Adrenalized
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For my dad, Ken, and my mum, Connie
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I came into this world on December 8, 1957, in Hackney, a London borough located in East London. A day or so after being born at the Mothers’ Hospital of the Salvation Army on Lower Clapton Road, I was brought home to 223 Boundary Road, London, where I would spend a large chunk of my life until 1983, when I went on tour with Def Leppard. It was a small row house in a working-class neighborhood that was considered to be pretty rough. It didn’t seem like that at the time because I had nothing to compare it to. My dad, Ken Collen, was actually born in Wales, even though he grew up in East London. He was a lorry driver (or a truck a driver, as they’re known in the States) his entire life. He loved driving, so even when he wasn’t working, it wasn’t a chore for him to drive us all over the place. We’d call it a “busman’s holiday.” That’s an old British phrase that describes a vacation on which you still do the same kind of activity you’d normally do in your job. My mum, Connie Collen (née Wheeler), was from nearby Leytonstone. She became a housewife as soon as I was born, and we spent lots of time together while my dad was off on his frequent driving trips for work. I was the only child they’d ever have. As far as my mum was concerned, the sun rose and fell on my arse. My grandmother, my mum’s mother—Nan, as I called her—stayed with us because my mum needed a bit more help. My mum’s two older sisters, Dorothy and Rosie, were really strong women. (My wife, Helen, and I recently went to visit my auntie Dorothy. She was ninety-two, vegetarian, and doing great.) My mum was weaker physically, suffering from a variety of ailments, including asthma (which I think I psychologically inherited from her) and scarlet fever. So my nan was there to lend a hand even after my mum got married.
All of East London was very working class—Hackney, Walthamstow, Leyton, and Leytonstone. Our small house and these surrounding neighborhoods became my universe as a youngster. I had a paper round, like a lot of other kids, so each day I would set off on foot around the neighborhood delivering a variety of different papers to dozens of families.
Early on, I lived what I think was probably a very similar experience for lots of other English kids of that period. I had a dog, Coffee, who was a Jack Russell–beagle mix. I was about four or five years when I got Coffee. I was always so paranoid that he’d run out the door and get hit by a car. This compounded the asthma. As a kid in school I played a lot of football (or soccer) like everyone else, and we played in the huge area of grassland on the western bank of the River Lea called the Hackney Marshes. In fact, Hackney Marshes is where my dad first took my training wheels off my bike. The place was later to become a part of the 2012 Olympic stadium. Talk about expanding your universe. The West Ham (my team), Arsenal, and Tottenham teams were all within striking distance, and all the kids supported one of those. Leyton Orient, another football club, was walking distance from my house, but no one supported them because the poor fuckers were in the Third Division. My dream—like that of all British kids—was to play professional football.
One of my fondest memories of growing up is of the weekends and holidays that we would take to Southend, Jaywick, Clacton-on-Sea, or Canvey Island, places at the end of the Thames Estuary, where the Thames filters into the North Sea. Even though these places were barely an hour away from home, people of limited means could escape there from the city and feel as though they had entered some exotic playground. I’ve read recently that Jaywick is today considered one of the most deprived areas in the country, but at the time, those trips represented adventure, escapism, and my love of travel.
My parents smoked liked troopers. They were completely unaware of the hideous side effects this would have on their sickly child and how it was probably making my asthma worse. Swimming was suggested by my doctor to relieve my asthma because he refused to place me on an inhaler for fear of me becoming reliant on the drugs. I loved to swim and was swimming about a mile by the time I was eight years old. I actually became a fairly decent swimmer and diver and joined several swim teams while I was in school.
As I was growing up, my parents taught me (like many other post–Second World War kids) to appreciate what you have and not to harp on about what you don’t have. They were very frugal and I know a lot of that stems from the lean years they spent during the war in England. That mentality seeped everywhere, even down to what we ate. As with most families at the time, our diet wasn’t quite what I would call healthy, but then again, we managed to survive on British sustenance. That is to say, lots of braised beef, along with plenty of mashed and boiled potatoes. Then of course there was also what we Brits called pork scratchings or pork cracklings (also known as pork rinds), which were just basically fried and roasted pork fat; another pig delicacy was dripping, which was congealed fat spread on a slice of bread. So once again, I had nothing to compare all of this to until I had my first curry.
I would have conversations with my mum, sitting in our small kitchen while she peeled potatoes for dinner. I would sit there quietly as she told me stories about the war with a certain love and pride in her voice even as she recounted in great detail what it was like to be a child and live through the Blitz in 1940 and 1941, when the Germans launched massive and sustained strategic bombings all across the United Kingdom, when more than one million London houses were destroyed or damaged and more than 40,000 civilians were killed. My mum and her family would hop from bomb shelter to bomb shelter throughout her neighborhood, and by forces of both luck and common sense, they managed to survive.
As the adage goes, what didn’t kill everyone made them stronger, and my parents were living proof of that, as were many other people in our neighborhood. My mum always stressed to me how the war and severe rationing made people pull together and how proud she was of her country’s ironclad patriotism. To this day, this is a big part of who I am. I will always go around my house looking for lights and/or water to turn off and such, due to the fact that both of my parents instilled in me this sense of never wasting anything. When you grow up taking one bath a week to conserve water and rationing your meals because you never knew when things could be taken away from you, it reminds you that it’s always a good idea to conserve and not take anything for granted.
One of my closest friends, Gary Saint, lived in the next street over. I’d known Gary since we were about eight years old. He’d be at my house all the time. He’d even come on my parents’ weekend trips to Jaywick and remained a loyal friend well into our adult lives together. There was a group of us that hung out together, like kids do. I remember it being a wonderful childhood, where members of our little gang were within shouting distance of each other’s houses.
To anyone passing by, Boundary Road and the surrounding area looked like the countless other gray and dreary English cityscapes. But it was a thriving, colorful place, inhabited and enhanced by people of many cultures. We all lived alongside many immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean, including a huge influx of Jamaicans, who brought with them the sound of reggae, which would influence many musicians in the 1960s. As I walked home from school each day, the air was thick with the aromas of many different and wild-smelling foods. All the various kinds of pungent curries and spices, fresh ginger, and those mouthwatering, aromatic smells gave our neighborhood a rich, ethnic flavor (both figuratively and literally). That is not to say we didn’t have our fair share of racism on our streets. Many Brits harbored deep anger toward the influx of Indians
and Pakistanis, who were encouraged to come to the country for work. They called it Paki-bashing. I knew kids who were singled out and attacked simply because they were Indian or Pakistani. I never understood it.
Being around people of different ethnic groups was nothing new to me. My mum’s oldest sister, my auntie Dorothy, had three daughters—my first cousins. They were all married to black men. So a part of my family is multiracial. To me it was strange to see the separatism of races pushed by propaganda. Nothing new there. It was no surprise that white-bread Britain, with its strong Anglo-Saxon foundation, would have a problem with the newly integrated brown population.
By the early 1960s, when I was just seven or eight years old, I started listening to the radio as if it were this great and brilliant discovery. It was the radio that opened a whole new world, and that world was named the Beatles. I became obsessed with Paul, John, Ringo, and George, pretty much like every other kid with a pulse back then. I loved their songs, how the guys looked, everything. I remember that thrill of sitting in our front room waiting for any song by the Fab Four to come on the radio. As soon as it did, my friend Terry from next door and I would go to the shed (aka “the stage”) behind my house and pretend that we were John Lennon and Paul McCartney, substituting tennis rackets for guitars and donning plastic Beatle wigs that were popular then. Often to the annoyance of our neighbors, we’d cry out our own strangled versions of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Twist and Shout.”
The mid-1960s were absolutely mind-blowing in terms of what one could find on the radio, and not just the Beatles. And not just on the BBC, which actually had a fairly limited selection of music. No, to find what was really going on, we tuned in to underground broadcasting outlets. There was Radio Luxembourg and pirate radio stations that offered some remarkable sonic lifelines from America, including artists like the Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and all of the big Motown artists of the day. Pirate radio was broadcasted illegally, without a license, by ships anchored miles off the coast of England. Radio Caroline, Wonderful Radio London, Swinging Radio England—these fantastically mysterious stations kept us all completely plugged in to music that was part of the “Swinging London” scene that had begun to flourish in the mid-1960s. You had the British Invasion, which included the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, the Who, and the Small Faces. You had psychedelic rock from Jimi Hendrix (I’m claiming Hendrix because he broke in England first) to Cream and Pink Floyd and others. And you had mod fashions and sexy pop tarts like Jean Shrimpton, Penelope Tree, and Twiggy. All of these converged in London Town in one huge, swirling orgy of culture, fashion, and especially music.
It was in this atmosphere that you felt something important was shifting. One day you would hear “Like a Rolling Stone” for the very first time. Then you might hear “Satisfaction” or “My Generation.” It was the 1959 Colin MacInnes novel about London, Absolute Beginners, brought to life. The ground was shaking. There was something charged and intoxicating in the air. London seemed to be the center of it. Living in Walthamstow and with it being a suburb, we did not have direct contact with all the glittery, seductive charms of Swinging London, but it did trickle down to us in the way of music. I had a partner in crime who explored this new amazing world with me, my cousin Dave Wheeler.
It’s hard to measure the influence Dave had on me. He was two years older than me, so it was a bit like having an older brother. Being an only child, I never had that sort of older sibling to influence me, shape me, or even corrupt me. But thankfully Dave did all those things. Dave was my mum’s oldest brother Georgie’s son and he lived in a tower block just paces off Boundary Road.
Dave and I actually went out with two sisters who were two years apart. My girl’s name was Kim Taylor. She was dark-haired and considered my first girlfriend. Dave was going out with her older sister, Pat. But even more important than that, Dave exposed me to a wild, all-you-could-eat musical buffet that affects me to this very day. He wasn’t just a big fan of music—he also had access to rare and wonderful under-the-counter bootleg albums back then, trawling vinyl shops throughout London’s East End to procure some of the finest illegal concert recordings known to man. These vinyl treasures announced themselves differently than regular albums. Forget the slick packaging. We’re talking a plain white cardboard sleeve, usually with a color-mimeographed piece of cover art scotch-taped on the front. They looked and felt like contraband—sonic taboo—and Dave treasured his hot wax. I always preferred the real recordings, but the artists that he exposed me to were the real magic—Hendrix, Zeppelin, the Stones, Floyd, and of course Deep Purple, all of which he blasted out of his stereo. A bunch of us would go up to his mum and dad’s flat and greedily absorb it all.
When I was about fourteen years old, I had an epiphany. I remember seeing David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars on Top of the Pops. They were playing this type of music that just spoke to me. It seemed that Bowie was directly writing songs for my group of friends. I had never heard or seen anything like Bowie in my life. It was all brand-new—totally androgynous. Since I was a sponge, it was ultimately cool. Although Bowie spearheaded the glam rock movement, along with Marc Bolan of T. Rex, the real hook was the amazing songs and melodies that Bowie wrote. Then there was the fact that he obviously didn’t give a fuck about how people perceived the way he looked, even though it was a very contrived concept. When I first saw Little Richard, I was too young to know that he was effeminate. But when I saw Bowie, he overdid the androgyny and was wearing glitter, colored hair, and girls’ clothes. It was certainly nothing anyone in England had seen before. As a teenager trying to discover myself, I thought that this seemed like a gang I could belong to. Then there was the amazing look and playing of his guitarist, Mick Ronson, which totally hooked me.
When I later saw David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars on The Old Grey Whistle Test, it further sealed the deal for me. The Old Grey Whistle Test was a music television show that ran on BBC Two, and I’m sure that besides me, it influenced many other kids of my generation. The beauty of The Old Grey Whistle Test was that it was all very low-key. Bands would perform their songs in a very plain-looking studio without lots of production, which forced you to really focus on the music. There was no studio audience, so you could practically hear a pin drop between songs. To this day I love looking up clips from the show on YouTube. It’s sort of like time stands still. As soon as I hear the opening title music—a cool, groovy, harmonica-based song called “Stone Fox Chase” by the Nashville band Area Code 615—I’m back to being that wide-eyed boy in the living room. The sound of that opening was just so rootsy. You knew you were going to get an untarnished view of whatever artists happened to be on the program that week. The show’s original host when it started back in 1971 was Richard Williams, but on this magical night in 1972, the laid-back “Whispering” Bob Harris (as he was known) by then had taken the helm. The program took its strange name from an old Tin Pan Alley phrase. According to legend, agents would have the doormen for the building come in and listen to a song and see if it was worthwhile—the “test” was whether the “old grey” folks could whistle the tune.
All I remember is Bowie playing an acoustic guitar and Mick Ronson playing his famous Les Paul banging out “Queen Bitch.” The interesting thing was that as different and new as his image was, he didn’t look like some dude wearing makeup. He looked like David Bowie. The whole visual thing Bowie gave off combined with his expression of the music made him seem like part of some exclusive club I desperately wanted to belong to. Of course Bowie was speaking to me. The first line of “Queen Bitch” was, “I’m up on the eleventh floor and I’m watching the cruisers below . . .” and Dave’s family lived on the eleventh floor.
The Old Grey Whistle Test, by the way, would go on to host lots of other legendary performances as I got older. It’s where Bob Marley and the Wailers made their very first British TV appearance. I also remember seeing Stevie Marriott and Humble Pie and Bill Withers, among many other legendary
performers, not to mention, later, a performance by a band called Girl, of which I would soon become a member. But of all of the artists that I saw on the Whistle Test no one dazzled, dazed, and amazed me the way David Bowie did. Thanks to him, in one single moment, my world went from black-and-white to color.
If seeing Bowie on television was a landmark moment for me, then so was the day that Dave and I went to our first live rock concert. Neither one of us had ever seen a live show, so this was a big deal. We went to see Deep Purple, who in 1972 were one of my favorite bands. They were out on the road for their Machine Head tour, and they were playing at the Sundown Brixton (now known as O2 Academy Brixton), a former movie house that dated back to 1929. It was (and still is) a classic-looking theater, held about 3,000 or so and was built to feel like an amphitheater set in an Italian garden. It had just been refurbished for concerts, and this night, September 30, was actually to be the very first rock-and-roll show held at the venue. A christening of sorts, in more ways than one, and we were going to be there to experience it.
I don’t remember queuing up, but we stumbled in and were front row, propping up the stage. We were totally excited. Even the opening act, Glencoe (crap name, crap band), freaked me out because I had never seen a live band before. So when drummer Ian Paice, bassist Roger Glover, singer Ian Gillan, keyboardist Jon Lord, and especially lead guitarist Ritchie Blackmore strolled onstage, it honestly left me breathless. Ritchie Blackmore stood right in front of me. It was surreal. I think people tend to forget that in the pre-MTV world rock stars truly were godlike, mythical figures of lore that were quite different than mere mortals. There they were, just as they appeared on the album covers and in the magazines. Flesh and blood. Deep Purple. I was just trying to take it all in.