When I told him what I’d done, he yelled at me. A man who worked as a driver for the city of Chicago’s sanitation department and spent most of his life communicating with his colleagues over the noise of his garbage truck, he could really yell.
I looked like a finalist in a competition to find Britain’s least convincing flower child.
The launderette, you say? Hmm. Delightful as a career manning the tumble dryers sounds, I think I’ll stick with songwriting for a bit longer.
If she wanted a row, Mum always knew which buttons to press, because she had installed the buttons in the first place.
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid!
I don’t know if you’ve ever been driven very slowly through a crowd of screaming fans, in full view of the world’s media, on a gold-painted golf cart with a pair of enormous illuminated glasses and a bow tie on the front, but if you haven’t, I can tell you that it’s a pretty excruciating experience.
If you listened carefully, you could hear the kitchen sink being dragged into the studio. We might have been better off had we realized less is sometimes more, but you don’t think like that when you’re making your first album.
But I’d rather try and build a bridge to someone on the opposite side to me than put up a wall.
No drugs, except maybe poppers.
After a while, the only presents I wanted were records and books.
This was not the way anyone of sound mind in America in 1970 looked.
But the fact that he never expressed it instilled in me a desire to show him that I’d made the right decision. It made me driven. I thought the more successful I got, the more it proved him wrong, whether he acknowledged it or not. Even today, I still sometimes think that I’m trying to show my father what I’m made of, and he’s been dead since 1991.
I was constantly in fear, metaphorically speaking, of getting a smack.
I would shut myself away in my room, just like I had as a kid when my parents were fighting, and try and ignore what was happening.
I had no idea how to live, but I didn’t want to die.
Sometimes, you just have to step up to the plate, even if the plate is miles outside your comfort zone.
It was a reminder that you only get so long, that you never know what’s around the corner. Maybe that gave me some real clarity about what was important to me about life. Why try and deny how you really feel, deep down, about something as fundamental as fatherhood?
Presumably already alive to the thought that I might go off the rails thanks to my inability to eat celery in the correct way, he resolutely believed that rock and roll was going to result in my utter degradation.
He was a typical British man of the fifties in that he seemed to regard any display of emotion, other than anger, as evidence of a fatal weakness of character.
I wished that things had been different, but it was what it was. Sometimes you have to look at the hand you’ve been dealt and throw in.
Living is the best and we must live every day as it comes.