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read music as well as play several instruments pretty well. The house had been full of guitars; Dad also used to have a saxophone, a piano and a drum kit. At one time, in a garage near by, he had started to build his own harpsichord.
    From the age of fourteen, Dad had played in many longhaired, short-haired and now, mostly, bald bands. He could play in any style, and sing in only one. Gabriel’s mother called him Johnny-about-to-be-famous. Dad was smart enough to know that by his age you had either become successful, rich and pursued by lawyers, stalkers and the press, as some of his former friends had been, or you found something else to do. ‘Something else’, of course, was an admission of failure; ‘something else’ was the end.
    Worse than this, according to Mum, was to play pool in the pub every day with other ‘superannuated long-hairs in dirty jeans’, saying how the latest ‘beep-beep’ music wasn’t a patch on Jimi’s or Eric’s. This group of has-beens, who, as Gabriel once quipped, could hardly manage ‘joined-up talking’, only left the pub to attend AA meetings. Mum, who remembered being at the centreof the rock scene, wouldn’t have these bums in the house. At night Dad went to his mates’ houses to drink, jam and smoke dope.
    At least Dad had never stopped loving music. It was just that he didn’t get paid for it.
    He still played live with these friends, in pubs or at parties and weddings, where no one listened and middle-aged people danced without moving their bodies. Not long ago they had been invited to play in a hotel while the guests had supper. It was a pretentious place but seventies music had been requested. Gabriel had gone along to help set up, as most of the band were in such bad shape they could barely lift their instruments.
    Dad’s band had played the tunes that millions had liked when he had been in Lester Jones’s group, but one by one the guests were driven like refugees from the dining room, carrying their plates and some of them still chewing, until only one red-faced old man remained, dancing in front of the band. He danced till he collapsed into the arms of a doctor who was staying there.
    Sometimes Dad became dejected, or distraught with envy at the young kids, not much older than Gabriel, who flashed across the nation’s televisions, into the charts and Hello! magazine, and then were gone, carrying a good deal of money with them, if they were lucky.
    Gabriel had played both guitar and piano from a young age and had been in a school group, playing indie rock, for a few weeks. He couldn’t write songs and didn’t improve as a musician. The pained look on his father’s face – Dad hated him to play badly – made murder more likely and learning impossible. It was easier for Gabriel not to play, and, anyhow, Dad hated anyone touching his instruments. If Dad watched Gabriel, it was because he was worried about whether the boy would drop his best guitar. When, to the relief of them both, Gabriel ‘retired’, what he did miss was having something big to be interested in.
    One day his mother had taken him to see an exhibition of old and new drawings at the British Museum. Afterwards, she bought him pencils and a sketchbook. Like his father, Gabriel soon had his own ‘sacred’ objects, obtained cheaply from the numerous second-hand shops in the area: paintbrushes, pencils, videotapes, old Kodaks. He started to take his ‘objects’ whereverhe went, in his special rucksack. If he placed something like a pencil or camera between himself and the world, the distance, or the space, enabled good ideas to grow. He and his father were working in parallel, rather than in competition.
    When the weather was good and Dad was feeling ‘inquisitive’, Gabriel and Dad used to ride their bicycles along the river. Dad refused to leave London: for him, the rest of the country was a