Read Online The Living Years by Mike Rutherford - Free Book Online Page B

been that Ant and John Al would come with me as backups. When I opened the door to Chris’s study bedroom and started with ‘Chris: Ant, John Al and I think . . . ’ I looked over my shoulder to discover that they’d pissed off.
    New Musical Express
called ‘The Silent Sun’, ‘a disc of many facets and great depth’ although ‘it might be a bit too complex for the average fan’. We also got a good review in
Melody Maker
, which was the one we really wanted to be in.
Melody Maker
had a quality to it – musicians read it and believed it.
    Sadly our next single, ‘A Winter’s Tale’, generated zero interest. The only way it was going to be played on Radio 1 was if someone took an acetate up to Broadcasting House and shoved it in Tony Blackburn’s hands as he came out. Which is exactly what Pete suggested doing. Somehow it was Tony Banks who ended up being the one standing outside the door in Portland Place. Unfortunately Tony gets a bit aggressive when he gets nervous and I think Blackburn thought he was going to be beaten up.
    * * *
    I was seventeen in 1968 and growing up fast. In the spring Cliff had performed ‘Congratulations’ at the Eurovision Song Contest and he now definitely looked dated to me. (To be fair, I still think he has a great voice: give him the right song. But I wasn’t ten anymore. Cliff who? It was like we’d never known each other.) I was also a year into my A levels at Farnborough Tech studying English (which I enjoyed); French (which might come in handy); and Economics (which I didn’t understand).
    By my age, my father had finished his training at the Naval College in Osborne on the Isle of Wight and, later, Dartmouth. He’d already undertaken two tours on the training battleship HMS
Thunderer
and had joined the battleship
Revenge
, part of the Atlantic Fleet, as a Naval Cadet. Eight months later he was promoted to Midshipman and joined the cruiser
Danae
, which was based at Malta.
    By the time he was twenty-one he’d sailed along the Suez Canal on his way to Singapore and Hong Kong, and was back on land to study for further exams at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. It wasn’t all work:
    The glittering London season was underway. With my parents on occasions I did various events such as the Royal Academy, Chelsea Flower Show, the Derby, Royal Tournament, Varsity and Eton and Harrow match and so on.
    To take part in these splendid events a suitable wardrobe was essential.
    If going around town in daytime, a bowler hat and rolled umbrella were needed. If going out informally or to the West End at all in the evening a dinner jacket with boiled shirt, wing collar and black tie was worn. This was surmounted by an opera hat, a cunning device like a conjuror’s top hat which could be collapsed and put under a theatre seat and at a flip of the wrist sprung out into shape.
    He’d also got himself a car, a two-seater Morris Cowley, which had a canvas hood and one door. On the passenger side. This meant that ‘If the passenger was a lovely girl in long evening dress and satin shoes . . . it could be the end of a beautiful friendship.’ (When I was his age I had a yellow Ford Anglia with brown rust weeping down the right wing and was stuck in Farnham.)
    After my father had finished his two terms in Greenwich, he went to train in Gunnery, Torpedo and Navigation at Whale Island, where he would take command thirty years later.
    [Training] ended with a nightmare three weeks of exams ranging from abstruse mathematics to drilling a company or instructing a fifteen-inch turret’s crew.
    These surmounted, I was appointed to the junior staff of the Gunnery School at Chatham which, unlike Whale Island, was not an independent command but an integral part of the Royal Naval Barracks. Besides being instructors at the School, we were also Barrack’s Officers.
    I was made parade training officer so – basilisk-eyed and all boots, black gaiters and silver-plated whistle chain – marched myself