If I look back, I can see two or three chance happenings in my early years that defined the course my life was to take. A meeting with a friend of my brother’s called Lionel, when I was thirteen, was the first.
I’d been trying for a while to get somewhere with playing quite an odd, junior-size guitar that my parents had given me for my eleventh birthday. My elder brother Martin had been playing for some time, with friends of his, but though he was always quite encouraging in a general sense, there wasn’t really a role for me in their group, so I had a bit of a lone struggle.
Lionel lived nearby. One day in the Autumn of 1964, he just happened to come round to our house, but Martin was out – although his guitar must have been leaning against a chair in the living room. Lionel was interested in folk music and, for whatever reason, he just decided to fill in the time as he waited for Martin by showing me a few things on the guitar – like how to play finger style, and how to play the introduction to The Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun”, that had been such a big hit that Summer (a sort of all-purpose beginners package, back in the day). And if Martin hadn’t been out that afternoon, or had come back earlier…..the whole story might never have happened.
As it was, I never looked back – or not until considerably later in life, anyway. I pestered my mother until they got me a proper guitar, my grandparents chipped in with a harmonica as their contribution, I made a harness – so I could play the two at the same time – out of a converted wire coat-hanger, and I was away, with a song about a fox and a goose, that was around at the time . It seems that at some point during the years that followed I conceived the idea, without telling anybody else, or even letting my conscious mind fully in on the plan, to live my life as a sort of amalgam of “The Autobiography of a Supertramp” (the life story of Welsh poet W.H. Davies, who went to America as a young man and spent many years riding the rails ), and what I had heard about the life of Woody Guthrie, the American folk artist. And after I’d paid my dues to the grand old British Education System, some eight years later, I went off like a lamb to the slaughter, and just did it.
If there was a problem at school, it was that the type of pupil I was, i.e. rather conservative, earnest and hard-working, didn’t fit so well with the type of musician I was trying to be, i.e. into contemporary folk and rock. My teachers were for the most part friendly and helpful to me, but it was quite clear that the chief impetus was concerned with me getting my arse up the M11 to Cambridge rather than getting myself a career as a busker-songwriter.
And when I did get to Cambridge, I suppose the truth is that I never properly settled in. Considering that I was, as far as I knew at the time, the first person in my family to get to Cambridge; and then taking stock of how proud they all were of me, and how encouraging they had always been along the way… well, I just couldn’t lightly walk away from it all. And of course, the knowledge that I had successfully competed for my place did give me something to be proud of, even if my music was going nowhere. So it was hard to resist the temptation to just immerse myself in the whole collective experience, on the vague assumption that something would work out at some point, rather than admit that I had lost my way, and get out of the gilded cage while there was still time.
Photographs by Matt Moon
I approach the years at Cambridge with more humility these days than before – time alters the perspective. It was clearly a golden opportunity for a young person to set themselves up for life. It’s just that I wasn’t that person. And I couldn’t see any way to fit in with, nor usefully contribute to, the situation I was in – nor indeed could I even get out of it, as I have already explained. I often feel sad it all went so wrong – though I hope anybody that I upset back then has recovered from it by now! A lot of water has passed under the bridge in the meantime, and today it seems to me that the years of chronic indecision, wasted though I used to consider them, were all but inevitable.
And so I want to conclude by recording that, at some point after I had started working with Bongo Mike – one of the most committed opponents of elitism and snobbery in art that you could ever hope to meet – he said to me that probably the main reason why he had been interested for me to join with him in distributing poems and playing music in the street was that when we’d first met, in a squat in Belsize Park in 1973, when I was homeless and jobless, I told him that I had been to Cambridge University. That’s how hard it is to escape the whole thing – I even got my job as a busker because I’d been to Cambridge!
And as a final afterthought on the subject with which I opened the post, the issue of life-defining chance happenings, I’d like to add that I actually became acquainted with the “Autobiography of a Supertramp” because an English teacher at Brentwood (Mr Brooks, affectionately known, for some obscure reason, as “Daddy Brooks”) read the book to us in its entirety, when we were in the 4th form…. And I find myself wondering if it ever crossed his mind that any of his pupils might be inspired to emulate the author.
The Story Of Situation Art 