Dad bought us The Beatles’ albums when they came out, as far as The White Album, anyway, whose experimentation displeased him (and many others) so that the capital for Abbey Road had to be raised by private subscription.
There was always a worry, since records could only be played in the public spaces of the flat (we were too young to have our own record players), that Dad would find something objectionable coming out of the grand Decca television-cum-radiogram. It was a relief, for instance, when he pronounced ‘Lady Madonna’ essentially reverent in its appropriation of biblical imagery, though he must have expressed himself less pompously. He could be touchy about anything that mocked holy subjects, though he did enjoy telling one high-class joke with just a touch of blasphemy about it:
Jesus (addressing the crowd gathered round the woman taken in adultery): Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
(A stone flung with great force strikes the woman on the forehead. Shocked silence.)
Jesus: Really, mother, sometimes you can be impossible.
The White Album, which came out shortly after my fourteenth birthday, was a particular embarrassment. I was extremely prudish at this stage, though my prudishness was of a particular kind. It was a matter of social context. I could listen to dubious lyrics on the White Album perfectly calmly, though with disapproval, as long as neither parent was around. My mother’s presence, even if she was moving in and out of the sitting-room with other things on her mind, would make me nervous, and Dad’s presence brought on a much more intense agitation. So it was only the conjunction of all three elements that was unbearable: the offensive record, the paternal presence and the confused son. I had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but it stuck in my throat. I could no longer be a child and had little idea of how to be an adult, but adolescence was the role, of the three, that I found hardest to inhabit. I disliked surliness as a characteristic, and it repelled me just as much when it was my own. All this had little to do with puberty as a physical fact, news of which reached my body rather later.
My solution was as desperate as I felt the problem to be. As the offending moment of the White Album approached, I would walk casually over to the radiogram and either turn the volume dial all the way down or lift the needle from the record. Turning the volume down worked well enough for scandalous individual moments, such as the cursing of Sir Walter Raleigh (‘he was such a stupid git’) on ‘I’m So Tired’, but lifting the stylus out of the compromising groove was called for when the outrage lasted for longer than a few seconds, as it did for instance on ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’. I cursed the Beatles in my turn (without using bad language) for their disobligingness in leaving no visible division between tracks, selfishly advancing their credentials as makers of a unified artwork and ignoring the needs of those who might want to skip the needle lightly across a trench of filth. It was difficult to guess exactly where to put down the needle again. It might happen that the upsetting lyrics sounded out all over again, if I’d underestimated the distance, so it was better to play safe.
The result was that I’d end up skipping whole tracks that had done nothing wrong, so it seemed better to revert to the volume-down method of censorship. I would sit on a patchwork leather pouffe (for yes, we followed trends) near the radiogram until I could hear, from the tiny unamplified sound made by the needle, that we had safely come to the end of ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ or ‘Sexy Sadie’. Would I have been less vigilant if I had known that ‘Sexy Sadie’ was originally called ‘Maharishi’, and was Lennon’s bitter farewell to the guru he’d outgrown, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi? Probably not.
I hate to think what my parents felt about my purity campaign focussed on the White Album, my attempt to make the two-LP set live up to its name (a name that didn’t appear anywhere on the cover or label). No-one ever said anything about it, which was probably for the best. I don’t think I was making a cry for help but something a little more contradictory, a cry to be left alone, not to be required to think about certain things.
Early and mid-period Beatles were genuinely things the whole family could enjoy, a category that seems stable until one day it’s gone. Late Beatles were already divisive, opening up a rift between us or perhaps just a rift in me. Then there came a point when we would have lost face if Dad liked any of our chosen music, though he was always waiting for us to come around to his choices, just as he assumed that in due course we would abandon Monty Python and join him in front of Dad’s Army.
If we didn’t want to share the experience of music then it followed that we needed our own means of mechanical reproduction.
By the time the Mothers of Invention released Over-Nite Sensation in 1973, my brothers and I had a record player of our own and could shut ourselves safely away in our bedrooms to be dazzled by the toxic jewels of the counterculture. In the years between 1960 and 1981 there was a holiday home by the seaside on Anglesey, and it was there that Tim and I listened in shock and wonder to the album, which I had bought in Bangor’s only forward-looking record shop.
My hands went instinctively in such premises to the racks labelled New Wave & Progressive (that’s the old New Wave, of course, not the one that succeeded punk). I was an anti-connoisseur of most popular music. Dance music, in particular, I didn’t understand at all. Music was to be listened to in stillness, with a little tapping of the foot if there was no avoiding it. Both feet might be called on in the case of polyrhythms.
It seems very plausible that we kept Matthew out of the room, theoretically to protect his innocence but really to reinforce our feeling of being a corrupt secret society. Almost every lyric on the album was filthy in a way that left the Beatles in the dust. Sometimes the words were witty, like these from ‘Camarillo Brillo’: ‘She stripped away / her rancid poncho / An’ laid out naked by the door / We did it till we were un-concho / An’ it was useless any more …’ But usually not.
The doors in the house had 1930s-style locks which only worked from the inside, little depressed recesses about the size of a thumb that could be slid across to engage a catch. We were safely locked in. Dad tried the door and when it failed to yield he gave the knob a theatrical rattling. ‘Tim? Adam? What are you doing in there?’ We weren’t doing anything — we weren’t smoking cigarettes, for instance, let alone dope. We were giggling at smut. But by great good fortune Dad entered the room just at the point when Frank Zappa’s relentless campaign of obscenity was taking a break. It was the long fade-out on a disgraceful song called ‘Dinah-Moe Humm’, in which the song’s narrator — which doesn’t seem the right word — accepts a bet of forty dollars from a defiantly unresponsive woman that he won’t be able to give her an orgasm. She (the Dinah-Moe Humm of the title) has in turn bet her sister, also present, an unspecified number of dollars that she (D-M H) can prove that men are scum. The whole song glories in its woeful crassness. The only lyric I could make any sort of claim for is ‘Kiss my aura, Dora — it’s real angora’. Not Cole Porter, to be sure, but creditable in the cultural context.
The song winds down at last from its disgraceful efforts, with Zappa crooning smugly ‘Dinah-Moe … and a Dinah-Moe’ on a long fade-out. This was the point at which Dad entered the room. The air must have been awash with late-adolescent relief, as well as a trace of our disappointment that no showdown had taken place. Matter and anti-matter had come within a micron of achieving each other’s destruction. Our buried hunger for confrontation had been thwarted, and the puritan had entered the room just as the smut-hound was leaving. They hadn’t recognized each other.