The Modfather: My Life with Paul Weller

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  1. When I’m Young

  2. To Be Someone

  3. The Eton Rifles

  4. Going Underground

  5. Start!

  6. Absolute Beginners

  7. Precious

  8. Music For The Last Couple

  9. Just Who Is The 5 O’Clock Hero?

  10. The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow)

  11. Speak Like A Child

  12. A Paris

  13. Le Depart

  14. Shout To The Top!

  15. Walls Come Tumbling Down

  16. A Man Of Great Promise

  17. The Cost Of Loving

  18. It’s A Very Deep Sea

  Copyright

  About the Book

  When David Lines first heard This is the Modern World by The Jam, it sparked off a love affair that continues to this day. Paul Weller became the blueprint for David’s life, and he followed his music and his style with the fervour of a truly devoted fan – to the bemusement of his long-suffering family. At once disarmingly candid and hilariously funny, this is the story of what it means to have a hero, its pleasures and pitfalls. Illustrating his memoir with landmark songs from The Jam and The Style Council, David maps out the occasionally bizarre events in the life of an obsessive fan and wannabe writer.

  From Player’s Navy Cut to Gitanes, boating blazers to cashmere sweaters, The Modfather is about acquiring style, finding substance and living life with Paul Weller.

  About the Author

  David Lines was born in Nottingham in 1967. He has written for radio, stage and various newspapers and magazines. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and two daughters.

  For my Father

  Acknowledgements

  Heartfelt thanks to Susan Sandon, Justine Taylor and Ann Evans

  Looking back now, I don’t know what exactly it was that I was looking for, or indeed if I was looking for anything. What I do know, is that when I discovered The Jam, they changed my life forever. At the time, it seemed that before them there was nothing and once I’d found them – there was everything. Listening to Paul, Bruce and Rick was like unlocking a great, big door, opening it up and stepping out into the most glorious, blazing sunshine.

  What I didn’t realise was just how much my life would come to revolve around The Jam and how, overnight, it seemed my fixation with Paul Weller came to dominate my teenage years and could – at best – be described as unhealthy and at worst, obsessive. This is my story, it’s about my friends and my family, my haircuts, shampoo and shoes, music and modernism. It’s all about how I grew up with Paul Weller. This was my modern world – and you’re most welcome to join me in it.

  1

  When I’m Young

  SATURDAY MORNINGS WERE when it normally happened, I’d say about once every three or four weeks on average. I realise now it was an act of great love, although it didn’t feel like one at the time. When I was very little, I didn’t mind it at all, in fact I quite enjoyed it, but once I had turned ten and started to find myself becoming more conscious of the way I looked, it slowly became something I dreaded. I would carry a kitchen stool up the staircase, behind my father, as we made our way to the bathroom and I’d set it down on the floor, hop on and tightly shut my eyes. A cigarette burned in the ashtray on the windowsill and on the shelf next to it was a domestic collection of the tools of his trade, smaller and less extensive than those which were at the shop, but nevertheless impressive: a cut-throat razor, scissors, water spray, combs and a talcum-powder puffer which made a noise like a sigh when you squeezed it. I would sit as still as a statue until Dad’s work was done. ‘There you are, lad – a perfect short back and sides …’

  Once Dad stopped working Saturdays, that’s when he cut my hair. For years he worked with his dad, my Grampa Lines, in the family barber’s shop on The Avenue in West Bridgford, a leafy suburb of Nottingham. I was born on 15 February, 1967 (I’ve always regretted missing Valentine’s Day by a whisker). Mum had decided that with us three boys, that’s me and younger brothers Chris, aged seven, and Phil, five, it was high time Dad got a proper job, not just one where he got paid out of the till at the end of each day. So, after ten years, Dad left the family business and went to work as a sales rep for Pompadour, the hair care wholesaler, where he sold things like coconut oil shampoo and condoms, disposable razors, Brylcreem and Cossack hairspray which came in bright red aerosol cans with a fierce Russian horseman on the front. He sold this stuff to Grampa, who never really forgave him for going. Mum would ask, ‘Did you see your father today?’

  ‘Yes, Margaret, I did.’

  ‘And did he buy much stock from you?’

  ‘Now that you come to mention it, no.’

  My father’s name was Bill Lines and he was without doubt a sharp-dressed man. Six foot tall, slim, broad shoulders, olive skin, mohair suit and perfect, dark brown hair. He wore it short, with a side parting, shaved close into the nape of his neck and he was never without a Players Navy Cut on the go. He became a barber because his father was a barber. And his father became a barber because his father left him, as a baby, on the steps of a barber’s shop. The Pughs had no children of their own and they took him in, adopted him and raised him as their own. From the age of nine, he worked in the barber’s shop all the hours that God sent and when they died, they left it to him. At twenty-six he was his own businessman and Dad used to say that he wished it was that easy for all of us, but I never knew what he meant. I used to think that it couldn’t have been that easy for Grampa Lines, I mean, not knowing who your real parents were couldn’t have been that easy.

  It wasn’t until years later that I discovered why Grampa used to let Slack Alice live in his loft. It turned out that she was a distant Pugh and Grampa felt as if he owed her a roof. She was mad, and ate chocolate cake all day long.

  I used to walk past her door and there she was, through the crack in it, like something out of Hinge and Bracket. ‘Come inside, I’ve got a slice …’ One year she was arrested in the park for taking off all of her clothes and carting a young boy away under her arm. She went to hospital for a week and when she came back we were told never to mention it again. The day they let her out and she went back to Grampa and Granny’s I took a Lyon’s chocolate sponge cake up to her room, knocked and put it on the plate outside her door. ‘There’s cake outside if you want it.’ An hour later it was still there, completely untouched. Dad said she’d have leapt on it before she’d had her treatment. ‘Must have put an extra fifty pence in the meter and cranked the thing right up before they wired it up to her.’

  Dad told me about the one day that Slack Alice worked in the shop. Grampa asked her to add up some cheques. Fifteen minutes later he went into the tea room where she was and found her struggling to count on her fingers.

  ‘Have you added up those cheques yet?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There’s four of them.’

  In the evenings Dad sold insurance, riding around Bridgford on his scooter, seeing his clients and selling them policies. Occasionally he’d also drive cabs for Brown’s Bridgford Taxis, going straight from insurance on the scooter to cabbying in the car, and would work late through the night till the early morning light. The only way I could hear him before I went to sleep was for me to tune the radio to the short wave and listen out amongst the police band and the Gas Board.

  ‘Forty-two, forty-two, come in forty-two. You’ve got a wait and return from number eleven Pierpoint Road. Roger that, for
ty-two?’

  A crackle of radio static, then ‘Forty-two here. Roger that, base.’

  Underneath my covers I’d shine the torch close up to the speaker and whisper into it.

  ‘Goodnight, Dad. Drive safely and remember – I love you. Roger that?’

  Bedtime became fun when Dad wasn’t there at night, I used to get such a thrill out of secretly listening to him, picturing where he was going, imagining who he’d picked up. The next morning I’d play little games with him, never once letting on.

  ‘Did you pick up anyone famous last night?’

  ‘I did – Brian Clough. Had to pour him out of the pub – anyway, how did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t. Just asking …’

  Mum was ten years younger than Dad. She played Beatles records and smoked cigarettes on the top decks of buses; she painted her toenails in the garden, then stretched out on the sunlounger. She had beautiful Titian hair and sang songs when she was sewing or baking a cake. Uncle Nick (Mum’s big brother) and Auntie Gill, plus cousins Zoe and Kirsty lived in Bridgford too.

  Mum and Dad first met at the local tennis court and three months later, when she finally introduced him to her parents, Dad came face to face with a man whose hair he’d been cutting for the past eight years and who always bought ‘something for the weekend’ from him. Apparently he never did again. Thinking about it now, I’d hate to think that meeting my father put an end to Granny and Grampa Sewter’s sex life.

  One day Dad’s scooter went kaput. Because we didn’t have a car, this was a serious crisis, as it meant that his evening insurance job would be on hold till a replacement was found. It was simple really – with no transport, there was less money coming in. That week’s copy of Exchange and Mart came up trumps – there was a scooter advertised. Dad went to look at it and he liked it so much he bought it on the spot and rode it home. It was a very different sort of scooter, a Lambretta, and I was in awe of its grace and beauty. White, with a calfskin seat, three sets of chrome mirrors and a chrome rack on the back as well as red, white and blue tassels which hung from the handlebar grips. Whoever owned it before had loved it very much.

  ‘The chap I bought it off was at great pains to tell me it’s a scooter and not a moped, he made himself very clear about that.’

  Mum winked at Dad and said, ‘Very nice. Are you planning on riding down to Brighton at the weekend?’ He didn’t seem to understand. ‘Brighton? No, but I am thinking about going up to Leeds sometime soon.’

  Mum raised an eyebrow and asked why.

  ‘Nothing for you to worry about …’

  We put it down to his job with Pompadour and left it at that. Dad kick-started his scooter and the thing purred, not like his old one which sort of coughed-up phlegm before it got going, and Dad set off. I ran down the drive and watched him scooter away into the distance. He looked like a god on that thing.

  The next day I went straight to the local bike shop. Oil and rubber filled the air, and I had the contents of my piggy bank in my hot little fist. The last time I was there was in the autumn when Dad brought me in to buy a new saddlebag to keep conkers in. The same man who sold us the saddlebag appeared.

  ‘Can I help you, son?’

  ‘How many chrome mirrors can I buy with six pounds and fifteen pence?’

  It turned out that I could buy four mirrors, which was two sets, a whippy aerial and a roll of black and white chequered sticky tape exactly the same as on Dad’s scooter. I pedalled home as fast as I could, fitted the mirrors and the aerial and stuck tape on the front forks and then I looked just like my dad.

  * * *

  On Thursday nights I’d cling for dear life to Dad. I’d be on the back of the Lambretta and we’d zoom our way round to Grampa Lines. It was the same every Thursday, Spot the Ball night. Dad and Grampa would sit hunched over the grainy, black and white picture in the Evening Post. Grampa would get his massive magnifying glass out and Granny Lines would busy herself in the tiny kitchen, warming her pot. Dad and Grampa had been trying to guess where the football was every Thursday night since before I was born.

  Suddenly, Grampa threw back his head and leaned in with the glass. He looked just like Sherlock Holmes. ‘Bill, look closely – I think we may very well have found it …’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There. Above that bloke’s bobble hat in the second row. Next to that troublemaker with the long hair. Needs a damn good short back and sides.’

  Dad said, ‘The one who looks like Barry Sheene?’

  ‘If you say so. Him, anyway.’ Grampa circled the spot with a thin finger.

  We never did win. Dad opened that paper every Saturday and always said the same thing.

  ‘Bugger. That was a close one, that was. We were just a hair’s breadth out …’

  The week that Granny Lines died we all cried buckets. She was lovely, and I knew that she was poorly but I didn’t know she was that poorly. I used to help her sweep up the hair in the shop and she was always telling me not to open the sterilising cabinet. ‘Don’t look inside there – you’ll go blind.’

  Dad took Chris, Phil and I to see her the Saturday before she died. Granny was in bed, propped up on pillows with her silver hair held back off her bony face with clips. An oak ashtray shaped like an enormous chess piece stood by the side of the bed and Granny was as white as the Senior Service pinched between her lips, and probably just as thin. She reached inside her handbag, took out her purse and threw three fifty-pence pieces at us. They didn’t get far, not past the end of the bed. Dad plucked them from the camberwick bedspread and handed us one each.

  ‘Bill, make sure they buy something nice, won’t you. Let the boys get themselves some sweets. They like sweets, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, Mum. They like sweets. Say thank you to Granny, you three.’

  We did, and Chris and Phil raced off to the newsagent’s on the corner and came back ten minutes later with paper bags full of Refreshers and Cola Bottles, CurlyWurlys and red liquorice laces. I didn’t, I was saving my money for different laces which would come in a pair of suede shoes, just like Dad’s.

  We never saw Granny again. But we did see her handbag, because Grampa had taken to carrying the thing around with him all day long. I loved Grampa, but I didn’t love him nearly as much when he started carting dead Granny’s handbag everywhere. It was incredibly embarrassing. He took his lunch to the shop in it, the takings to the bank in it and at the end of each day he bought a bottle of Scotch and took that home in it too. I knew this because I’d heard Mum and Dad talking about it one morning when I was getting ready for school.

  ‘Bill, you’ve got to talk to him about his drinking. Your father’s going to the shop half-pissed every morning – if he’s not careful he’ll have some poor sod’s ear off …’

  * * *

  It was the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. I was excited because we’d been doing a project about it at school when they announced on the news that the Queen was coming to visit West Bridgford. I told Mum that I didn’t know that where we lived was so important, and she told me that it wasn’t and that the Queen was visiting everywhere in the country and anyway, she’d have to meet Brian Clough so maybe she wouldn’t come after all.

  It was the day of the street party and, even though it was a Friday, we were all in our Sunday best. Everyone from Selby Road was there, as well as some characters I’d never seen before. They had brightly coloured hair, pink, blue and green which stood up in huge spikes on top whilst the rest of their heads were shaved bald. They wore safety pins through their noses and had menacing-looking chains which hung from their trousers. They drank beer out of cans and to me – and everyone else – they may as well have come from another planet. One of them had painted ‘God save the Queen’ on the back of her biker jacket. Irony had yet to enter my orbit, and I’d never even heard of The Sex Pistols. These punks looked frightening to me, but they had something about them which I liked, some sort of bravado, some sort of style.

  Grampa Lines w
as right next to them, eating a piece of flapjack and carrying his handbag. He was just standing there, two feet away, just staring at them like animals in a cage at the zoo. I got the feeling that they might turn at any minute.

  ‘Mum, who are those people and what are they doing here?’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘Those people. The ones over there.’ Mum told me not to point because it was rude.

  ‘Oh, you mean the dodgy ones with the funny coloured hair?’

  ‘Yes, the ones with the hair.’

  Mum knelt down and whispered in my ear. ‘The one with the purple rinse is Mrs Gregg and the one with the bright blue hair is her sister. Don’t worry, I can’t see them causing any trouble – they haven’t got a single hip between them.’

  Grampa Lines sidled over looking all handbag and disgusted. ‘I’ve never seen anything so disgraceful. Have you seen the state of their hair? There should be a law against it.’

  Mum winked at me and Grampa went on. ‘It shouldn’t be allowed, it’s upsetting to look at and it’s disrespectful to the Queen. I’ve a good mind to go and say something, go and give them a piece of my mind.’

  I said, ‘I know, what with it being the Jubilee you’d have thought she’d have kept her hair silver instead of dyeing it blue.’

  Grampa was not impressed. ‘Don’t be disrespectful to your elders – Mrs Gregg’s husband lost both his feet last week.’

  That shut me up, but only for a minute. ‘Really, Grampa? I didn’t know that they came off.’

  He gave me a quick clip round the ear and as I winced and turned my head I saw Dad running down the street towards us at breakneck speed. I remember thinking what a weird sight that was. I’d never seen him running before and, thinking about it now, I don’t think that I ever saw him doing it again. He wasn’t the sort to get involved in that sort of thing.

  Dad ran like mad and waved at the same time and when he got to us he was almost completely out of breath. He smoothed down his hair and gave Mum a peck on the cheek. ‘Where’s Chris and Phil?’