DULWICH, MUSIC AND THE SIXTIES
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My brother solved one problem: Pooh and the Ostrich Feather was the moniker selected. It might have been ‘Wing Commander Nixon and his Wheat Eating Bees’, but Pooh and the Ostrich Feather was already printed on the programme before my late brother also came up with the other name. Looking back, as the lead singer I think I’d rather have been
Phil, meanwhile, sporting a large black hat, played the entire thing with his back to the audience. But Phil, a man already with an eye to his future as a guitar god, appeared under an appropriately god-like name: Phil Manzanera (it being his Colombian mum’s maiden name). Charles drummed with his customary exuberance, whilst Dave quietly and efficiently got on with things. He played violin on one song (bugger me but we were avant-garde) whilst I plunked along with a one or two- note bass part. The final song was an original ditty composed by Phil and Charles, ‘Marcel my Dada’, a reference to Charles’s much-beloved Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp. And that was that. The audience seemed astonished, bored, or appalled. We, meanwhile, started to plan for inevitable stardom.
A MUSIC REVOLUTION(ISH) Clichés abound concerning the 1960s. A favourite is: ‘If you can remember the 60s you weren’t there’. Perhaps true in some quarters. Not, by my recollection, at Dulwich College. I remember it all, or think I remember it all. And quite clearly. In 1962 Philip Geoffrey Targett-Adams OBE (60-69) and I met at Dulwich for the first time. It was, then, a passing acquaintance. Author of the article Bill MacCormick (62-69)
a Wing Commander than a small talking (or singing in this case) bear. But there you go – can’t have everything. Back to bass players. Step forward one Dave Buckley
and Jon on guitars, moi on bongos and vocals. So, not quite the 100-watt Marshall stacks with all the trimmings as in our collective dreams. Things stuttered along until someone, no idea who, asked, “do you know Charles Hayward (61-71)?” Utterly baffled, the reply was , “who?” At Dulwich College knowledge of pupils outside one’s year group was minimal. Charles was two years younger and, therefore, might live on another planet (perhaps still does). Then it was mentioned he owned a very large Premier drum kit, with two bass drums in a garishly bright red glitter and, what is more, knew how to play them. Charles was in the band before he knew it. Invited round to Phil’s mum’s house in West Road, Clapham, he arrived with his dad in what I believe was the wonderfully British 1966 Morris Minor 1000 Traveller. An adaptation of the hugely popular and cheap Morris Minor, it was an estate with two large doors at the back and a wooden frame reminiscent of a Tudor house. Perhaps designed in the first Elizabethan era and built in the second, its main virtue was that it just about took all of Charles’s drum cases. These were hurriedly unloaded, transported upstairs, and set up in the front bedroom. The bongos were consigned to the dustbin of musical history. The band had a drummer. With Phil and a Hofner Galaxie electric guitar, there was a lead guitarist. And a poseur who thought he was a singer. A bass player was next on our shopping list. We also needed a name. Both were vaguely urgent as we’d submitted to the powers that be a request to perform at the Summer Miscellany, the annual Dulwich College summer event in the Great Hall designed to highlight the College’s elevated cultural atmosphere: string quartets, poetry recitals, choral performances, that sort of thing. It was attended by proud parents, teachers, and students, and was regarded as a highlight of the artistic calendar. Foolishly, the College agreed we could perform. We then panicked.
(62-70). We knew Dave a bit. Nice guy. Friend of another friend, Dave Price (61-69). Dave Buckley was one of those annoying folk musicians: perfect pitch and could make almost any instrument sound good. He played the trumpet. And the violin. And, it turned out, immediately made sense of the rudimentary bass parts for the material we planned to play. He was in, feet not touching the ground. By now, we were more aware of goings on in the Frisco Bay, especially at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium. Bands played accompanied by light shows with pulsating colours projected behind the musicians. And, if Jefferson Airplane sported a light show, then so must we! Thus, friend Tim Seaman (62-70), inspired by seeing Pink Floyd play at the Albert Hall on 12 December 1966, teamed up with Dave Price, and duly obliged. They raided the Science Block for overhead projectors, and, I may be wrong, experimented with cooking oil and food colouring, to provide a pulsing, squirming, amoeba- like liquid light show. Throw in a few moiré patterns and slides and it was a go. The unsuspecting audience was to get the full West Coast psychedelic experience. Without the LSD of course. Moving on, come the night, our set was strictly limited timewise. Three songs as I recall, one of which I cannot for the life of me remember. First up, a raucous version of Love’s ‘7 and 7 is’ culled from their album Da Capo released at the end of ‘66. Before the internet and lyric websites it was almost impossible to make out what words people were actually singing (eg Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ lyrics: “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” or, as some would have it, “Excuse me while I kiss this guy”). This applied here so I just mostly made shit up but did so with confidence, or perhaps brio, this being a musical reference. For example, the actual lyrics start: “When I was a boy, I thought about the times I’d be a man.I’d sit inside a bottle and pretend that I was in the can.” OK, so I heard the second line as: “I’d sit inside a bottle and pretend I was in a jam.” Which, I would venture, makes a tad more sense lyrically than Arthur Lee’s nonsense. Not a lot more. But some.
He was a boarder; I was a day boy. Other than our fathers meeting somewhere in South America sometime in the late 50s there was nothing to link us. Anyway, in the first term I was too busy to consider widening my circle of friends. Too busy practicing diving under the desk should the Cuban Missile Crisis of that October help the Cold War get ‘hotter’. Well, that was my excuse for doing no work. For the next four years I was at least consistent… In doing no work . That is, because a coincidental meeting of two mums led to another, far more important, thing getting in the way of dissecting worms in biology or conjugating redundant Latin verbs (or algebra! I mean, WTF use is that?). That ‘thing’ was music. Of the weird and obscure variety. In 1966 my mother met Honor Wyatt, both being teaching assistants at the prep school. Honor was the mum of one Robert Wyatt and Robert was the drummer/singer in what she described as a ‘pop group’. We were invited round for lunch, my mother and father were perplexed (perhaps, quietly horrified), my late brother Ian and I simply entranced (Ian being Ian MacDonald, founder of ‘Muse’ at the College, author of Revolution in the Head, and previous Assistant Editor of the NME). Then we saw Robert’s band, Soft Machine, play their first ever gig at a party in Kingston. ‘OMG!’, as I believe young people say nowadays. I wanted to be a rock and roll star. Fancying myself as West Norwood’s answer to Jim Morrison, I needed a band. Someone mentioned Mr Targett-Adams owned a shiny, red and white Hofner Galaxie electric guitar. Thus, one day, I sidled up to him somewhere on the North Gravel, or it could have been the Buttery. There, at first break, I was known to keep up my blood sugar levels until lunch with a cheese roll and an apple turnover (then more at 4.15p.m. when school finished, possibly a cream bun, and topped off with a ¼lb bag of wine gums for the walk home. I was a growing boy and needed such sustenance to see me through to dinner). Back to sidling. “Pssst. Wanna form a rock and roll band?” I may have whispered through the turnover’s crisp yet flaky pastry. To which Phil, looking down his nose and through his glasses, may well have replied: “Why not? Nothing better to do.” And thus is a musical dynasty was created… Or not. Drawn magnetically to one another by a shared fascination with the music revolution sweeping the nation, and rumours of weird shit going down in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, we were two wannabees in search of stardom. Our first attempts were barely fruitful. Recruiting a third prospective band member, one Jon Copeland (62-69) from Cheam, a few not very productive ‘rehearsals’ took place. Phil
L to R: Bill MacCormick, Dave Buckley and Charles Hawyard, Summer Miscellany 1968
Flushed with success we moved forward. Dave Buckley departed, others joined: Bob Lubran (61-69) on a home-made bass, and the soon-to-be-expelled Dick Hearn (61-68) on second guitar. Rehearsals took place at Charles’s parents’ house opposite Camberwell College of Art. The walls of a small corner room were covered with orange painted egg boxes. It was a small room, nay intimate. Five people, a very large drum kit, and various amps were squeezed in as we went through our expanding repertoire. To add to ‘ 7 and 7 is’ (proving we could add up) came Nick Gravenites’s ‘Born in Chicago’ (proving white public schoolboys could play the Blues), a slowed-down, extended version of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody to Love’ (proving we had imbibed the current psychedelic atmosphere if not anything actually psychedelic), and an even more extended version of Cream’s ‘Spoonful’ (proving we could be self-indulgent). There was other stuff, ‘Love me Two Times’ by The Doors for sure , but I’m buggered if I can remember the rest (except a version of ‘Crossroads’. No, not the theme from TV show about the eponymous motel. The classic by Cream from Wheels of Fire. Not sure I ever got the lyrics for that completely right either). Charles’s mum fed us royally (I was particularly fond of Mr Kipling’s Fruit Cake and could consume an entire one if no- one intervened. I was a growing boy…). His younger brother, Tony, might entertain us with some new artistic creation. His dad would quietly pass through from time-to-time beaming. And their boxer, Tarzan, would try to eat any of us caught in the hallway. Once, he almost devoured Bob Lubran, a shoe suffering significant damage before he, and it, were rescued by Charles. Bad doggy!
An historic document: The Summer Miscellany Programme, June 1968
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