Way Back When..

I was born in 1947 in a place called Nantyglo in South Wales during the biggest blizzard to ever hit Britain. The snow was so high it came up to the bedroom windows. My brother and my father had to dig a tunnel so that the midwife could gain access to our house.
I was a sickly kid. I caught more than my fair share of childhood diseases - chicken pox, measles, mumps, whooping cough. At the age of five I had my tonsils removed and, from then on, things started looking up. When I got home from the hospital, my mother had bought me a cowboy outfit to ease the boredom of recuperation. I wore it consistently for weeks. I started school a year late.
My mother thought I looked cute with long curly hair, which she kept out of my eyes by the liberal use of hair clips. On my first day at school the other kids roared with laughter and began a vicious whispering campaign that I was, in fact, a girl. At lunchtime, in the school urinals, the other boys in my class were incredibly interested in whether or not I actually had a penis. When they discovered that I had, they were slightly disappointed, so much so, that Russell Powis urinated over me. I left school early to get cleaned up at home.
When my brother, who hadn't begun to hate me yet, heard about my tribulations, he remonstrated with my mother about the length of my hair and persuaded her to cut it to an acceptable length. This was my first brush with conformity - later in life, I, and millions of others decided to grow our hair down to our asses to show our contempt for the norm. Inevitably, we became the norm.
1947 was indeed a fortunate year to be born in, because it meant that I was twenty in 1967, and able to participate fully in the optimism, hope and eventual collapse of the so-called "hippy" era - "the summer of love" etc. etc. Luckily enough, I managed to disguise myself as a punk in the following decade, and to infiltrate the whole "new wave" thing.
I guess I'm jumping ahead here.
A little more background perhaps.
When I was ten, and smitten with the likes of Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Freddie Cannon and Fats Domino, I made a guitar out of an old piece of wood, with nails hammered in at either end to which I attached elastic bands. I would strum the elastic bands and pose in front of the mirror in my bedroom, my imagination allowing me to convince myself that fame was imminent - just a matter of time. At fourteen, my mother bought me my first guitar for Christmas. It was an ice-blue Selmer Futurama. My brother, now grown-up and married, and my father, at home a dour and sometimes violent alcoholic, disapproved. I think they saw my guitar as the first step on the road to decadence. Looking back, I guess they were probably right. I practised diligently, and learned some Shadows' songs with a friend of mine, a more advanced guitarist who lived in Blaina. I knew no chords so he would let me play the lead lines to "Apache", and other stuff like "Wonderful Land", and every couple of days, he would teach me some simple chord shapes.
I progressed, and formed a band with some school friends, initially as a singer, and then as "rhythm" guitarist. However, I just wasn't up to the job, as my knowledge of chords wasn't great and the lead guitar post was already taken by a better player. Eventually I was told that if I wanted to stay in the band, I would have to play bass, as bass players were thin on the ground and the other guys had met a guitarist who was a much better player than me, and who was eager to join.
I was miffed. But Paul McCartney played bass, so I figured that it wasn't such a bad deal.
I got a bass, the band got to be quite good and we played under the name of "Randolf's Party", taken from the title of a short story in John Lennon's book "In His Own Write".
Then, after a broken romance (bitch!) and a boring year spent as a trainee journalist, I went to the pub with a friend of mine and, over a pint, suggested that we should live in London, where everything was wonderful. The guy sitting at the next table overheard our conversation and said, "I'll come too, we can get a flat together!".
He turned out to have gone to Walthamstow art college a year earlier, and knew London quite well.
So, aged 19, in the Autumn of 1966, the three of us headed for London with our stuff and ourselves crammed into an antiquated Ford Thames van.

Next time: The Road to World Conquest