Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (4 page)

That summer of 1956 guitar sales went through the roof as almost every British kid seemed intent on following the dream of becoming some kind of musical star. Desperate parents nationwide, even as they contributed their spare cash towards purchase of a generic six-string for their infatuated sons, warned that the dream was an impossible one: working-class boys without musical training simply didn’t become popular singers. But when the following January a former merchant seaman, Tommy Hicks, having been discovered by British pop impresario Larry Pames singing at the Stork Room in London’s Regent Street, went to number one with his vaguely rebellious version of ‘Singing The Blues’ under the more glamorous name of Tommy Steele, it seemed as if the dream truly could be a reality for anyone with sufficient looks and determination.

Conservative guardians of society – politicians, clergymen and newspaper columnists, all of them brought up on the complementary notions of conventional wisdom and respecting one’s elders – were provoked to consider the imminent downfall of Western society. Against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis, which permanently dented the insufferable arrogance of the troubled British Empire, the convergence of Teddy boys, rock’n’roll and skiffle, combined with the teenagers’ discovery of economic independence, hammered a particularly painful final nail into the coffin of established values. Music weeklies like the jazz-dominated
Melody Maker
and more mainstream
New Musical Express
joined the protest, voicing their hopes that the rock’n’roll fad would fade. But new records by Gene Vincent (‘Be Bop A Lula’, ‘Blue Jean Bop’), Little Richard (‘Rip It Up’, ‘Long Tall Sally’), Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers (‘Why Do Fools Fall In Love?’, ‘I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent’) and further hits by Elvis Presley and Bill Haley – all coming from different angles but part of the same cultural revolution, like conquering armies of a new Allied Forces – continued to pile on top of each other in the British charts. This despite the fact that BBC radio avoided rock’n’roll like the plague on common decency it evidently was. (Prospective fans were forced to tune instead into Radio Luxembourg, which sold 15-minute slots to American major labels and on which the legendary American DJ Alan Freed had a syndicated Saturday night show.) By the spring of 1957, the skiffle craze was at its peak and rock’n’roll was here to stay. The biggest generation gap of all time was bursting open at the seams, unable to contain the exhilaration of youth.

They say nothing happens in a vacuum but it sure as hell must have felt that way for those whose lives were changed by the new music. What had their parents been thinking of, cooing along with Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como and Bing Crosby? How could their uncles and aunts have possibly found the Inkspots innovative now there was Little Richard, or Johnnie Ray seductive now Elvis was on the scene? And as for jazz, how could anyone expect teenagers to get into something with so much emphasis on musical theory when skiffle brought it down to the rudimentary, emotional basics? Without exception, the individual members of the British bands who would storm the musical world the following decade – the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, the list goes on – each underwent their own epiphany during this period. Life for all of them would never be the same again. It couldn’t.

Keith, certainly, was into rock’n’roll from the moment it exploded, talking his parents into buying ‘Rock Around The Clock’, ‘Green Door’ and other relatively harmless symbols of the new music explosion, which he pounded out repeatedly on the family’s 78rpm record player, and then by using his own pocket money for the first time to buy a copy of Tommy Steele’s ‘Singing The Blues’. Though he was at the younger end of the generation to prove so enthused, he was hooked as instantly as any of those already well into their teens.

What chance then did his education have, with all these odds and outside influences stacking up against it? To his parents’ acute disappointment, to his own apparent nonchalance, he failed his 11-plus in the late spring of 1957. While a number of his primary school friends went on to Wembley County Grammar School and the prospect of success in life, Keith Moon was sent to Alperton Secondary Modern and the near certainty of failure.

T
here is, in all probability, no British suburb more famous than Wembley. This has nothing to do with its natural charm or beauty – it hasn’t any – and everything to do with its illustrious man-made monument: Wembley Stadium, the home of English football. It makes for quite an identity crisis. While the children of this far-flung north-west London community frequently dream of escape to more exciting environs, as suburban youth are wont to do worldwide, the rest of the soccer-mad country dreams of
getting
to Wembley – if not for the FA Cup Final held there every May as the conclusion of the world’s longest-running and most fascinating annual sports tournament, then for the final of other football competitions, for international matches invariably featuring the England team itself, and increasingly in these days of stadium rock, for concerts too. Add in the uses of the accompanying 10,000-seater Wembley Arena (previously the Empire Pool), one of Britain’s largest indoor concert venues, and it is no surprise that Wembley often wins instant name recognition on foreign turf far more easily than even Buckingham Palace.

It is hard to imagine, then, as one journeys up the Harrow Road from Paddington railway station on the fringe of central London, past a series of mostly tough and unforgiving inner city enclaves – Westbourne Park, Kensal Green, Willesden Junction, Harlesden (where Keith’s mother was born) and Stonebridge Park (where Keith first lived) – that Wembley was once in the countryside. Only as one passes through Wembley itself and on into Kenton, Harrow and Pinner, and the parks that were so rare a few miles back begin to proliferate, soon giving way to golf courses and farms, does one realise that the vast city of London does actually have perimeters, that the high-rise tower blocks and tightly packed terraced streets, the fumes spewed from buses and commuter hordes from tube stations, do come to an end somewhere.

For centuries Wembley was a remote country village, comprising only six houses in 1542, just 22 by 1805, and for much of the nineteenth century maintaining a meagre population of 200. That changed in 1844 when a railway station opened at neighbouring Sudbury on the new London-to-Birmingham line, opening the community to the rest of the nation. Wembley became a parish just two years later, and an Urban District Council in 1895, the years in between having seen rapid growth – especially after 1879, when a branch of London’s first underground line, the Metropolitan, cut through Wembley on its way to Harrow-on-the-Hill.

The Metropolitan’s founder, Sir Edward Watkins, bought up the land either side of his new railway lines, on which he built then-modern housing estates, closing the gap between London itself and these outlying parishes; the term ‘Metroland’ was coined for this particularly vivid example of suburbia, inspiring many of Sir John Betjeman’s more renowned poems in the process. Watkins was ultimately best remembered in the area for a less permanent achievement: his attempt to build an equivalent of the Eiffel Tower in Wembley Park, a recreation ground which opened in 1894. Hampered by budgetary problems, the structure never got higher than its first tier, and became known, rather cruelly, as Watkins’ Folly. It was demolished in 1907 and Wembley Stadium eventually built over it.

Photographs of that more successful national monument being constructed after the First World War, by which time the local population had grown to 13,000, show the surrounding area to be still predominantly countryside. Much of it was in fact dairy farms, and generations of Londoners will instantly recognise the names Express Dairy, Vale Farm and Welford’s Dairy, all of which were located around Wembley, as providers of their daily milk. Indeed, Chaplin Road was built over land once belonging to Sir George Barham’s Express Dairy – hence the name of Keith’s primary school and the surrounding Farm Avenue estate.

By 1940, the population of Wembley, partly through the eruption of suburbia, and doubled by its merger with the Urban District of Kingsbury, had risen to a phenomenal 120,000. Even without the Second World War, it would have been difficult for the supply of housing to keep up with demand, but the combination of bombs and a baby boom wreaked particular devastation upon the area’s infrastructure. In all during the war, some 9,000 bombs damaged almost half the houses in the borough, creating such a savage shortage that squatting was rampant in the immediate post-war years.

Local schools were little better off. One elementary, Wembley Hill, was destroyed completely in the war. Alperton School, high up on Ealing Road,
⁵
had considerable problems of its own. It had originally been built as an elementary back in 1898, when the community for which it was named was still a village, and had expanded via various huts and annexes to its limits since the First World War, when the school leaving age had risen from 11 to 14, and then again when work on and at Wembley Stadium (which opened for the FA Cup Final in 1923 and was immediately overrun by 250,000 fans) brought in yet more families and fully urbanised the area.

The 1944 Education Act did away with elementary schools, creating the secondary modern in its place, confining under-11s to primary schools, and increasing the leaving age again, to 15. With Alperton already stretched beyond reason, plans for new and larger premises were immediately proposed to cope both with this change in law and the influx of future pupils created by the baby boom. The harsh reality of post-war economics pre-empted intent, however, and it wasn’t until the mid-Fifties that work began on a new building at the bottom of One Tree Hill, just behind Alperton tube station lower on Ealing Road. Yet even the new building couldn’t hope to fully accommodate the increase in roles, so in the autumn of 1957, the school split down the sexual demarcation line, the girls staying behind at the original premises high up on the Ealing Road, and the boys taking over the new building with the former headmaster, Mr Hostler.

A number of changes came with the new location and its name, Alperton Secondary Modern School for Boys (though the ‘Modern’ was quickly dropped from the school’s parlance due to its negative connotations). Prominent was its sheer size and status: the playgrounds seemed as big as the whole of the old Alperton, and the science labs, gym, library and art room were the envy of the grammar school – although Alperton still offered no facility to learn musical instruments. The most significant change was from all-subjects teachers to separate teachers for each subject, a necessary step in priming its pupils as potential candidates for GCE ‘O’ levels. For while all children could still opt to leave school at 15, the brightest, which would include those who might normally have been at grammar schools but for the baby boom, were from 1960 onwards able to stay on for a fifth year to take these prestigious exams.
⁶
Others would continue to be offered a shot at compensatory RSA (Royal Society of Arts) exams instead. All things considered, Alperton Secondary Modern was determined to be a training ground rather than a dumping ground. And what with a new building, a new system of education, a new badge featuring a solitary tree in honour of its new location, and the sudden absence of girls in the classroom (and women in the staff room), the effect was to provide a level playing field, in which every boy, from first year to fourth year, felt as though he was part of a fresh beginning.