Too Young for Rock and Roll

By Dave Clemo

Dave’s first home was a beach chalet in Cornwall. The plain wooden shack had none of the things we take for granted like electricity, sewage or water.
Cornwall in the 1950s had no TV and only two BBC radio stations, so he had very limited exposure to popular music.
He was seven when Elvis and Cliff Richard hit the charts.
Ten years later he was living in West London, the epicentre of the underground music scene that shook the music business like an earthquake. He went to the first free festivals in Hyde Park and a host of gigs where he saw groups like Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The Who and Genesis in their earliest incarnations before they became global superstars.
He spent the next few years trying to emulate his heroes using clapped out and home made guitars and amplifiers.

‘A highly recommended read not only for fans of grass roots music but also for those wishing to experience a flavour of those times.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dave Clemo
• Release date: Apr 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463471418

Dave Clemo

Dave was born almost exactly halfway through the last century. His first home was a beach chalet in Cornwall, England. The plain wooden shack had none of the things we take for granted like electricity, sewage or running water. Cornwall in the 1950s had no TV and only two BBC radio stations, so he had very limited exposure to popular music. He was seven when Elvis and Cliff Richard hit the charts. His family moved to West London in 1962. He was given a guitar for Christmas and spent the next few years trying to play it.In 1967 the area around Ladbroke Grove was the epicentre of the underground music scene that shook the music business like an earthquake. During that late 60s and early 70s he went to a host of gigs and saw groups like Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The Who, Jethro Tull and Genesis in their earliest incarnations before they became global superstars.He also spent the next few years trying to emulate his heroes using clapped out and home made guitars and amplifiers before moving to Northampton in 1974. For the next ten years he played in two of the most successful local bands. He wrote his first songs in the late sixties but his writing took off when he became a Christian in 1990. Since then he has had over 100 songs published, has contributed articles for magazines, written and delivered dozens of sermons and was a regular contributor to a 'one minute thought for today' on local radio. He has recorded and released over ten albums of mostly self penned songs, played pubs, concerts and festivals across the UK on guitar, mandolin and bass.From 2009 a series of health issues has meant that Dave was unable to play at the same frequency as before so he has used the time to turn his writings and research into a series of autobiographical books.The first volume ‘Too Young for Rock and Roll’ was published in June 2018.‘A highly recommended read not only for fans of grass roots music but also for those wishing to experience a flavour of those times.’ Pulse Alternative Magazine.

Book preview

TOO YOUNG FOR

ROCK AND ROLL

Dave Clemo

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Text Copyright Dave Clemo 2018

Dave Clemo has asserted his right in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be lent, resold, hired out or reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author and publisher. All rights reserved.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of photographic and other resource material used in this book. Some were unreachable. If they contact the publishers, we will endeavour to credit them in reprints and future editions.

Published by 3P Publishing at Smashwords

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First published in 2018 in the UK by 3P Publishing

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ISBN: 9780463471418

This book is available in paperback.

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For Sue

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Contents:

Acknowledgements

Chapter One – In the beginning

Do You Remember?

Chapter Two – London

Chapter Three – Off to work

Chapter Four – Classic 1967 shows

Chapter Five – 1968

Chapter Six – 1968 continued

Chapter Seven – The first free festivals

Chapter Eight – Imitating my idols

Chapter Nine – Oakland Chapter

Chapter Ten – 1970

Chapter Eleven – Updating the kit

Chapter Twelve – Talent shows

Chapter Thirteen – All change again

Chapter Fourteen – Captain Swing

Postscript

Further reading

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Acknowledgements

I couldn’t have written this book without the valuable input from family and friends.

Andy Brazier helped by supplying photographs and other items from his personal collection. He also helped confirm many dates and names in the story. Dave O’Callaghan was amazed that I could remember anything from back then, but he and his wife Jude added more names and other details to the story.

Pete Jones was another valuable contributor. Our long telephone conversations helped flesh out many of the stories and his photos (including the only pictures of our first band together) also proved invaluable. We visited many of our old haunts together in March 2017, and while many landmarks had vanished, enough remained to remind us of those long ago times.

Trevor Denton also helped fill in some detail. It’s amazing when you get together with old friends. One fuzzy memory acts as a trigger and long forgotten events come back with almost total recall.

The Marmalade Skies website helped me establish the timeline, with concert dates and record releases. The UK Free Festivals website was also a gold mine of information regarding the Hyde Park concerts. I’m also indebted to everyone who posted old adverts and articles on the internet for old geeks like me to admire.

Andy & Caroline from 3P Publishing added impetus to the project, spurring me on to make the book the best it could be.

Last, and not least, I could not have done this without the love and support from my wife Sue and our children Jayne & Christopher. Thank you all. Dave Clemo. 2018.

Back

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Chapter One. In the beginning.

I was born in a hospital in Redruth in Cornwall in December 1949, two years after a certain Mick Fleetwood. He went on to great things, playing drums in Fleetwood Mac, arguably the biggest and most famous Anglo/US rock band, and whose story has been told in great detail elsewhere. I saw him play several times in the late 1960s, but never knew of our connection. Everyone knows his story. This is mine.

Five years is an awfully long time when you’re just starting school. I was still in primary school when Cliff Richard had his first hit record. He’s only ten years older than me, but back then ten years was more than a lifetime. As we get older time compresses, like the grooves in a long-playing record. When we are young it seems to take longer to traverse one circuit of the disc and return to where you started, but as you travel towards the middle everything seems to speed up and the anniversaries come around more frequently.

Back in 1955/6 rock and roll was meaningless to a five-year old like me, but for someone ten years older it was the music of life itself. Likewise, the psychedelic music revolution of the late 60s would also be meaningless to anyone born in 1960, but punk? Now you’re talking.

I was an In-betweener. I was too young for Rock & Roll, too old for punk.

In these days of wall to wall music, with umpteen radio stations and a score or more satellite channels to provide (as Radio 1 once proclaimed) the soundtrack to your life, it may be hard to envisage a time when pop music was confined to a couple of programmes broadcast on the radio for a few hours each week. The first pop music charts were published in 1952 and were based on sales of sheet music. Very few people owned a record player where I lived, and if they did, there was nowhere to buy records anyway.

There was a major shortage of living accommodation after the war. My mother was living in a Land Army hostel when she was single but had to leave when she married. The newly weds stayed with my grandparents for a while, but the cottage was too small for five adults (my uncle Peter was living at home as well). They moved into a grotty bedsit in Penzance but there was a ‘no children’ rule so they had to find somewhere else to live. They wanted to live close to my dad’s family in Goldsithney or Marazion, but all they could find was a tiny one-bedroom chalet on Hayle Towans. The name of the chalet was ‘Lanteglos’ and was still standing when I visited it in 2017.

They moved to a larger chalet after a few months. My son and I found the location by lining up some old photos but the chalet has been replaced. It’s no great loss. It was primitive. There was no electricity, no running water and no sewage connected. My mother cooked on a primus stove and the chalet was lit by hurricane lamps. There was a chemical toilet in a draughty wooden shed just outside the back door. It had to be emptied every week. This chalet was our home until we moved into our new council house in 1954.

I only have a few memories of the time. My parents took me to the cinema at the Copperhouse end of Hayle to see the newsreel of the Coronation of the Queen. That would have been in June 1953. The Duke of Edinburgh paid a visit to the town to open the new Recreation Ground at Copperhouse. I was there, sitting on my father’s shoulders. There’s a cast iron plaque attached to the gates that commemorates the event. On another occasion there was a demonstration by a new Westland Whirlwind helicopter from the nearby Fleet Air Arm Culdrose airbase where the crew sent a winch man down to ‘rescue’ another crew member in a dinghy that was roped down to stop it blowing away. The crowd were allowed within a few feet of the dinghy. If anything had happened to the helicopter the death toll would have been unimaginable.

I still have my ID Card that was issued when I was born.

So where did my musical story begin? And how was it shaped by the places I lived in and the people that I met? For a start I'm not from a musical family. None of my family or relatives is at all musical. I never had any great urge as a child to perform or go on the stage, yet a huge part of my life has been devoted to music.

Our new house was on a newly built estate. My mother always complained that the house had been built on the site of an abattoir and was infested with fleas in hot weather. It was cold and draughty in winter. There was only an open coal fire in the living room for cooking and heating the house. The windows were single glazed metal framed Crittall windows and the bedrooms were so cold I used my overcoat as an extra blanket. It was still better than the chalet.

When we moved into our new house we had electricity at last and my parents got an old radio. I remember my mother singing Rosemary Clooney's song ‘This Old House’ as she worked around the house. It was very relevant as we’d just moved from the old beach chalet. Television finally arrived in Cornwall in about 1957/8, but it was a couple of years before we could afford one, so any exposure to pop music was very limited.

I do, however, remember the Skiffle boom. I was in the third year at Penpol Primary School (so would have been eight or nine) when the headmaster brought an older pupil into the classroom to play to us. He had a real guitar and played ‘O My Darling Clementine’ to us. His name was Gary and his young band (the oldest member was 13) had just won a Skiffle competition in the county. For a few weeks it seemed that every boy on our estate had fashioned himself a stringed instrument from old bits and pieces. There were impromptu jam sessions in many a front garden. The fact that Skiffle was a do-it-yourself musical genre was what set it apart from every other musical style at that time. You didn’t need an expensive (sometimes prohibitively so) musical instrument. You didn’t need music lessons. You didn’t need to study for years before you were proficient enough to play. You didn’t need to read music. You just did it!

By the time I took my eleven plus exam and started at the grammar school in Penzance I'd learned the words to a couple of songs. The first was ‘Only Sixteen’ which I'd heard on the TV show ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’. Elvis was in the charts when I was in the local cottage hospital having my tonsils removed. The song was called ‘Wooden Heart’.

Did you see what happened just then? I was able to link an event in my life to a song that was playing on the radio. That simple fact is what makes music memorable.

I’m aged about two outside my home on Hayle Towans in 1952.

My school photo 1961.

I only stayed at this school for two terms. I remember a music lesson where the teacher tried to teach our class how to play the recorder. He went to the cupboard and took out a box of recorders. Before handing them out he told us not to play them until being told to. No sooner had he started giving them out than the tooting and squeaking began. The teacher told us to stop. The cacophony continued to our teacher’s annoyance. Finally, he snapped. ‘If you don’t stop now I’ll put them away!’ There was another toot from somewhere in the class. That was it. Within a minute the recorders were all gathered up and put back in the cupboard and that was that.

Another incident from school in Penzance set me apart from the others in my class. One day our form teacher asked his pupils who their favourite singer was. Hands went up when he asked ‘Elvis?’ Other hands went up when he asked ‘Cliff?’ or ‘Adam (Faith)?’ My hands stayed down. At that time my favourite singer was Helen Shapiro.

Now who'd have thought that 50 years later I would be sharing the bill with her, George Hamilton IV and others at a gospel music concert? And who could ever imagine that Frank Ifield, another star from the early 60s, would become a personal friend? Or that I’d be helping backstage when he toured the UK in 2015?

There are two words in ‘Music Business’. The business side has always been in the hands of a few powerful companies and individuals. They decide what the public will hear. As far as they are concerned they could be selling baked beans. Every few years a new face is chosen for the label, but it’s the same product underneath.

In musical terms the Fifties began in 1955/6, soon after Skiffle music grew from being merely the novelty item in a jazz band’s repertoire. The brass players would take a break, leaving the rhythm section (guitar or banjo; bass and drums) to play their versions of old Leadbelly songs. It’s almost impossible to quantify the effect this had on the teenagers at that time. Here was a style of music that anyone could play. It was