I Fear for This Boy: Some Chapters of Accidents

By Theo Fennell

"I ripped through I Fear For This Boy like a train, snorting with laughter and delight as I rattled along, pulled by the power of Fennell's unique story-telling genius…. I can't recommend the ride highly enough." - Stephen Fry

Named 2022 Book of the Year by Spectator World

Theo Fennell's picaresque journey from the depths of financial despair to the glittering celebrity world of the rich and famous is a comic classic comparable to Three Men in a Boat or Bill Bryson's The Thunderbolt Kid. Despite the occasional success, disasters and failures dominate his business life. Nonetheless his jewellery has brought pleasure to thousands and this book will bring pleasure to millions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mensch Publishing
• Release date: Apr 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781912914418

Theo Fennell

Theo Fennell was born in Moascar, Egypt, where British soldiers were garrisoned along the Suez Canal. The son of an army family, he spent his early years all over the world. He was sent to boarding school at five, then to Eton, York College of Art, followed by the Byam Shaw School of Art. He is a leading British jewellery and silverware designer. He lives in London with his wife, Louise, an author. The couple have two daughters, Emerald, a writer, actor and director, and Coco, a dress designer.

Book preview

1

I AM THE MUSIC MAN

Like many of my generation, I dreamed of making some sort of a life in the strange and wonderful world of rock ‘n’ roll – but only in the most general and unstructured way.

The catalyst for this ambition was my obsession with the music of my youth. Music which changed so much in such a short time. I had older, twin sisters and the music they loved was the first that I heard. Many British people their age – and I fell vicariously into that generation – trace their musical epiphany to 1956 and the coming of Elvis. No one has more respect for the King than I but the sounds that formed my musical tastes were much more varied. Between the twins and my father, we owned an extraordinarily diverse collection of 78s and 45s; these included Elvis of course, The Dambusters’ Theme, Eden Kane, Nina and Frederik, Bartok, Wagner, Gilbert and Sullivan, and everything in between.

My father also had a host of very eclectic records of almost every popular musical show as well as the 1920s and 30s music of his younger days.

He was hopelessly in love with Zizi Jeanmaire. Occasionally he might ask me if I had heard of a chap called Ray Aubusson, who sung a wonderful song called Blue Bayou. His tastes leant heavily, as did mine and my sisters’, towards the overtly romantic.

Another big influence on the development of my musical tastes came in the extraordinary shape of my Great Aunt Nellie.

She had a pianola hidden away in her terrifying house where I sometimes stayed in the school holidays if my parents were stationed too far away abroad for me to make the trip. A pianola, a rarity now, was a stand-up piano you could either play normally or by putting a roll of paper with holes in it into an opening at its front. This acted rather as the metal drum does in a music box. Not only did it play a tune but also made the keys go up and down, giving the impression that you were actually playing it, if you wanted to fool people. As I was the only person in this strange, unused room, I was only fooling myself – this became a regular theme in my life. Sadly, it also demonstrated that there were quicker ways of being able to do things than just hard work and practice.

She had many of these rolls, but none of them dated from after 1918 which was, for her, ‘the day the music died’ as it marked the end of the Great War. Those rolls gave me an abiding love of music-hall songs and deeply sentimental Edwardian ballads and these joined all the other contemporary music rattling around in my young head. There was little other entertainment to be had in that house, except for a contraption which you put slides into that had two almost identical pictures so that, when viewed through the eye-holes together, it made the scene appear three dimensional. As the photographs were mainly images of Flanders battlefields and regimental parades of those about to die, they were quite harrowing stuff for a child.

I was sometimes made to have bizarre and quite frightening conversations with my mother’s mad cousin Bobbie, Nellie’s daughter. She was a woman of indeterminate age whose teeth had been removed for her own and other people’s safety. She occasionally ran around the garden at night, stark naked, and then hid behind a big Cedar tree until her mother calmed her down. Very occasionally she and I would have completely lucid and quite interesting conversations which, in their own way, were more unexpected and disorientating than the indecipherable gibberish she normally spoke.

At its zenith this dark and forbidding place housed Aunt Nellie and her sister Sybil, who was my grandmother, another great-aunt and Bobbie. They were looked after by a strange retinue of the unemployable remains of the sisters’ various households. This included Mrs Hugo, the worst cook who ever drew breath but whose fierceness precluded any complaints, Florence, a dim ‘girl’, now in her seventies whose racy past was a legend in my mother’s family, and a man who wandered around the garden rather mysteriously. Bobbie had a succession of nurses but few stayed long. It was a strange and unsettling place to stay for a boy of seven or eight.

Nellie would, quite suddenly and when the sherry decanter had taken a thrashing, sing very sentimental songs in a loud and trembling soprano until slow tears ran down her face. I found this unnerving but, looking back, they must have reminded her of happier times before the huge swathe of friends and family deaths she had witnessed during the Great War and, straight afterwards, the Spanish Flu epidemic in which my other grandmother died.

This heady melting-pot of music helped to make my tastes very eclectic and I can still remember pretty much all the words to those music-hall songs, pre-war hits, current pop songs of the time as well as all the musicals we listened to at home.

My grandmother, who I sadly never really got to know very well despite that time spent with her among this odd menagerie, took me to a matinée of My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane with its original cast, which included Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. It was during a half-term and I was eight. From the first note of the overture to the final of the many curtain calls, I was transfixed. I had no idea that something so wonderful could possibly happen right in front of you in real life.

As we walked out I looked up at her and said,

‘Granny, I want to be in musicals when I grow up.’

She stopped walking and bent down, her face level with mine, and said firmly,

‘Whatever you do, don’t tell your father that.’

On reflection, I think hers was just a natural, Victorian reaction. The belief of her generation was that life on the stage, especially in musical theatre, was not only wicked and unreliable but peopled by men who were ‘not as others’ or ‘somewhat artistic’ as my father used to call my Uncle Ronnie.

We all adored Ronnie who was a majestic old queen of the kind you hardly see nowadays. He always wore very well-cut, high-waisted trousers, a blouson shirt with its collar turned up and a chiffon scarf done up with a toggle. I think my father, who was actually very relaxed about people’s sexual orientations, would have loved to have seen me give my Curly in Oklahoma and have been incredibly proud and secretly cried his eyes out.

In 1960 my father was stationed at Fontainebleau with the Army. He was attached to NATO and most of the other troops there were American. Their soldiers had something called the PX (Post Exchange) while our brave lads only had the NAAFI (Navy, Army, Air Force Institute). These were places the troops could eat, buy food and drink and where there would be films and occasional entertainments. The American PX was to the NAAFI what Harrods is to a village shop.

Rationing had not long vanished in Britain so it was magical to see things that, up to then, had only been part of my American mythology – like bubble gum and soda pop, Superman comics and hot-dogs. The PX was not far removed from a modern mall and had a cinema that showed current movies like Spartacus on huge screens and in Technicolor. There was a hamburger bar, a record shop and pretty much everything else I could have dreamed of and it shone like a rainbow against the drabness of Britain and the NAAFI. The PX was where I first saw men wearing blue jeans, turned up in the American way with white T-shirts, packets of Camel cigarettes tucked under the sleeves above the bicep like James Dean. Flat tops and beehives, like Connie Francis’s, abounded and everyone had amazing teeth. It was all very seductive for a small boy on the cusp of teenager-hood with a sweet tooth, a soft spot for bright colours and a love of vocal harmony.

I had – and still have – an inbred cultural patriotism that completely embraced the gentleness and quirk of the home-grown offerings they showed at the NAAFI. We saw School for Scoundrels with the incomparable Terry-Thomas, the St Trinian’s films, and absurdly melodramatic police dramas. I found the sometimes plangent, sometimes raucous sense of humour of British squaddies far funnier than their GI counterparts and, although they were the easy winners in any repartee contest, there was no doubt as to who the GIs thought had been the real winners of the Second World War, only a decade and a half before. On a night out the British, in their appallingly uncomfortable and ill-fitting serge uniforms, stood little chance against the GIs in their spiffy outfits and natty hats.

The officers were a different matter. The old-fashioned British career officer, elegant and assured in his Savile Row uniform, seemed touched by a sense of destiny undimmed by the depletions of six years of war and a country reduced to penury. They would saunter about looking like the natural leaders of the free world, seemingly unaware that their primacy had evaporated. Their American counterparts had about them an air of slight embarrassment, tinged with an unintended superciliousness manifest in their complete lack of interest in anything European.

On the popular music home front there was, of course, a very young Sir Cliff but also the man who was then a hero to me and later became a friend, Adam Faith. I still love the enthusiastic amateurishness of many of those British performers, huge stars at home, but never standing a chance in America as they lacked the necessary polish. But this was the attribute I found most endearing. Our popular entertainers always looked as if they had just won a holiday-camp talent show and appeared positively shoddy compared to their gleaming, well-fed American counterparts.

How extraordinary it was then that, just a couple of years later, British bands from provincial backgrounds were to take over the music world and we humble Brit pop-pickers would find ourselves belonging to the coolest nation on earth. Our fashion and our painters, literature and music suddenly made us, for a decade or two, the epicentre of the new pop culture. And bliss it really was to be alive and, as I was also young, it was very heaven – musically, at least.

So, by that age, I had such a myriad of musical influences and passions, all distinctly lowbrow, that I couldn’t help but be confused. During their prepubescence and through their early teens, most people desperately wanted to belong and that meant nailing your colours to a specific mast. I could never choose that mast and I still can’t.

I was at a boarding school during that first school holiday I spent among Americans, and returned with all sorts of incredibly rare things to impress my schoolmates. I took candy bars and comics and some genuine American records. The first three singles I ever bought were The Four Preps’ ‘26 Miles’, Adam Faith’s ‘Someone Else’s Baby’ and The Everly Brothers’ ‘Let It Be Me’ and I love each one of these still.

When the Beatles and Mersey Sound took over the world, the floodgates opened for so many other, extraordinarily original, gifted British groups and artists all of whom produced such wonderful music. Almost every top twenty – the Hit Parade as it was called then, and an expression that reduces my daughters to helpless mirth now – hardly had a dud song. The music was so life-affirming and the people involved with it seemed to be having such a good time that I was amazed that everyone I knew didn’t want to be a pop singer, however academically brilliant they were.

In fact, some of my friends did go on to be rock musicians, successful or otherwise. My great friend from those early days, Chris Stewart, somewhat eccentrically always wanted to be a shepherd. He became, for a brief moment, the drummer with Genesis before being replaced. This allowed him to take up his crook and fulfil his ambition of living among his flock. He later wrote an incredibly popular book about actually being a shepherd called Driving Over Lemons.

How wonderful to have achieved such a gentle ambition.

Many of my heroes, and not just musicians like The Kinks but also those in the many burgeoning creative fields, had been to art school so that seemed like the place to go and catch your artistic breath and ruminate on which road might be the best to travel.

This solipsistic sense of wanting to do something ‘creative’, but not being quite sure where your talents lay, wandering about and having a lovely, irresponsible time trying to find a career that doesn’t involve too much hard work, is now a common phenomenon, but back then I was a trailblazer.

It seemed that the first step of the journey to rock immortality was to be able to play the guitar but, for some strange reason, comparatively few of my schoolmates actually did, and nor did I before my mid-teens.

When I was about fifteen I injured a leg and, while it was in traction, I discovered a guitar in the school hospital. With little else to do, I taught myself to play it with the help of Bert Weedon’s great manual Play in a Day, that Bible for so many wannabe guitarists. When I say ‘play the guitar’ I mean that I learned to strum some chords to accompany a song – so long as it had no more than three or four. I didn’t have the application of those who practised for hours, swapped and learned new chords, and studied fingering long into the night. Half a century on I may have added a few chords to those original ones but, as any guitarist knows, you only need to know a few to have a good sing-song and, if your repertoire hasn’t much changed over forty years, why bother to learn more?

As Harland Howard said, ‘All you need to write a great song is three chords and the truth.’

I wrote a lot of angst-ridden poetry back then, drew moderately and read many pretentious books, just like so many other arty-farty youths. I also adopted a new philosophy pretty much daily and wrote some extremely weak tunes and when I set my poetry to these the results were mainly mortifying.

It appeared that none of these slightest of skills suited me for anything much, other than going to my local art school to do a Foundation Course. Luckily for me this happened to be York which then offered a truly wonderful year-long course that covered the full spectrum of all the visual art disciplines.

I had the first intimations of the liberties allowed a young man, armed only with a consistently out-of-tune guitar and a curious voice, while I was singing in bars in Italy during the holidays. As the locals only knew British music from the radio and didn’t understand English, I could pretend to be a professional just with my few chords as, if you were from swinging London, you were almost considered a Beatle. Luckily, my penchant for folksy, tortured songs with impenetrable words meant I could make up the lyrics when I forgot them and quite often re-invent the tune as well.

A slight germ of ambition began to take root. Perhaps my future might lie as a sort of blonde and deeper-voiced Donovan with hidden emotional strengths; or even a slightly less rugged but better dressed Kris Kristofferson.

In those days, and even now, pawnbrokers’ windows were full of musical instruments. Like all very ordinary guitarists I am besotted by guitars. I love their look and feel. I adore the provenance and the sound of them and I would happily own several hundred if I could.

I passed a pawnbroker every day as I walked to the art school in York, and I would stare longingly at the myriad of guitars and saxophones, trumpets and banjos hanging in the window. One day, dangling like a prop for a dangerous and outlandish sex game, I saw a bass drum attached to a collection of leather straps, cymbals and wires. It gradually dawned on me that it was a one-man band kit. I was a big fan of that great practitioner of the art, Don Partridge, and his capricious lifestyle. I had done a bit of busking, once nearly clearing ten shillings, and this apparition in the window seemed like kismet and my ticket to the open road. ‘A wandering minstrel I, A thing of shreds and patches’, I thought, which was very much my look at the time.

I was fired with a sense of purpose. I had found my place in life for the third time that week and so I went into the shop. After a bit of complicated business, trying it on and adjusting straps, I handed over three pounds ten shillings. My career in the music business had begun.

I stepped proudly out of the pawnbrokers and onto the pavement.

I was a one-man band.

2

I’M A ONE-MAN BAND

Once, when asked by a very sweet old hippie interviewer, why I had packed in my one-man band, I said,

‘Well, like all bands it was great for a while but then we began to argue.’

She gently shook her head and, with genuine sympathy said ‘Right, right, oh man, isn’t that always the way? Bummer.’

But my puerile reply really wasn’t far from the truth.

First of all, the kit was deeply inconvenient to carry or travel with. It was also impossible to store and, in my case, find a receptive audience. It was incredibly complicated to play, even competently, and I still have nothing but respect for those artistes who have genuinely mastered the craft. Although you didn’t necessarily need huge musicianship, though there are some genuine maestros, you did need immense energy, perseverance, and coordination. I had little of any of these.

First you had to learn how to play each of the instruments adequately and then all together and at the same time. This takes a vast amount of practice and tenacity. But after hours of trying there is a magical moment when everything synchronises and an ear-splitting, joyous cacophony bursts out of just one person and that person is you! It is suddenly worth it and does give an immense and rewarding surge of delight when it goes well. The very few times that I got onto any sort of a roll and it became a natural process, I felt I could make the whole world laugh and dance. Unfortunately it happened very infrequently and the whole world’s normal reaction was,

‘Oi, you, shut the fuck up!’

I mentioned the amount of practice needed to become confident and proficient because it really does need hours and days and weeks as there were so many different facets. Learning the chords and matching harmonica riffs was fairly simple and my four chords were generally enough. I also found that, if the harmonica was in the same chord as my guitar, it really just involved breathing in and out and, if it all got a bit complicated, I would resort to the kazoo. Neither were the other parts that tricky, the bass drum on my back merely needed to be struck in time by way of a leather cord lassoed around my foot and the cymbal was under my arm and so fairly easy to use and shaking my other foot worked the tambourine. Individually, none of these things was that demanding but playing them all together was nigh on impossible.

The only place I could practise was the flat that I shared with two other students who were reasonably long suffering and very often stoned so, on the face of it, an ideal audience. But the noise of a one-man band indoors is unbelievable, especially when finding the busker’s Holy Grail when drum, cymbal, guitar and kazoo reach a dizzying, communal climax. Unlike rehearsing a song on the guitar, tedious for the player and hellish for the listener but comparatively gentle, this contraption was very, very loud.

Practising on this portable orchestra involved many fruitless, thunderously optimistic but thwarted beginnings. Even more frustratingly, for both the player and the listener, were the times when everything was integrating nicely and I would then miss a beat and the whole thing would fall noisily apart before I started again. My gentle flatmates eventually steeled themselves to ask me, terribly sweetly, if I could practise elsewhere.

This was a blow, as I felt I was so nearly there.

I found an unused room at the college and they allowed me to practise between six and eight in the evening and so I spent a few solitary days there. On reviewing these paragraphs it reads as if this all took many tortuous years of practice and heartache but, in reality, at this point I had only had the kit for three weeks.

I reached a level of proficiency, as I have with many other things I have tried, at which I began to discover short cuts and clever ways around the parts that needed really hard work and practice.

There were some Airfix model kit makers who religiously followed the instructions, took hours making them, and ended up with every piece in the right place, their end product finished with Humbrol paint to exhibition quality. There were others who looked at all the fiddly bits and just put it together as fast as possible, leaving out many small but detailed pieces altogether, just to try and finish it before boredom set in. The end result was poor and left them unfulfilled but with spare time to do something else in a slapdash way. In those days I fell very much into the latter category. I have since acquired almost an obsession with attention to detail of which I am immodestly proud, but this infuriating trait was not easily learned.

I soon discovered that, if I only used the guitar, tambourine and kazoo most of the time and left the drum and the other kit essentially for show, I could make a passable noise, but it did mean that my full repertoire was somewhat limited. My opening number was the great Don Partridge’s ‘Blue Eyes’, which had a difficulty value of nearly ten out of ten, as it needed the bass drum, tambourine and the cymbal at quite a few crucial moments. ‘Catch the Wind’ by Donovan was a five which could be got through with just guitar, tambourine, harmonica and a lot of pathos and the mighty ‘Under the Boardwalk’ a three during which you could put in almost anything, anywhere. ‘Streets of London’ had a difficulty value of one, as it involved only the guitar and a hint of harmonica, but just its opening line cast a depressingly deathly pall over everyone who had, until then, been having a happy evening.

Over the next couple of weeks, I gave some ad hoc and almost passable performances to students in big rooms or outdoors, but my few attempts at using my kit for after-dinner singsongs so deafened people that they asked me to stop, sometimes only three bars into my first song. It seemed to me that my band’s future lay either al fresco or on the big stage.

Like many people of my age I had been in a band that never really was a band called The Missing Link. I had soon realised that delighting a few friends or even strangers in a bit of a musical get-together was very different from performing in the real world. On my foray into solo, professional busking I found it extremely tough out there on the mean streets of York and my earnings were embarrassingly paltry.

I was downhearted but, just when I was thinking of disbanding, Mrs Dill who was a very grand friend of my mother’s and had heard that I played the guitar, rang me to ask if I would ‘do a turn’ at the Thirsk Darby and Joan Club’s Christmas Entertainment. For the youngsters among you, these clubs were for very, very old people.

Mrs Dill was the sort of wonderfully public-spirited, bossy Englishwoman who, put down anywhere in the world – and being a Colonel’s wife she had been – would immediately organise a charity jumble sale or a gymkhana in a day. I told her that, better still, I had a one-man band and so I could offer her audience a lot more in the way of entertainment than just a mere folk-singer.

‘Well if you must,’ she said.

I took this as an enthusiastic affirmative and began to prepare for the big night. I thought of giving them a wartime hit or two as all of the audience would have been through the Second World War and many of them through the Great War, but none of those songs really suited the one-man band genre. They were either too mawkish or didn’t easily fit into the up-tempo syncopation which shows this solitary art at its purest. I also wanted to introduce their generation to where it was at.

So, after much thought and inner musical wrestling, I decided to give them ‘Blue Eyes, ‘Catch The Wind’ and, as my encore, ‘Streets of London’. I could keep ‘Under The Boardwalk’ up my sleeve for the second encore.

As the day approached, I had sleepless nights from the panic that attacks the occasional performer. Would they be sympathetic to ‘pop’ music? Was my play-list right for the night? Should I give them some comedy – like the patter that went down so well when Haggis and I used to busk for charity (another time, another place) which involved impersonations of living, dead, or dying personalities? I decided, in the end, to keep it lean as I didn’t want to overexcite the old people.

I decided on a very traditional busker’s outfit of black trousers, held up by a big belt and braces, lace-up boots, a white, collarless shirt worn under an old pin-stripe waistcoat and a red, spotted scarf tied around my neck. The only thing missing from this singing costermonger’s outfit was a spiffy Gor Blimey cap but I was afraid the local, Yorkshire audience might think a flat hat was cultural appropriation.

I arrived at the church hall and I was disappointed to see I hadn’t made it onto the poster outside. Percy Windows and his whistling act had top billing above Penelope Danvers at the piano. Even The Little Elves Dance Troupe, who turned out to be a very poor act, got a mention. I decided to be philosophical about this as everyone that became huge had to start somewhere and Thirsk was as good a place as any.

Mrs Dill rushed up and buttonholed me.

‘Theo, darling boy, you’re here.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘We’ve had a disaster with the magician. He’s stuck in Weatherby and won’t be able to get here.’

‘Couldn’t he get on a magic carpet,’ I said trying to lighten the atmosphere as she was tense.

‘Don’t be facetious,’ she snapped. ‘Just like your father, not the time, this needs sorting out, so you will have to do two songs.’

‘Well, actually…’ I began but she had hurried off to plug another entertainment dam.

I was listed to come on after the Elves and before a mysterious performer who was simply known as Maurice. I hoped he wasn’t another one-man band but the chances of that seemed slim.

I got my kit on and squatted on a box