Spider from Mars Read online

  After you’d had a bath, it was too wet in there for you to put your clothes on, so you had to wrap a towel round you and sprint to the house through the wind, rain and snow, thinking, ‘Fuck!’ Being clean took courage! This was normal back then, by the way; we weren’t a poor family, although there wasn’t a lot of spare money. (After a couple of years we moved into the upstairs flat, a considerably nicer place with an inside toilet!)

  It was quite a shock for me to leave the Bradleys, where I was part of a large, warm family who gave me a lot of attention. About a year after my parents married, my sister Pamela was born, which was something else to adjust to. But the most difficult thing was living with a dad I hardly knew, having only seen him when he was home on leave. He was very strict: I wasn’t allowed to jump on furniture or walk on walls like you do as a kid. I guess I’d got used to the more relaxed atmosphere at my gran’s when I had been the only child in the family. His viewpoint was that I was spoilt. To me he looked a bit like John Wayne, a bit of a hard man. I began to have a troubled relationship with my dad at this point. He carried a chip on his shoulder for quite a while, as I’d effectively come along and interrupted his army life. He had a lot of mates in the army, and none at home, so he didn’t have much of a social life because he was a young dad. I was the object of his frustration, basically, and that took a lot of getting used to. It’s tough for a kid to feel that his father resents him, although I realize that there were extenuating circumstances.

  Sometimes my dad’s annoyance would be frightening: my mum would set the table for Sunday lunch and if he was in a bad mood he’d grab a corner of the tablecloth and rip the whole thing off. My dinner would be in front of me, and then all of a sudden it was dripping off the wall. This was scary behaviour.

  I can understand it to an extent, because I have three sons myself; although I love them and I’m close to them, being a parent can be hard work, and I think it was especially hard for my dad because he was so young and his life had been overturned when I arrived. My relationship with him wasn’t all bad, fortunately: he had a great sense of humour, which I shared. We both loved listening to The Goon Show and watching Hancock’s Half Hour on TV and he took me to see the comedian Jimmy Clitheroe in Bridlington. I remember Jimmy came and sat next to me during the show, and it freaked me out because he was an adult but barely four feet tall. Dad and I would have play fights, and he took me fishing, too, and did a lot of dad stuff like that. There were good times as well as less good times.

  My dad had one record, a collection of blues songs by Muddy Waters and others, although he must have played it at my grandmother’s house because we didn’t have a record player at home until much later. I must have wanted to play music rather than just listen to it, because I remember at the age of eight I had a tantrum in Woolworth’s. Apparently I wanted a trumpet, of all things, although I have no idea why because I’ve never wanted to play a brass instrument since then. I kicked up merry hell, lying on the floor and shouting, and they had to carry me out. I didn’t get the trumpet either. That was the end of my performing aspirations until I was fourteen, by which time I’d started to get into music properly, mainly through listening to Radio Luxembourg, which was the best source of contemporary music, although the BBC Light Programme had shows like Pick of the Pops where you could hear what was in the charts.

  Even though I lived in a very small place, I was always interested in the outside world. There were American air force personnel based at RAF Driffield in the late 1950s and I had a couple of American friends; it felt very alien to have them in our schools, because they were so different from us. I remember playing baseball on the school field with George Smith, who had a typical American crew-cut and who wore sneakers and jeans which seemed a lot cooler than the ones we wore, better fitting and more stylish.

  George was a nice guy, but quite a few kids at school didn’t mix with him because he was different, and people didn’t like things being different back then. But there was something about America that fascinated me from an early age: I used to wonder what it would be like to go into a diner in Texas and order dinner. When you were in a farming town in Yorkshire, the idea of ever doing that was almost unimaginable.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that Americans like George’s dad were in Driffield because the US wanted to deploy their Thor ballistic missiles in Britain. RAF Driffield was home to three of these nuclear warheads, which were capable of reaching Moscow. Considering that made us a target should the Soviet Union ever launch a nuclear strike, I’m glad I was oblivious to this. But I do remember the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when it seemed America and Russia were on the brink of nuclear war. It was made very real for us because our American schoolmates were so fearful.

  My curiosity was also fuelled by reading science fiction comics. I bought every comic I could lay my hands on and so did two of my school friends, Johnny Butler and Graham Cardwell. Johnny’s father was in the navy and he’d bring back American science fiction comics like Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. I was hooked on them; some of the stories really opened your mind up to different possibilities.

  There was often a moral in these stories, which taught me right from wrong much more effectively than anything I ever read at school. There was one story about an astronaut who crashed on a planet, searching for an earlier astronaut who had been lost. It was raining heavily on this planet and there was mud everywhere. He saw what he thought was a monster, covered in lumps and hunched over, and assumed it was an enemy – he spent most of the story trying to kill this ‘monster’ but actually it was the lost astronaut. Then the rain started burning his own skin and raising lumps, and he began to turn into a monster himself – and that was the end. I thought, ‘Whoa! So the moral of this story is that appearances are deceiving, and you can’t judge things by how they look.’ This was an interesting way for a kid to learn about life.

  I liked thinking and talking about the meaning of life, although I do remember very clearly that my mother had no interest in these subjects whatsoever. I once asked her, ‘Don’t you ever wonder what life is all about, Mum?’ and she sighed and said, ‘Oh no – what do I want to think about things like that for?’ That was always her attitude but I didn’t hold it against her. She had a lot on her plate trying to run a household, with money and time in short supply.

  Still, I was different from my parents in that respect, and from my sister Pamela too, who was going the same way as my mother in that she wanted to be a nurse when she grew up. Pamela and I were close, though; we had good times growing up together.

  I was raised as a Methodist, and I got really into it and did all the scripture examinations. I was even thinking about becoming a minister at one point, which seems pretty amusing to me now. In church we’d discuss the nature of God, and where religion fits into life, but by the age of ten I found myself asking things like, ‘Does God have a mother, if we’re created in his image?’ and was told not to come to any more discussions because I was disrupting them with my silly questions. I also noticed one of the members of the congregation taking money out of the collection box at a point when we were all supposed to have our eyes closed – which clinched it for me. So I grew out of Christianity pretty quickly.

  My parents both worked, although making enough money was sometimes a struggle for them. After my dad left the army he held down two jobs, one at the East Yorkshire Electricity Board and the other – more excitingly – as a fireman. Occasionally when I was at school I’d see him running across the field to the nearby fire station. In those moments he looked like a hero to me.

  At the age of ten you don’t really ask yourself why your father’s got two jobs. I found out later that it was because my parents were saving up to buy a house, which they eventually did, at 30 Victoria Road in Driffield in 1961. That was a big place: a Victorian terrace with a bow window and three bedrooms, and the all-important inside toilet as well as one outside. The house was definitely a huge step up for us, socially and in terms
of simple comforts.

  My parents were ambitious for themselves and for their kids. My mother always insisted that I needed to do well academically. All through school I endured her saying things like, ‘Mick, your cousin’s working in the bank now, and you’re brighter than he is. I hope you’re going to work hard at school’ and ‘So-and-so in the family’s done well: he’s a lawyer. You could be a lawyer too, as long as you work hard’, and so on and so on.

  I passed my eleven-plus exam in 1961, and it was a real learning experience for me: it made me realize that the grammar school system wasn’t remotely fair. When they were allocating places for the grammar and secondary modern schools, the teacher called me out and asked, ‘What does your father do, Woodmansey?’

  When I told him my dad worked for the East Yorkshire Electricity Board, as well as being a fireman, he said, ‘We think you’d be better off going to a secondary modern school, young man.’ That was the first time the class system really hit me: they were literally telling me that I couldn’t go to a grammar school because of who my parents were, and what their jobs were – even though I was top of the class in most subjects.

  The whole process was ridiculously unfair but it didn’t really bother me, partly because even at that early age I wasn’t planning to have a long-term education. School just didn’t mean a lot to me, although I genuinely enjoyed some of the lessons. Perhaps most importantly from an eleven-year-old’s point of view, all of my close friends were going to the local secondary school, so I didn’t mind not going to the grammar school anyway. My parents didn’t kick up a fuss because in those days you didn’t argue with an authority figure like a teacher.

  In September 1961 I started at Driffield County Secondary Boys’ School; there was an equivalent girls’ school 200 yards away. I was a good student at Driffield County, just as I’d been at my primary school. I really liked English and maths, and I was particularly good at art and football. I also did athletics; my father had been a sprinter in the army and it turned out I’d inherited his speed. I could do the 100 yards in 12.2 seconds, even at the age of eleven, and also raced in the 200 yards and the last leg of the 440-yard relay. Our gym teacher, Mr Wilson, asked me if I’d considered running as a professional, and entered me in a competition between the schools in the area – they wanted us to try out for selection to the English national team. I came second – pipped at the post.

  I could have taken athletics further, but rock ’n’ roll got in the way in 1964, when I discovered the Roadrunners rehearsing at the Cave. Once I’d seen them play I knew I had to put together a band of my own, so I suggested it to some mates from school; they were Frank Theakston, whose dad owned the farm machinery depot where I’d discovered the Cave, Paul Richardson, John Flintoff and Michael Grice.

  None of us had any musical experience, but that didn’t stop us: rock music was cool, and all around us, and we knew that we had to be a part of it. We went down to the Salvation Army shop and bought two acoustic guitars and a bass. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, though. I didn’t know how to tune the guitar, let alone play it. You probably won’t believe this, but I simply sat at home with it on my knee, thinking to myself, ‘Something’s bound to happen.’ Strangely enough, it didn’t! I don’t know why I never thought of getting a book to teach myself how to play, because such books were around. I had absolutely no idea how to get started. You can’t imagine today’s kids being that clueless. All I can say in my defence is that it was a different world back then. We had no information.

  So the band got together for a rehearsal the following week in a shed which was in the same yard owned by Frank’s dad. The others all said to me, ‘Go on, play your guitar.’ I couldn’t play a note, of course, but Frank knew how to play chords and he quickly showed me some. Obviously I still couldn’t play the guitar, even after he’d done that, so they said, ‘You’re rubbish’, took it off me and gave it to Paul, who could play it as he’d been practising it at home.

  Now I looked like a complete loser. But then Frank pulled a pair of drum sticks out of his back pocket and said, ‘You’re the drummer.’ I liked that idea a lot, so I took them and said, ‘Cool!’

  I went and got myself a drum kit for the equivalent of 50p in today’s money from the Salvation Army shop. God, that kit was terrible. It was really old for starters: one of the cymbals was bent and sounded terrible when you hit it, and the skins were real animal skins, with old tears stitched up. Nowadays skins are synthetic and easily replaced. But it was a functioning drum kit, and I spent a lot of time tinkering with it. After a while I started experimenting with it, and, as time passed, I gradually learned how to play it.

  We called our band the Mutations, which was the strangest name we could think of. And once we’d realized how badly the shed leaked in the rain, we got permission from the Roadrunners to move to the Cave for rehearsals. We used a little room next to theirs which had been blocked off from the rest of the Cave and had no door. It did have a large window – although there was no window frame or glass, just a rectangular hole in the wall. I had to put the drums through the window to set them up. I kept my kit at the Cave – my dad would never have let me play the drums at home – and I’d practise in there, on my own, at weekends.

  The other guys in the band thought this was hilarious, and they used to throw sticks and stones through the window at me, just to piss me off. A stone would come sailing through and hit the cymbal, or a branch would come in and land on the drums. I’d shout abuse at them. I guess I took the band more seriously than they did.

  I must have had a bit of native talent for the drums, because it only took me a week to master the all-important trick of playing different things with each hand. Once I felt a bit confident about that, I brought the bass drum in. I was dead set on getting a beat right; I was really motivated, actually. I remember finally getting it right one day, but I didn’t dare stop playing in case I lost it. I kept going with a single drum beat for about an hour. That was the moment when I first thought, ‘I can do this.’

  Music began to mean everything to me from that point on, and I started listening to as much of it as I could. As I’ve said, my favourite band was the Rolling Stones, who made a huge impact on me because they were rebellious. I was starting to feel that way myself: pissed off with school, and having to study subjects that I thought were far less interesting than music and the drums. I got into earlier music too, thanks to the Stones who were influenced by the blues. American singers like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters were my idols; I’d make a real effort to find old blues records and learn the drum parts from the songs.

  The first style of drums I played was rhythm and blues; if you couldn’t play that kind of music you weren’t accepted in the circle of musicians that I was starting to move in. After that I moved towards soul and Tamla Motown, and then I got into more musical blues-rock. A friend called Dave Simpson, who later became a roadie for the Roadrunners, had a lot of albums. He lent me the first Stones records and Five Live Yardbirds, the first Yardbirds album which featured Eric Clapton. He introduced me to John Mayall too and over the next few years I’d borrow the Bluesbreakers albums from him. I had a record player of my own now, so I’d play them incessantly. These guys were so advanced musically; that was why I was attracted to their music and the way they played it, although I certainly wasn’t any kind of advanced musician myself at that point.

  Around that time I had to make a decision between music and sport, because if I was going to take my running any further I would have to devote a lot of time to it, and the Mutations would have to go. So I asked myself if there was a career ahead of me in athletics, and I suppose there might have been to an extent, but it wasn’t a passion of mine so I had to let it go. I didn’t mind, though: I was too busy with the drums to go out and run every day.

  Now I was in a band I needed to look the part, so I decided to grow my hair long, which was the start of the downward slope, academically speaking. There were only four of us at Driffiel
d County Secondary who had the courage to sport long hair: Johnny Flintoff from the Mutations was one of them.

  The teachers hated it and wouldn’t let us eat our lunch with everyone else; they actually had a special table in the canteen for the long-haired boys. I guess it’s hard to imagine this nowadays, but back then the whole school would walk past you, chanting ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ and pretending to ring lepers’ bells.

  I suppose that was moderately funny, but it didn’t feel like that to us so we told them to fuck off.

  You have to understand that ‘long hair’ back then just meant that you hadn’t got a short back and sides; there was a little bit of hair over your ears. Look at any photo of a band from that era and you’ll see what I mean. Nowadays a kid would just laugh if he had hair like that and the teachers got angry about it.

  When those morons shouted ‘Unclean!’ I felt conflicted, because of course it was a major put-down, and it made you feel like an outcast – but at the same time it felt great, because it was rebellion: a real fuck-you to them.

  My grades began to go down after that, simply because I was losing what interest I’d had in my studies. I just wasn’t bothered any more because the drums were taking up so much of my attention. Worse, I also started to annoy the teachers, but not deliberately, and not just because of my long hair either. It was because I was trying to be funny. At the time I thought I wanted to be a comedian when I left school. I’d watch comedy shows on the TV trying to understand how humour worked. A lot of it was down to timing, which tied in with playing the drums, of course.