Read Who I Am: A Memoir for Free Online Page B

three strings had broken and the neck of the guitar started to bend, but I just reduced the tension and made do with the three remaining strings.
    One day I was strumming when Dad’s trumpet player friend Bernie Sharpe heard me in my room and looked in. ‘You’re doing well, Pete,’ he said. ‘Isn’t he, Cliff?’ No response from Dad, but alone in my room picking out notes on my guitar I had visions of leaving him and his glorious musical traditions behind. Deep down, I suspected that my father had had his day.
     
    In 1957 Chas McDevitt had a UK hit with a song called ‘Freight Train’. I first heard the song on BBC TV sung by Nancy Whiskey. Listening to the homespun campfire sound of skiffle I realised that with a guitar and a few chords you could make hit records.
    Because of the very real and immediate threat that skiffle music posed to Dad’s recording career – and thus to my family’s security (for now I never seemed to see a saxophone or clarinet player on the TV) – I had a unique window on how society was subtly changing. After decades of dealing with military threats, our parents now faced a danger from within. ‘Youth’ was what it came to be called. I had joined an army of my peers by picking up the guitar, that instrument that threatened my father’s career. Perhaps that’s why I delayed by picking up the banjo for a while, playing Dixieland jazz.
    The group of school friends with whom I played music was full of potential Jimpy substitutes. Chris Sherwin was a student drummer, and with Phil Rhodes on clarinet and John Entwistle playing trumpet we met each week to rehearse a quartet in which I played banjo. We called the group The Confederates. In spring 1958, when we began, I was still only twelve years old, but they were already teenagers. I knew John Entwistle a little, and enjoyed his sense of humour. Chris Sherwin acted like the band’s leader, partly because our rehearsals were held at his father’s house on Ealing Green.
    Our first gig with The Confederates was at the Congo Club at the Congregational Church in Acton on 6 December 1958. We played for about ten people. I was frozen with nerves as we played a tune we’d made up together, based around a banjo ‘C’ chord I picked out. We went on with ‘Maryland’ and ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’, featuring Chris Sherwin’s explosive drum solo. After we finished I watched in complete amazement as John Entwistle and the other boys jived with girls. One girl tried to teach me the steps, but I just couldn’t hit her marks. I still can’t jive today.
    And when the lights went down and the snogging started, I slid away home.
     
    One day, while looking through the junk shop, Miscellanea, that my parents were now running, I found a mandolin, which whetted my interest in the so-called antique trade. Dad enjoyed the simple rhythm and informality of running the shop – it was often ‘closed for lunch’ while he went to the pub. In the summer I stayed with Dad for the few weeks he was playing on the Isle of Man, and when I got home I realised that while I’d been developing my banjo skills other boys also had been getting on with their music.
    John Entwistle, Chris Sherwin, Phil Rhodes and Rod Griffiths were rehearsing regularly with Alf Maynard’s jazz band. Alf was a great fellow, but he played banjo, which made me redundant, although I remember playing duelling banjos with Alf at Christmas, when the band of six took in £18. I was briefly part of their brave, grown-up world and could even afford my first decent guitar. Purchased from my parents’ junk shop for £3, it had been built in Czechoslovakia and had a thin but pleasing tone.
    I saw less of John Entwistle while he was playing in Alf’s band, and I left music itself behind for a while as Chris tried to help me catch up with the march of adolescence all around me. He took me to my first X film, Peeping Tom (which turned out to be elegant film noir rather than the smut