I always loved my friend Ed's house. He lived in the Vicarage in Leigh-on-Sea, though his Dad was no vicar. No, Dennis Hill was an entrepreneur from Plaistow who now owned his own catering business (providing high quality pies to local delis), had once been a restauranteur, and for his holidays cycled across the Pyrannees. For me, whose Dad worked for the Gas Board (as we called it), this was attractively exotic.
The Vicarage seemed ramshackle, haphazardly put together, labyrinthine even. Its twin centres were the sitting room where we would watch Airplane! and Escape from New York on an ancient Sony Betamax after coming back from the pub, sprawled on a vast, L-shaped leather sofa; and the kitchen, which had a wooden floor and an Aga, where we were occasionally allowed to sit.
At the back of the Vicarage was a large space known as the Billiard Room, which had been through a succession of uses, but when I first saw it, had a table tennis table in it. It had a high ceiling and was mightily cold in the winter. It was also the rehearsal space for Tortoise Head, our band. 'Oh no, not them buggers again,' said Dennis Hill, as we humped the gear through the kitchen. The Hills showed us quite remarkable toleration, even indulgence, in those years, I should add.
But this is the wrong place to begin.
The story should begin on the pavement in Hadleigh, my home town, a small town whose spine was the A13, Billy Bragg's 'trunk road to the sea' that runs between East London and Southend. Honky Tonk Music was a shop towards the eastern end of Hadleigh, where the town began to run out and the Salvation Army fields took over for a short urban hiatus, before Leigh-on-Sea began. It's not there now, and neither is the SOGAT union headquarters that was also in the town in the 1980s, inexplicably. I think it's an Aldi now. I don't go home much these days.
On the pavement, in 1986, are four lads: Ed Hill, Rich Laxton, Lee Ellis, Lee Cook. The local paper, the Evening Echo, had a picture of them, camped out. I imagine this was Ed's idea, to camp out. The reason? A Honky Tonk Music publicity stunt. The first four customers on a chosen day would receive guitars, amps and drums, enough to start a band.
Why was it Ed's idea? Ed always wanted to be a Rock God. He loved the Ramones, Motorhead, Black Sabbath, Tom Petty, early ZZ Top. He wanted to sing, to play guitar.
The four lads got their gear. Ed got a Japanese copy of a Gibson 335 (the f-hole semi-acoustic that BB King played) and an amp. I have the guitar now, it's upstairs as I write. I've had it for nearly 20 years. Rich Laxton got a PA, for vocals. Lee Ellis, a bass and amp. Lee Cook, drums. They formed a band: TNS, for Total Noise Syndrome.
TNS recruited one Ken Crudgington to play lead guitar, becuase the technical level of Ed's and Rich's playing wasn't up to it. They rehearsed four songs: 'Chasing the Night' by the Ramones, 'Paranoid' by Black Sabbath, 'Wild Thing' by The Troggs, and a song of their own: 'Beast in my Pants'. They were 17 years of age.
The TNS were invited to play at a birthday party at a pub in South Fambridge, in mid Essex. Nerves, drink, sound problems: 4 songs were made to last 35 minutes, and they were gone. Forever. I wasn't there. TNS are only a part of my story, the Tortoise Head story, on the tape that was made of them rehearsing, played in Lee Ellis's Ford Cortina as we sipped our Budweisers. The TNS were history, South Fambridge part of legend, re-told, re-worked, laughed and bickered over.
In 1989 I bought a second-hand acoustic guitar and started to learn. Soon.
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