for me during the fight by endlessly urging meto”hit him, Carl!”, followed me home in tears a few minutes later.
If my close friend notorious local tough Steve had been with me in the clean alley when we decided to pay it a visit following the end of the feud I’d initiated, my brother and I would never have been humiliated in this way. Steve lived virtually opposite us in Bedford Park, but he was from another dimension altogether. He was a feral kid, a skinny cockney with muscles like steel who seems to me today to have been born to wage war with sticks or stones on the bomb sites of post-war London. For some reason, he became devoted to me…”Carly”, he’d always cry -this being his pet name for me - and he’d always be welcome at our house even though this brought my family some disapproval in the neighbourhood. One of my mother’s closest friends Helen Jankel warned her of my association with Steve as if genuinely concerned I might end going to the bad, which was typical of Helen, who was such a caring person. But Steve was a good kid at heart as the piece below makes clear. It was based onanautobiographical story about my childhood written in about 1977, as was much of the material above as of the wolf cub section. I versified it in the winter of ‘06, publishing it at the Blogster website on February the 15th. It depicts my first meeting with Steve in the dirty alley possibly in about 1965 or ‘66.
Wicked Cahoots
When he made
his first personal appearance
in the dirty alley
on someone else’s rusty bike,
screaming along
in a cloud of dust
it rendered us all
speechless and motionless.
But I was amazed
that despite his grey-faced surliness,
he was very affable with us…
the bully with a naive
and sentimental heart.
He was so happy
to hear that I liked his dad
or that my mum liked him
and he was welcome
to come to tea
with us at five twenty five…
Our “adventures” were spectacular:
chasing after other bikesters,
screaming at the top
of our lungs
into blocks of flats
and then running
as our echoed waves of terror
blended with incoherent threats…
“I’ll call the Police, I’ll…”
Wicked cahoots.
This Glam Rock Nation
In September 1968 while still only 12 years old I became the youngest cadet at the Nautical College Pangbourne, a naval college situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in the county of Berkshire. This probably made me the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time.
Founded in 1919, she was still known by her original title of the Nautical College Pangbourne, but by 1969 this’d been abbreviated to Pangbourne College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers’ uniform. What’s more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational.
The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you’d've been seriously punished, although not necessarily with the cane. I was however beaten on numerous occasions although with never more than four cuts, or swishes of the cane. I was heavily disciplined from my very first term in fact; but I’d like to go on record as saying that I’m indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of itsiconsboth artistic and political, Che Guevara being my hero for a good long time. Needless to say, he no longer is.
In 1970, we moved from Bedford Park to a little industrial suburb close to the Surrey-London border. Our own street was relatively gentrified, and several of my parents’ closest friends were from working class districts of West London such as Shepherd’s Bush and Notting Hill who’d since “made good” and so had moved out to the suburbs like my dad.
I finally left Pangbourne in the summer of ‘72, after a decision had been made involving my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at the college. 1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. For my part I couldn’t wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I’d despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its teenybop idols. I was of the school of Hard and Progressive Rock…Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and so on. But I was changing. For better or worse, this was going to be my era.
In late ‘72, I saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on a long-forgotten teenage programme called “Lift off with Ayesha”, and with all the passion of a former enemy I fell in love with their new camp image, all eye-shadow and glittering outfits and massive stack-heeled boots. Several months later a certain Rock chameleon - David Bowie of course - appeared on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 with his eyebrows shaved off and my devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former skinheads want to look like Charlie George or some other flash dressing hard man became total. So many of the popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock nation, as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England. It was a terrible time tobeyoung; but I of course loved it, lapped it up.
In late ‘72 I was launched by my dad on an intensive programme of self-improvement. Through home study and with the help of local private tutors I set about making up for the fact that I’d left school early at 16 with only two GCE (General Certificate of Education) exams to my name; at ordinary level, of course, which is why they were called “O” levels. I studied various martial arts at the Judokan in Hammersmith, west London. Among my fellow students were hard-looking young men who may’ve been influenced by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern, what with the cult of Bruce Lee and so on, some of them sporting classic ’70s feather cuts as I recall. Perhaps they’d seen Rod Stewart strutting around with one on Top of the Pops.
I also went to swimming classes at a local baths. I had a mad crush on one of my fellow pupils who looked a bit like a skinhead girl with a boyish crop which suited her angelically pretty features, and I think she beckoned to me once to come and be with her but I just stood there like a lemon, frozen to the spot. But my heart wasn’t in the swimming, and one of the teachers told me so, wondering why I was wasting my time even turning up. She had a point.
I learned to play basic Rock guitar from a shy sweet man who taught Rock guitar from his little house near the Thames in suburban Surrey, and whose short back and sides and baggy dad-style trousers belied a deep love of the rebel music of Rock’n'Roll. He taught me the basis of the Rock solo, which involved going up and down the Blues scale in whatever key you chose. I was an idle little skiver in this as in all things, but I probably learned more from that man about the guitar than anyone, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend called Steve, whose songs I stole with their simple chord progressions…C, A minor, F, G and back again to C and so on. And then there was Deep Purple’s “Black Night”, whose simple bluesy riff I’d once played to a pal at Pangbourne, at which point the kid turned to whoever else was present and announced something like: “Hey guys, we’ve got a natural here!”.
Then in late ‘72 I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment. At some point soon after this, it became clear to me that I’d been noticed for my angelic good looks. I think this came as a bit of a surprise, but I was flattered rather than offended, as if a seed of narcissism had somehow become implanted within me in late adolescence. I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of being good-looking before ‘72, because there’d been occasional comments about my looks by female friends of the family for some time, and I’d even been aware of being handsome as a very young child. But none of that had ever meant much to me. In my early to mid teens I’d been quite a typical boy in a lot of ways, friendly, feisty, self-confident and so on, but I’d never gone through a phase of finding girls drippy or whatever, infactfrom as far back as I can remember I’d been prone to falling hopelessly in love with them especially if they were somehow unattainable to me.
I was a born romantic, cherishing a grossly sentimental streak all throughout my teens that may’ve placed me at odds with my peers. While still only about fifteen and pretty thuggish for the most part I nonetheless was capable of becoming entranced by notorious weepies such as “South Pacific” which I saw with my mother at the cinema. John Schlesinger’s film version of the Thomas Hardy novel “Far from the Madding Crowd” which I saw at Pangbourne was another film that affected me very deeply indeed, too deeply perhaps for an adolescent boy and it may’ve been partly responsible for an obsession with lost love and high romantic tragedy that remains with me to this day.
I’d a dreamy almost mawkish side to my character even as an adolescent and this must surely have exerted some kind of influence on the course of my life. But in no way was I a typical delicate sheltered milquetoast, far from it. For this reason, to realise that I was perceived by certain other men as a pretty boy genuinely took me back, and I’d not seen it coming, although I can’t emphasise this enough, it was a source of delight to me, not shame. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was where it was at, and that was cool by me.
The cult of androgyny was a powerful force in the Britain of the early 1970s, and to a lesser extent all throughout the West, having been incubated by sixties Mod and then Hippie culture, and Rock acts as diverse as the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Doors, Alice Cooper and David Bowie. It’d been some ten years since this Rock’n'Roll child had first been confronted with male androgyny although subtly in the shape of the Beat groups of the Mod era, but by’73, certain Rock stars were flirting with out and out transvestisism in defiance of the Bible’s strict warnings about adopting the clothes and mannerisms of the opposite sex. In the mean streets of London and other big British cities, however, you still took your life into your hands if you chose to parade around like Bolan or Bowie, and therefore few did.
One of my big heroes as a boy had been all-American actor Steve McQueen, who incarnated an uncompromising tough guy cool. And yet in ‘73, many of my new idols were “prettier than most chicks” as Marc Bolan once described himself. I can only wonder what effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being, and the same goes for all of those who worshipped at the altar of Glam.
I fantasised about fame and adulation as a Rock or movie star as never before throughout the Glam era, and built an image based on David Bowie, spiking my hair like him, and even peroxiding it at some point. Not surprisingly then I didn’t fit in at all in my new home town, unlike my brother who was far more suited to the area than me with his strong cockney acccent and laddish ways, and he wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene centred mainly around football, traditional sport of the British working classes.
For my part, I came into my own in Spain, or rather Santiago de la Ribera on the Mar Menor near Murcia, where the family had been vacationing since about 1968. I think it was towards the end of my summer ‘73 holiday that I finally started to be noticed in a big way by the local youth, most from either Murcia or Madrid, and so la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my becoming a social being among members of both sexes. A large variable group of us became very close and remained so for four summers running.
Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties. It was really a great time, and probably signalled the start for me of a lifelong love affair with the Spain and the Spanish people, indeed with Latin and continental Europe as a whole.
In the early 1970s, everything seemed to be mine for the knowing, for the tasting, for the taking. It was a time of constant, frenetic change and I greedily eyed the fruits of a social revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf in the sixties. I was soon to feast on them…never once considering the welfare of those fated to follow in my wake, to come to maturity in a world in which baby-boomers like me had lately gambolled like so many senseless, sensuous fauns. Pity their poor souls.
t 
Photos: Pat Halling, 1940s?, Miss Ann Watt, 1940s?, C. 1950s, Mary, 1960s?, C. 1972, from http://flickr.com/carlhalling
1975?
