Stories We Could Tell

But Ray was at that awkward age. He looked different to the other boys and girls. His hair was still cut in a brutal short back and sides, he was wearing grey flannel short trousers and a short-sleeve white nylon shirt, and he was still sporting the tie and blazer of his old school.

It was the summer of 1969, and Ray Keeley was dressed like Harold Macmillan.

Although his new classmates also wore a nominal school uniform, compared to Ray they were Carnaby Street peacocks.

Long hair curled dangerously over the collars of paisley shirts, or it was cropped to the point of baldness. School ties had knots thick enough for Roger Moore. Many of the girls had hiked their regulation skirts up to just below their knickers of regulation navy blue. And lounging right at the back of the class, there were boys in pink shirts.

Pink shirts! On boys! Flipping heck!

Ray had been in England for a month. Nowhere had ever felt less like home.

‘Ray is from Hong Kong where his father was in the police force,’ announced the teacher. She picked up a ruler and slapped it twice against a map of the world. ‘Now, who knows what Hong Kong is?’

The class chanted as one, making Ray jump. ‘One of the pink bits, miss!’ ‘And what are the pink bits?’ ‘The pink bits are ours, miss!’

But Ray felt that nothing belonged to him – not the Chinese place they had left behind, or the army bases in Cyprus and Germany where his family had lived before that, and certainly not this strange suburban town where the boys and girls were dolled up as if they were going to a fancy-dress party.

A skinhead child was assigned to look after Ray but deserted him as soon as the bell went for morning playtime.

On the far side of the playground Ray could see his big brother John kicking a ball around with some of the lads. His kid brother Robbie was running in circles with a pack of little fellows, giggling like crazy. Ray stood there, not knowing where to go, what to do, or even where to put his hands. But then something happened that changed everything.

Someone started singing.

It was the chorus from ‘Hey Jude’. On and on. Voices joined in. And then there was another chant – the opening bars of ‘All You Need Is Love’.

The children kept on playing. The football and gossip didn’t stop, did not even pause for breath. The conkers and hopscotch continued. But they sang as they played.

There were more tunes, more chants – yeah, yeah, yeah – ‘She Loves You’ – and more children raising their voices in these songs that they all knew better than any hymn, better than the National Anthem.

Songs they had grown up singing, the soundtrack to all those Sixties childhoods. It was only the Beatles. Always the Beatles. As if the times that these children grew up in began and ended with John, Paul, George and Ringo. And soon the entire playground was singing and Ray Keeley stepped out among them, his senses reeling, surrounded by the music, and a world unlike any he had known before. A world of shared feelings.

Years later he wondered if he had imagined it all – the first day at the strange school, the desperate attempt to hold back the tears, the sight of his big brother playing football with his new friends somehow underlining Ray’s loneliness, and then out of nowhere the playground full of children singing Beatles songs. Certainly he never saw it happen again.

But he knew that it was real. He knew that it had really happened. He had felt it. The magic that can set you free.

And sometimes Ray felt like his entire life was about trying to get back to that moment, to recover that day when suddenly it didn’t matter that he knew no one and his clothes were all wrong, that schoolyard in 1969 where the children sang, na-na-na, yeah-yeah-yeah and love-love-love, love is all you need.

The office wasn’t empty. Ray should have known. Their office was never quite empty.

Music thundered from inside the review room, making the panel of glass in the door rattle. Ray pressed his face against the glass and saw that Skip Jones was in there. He would probably be in there all night, writing the lead album review for next week’s issue. By hand.

Despite all the modern red plastic Olivettis in the office, Skip Jones always chose to write by hand. You would see him in odd empty corners of the office, or in the review room, his long giraffe like limbs hunched over a tatty notebook, and the fact that he was left-handed and had to wrap his hand around his leaky Biro made the process seem all the more awkward and tortured and strange.

Yet Skip Jones still wrote the pants off everyone else at The Paper, effortlessly constructing this cool, pristine, sceptical prose that seemed perfect for the age, and he was the closest thing The Paper had to a legend.

Ray hated to disturb Skip Jones. But if anyone knew where Lennon would be tonight, it was Skip. He paused, working up the courage. Then Ray let himself into the review room with a diffident smile, his hair falling forward.

Skip didn’t notice him at first. He was lost in the music, consumed by his writing, surrounded by a forest of dead cigarettes that he had half-smoked and then carefully stood on their filter tips, allowing them to burn down to a bendy cone of ash.

Ray watched him work, wondering what the music was – twin lead guitars, a world-weary nasal vocal that was completely contemporary, but with a dreamy quality that was out of step with what was going on.

Ray loved to watch Skip work. It restored his faith, it made him feel that they were doing something worthwhile and important. Watching Skip made Ray feel that the music hadn’t died.

Skip leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette and noticed Ray. He grinned and motioned him further into the room, not quite making eye contact for, while Skip Jones was the best writer at The Paper, he was the shyest man in the world. Looking you in the eye was Skip’s personal Kryptonite. Ray smiled gratefully and pulled up the room’s other chair.

‘Ray Keeley,’ Skip said. ‘Wild.’

Skip handed him the cover of the album he was reviewing. Marquee Moon by Television. Ray shook his head – never heard of it. Skip closed his eyes and nodded emphatically, indicating that this was the real deal.

‘Man, what’s the biggest selling album of the year?’ Skip said.

‘Don’t know,’ Ray said. ‘I guess it’s still Hotel California.’

‘Wild,’ Skip smiled, carefully standing his newly lit cigarette on its filter tip. ‘Laurel Canyon cowboys – cod country that the Byrds did first and harmonies that the Beach Boys did better.’ He chuckled, and Ray laughed along with Skip, even though he had always been quite fond of the Eagles, and it felt like a bit of a betrayal. ‘Well, sorry, boys – Television are going to kick your LA arses all the way back to the dude ranch.’

Ray’s eyes shone with admiration. He thought that Skip Jones looked like a buccaneer. A buccaneer who had been shipwrecked with Keith Richards and a big bag of drugs.

Skip was freakishly tall, alarmingly thin, deathbed white, and if you had seen him loping by, a stack of albums stickered with the words Promotional Copy Only: Not For Sale under his arm and about to be sold, you might have thought he was a homeless person, or a genius who could not live as mere mortals did. You would have been right on both counts.

On the rare nights when he actually went to bed, Skip Jones slept on a succession of sofas and floors across north and west London. Skip often lacked a home, but never a roof. Too many people worshipped him.

By day, Skip lurked in whatever spare corner of The Paper was free – he had no office of his own, and didn’t want one – that’s how totally rock and roll Skip was. He seemed to embody the very essence of the music. And on crumpled notepads, scraps of paper, the backs of press releases and the inside of empty cigarette packets, Skip wrote – by tormented hand, in laborious, cack-handed pencil – the most glittering words about music that anyone had ever read.

Skip was wearing the only clothes he seemed to own – torn black leather trousers, a red leather biker’s jacket and the kind of ruffled blouson that might be suitable if you found yourself fighting a duel with rapiers at dawn. He wore these elegant rags every day, in every kind of weather. Ray thought Skip looked like some kind of rock-and-roll cavalier, when everyone else was a roundhead.

Skip’s trousers were ripped at the crutch and sometimes at editorial meetings his meat and two veg were given an unexpected airing. Hardened rock chicks who thought nothing of giving head to a member of Dr Feelgood backstage at the Rainbow blushed to the roots of their dyed hair, but Skip was oblivious.

When he walked through the streets of London, rough boys with feather cuts and diamond-motif tank tops and flared jeans flapping above their steel-capped boots lobbed rocks at him. The wide world scorned him as a freak. But at the paper, Skip was revered. It wasn’t just Ray. Leon loved Skip. Terry loved Skip. He was the reason they all wanted to work for The Paper.

Skip Jones had started writing for The Paper when he was a bleary-eyed dropout from Balliol and the youngest writer on Oz, and his waspish reflections on the music’s glorious dead – Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Nick Drake – and walking wounded – Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Iggy Pop, Dag Wood – did more than anything or anyone to help Kevin White drag The Paper from underground rag to mainstream music magazine.

‘You like the new bands?’ Skip said. ‘Not your thing, right?’

Ray smiled politely. He didn’t really have to explain anything to Skip. Skip understood.

‘I like them,’ Skip said. ‘Some of them. But what they’re doing, what they’re devoting their careers to, Eddie Cochran did in less than two minutes. Check it out, man. “Summertime Blues” – one minute fifty-nine. They want back to basics? Eddie Cochran did it first. And you can’t slag off the old guard when you’re stealing their riffs. I mean, where did the Clash lift the riff for “1977”?’

‘The Kinks,’ Ray said. ‘“You Really Got Me”.’

Skip smiled slyly. ‘So what are you into these days? Not Led Zeppelin?’

‘My brother liked all that. I liked – I don’t know – the folky stuff they did. You know, “Tangerine,” “White Summer/Black Mountain Side”’.

Ray didn’t say that his brother had died and the records were gathering dust in a bedroom that his parents had locked. He didn’t tell Skip Jones that. They didn’t talk about their lives. Every conversation they had was about music. Ray supposed that Skip must have a family somewhere. But he never mentioned them. Over the din of the music, what they talked about was music.

‘Big Joni Mitchell fans, Page and Plant,’ Skip said. ‘Everyone ignores that. But if you like that acoustic side of Led Zeppelin, you got to check out some of those folk boys. Davy Graham. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, the Pentangle boys. Leo Kottke. John Fahey – a mad genius, the acoustic Hendrix. And John Martyn. You know John Martyn? He’s our Dylan. Don’t be put off because the guy’s got a beard, man.’

‘Beards don’t bother me,’ Ray said, struggling to commit the names to memory. He had to listen to these people. There was great music out there that he had never even heard of.