Month: January 2019

I went to a catholic, all-boys school in North London. We often had fun, but it meant no regular contact with females for me, from the age of 11 until I left at 17. What a disaster! Right through puberty. As if that wasn’t weird enough, I’ve only seen two or three of my old school friends since I left. But I didn’t make any effort to meet up with anybody and neither did they. On the other hand, we had no telephone while I lived at home. My parents installed one only after I had moved out, so no easy way to keep in touch. The kids at school were also spread all over North London as it was the only school of its kind. We mostly didn’t live close to each other and rarely met outside school.

The head teacher was a large priest and several of the regular teachers were also priests. A couple of them were even pretty good. One of them was rumoured to be a pedofile, but he was old and thankfully I had no personal experience of him. I have fond memories of being beaten by the head teacher with a thick leather strap on the backside on a few occasions for minor offences. I may not have been St. Philip but was not a bad kid either. I was also threatened with the police by him one time when I was caught with a golf ball that I had found in the street. I was only 11 or 12 at the time and I was scared to death. Apparently, balls were regularly stolen from the local driving-range. But not by me!

Some of the other teachers were quite extreme in the violence department too. Names like Levy, O’Shea, Wilkins and Linnane spring to mind and they all had their “specialities”. Linnane liked lifting us by the short hair on the side of our heads, Levy used the edge of a ruler to hit boys’ fingers and Wilkins favoured a gym shoe on the backside. All of it painful. O’Shea was big, angry and frightening. It makes me chuckle now to think about it and it was comical in a way. 15 years after I left school I told my father about those punishments and he couldn’t believe it. If I’d told him at the time, he said he would have gone to the school and punched their lights out! He might have been able to sort the short Wilkins’ out, but O’Shea or Linnane? Probably not.

Why did I go to that school? Well, it was a “grammar” school, with focus only on academic subjects. In which I frankly had little interest. My focus was on guitars from the age of 10 and I cared little for physics, chemistry and mathematics. The alternative “comprehensive” school was closer to home, more vocational, and mixed (boys and girls!). I’ve often thought that would have been better for me personally, but the grammar school was what was expected of me. And what’s more important than making your parents happy? Doh! On the other hand, I may have been even more bored going to the comprehensive. 

In my final year at school I would arrive at 9:00 am, register in class, then often leave to do something else. Once I even climbed out of the toilet window by the chemistry lab to escape. I ran up the hill to the street with my school bag hiding my face from the teacher. But the consequence of not doing any work during the school year was that I was not permitted to sit the exams in most subjects. And if you don’t sit the exam, or fail in every subject, you can end up leaving school with nothing. As if you’d had no schooling at all. After repeating my final year, I had passes in English Literature, English Language and Art. That was it. All other subjects, it was as if I’d done nothing for seven years. But I really didn’t care, and I suppose I was a bad boy that final year. Strangely enough, though I left with almost no qualifications, a lot of what I was forced to learn stayed with me. Both math and chemistry have been useful. And French!

“My Old School” is from the Steely Dan album Countdown to Ecstacy. Killer guitar work from Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and this is one I often go back to.

My mate Paul and I headed for the west of England in his blue, short-base, 1200 cc, VW beach buggy. Very lightweight and very speedy! We looked forward to a two week summer holiday in St. Ives. A tiny, charming fishing village on Cornwall’s north coast.  I was still 9 years away from getting a driver’s license, so as always, Paul was in the driver’s seat. We travelled through the night, westward from London and crossed the country on empty, unlit roads. There was no motorway.

The only drama we encountered on the journey was passing fields of corn in a soft-top car with no windows. We captured thousands of tiny flies which landed in drifts in the back of the buggy. These we scooped out in handfuls. And on the radio, one item of interest showed up in the middle of the night: Jan Akkerman’s high-velocity guitar playing on “Hocus Pocus”, by the Dutch band Focus. We’d never before heard anything like that.

At that time St. Ives was known for being a hippy-magnet and we naively wanted to be a part of it. I imagined conversations on peace and love and on music and I fantasized about meeting pretty hippy girls. But in reality there was none of that. In fact I don’t think we spoke to anybody apart from each other during those two weeks. The only people I saw that might have been hippies sat tightly together on the pier in St. Ives doing nothing, mostly looking bored. Cool! And there were never more than 20 of them.

The very first pub we visited in the center of the village was packed with people. Mostly men of course. We queued for 15 minutes to buy a couple of pints, but when we reached the bar we were immediately asked to leave. “We don’t serve longhairs in here!” On the way out we saw a hand-written sign saying the same thing, which we’d missed. We were unlucky choosing that dump as our first stop, but we found places that could live with the horror of long hair. Apart from warming soup outside our tent and getting sunburnt, the most memorable event of those two weeks was a concert with bluesy power trio The Groundhogs.

We’d been listening to The Groundhogs for a while, since their third album Thank Christ For The Bomb came out. That album is now mistakenly called “Thanks Christ…” on Spotify. Very naughty! They had a lot of success, especially with their fourth album, Split, which includes the muscular “Cherry Red”. Tony (TS) McPhee was the main man; guitarist, singer and songwriter. The TS is short for Tough Shit (really), and that’s no exaggeration if you check out “Cherry Red”.

Tony was backed by Pete Cruickshank on bass and Ken Pustelnik on drums at that time, but there were very many personnel changes over the years. As late as 2011 Cruickshank and Pustelnik still played in The Groundhogs Rhythm Section and McPhee was active live until 2014, despite having had a stroke 5 years previously. Still well worth a listen!

This is not about Langley Park. Or Memphis. But I needed a soundtrack. Instead it’s about trips to Atyrau, Kazakhstan and Perth, Australia. And an unlikely connection between the two.

In 2006 a customer summoned me to Kazakhstan to discuss a problem that had arisen with a product. It wasn’t easy to get there and took a couple of days as I first had to visit Oslo to get a visa. After half a day in Oslo, I flew to Amsterdam, then to Almaty in Kazakhstan. Not too far from the Chinese border. Then I flew back across the country via a couple of other small towns before landing in Atyrau. An unbelievable 18 hour trip – from Amsterdam.

I was also warned to stay awake at each airport stop, as sleeping increased the risk of stolen baggage. I arrived exhausted in Atyrau. An American, George, who worked for a very large service company, picked me up at the airport. He took me to the first of several meetings that day. They started and ended with Kevin, the scary Scots Quality Control manager. He may have been a great guy in a social context, but earlier George had told me that Kevin scared everybody, so I was wary. George was loosening me up for that first meeting.

The afternoon and evening passed in a blur of meetings. I finally got to bed around midnight after one beer and a few thin strips of pizza in a pub with George. I was starving and I don’t recall getting anything at all to eat during the day. I asked the hotel receptionist to wake me at 5 am and order a taxi to take me to the airport. But instead he woke me at 2 am and I have no clue why he did that.  Not enough English to distinguish between 5 and 2? Before I realised what time it was, I had put my head under a cold shower to wake me up. The shock of that, combined with lack of sleep and stress gave me an atrial fibrillation (for about the 20th time). Of course I felt like shit. I managed to get a couple more hours sleep and at 5 am went down to the waiting taxi. I asked the driver to take me to the nearest hospital. “Oh, you mean the clinic?” was the driver’s reply. Clinic? I got him to take me to the airport instead.

The Atyrau airport building was an unpainted wooden shack. A few uniformed guards with large-brimmed hats and about 30 other men waited for the plane to Amsterdam. There was nowhere to sit, so I stood and composed a letter of resignation to my boss (which was never delivered). On arrival in Amsterdam, my crawling pace between the terminals felt endless. But I didn’t dare ask for help as I suspected they wouldn’t let me travel if they knew I was unwell. I wanted to get home. A few hours later a taxi picked me up at Arlanda airport in Stockholm and the driver dropped me at the hospital in Gävle. Close enough. I spent a total of 15 mind-boggling hours in Atyrau.

My tour of Australia in 2010 was a little longer: 12 days split between Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. One of the companies I visited in Perth was the same as George’s that I’d visited with in Kazakhstan. Nothing strange about that. They have more than 100 000 employees, spread thinly around the globe. The guy my colleague and I were to see was not keen on seeing us at all as he’d heard about our little problem in Kazakhstan. But what he didn’t know was how we solved it. So I spent an hour dropping names (scary Kevin, his brother Ben, Scott, George and a couple of others). I explained exactly how we turned it around. I had every detail on my laptop and he knew, or had heard of all the people I mentioned. Finally, instead of throwing us out, which was his first thought, he gave us a healthy order for goods he needed. It was quite satisfying, a revenge of sorts and the cherry on top of my one and only Australia visit. And the order paid for both trips.