So I've posted about a cousin - my own age - who introduced me to Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. She also helped me get to know a little more about David Bowie. Click here for a link to that post.
I've also told you about another cousin, six years older than me. He introduced me to Planxty and folk music, John Dowland and Early Music. He also played me Vaughan Williams, an introduction to classical and devotional music. Click here for a link to that post.
But now I have to tell you about Dave Stanley.
I remember the first time we met. It was at the Coffee Bar in 1974.
The Coffee Bar was a youth club.
My mother worked full time for Kilburn's Child Guidance Centre. She was a secretary to the team of Educational Psychologists that worked at the centre. At some point in the early 70s, she decided to change her career. I don't know if she wanted to earn more money or she felt dissatisfied by her work as a secretary. With her three children growing up I think she craved a more stimulating life. At first, she became a youth worker. I think this work was voluntary at first. Then she did an evening course run by the local authority. Suddenly she was a student again, surrounded by a bunch of people, young, engaged and interested in the world. They were people that had an interest in young people. They were all going into youth work.
Studying with these people must have felt like a breath of fresh air in the dull and static life she had been living up to this point. Her move into youth work would eventually completely change her career trajectory and her life.
At the end of the course, she threw a party or a gathering at our little house in Wealdstone. They all came. There must have been about ten of them. She must have asked them to bring music to play. Someone bought a guitar. Someone else bought Palestrina. Though that sounds really weird. Why would anyone bring Palestrina to a party? Click here for a post that expands on that short musical encounter.
We were quite an isolated family. We didn't have many friends. Our family life was mostly dull and uneventful. Then suddenly there was this party. Mum had mentioned she wanted music and I, of course, volunteered to play the music I had. I dread to think what I must have played them. The Pink Floyd would have been okay. Even cool. But I cringe now at the thought of playing the Black Sabbath or the Hawkwind. Someone came to rescue the music. But suddenly I found myself briefly invited into the room. I wasn't a host or a guest. But I felt I belonged. I didn't stay too long.
Soon after the party mum told us she was going to work a couple of evenings a week at a youth club just opening up nearby. In fact, it opened just opposite my sister's school in Wealdstone. Whitefriars. The school was considered a real dump back then but it still exists and seems to be thriving. It's in Whitefriars Avenue in Harrow. There a couple of factories close by - Windsor and Newton and Hamilton Brushes. Apparently, most pupils ended up working at one or the other after they left school, aged 15 or 16.
So mum went to work at the youth club on Wednesday evenings.
When she started there she invited the three of us to come down to the youth club. Let's say I was 15, my sister's were 13 and 11. I think my sisters were quite young to be going there. Although I was the right age I was incredibly nieve. We had lived a sheltered and very protected life. We weren't really prepared for what we discovered there at the coffee bar.
I imagine the youth club was set up to cater to the local secondary school children in the area. But the club was dominated by bikers. The majority of them were of working age. There were a lot of them. They wore black leather jackets and drove motorbikes. Thinking about them now I reckon they were skilled or semi-skilled workers. I imagine some of them were car or bike mechanics, some of them in retail, some factory workers.
I think some still lived with their parents, some were lodgers, renting rooms in family homes or sharing flats.
One really important aspect of the coffee bar was the music. Rock 'n' Roll reigned supreme. The music was totally linked to 1950s-1960s, American Rock 'n' Roll. The music system in the coffee bar continually played music from that era. Everything from Bill Hayley to Elvis Presley to British Rock 'n' Rollers including, John Leyton who sang, "Johnny Remember Me" and the Tornados" Telstar." When the film, "That'll Be the Day" was released in 1973, that must have been a huge boost to some of the older bikers at the club. Perhaps the film and its fantastic soundtrack maybe inspired some of the younger ones to follow the lifestyle it chronicled. But 1962 was about as recent as the music went, "Shakin Stevens," "Alvin Stardust" - despite his earlier career as Shane Fenton - and "Showaddywaddy" were totally off the playlists.
I suppose if there was one song that summed up that place for me it must have been The Shangri-Las, singing, "Leader of the Pack."
Dave Stanley
So we started going to the coffee bar. My sister was quite excited by the place. She seemed to fit in very quickly. She made friends with some of the bikers and a girl about my age, two years older than her. The girl went to the sister school to mine. It was right next door.
I use to go down to the coffee bar at lunchtime. It was a bit of a walk but I was an outsider at the school. I didn't have any friends there. To be honest, I didn't have any friends at all. Although I didn't fit into the coffee bar like my sister, at least I wasn't being bullied there and perhaps here was an opportunity to start fresh and begin to make friends.
So on this particular lunch-time, I was sitting up at the counter and was eating a burger or a hot dog. The girl, my sister's friend, was standing next to me, with her boyfriend who had his arm around her waist. She had her back to me. But he must have been facing me. He said, "Can I have a bite of your burger?" and of course I said, "Yes." And that was it. We were friends.
It all happened very quickly. He took me to my first pub. It was either the Railway Hotel or The Queens Head. He bought me my first pint. It was a pint of lager. I couldn't drink it. It must have been a Saturday afternoon. There was a whole group. They kept buying the drinks. There were 4 or 5 pints all stacked up on the table. They were all mine.
I can't be sure how old he was. But we think he may have been five years older than me. I met him when I was either 14 or 15 years old. So he was probably 19 or 20. Thinking back to that time I think he was pretty messed up emotionally or psychologically. I don't think he had any friends his own age. He was an outsider. Like me.
He said he was an ex Hell's Angel. I wanted to believe him then. I don't believe it now. He didn't have a motorbike. Later, I remember, he drove a car. He had a black leather jacket. His hair was short.
I can't remember much about what we did or where we went but music played an important part in our time together.
He introduced me to The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. Click here to read about that experience. And click here to hear the album
Then sometimes we'd go back to his home. He lived in Stanmore with his mother and older brother. For some reason, I think she had re-married. I never met her husband, Dave's father or stepfather, but I met, once or twice, Dave's older brother or stepbrother. Dave played me his brother's music. He was older. A serious adult. He played "In the Court of the Crimson King" by King Crimson. I adored that album.
One night he played, Rick Wakeman's "Journey to the Centre of the Earth." I absolutely loved that record.
Click here for a link to a YouTube to hear the whole album.
I was like a sponge. I just soaked up everything he played me. I bought a few albums by Hawkwind. In Search of Space was the first one. I played it a lot. My interest in them - long gone. Thinking about it now Hawkwind seemed to embody the same values I had. But at some point, I realised, the music and the scene they represented wasn't for me.
I also bought a few Black Sabbath albums. I played them a lot. It took some time to realise this music wasn't for me. The music seemed dangerous. Some of the lyrics seemed to feed my growing interest in the occult. This was Dave's music and I didn't feel the same about it as he did.
He became my best friend. We did everything together. He often came round to the house. Our friendship was intense. He became a family friend.
But it was short-lived. Perhaps at the end of 1975 or the beginning of 1976, he became a Christian. We'd drifted apart a bit. He went away for a while. I think it was Scotland and when he came back he was a Christian. He was different. Whenever we met he went on about Jesus being my saviour. He kept telling me to invite Jesus into my life. He said Jesus would make everything alright. I had absolutely no idea what he was on about. It felt completely alien to me.
One day he invited my sister and me to a big Christian meeting at the Royal Albert Hall. I think it was a Pentecostal gathering. It felt alien and unfamiliar. The place was absolutely packed. There was a lot of dancing and waving of hands. The music was loud and repetitive. There was a lot of audience participation. People were praising God and shouting "hallelujahs!"
Then one night after this meeting I knelt down by my bed and prayed to Jesus. I asked him to come into my life. There it was done. I told Dave what I'd done. That shut him up. That was in early 1975. Nothing changed. But 10 years later in 1985 I did become a Christian.
For a time Dave was my only friend. But things were beginning to change. In my last year of secondary school, I began to make friends. There were one or two lads in my class I began to talk to. And again music became the currency of our friendship. I remember we met up once in the record shop. They wanted me to hear this album.
In the final year, the girl's school next door to our boy's school merged. We became Mountview High school. I began to make friends with one or two of the girl's. My loneliness was beginning to end. Slowly.
The school doesn't exist now. They knocked down the 1930's buildings and the breeze block temporary huts, probably built during World War II and were still serving as classrooms in the 1970s.
In April 1976 we moved from Wealdstone to Kenton. I started work in Bond Street London. We'd stopped going to the coffee bar sometime before we moved. And Dave Stanley just seemed to fade away into adolescence. The past.
