Well, no I do not. I am setting the scene.
I set this scene because it is important to do so. I really do want you to know just what this was like. It is a long time ago now, but the memory remains fresh, whilst many others have long ago grown rotten.
Like cabbage.
The school kitchen was painted in cream gloss paint, which made the walls look like slabbed butter. The utensils were huge. And this is not due to the fact that we are smaller when young, so everything seems big. These were big utensils, seemingly borrowed – or stolen – from a giant’s castle. The utensils were huge and the pots, great aluminium jobbies in which the foodstuffs boiled and gurgled over flaming gas, were of similarly gargantuan proportions. You could have got a whole sheep into any one of those great aluminium jobbies. Or a pig. Or a horse. If you sawed the hoofs off.
And then there were the school plates. Thick white china. And you never saw one get chipped, or cracked, or broken. Even when you dropped them – accidentally, of course. As I so regularly did. Just to see, as it were. Just to see.
The plates rose in giddy stacks, in racks to the left of the butlers’ sinks. Fine old stoneware butlers’ sinks, where Mrs Simian and her harridan horde of dinner ladies (whom I, for one, felt absolutely certain constituted a coven of witches, if ever there was one) lathered up and dug in deep.
The forks were shabby, though.
But then forks always are. It takes great care and attention and dedication, too, to clean scrupulously between the tines. And I have to confess that I have, on numerous occasions over the years, had to send my fork back to the kitchen because it had been insufficiently lathered-up.
So yes, from the kitchen, the grim cream-glossed school kitchen.
Into the brightly lit hall.
That smelled of plimsolls and also of young women.
And no more mention of armpits.
The end-of-term school dance was a major event. The major event in the minds of many. These minds belonging in part, if not all, to fifth-year boys who were leaving school that month.
It would be the last opportunity to pull at school.
At a school dance where it was free admission. Unlike dances and discos to come. Naturally there were other major events – sports days, open evenings, exams. But curiously, I for one never had the faintest interest in any of these.
Into the brightly lit hall.
Brightly lit and brightly decored, too. Every year a theme was chosen by a committee formed of prefects. And therefore, in my humble opinion, hardly a representative committee. This sleek elite would sit about in their common room; oh yes, they had a common room, although only a small one, which doubled as the band room. But they would sit about on the Cameo Mason Celebrated Percussion Safe and choose the theme.
This year the theme was Space Travel.
Last year the theme had been Space Travel. As it had been the year before. I was informed that this year the prefects had actually chosen Women of the Orinoco Basin as the theme.
But it had ended up as Space Travel. As it always did.
Because Mr Jenner, the music teacher, who let the prefects use the band room as their common room, always had the casting vote.
And Mr Jenner really loved the subject of Space Travel.
And so it was a brightly lit and lavishly decored Space-Travel-themed school hall that The Sumerian Kynges had now entered, through the door that led to the school kitchen. And it was a full and crowded hall. And there were a lot of teenage girls amongst this crowd. And I knew, just knew, in my rock ’n’ roll heart, that they were just dying to get a piece of The Sumerian Kynges.
Although, of course, they were not, as yet, aware of this.
And so the scene is as set as it can be.
And Mr Jenner mounts the steps.
These steps are those that rise to the left-hand side of the stage (looking from the audience, that is). The very top step is quite small. Mr Jenner often commented that this was ‘one small step for a man’, but happily not tonight.
To those who viewed him upon this night, Mr Jenner was not a God amongst Men. He was, in the common parlance of the day, a bit of a short-arse. And, in secondary school terms, one of the very last of his kind – ex-RAF, with medals to prove it, tweedy and ink-stained, given to mortar boards and scholars’ gowns. Always with sheaves of music tucked under his arm. A hurler of chalk dusters. The man who conducted the choir. His head was too big and his feet were too small and he smiled when he spoke of Space Travel.
There was a mic up on that stage. The school microphone. It was a Telefunken U Forty-Seven. Every school had one of those. A few years later, no school had one, because with the rise of the minicab, the Telefunken U Forty-Seven had a penchant for picking up the signals of the cab offices and broadcasting directions for cabbies, to the great merriment of assembled students.
I was just dying to sing into that mic. We’d had to rehearse micless, and there was to be no amplification other than that mic, which meant that I was going to have to hold it near Toby’s uke when he did his big solo.
Fearing as we all did that Mr Jenner would announce us as ‘the school pop group’ or something equally uncool, Rob had penned an introduction that would introduce, as it were, the term ‘Rock God’ into popular culture.
That one, I note, lasted. While the other one – ‘Cheese God’ – apparently did not.
Mr Jenner walked up to that mic and tap-tap-tapped upon it. If something was to be achieved by this tapping, we, cowering (uncoolly, if I remember) all beside the stage steps, didn’t hear it.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. The crowd went ‘boo’ and ‘hiss’. Not the kind of thing you could get away with on a school day. But this wasn’t a school day. This was the school dance.
‘Calm down. Calm down.’ Mr Jenner affected a light-hearted mien. ‘I know you’ve all come here to let off a little steam.’ We watched Mr Jenner from the side of the stage. He was going to read out Rob’s introduction, wasn’t he? He had stuck it straight into his trouser pocket when Rob had given it to him. He hadn’t even read it through. And now-
Mr Jenner did not take the introduction from his trouser pocket. He had words of his own to say.
‘These young gentlemen have rehearsed very hard,’ said Mr Jenner, ‘and I know that you are really going to shake, rattle and roll to their happening sounds. Please give them a really big hep-cat welcome: the school pop group, The Rolling Stones.’
I looked at Neil. And Neil looked at me. And Neil looked at Rob and Rob looked at Toby and Toby in turn looked at me.
‘I’ll get him for that,’ said Toby. ‘You just see if I don’t.’
7
The Rolling Stones weren’t that bad, I suppose.
Because, after all, it was their first ever gig.
The one that never gets a mention in biographies, authorised or otherwise. The one with the original line-up. With Wild Man Fosby on tea-chest bass and Mick Jagger’s sister on uke.
And Bill Wyman on uke. And Mick Jagger on uke and vocals.
My uke. And my microphone.
In case the reader is experiencing some degree of confusion here, allow me to explain, for it was my intention to create this confusion in the hope that it would in some way mirror the confusion that I and my fellow members of The Sumerian Kynges found ourselves in at the time.
We thought that Mr Jenner had simply got the name of our band wrong when he was introducing us. But not a bit of that. He wasn’t introducing us at all. He was introducing The Rolling Stones. A band that he had himself been coaching in the evenings. With the ukuleles that we rehearsed with during school time.
And Mick and Keith and Brian and Mick’s sister pushed right past us on the left-hand stage steps (looking from
