‘This is Dave Jackson,’ Maurie said. ‘Good guitarist, but he wants to play bass.’ He turned to the boy, who stood sheepishly clutching his guitar in its soft carry-case. ‘Tell them why, Dave.’ He grinned. ‘Go on.’
Dave looked embarrassed. He said, ‘I read somewhere that it’s the low frequency of the bass guitar that makes the girls scream.’
We all burst out laughing.
Except for Luke, who said, ‘Well, no, it’s entirely possible that the speed and pressure of a low frequency could have that kind of effect. Although it’s not the sound that has the frequency, it’s the means of making it that does. Sound is a pressure wave through the air—’
And we all threw things at him. A duster, bits of chalk, Maurie’s notepad.
Our laughter was interrupted by the arrival of a good-looking boy with thick, dark hair that tumbled over his forehead, like he was a Beatle himself. Even in his school uniform you could tell that he was powerfully built. And you knew at a glance that he was the kind of boy that the girls would just follow around like little puppy dogs. He was hefting a bass drum, and he set it down in the middle of the room.
‘I’ve got a snare drum, hi-hat, stands and pedals at the end of the hall if you want to come and give me a hand.’
I didn’t know him at all. But Maurie said, ‘This is Jeff.’
Jeff, it turned out, had never played the drums in his life, but had borrowed a basic kit so that he could be in the band with Maurie. Jeff had come from a different feeder primary, but the south-side Jewish community was a small one, and it turned out that he and Maurie had been best friends all through childhood, gone to shul together and even shared their bar mitzvah.
After he had figured out how to put all the bits and pieces of the skeleton drum kit together, Jeff sat down and gave it a thrashing while we stood and watched. Impressive for a first go.
When he finished, he looked at us with gleaming eyes. ‘My dad says if I’m any good, he’ll buy me a kit.’
And so we had our first rehearsal that day. ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ by the Four Seasons; ‘Crying in the Rain’ by the Everly Brothers; Del Shannon’s ‘Hey Little Girl’; ‘Return to Sender’ by Elvis Presley; and a whole bunch of songs from the Beatles’ Please Please Me album that had been released in March that year.
I wish I had a tape of that first session, to hear what we sounded like. We must have been pretty awful. But it seemed great to us at the time. I was John Lennon, and Maurie definitely fancied himself as Elvis. We discovered very quickly that you don’t have to have a great voice to sing harmonies, and right from that first day we established ourselves as a vocal group, more than anything else. Serendipity, I suppose, but our voices just blended.
As for Jeff, we had to keep telling him to play more quietly. A waste of breath, as we discovered during the next year and a half, as he regularly broke drumsticks. But by the end of that first practice he had decided that a drummer he was going to be. And a full kit wasn’t long in coming thereafter.
II
Within eighteen months we were fully electric, with individual amps and a PA system, and performing a lot of Tamla Motown stuff for dancing. I had a Fender, and Dave was playing a Höfner violin bass, just like McCartney’s. The music department loaned Luke their Farfisa organ. We were gigging at dances all over the city, and had grown a reputation for being the best group on the south side. We called ourselves The Shuffle, after the Bob & Earl song ‘Harlem Shuffle’.
I had no idea, then, that 1965 was going to be our seminal year, although not in a good way.
It was a year that began with the death of Winston Churchill in January. I have to confess that his passing meant very little to me but, having lived through the war, my mum and dad were glued to his funeral on TV. My mum was in tears. ‘You have no idea what those speeches meant to us in 1940,’ she said, ‘when we half expected to see German tanks rolling down our street at any moment.’
And she was right. I had no idea then. It was only listening to that voice in later years, and hearing the gravelly determination that we would fight them on the beaches, that I realized just how influential those speeches must have been.
But I was preoccupied with other things. The Beatles for Sale album had come out the previous month. We knew there was a new single due out that spring, and there were rumours that they were making another film.
And in February I met the girl I would marry five years later.
It was a Saturday afternoon, and we were setting up and rehearsing for a dance that night in the Clarkston tennis club. Jeff had gone through a string of girlfriends, attracted by his looks and his entirely unconscious wit. But they never lasted long once they got to know him. Until Veronica.
Veronica was a tall, classy-looking girl with long, straight, dark hair, and legs in knee-high boots and a miniskirt that just drew your eye. And held it. It was clear that she saw something in Jeff that the other girls hadn’t, but what amazed the rest of us was just how she dominated him. Jeff was a happy-go-lucky, simple sort of lad, but he had a stubborn streak in him like marbled gneiss. With Veronica, though, he was pure putty. She moulded him any way she wanted, and he followed her around like the little lapdog that she made of him. She was smarter than him, too. When Jeff made us laugh, he rarely knew why. Veronica made us laugh because she was clever and knew how to.
That afternoon, she brought a friend along to rehearsal. Jenny Macfarlane. The minute I set eyes on her I knew I wanted her to be my girl. I had been out with quite a few lassies in my time, adolescent fumblings in darkened cinemas, or in the back of the van after a gig. But none had set my pulse racing like Jenny Macfarlane. She was a pretty girl. Petite. With short-cut dark hair, wearing jeans and boots and a jacket she’d got out of the Army & Navy Store. Almost butch, except that there was nothing remotely masculine about her. She had full, ruby lips that needed no lipstick, and just a hint of brown eyeshadow on lids above striking blue eyes.
I’d have sat her down, right there and then, taken my guitar and played her ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’. Except it wasn’t released until later that year. But I might have written it myself, just for her.
Instead I spent most of the afternoon chatting her up. To the irritation of the rest of the group, who wanted to get on with rehearsals. But I was already a lost cause. And she was in awe that the guitarist of The Shuffle was so clearly besotted by her.
That night she stood at the front of the stage just watching me through the entire gig. And for my part, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, or the smile from my face. I could take any amount of this kind of adoration.
At the break we all piled into the back room and drank illicit beer, and I sat on the floor next to Jenny, ignoring the grumblings of the group that I was less than focused, and enjoying the warmth of her body next to me.
We were halfway through the second set when the first brick came through the window. Screams cut above the sound of the music, and a wave of bodies rippled back from the front of the hall. We stopped playing and heard someone shout, ‘It’s the Cumbie!’
Glasgow had a fearsome reputation in the sixties for gangs and gang warfare. There were gangs with names like the Tongs and the Bundy, the Toon, and the Toi, and CODY, which was an acronym for Come on Die Young. I remember once seeing graffiti on a walclass="underline" Even the deaf have heard of the Bundy. The affluent suburbs, too, had their gangs. And we possessed our very own Busby Cumbie.