The Modfather: My Life with Paul Weller Read online

  ‘Granny Sewter’s taken them to throw wet sponges at the vicar.’

  ‘They’ll like that – but not as much as he will.’

  Grampa Lines scuttled over to Dad. ‘I was just saying, Bill, I was just saying, it’s absurd the way those louts look, it’s not attractive to look at. There must be something wrong inside their minds. What kind of healthy mind walks around looking like that?’ This, coming from a man carrying a lady’s handbag full of flapjack.

  Mum rolled her eyes and Dad smiled back, weakly.

  Grampa found another high horse and got back on. ‘If the police are allowing animals like that lot to roam the streets of Bridgford, God alone knows what they’re getting up to in the inner cities.’

  Dad went a slightly yellow colour and suddenly found his cufflinks fascinating.

  ‘Eh, Bill? I say, if they’re like this here now, what’s going on elsewhere?’

  Dad lit a cigarette and ran his hand through his hair. He looked scared. ‘I’ll let you know, Dad. We’re moving to Leeds.’ Behind his head the bunting fluttered, all red, white and blue and deep in my stomach a thousand butterflies broke free.

  That trip to Leeds which Dad had mentioned wasn’t to sell shaving foam: it was for an interview. He’d got the job as a sales rep for AMF Clarbro, a company which made machines for the clothing industry. Our lives were going to be turned upside down. But not for almost eight months: Dad had to complete three months’ probation, then there was a delay to his start date because the person he was replacing was staying on longer before he left, and then there was the task of finding our new house. By the time we were ready to go I was eleven, and had started ‘big school’ at West Bridgford Comprehensive. I fitted in well, liked the teachers and my new fellow pupils. I did not want to go.

  We were in the kitchen. Chris, Phil, Mum and Dad and I were all scrunched up around the Formica table. Tea was finished and the plates cleared off the table and replaced by an AA road map of Great Britain. Dad took the top off a red biro and drew a small circle. He prodded a dot in the centre of it and said, ‘Right, that’s where we are now.’

  Chris sucked thoughtfully on a banana and toffee Chuppa Chup – he was rarely seen without one. He gave it a lick and asked, ‘And where are we going to, Dad?’

  Dad turned two pages and hunted around for a bit then drew another circle. ‘There,’ he said.

  At the time, it felt flicking through those two pages was like flying across continents. The distance between here and there looked like a lifetime, and little Phil started crying. Chris stuck his lolly in Phil’s mouth and it did the trick. All of a sudden I felt consumed by fear. ‘But Dad, where is Leeds?’ I whined.

  Dad lit a Players and jabbed again at the map. ‘It’s here, lad. In Yorkshire,’ and he blew smoke towards the open back door.

  ‘Will we need passports? Yorkshire’s not in Nottingham, is it?’ Chris asked.

  I could tell this wasn’t going as well as Dad planned. He answered, trying to stay calm, ‘No, we’ll only need passports if we were going abroad, leaving the country. And we’re not leaving the country, we’re only going an hour and a half up the bloody road.’

  I was not convinced, and asked, ‘Which road?’

  Mum straightened her skirt and lit one of Dad’s fags. She flicked her hair back and picked mascara from the corner of one eye before trying to put us at ease. ‘The M1. Look, kids – your Dad and I have talked this thing through till we’re blue in the face and we know we’re doing this for the best. Your Dad’s got a great new job, a smart new car and we can live in a bigger house. We’re moving on, and it’ll be fun. Believe me.’

  I didn’t believe her and my head span at the thought. ‘I don’t like Yorkshire pudding,’ I said, then asked, ‘What will happen to Grampa Lines?’

  Mum shot back with ‘He’ll be all right – he’s got his Scotch,’ and right away, by the look on Dad’s face I could see just how much she regretted saying it. I helped set the table for dessert, and after about ten minutes Mum had another try at helping Dad convince us. ‘Your Dad’s somehow – and don’t ask me how – managed to make a great chance for us all and we’d be daft as brushes not to take it. I know that moving away’s a hard thing to do, but we’ve just got to grin and bear it. It’ll mean he can swap his scooter for a real Austin Maxi and, frankly, that’s good enough for me. There’s even talk of a tow bar …’

  I couldn’t help repeating what Grampa Lines had been saying about Leeds. ‘Good. We’ll need it up there to help bring in the coal.’

  Mum’s lips tightened. ‘Don’t you go listening to your Grampa Lines. It’s not all pits and ponies up there, you know. I even read that Leeds city centre’s getting its own Chelsea Girl.’

  ‘But I’m a boy,’ I protested.

  ‘That’s not what I mean, David, and you know it. Leeds isn’t the end of the world, not by a long chalk.’ So that was it. We were moving to Leeds. Dad spent the next three months working up there at the head office and the four of us prepared ourselves for the jolt. I almost gave up listening to the police band on the radio what with Dad no longer cabbying at night, but the exciting bug of eavesdropping had burrowed too far underneath my skin ever to leave, and to this day I still get a thrill from overhearing a secret snippet on someone’s shortwave.

  I can remember when Dad brought home a photograph of the house. It was the first time any of us had seen what it was like. Mum said that it was nice knowing where we were going to be living. From her tone I knew that she’d have liked for us all to have gone and seen it before Dad bought it.

  Mum was in the kitchen and I’d just got home from school. It was my last week as we were due to move on Saturday. ‘Mum, I need to ask you something.’

  She stopped whisking up Angel Delight and switched Kate Bush off the radio. ‘What’s up, soldier?’

  ‘It’s something I’ve heard about Dad. Something Ralph Steele said about him.’

  There was a look on her face and she didn’t like the way this was going; maybe it was my imagination playing tricks on me, maybe it was nothing. ‘What? What have you heard?’

  ‘Ralph Steele said that Dad is a mod because the scooter has mirrors all over it and he said that his dad says that all mods are bum boys. Mum, what’s a mod? And what’s a bum boy?’

  I could sense Mum’s relief when my question turned out to be something silly, and she smiled to herself and switched the radio back on. ‘I’ve got no idea what a bum boy is, darling. And your father rides a scooter because he does, he just does. He used to be a barber, that’s why he’s got a smart haircut and he’s always liked to wear a decent suit. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he has to ride to the seaside at weekends and hit strangers over the head with a deckchair. Understand?’

  ‘Not really, Mum, no. Do they have mods and bum boys in Leeds?’

  ‘I have no idea. And anyway, now your Dad’s got the company car he won’t need the scooter – he’s selling it to the bloke taking over his insurance run. Now, go and clean your rabbit hutch out, there’s a good boy.’

  We moved up to Leeds five days later. Ninety-three Fairburn Drive was our new home. It was a three-bedroomed detached house, on a corner with a low wall all the way round. Behind that was the second line of defence, a row of conifers no higher than three feet. The house had a slightly larger garden than the old one, and the front of it was pink pebble-dash. There was a nice front garden, too, with roses and neatly kept beds. Inside, it was like the house in Bridgford, except where there had been a sitting room, there was now a lounge that led through to the dining room, and beyond that, French windows which opened onto a small patio and the lawn. I liked it. Across the road from us were three large, square grassed areas. I watched the local kids playing football on them and wondered when I’d summon up courage to get to know them all. I had a single bedroom to myself at the front of the house, and Chris and Phil shared a bunk bed in the double room at the back of the house. Ours was the nicest looking one on the estate, whic
h must have been built in the sixties.

  * * *

  In Bridgford, the house which we left behind was a quarter of the way up a road a mile long. The higher up you went, the bigger and more stately the houses became. At the very top of Selby Road the houses were like mansions, with massive iron gates; one even had a pool. Despite us being near the bottom of the road it was still a lovely place to grow up. It had a warmth, a kindness to it, and if it sounds like I’m peering back through the kaleidoscope of nostalgia – I’m not. West Bridgford was homely and Garforth was an alien landscape. Garforth had council estates not far from ours, where windows were replaced by boards and it was intimidating even to walk past them sometimes. The people were different there. They looked different and they sounded different and all I wanted was to be back in Bridgford. That wasn’t going to happen – I just had to get on with it.

  New School. Never have two words struck such fear into the heart of an impressionable and sensitive eleven-year-old boy. Especially when that new school was almost a hundred miles away in some strange and distant land called Yorkshire. Garforth Comprehensive looked like a prison. To be more precise, it looked like the H-block. A cold hard slab of institutionalised concrete surrounded by acres of warm, green playing fields, the school appeared to me like an almighty visiting spaceship which had simply landed in the middle of a field. Only once inside, I was the alien. To the front of it was the concrete playground, accessed by sets of steps from each of its four corners. It was ten feet below the level of the rest of the school and was affectionately referred to as ‘The Sunken’.

  The first lesson I had was rugby. I’d had to sit an assessment exam which took half the morning, then was taken down to meet my new form who were doing sports. As I’d not been given a timetable I didn’t know that it was a sports day, so one of the secretaries took me to the changing rooms and told me to wait there till the end of that period when I could meet my new classmates. As I stepped inside, what I saw chilled me to the marrow.

  Inside, lined up beneath the jumpers, shirts and trousers that hung messily on pegs, were maybe thirty pairs of the most terrifying footwear I had ever seen. Great, menacing boots of varying sizes, some black and some cherry red, some with red laces, some with black laces and yet all of the same design, all with evil black labels sticking out the top with a bright yellow, vivid electric typeface, like lightning bolts, proclaiming two words: Air Wair.

  I seriously thought that my new class must have been playing an away team from the local barracks. Surely only a squadron of soldiers would wear these things on their feet? Dear God, if these were my classmates’ boots then they must be the hardest people on the planet. I stepped outside, and through the rolling mist over the distant playing fields watched my new form literally kicking seven shades out of each other. Welcome to your new school, David.

  I envied Chris and Phil having new friends come home to our house for tea. They both went to Green Lane Junior School, just up the road from the house, and weren’t yet of an age where tribalism and what you wore on your feet determined who’d be your mate. They were still playing games like cowboys and indians and I wished then that I was as well. It’s a very thin line between being a child and being eleven. Everything seemed so much simpler for them. In contrast, things at my school were steadily becoming unbearable. I wasn’t being picked on, I wasn’t making any enemies, I just wasn’t being anything, really. Looking back, if I was anything I was lost. It didn’t help being invisible. I was entirely invisible and that was because it was the easiest thing to be. Despite this, it just wasn’t me. I didn’t feel comfortable not being seen.

  It was Sunday, a family day out in Dad’s new company car. We’d got a chocolate brown Austin Maxi 1750 HLS complete with tartan rug on the parcel shelf, and yes, the tow bar was there, too. We were going to Scarborough for the first time for a walk along the big beach and cliffs and to have fish and chips and eat them on the front. Dad took his binoculars because he loved looking at the ships out at sea. We were stuck in a traffic jam on the A64 and had moved maybe six feet in half an hour. Chris and Phil were busy wriggling around, playing I spy and getting bored, just like me. I started to daydream and from nowhere, whilst I stared up at the cloudless sky, there came a distant buzzing which very quickly grew louder. It sounded like we were suddenly going to be overtaken by a swarm of mechanical honey bees. I turned and looked out of the back window, back down the dual carriageway as the road surface shimmered in the sun, and there, right there, was the most impressive sight I had ever seen in my entire life. An army was coming, an invasion in a sea of green. Wave after wave of bright, shiny scooters buzzed towards us, weaving in and out of the traffic, engulfing the car. I was dazzled by the gracious necks of the machines, so fluid and birdlike, like a huge flock of chrome swans. I felt as if they had come to rescue me.

  The riders had badges and beer towels sewn onto their coats and a few of them had the words ‘The Jam’ spray-painted onto the back of them. I asked Dad what it meant and he said that he didn’t know, but we were stuck in a traffic jam then. He also told me that those glittering riders were mods, and it was then that I knew that I wanted to be part of them, part of their gang with their white socks flashing above bright, shiny shoes and desert boots just like Dad’s.

  I tried to count them all as they washed over us and I got to a hundred and then lost count. The desire to get out of the car and climb onto the back of one of those scooters and be taken off somewhere magical was overwhelming. Without so much as a second thought I opened the door, in a trance, and I put one foot out onto the motorway, and before I knew it, Dad screamed and shouted at me to get back inside the car before I got run over. I did, and Chris and Phil laughed at me and Mum told me not to be such an idiot. Dad gave me the silent treatment. Once calm was restored, Mum asked me what possessed me to try and get out. I made an excuse about needing a pee. I thought it did the trick, but my brothers taunted me for the rest of the day. ‘David wants a wee, David wants a wee,’ they sang all the way there and then all the way home. I didn’t mind, all I cared about was becoming part of that gang of mods.

  What I didn’t know then was that it wasn’t a gang – it was a way of life.

  ‘Why don’t you join a club?’ Mum had come back from the library. ‘Meet some new people that way. I was putting my name down for The Thorn Birds and saw lots of clubs and societies up on the notice board.’

  ‘Er, like what, exactly?’

  ‘Like a photography club, like a stamp-collecting club, like a cycling club, like a birdwatching club, there’s a chess club and a rambling club and all sorts of clubs for all sorts of people. I might even join one myself.’

  ‘Why?’ Mum didn’t strike me as the sort of person to join a club.

  ‘So I might meet someone to talk to. You’re not the only one who gets lonely, you know.’ Mum lit a cigarette and disappeared into the garden with a cup of coffee.

  I went to the library on my bike the next day. It was nice inside, with a shiny floor that squeaked when you walked across it and as many books as I could ever imagine. If I sat down then and started to read them all, I’d be dead before I finished even half of them. I immediately felt at home. We liked books in our house, I almost always got them as presents at birthdays and Christmas. Dad liked biographies and Mum read romantic fiction. I wasn’t there for books, though. I was there to join their record library.

  I signed up and got three orange tickets. This meant I could get three albums for three weeks each. I spent hours trying to decide which ones to get and finally came up with my three choices. They were:The Beatles – Rubber Soul (I chose this because Mum liked them); second choice was Grease – The Album (everyone else seemed to like it so I decided to give it a try and see if I did, too); my third choice was This Is The Modern World, by a band called The Jam, and I chose it because I remembered seeing their name written on the back of one of the scooterists when we went to the seaside. There was another album by The Jam, called In The City, b
ut it was on loan so I put my name down and the girl behind the desk said it’d be back next week.

  I never even listened to Grease and although I liked Rubber Soul, it was The Jam for me. When I put those twelve inches of black vinyl on the record player in the living room, it was like throwing open a window and breathing in a whole new life.

  There are some incredible songs on this album. My favourite was ‘The Modern World’ and it sounded like a gun going off inside my head. There were three people in The Jam: Paul Weller, who wrote most of the lyrics, played lead guitar and sang; Bruce Foxton, who also wrote two songs on this record, and played bass guitar; and then there was Rick Buckler, who was the drummer. When Paul Weller sang the words to ‘The Modern World’, he didn’t so much sing them as cough them up and spit them into my face. It was like getting washed in someone else’s anger – and I loved it. I loved the second song, ‘London Traffic’, less, but the third track, ‘Standards’, was as bitter and urgent as a bullet. In it, Paul warned against what would happen to us if we didn’t conform – he sang, ‘You know what happened to Winston’ and I went and asked Mum about what happened to Churchill. It was years later that I found, much to my shame, that Paul was referring to Winston Smith from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  ‘Standards’ was actually written about Weller’s horror at The Sex Pistols being dropped by their record company just because some Conservative Member of Parliament told them to. It’s amusing to me now, but back then I thought he was telling me not to hand in my homework on time. It’s funny how everything he wrote seemed so personal. It’s even funnier today, when it all still does. What I love about this album is how one minute it sounds as insistent as an ambulance and the next as tender as a whisper in your ear.

  When I’d listened to In The City, my made was mind up – The Jam were my band. I could see and hear what Paul was doing with these records. Despite hearing the second album before the first, or because of it, I could sense similarities, such as the way both albums open with the most blistering and powerful song on each record. You’d expect the albums to go downhill from thereon, but they don’t, they build on each opening track. The opening songs are statements, more than anything, they set you up for the rest of each record, although nothing could have set me up for the Batman theme on ‘In The City’. Some of the songs on this first album sounded to me like speeded-up rock and roll and I wasn’t as keen as I was with This Is The Modern World. ‘Away From The Numbers’, though, on In The City, immediately became my fave song of all time ever, and even though it’s about a mod stepping outside of his clan and taking a look at his world and that of the world around him and needing to take a break from it, I didn’t know this, and interpreted it as a sympathetic ear to how poor I was at arithmetic, and copied the lyrics down on the inside cover of my maths book.