Babble on an' ting: Alex Paterson's Incredible Journey Beyond the Ultraworld with The Orb

By Kris Needs and Alex Paterson

Always steered by Alex Paterson, The Orb were the mischief-making pioneers of the late 80s acid house revolution. Inventing “ambient house”, they took it to the top of the charts, before continuing its idiosyncratic flight path through subsequent decades, battling meteor storms en route.

Babble On An' Ting, the first full account of Paterson’s life, written by long-time friend Kris Needs in close collaboration with Alex, reveals a frequently astonishing journey from traumatic childhood through punk, Killing Joke and KLF to starting The Orb in 1988, then the five decade roller coaster that followed. Moving, shocking, hilarious and inspiring, at the heart of this story lies a true survivor doggedly following their musical passion.

First-hand interviews include those with Youth, Andrew Weatherall, Primal Scream, Jah Wobble, Jimmy Cauty and a parade of friends, collaborators and starship mechanics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: May 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781787592223

Kris Needs

Kris Needs wrote for NME and Sounds in the mid '70s and was editor of alternative rock zine Zig Zag. He also works as a DJ and musician in his own right. His autobiography Needs Must was published in 1999. He is also the author of The Scream: The Music, Myths and Misbehaviour of Primal Scream, and the forthcoming Keith Richards: Before They Make Me Run.

Book preview

THE LAVENDER HILL MOB MEETS TOP CAT

The Book and Record Bar on Norwood High Street is a local artistic hotbed, a scene within itself occupying a former pub (and squat) that still has its licence. Twice a week, sometimes more, Alex Paterson can be found behind the decks, broadcasting through the afternoon on the shop’s online radio station WNBC.London (aka West Norwood Broadcasting Corporation or Wake ’N’ Bake Club).

Having known Alex nearly forty years, it can safely be said he’s truly happy when he’s behind a pair of decks, weaving sounds into journeys through music’s past, present and, more often, the future. It can be an audience of two, ten times that in a club or thousands in an auditorium, but when Alex loses himself in the music, another journey begins its infinite flow and can end up anywhere. WNBC is his current outlet and it’s perfect.

He’ll wind up the sounds and bring his craft to land when the shop closes at six, if it’s still daylight maybe adjourning to the yard to share a spliff with friends. Soulmate Annette may well arrive with Ruby, the couple’s amazing dog, then they’ll trundle up the hills of Snorewood to the nearby house they’ve shared for the last five years. It sounds idyllic and in many ways it is but, as Alex recently celebrated turning sixty, it’s been a long time coming.

On an unusually warm afternoon in April 2019, Alex settles on a chair in the WNBC/BARB yard and starts recalling his childhood. Eyes closed, spliff in hand, memories come flooding back in quick succession or slow procession; some good, many painful and even traumatic. It was not always a happy childhood and the scars run so deep that, as often happens, he kept them bottled up for decades; sealed and stored like a forgotten box in an attic. I know what you’re saying, he concurs. I tend to block a lot of things out from when I was younger. Maybe they were boring but some of them were fun and sometimes traumatic.

Childhood’s part in shaping later life is usually acknowledged for its positive aspects unless it’s poverty providing a driving impetus. Only in recent years has the deeper impact of trauma been highlighted and scientifically proven. Physicians such as Canadian-based Hungarian Gabor Maté have revealed how childhood trauma can manifest in anger, anxiety, depression, addiction or illness, its lifelong resonance running much deeper than once suspected. On another level, it can also be a motivational presence when pursuing a chosen life path, success regarded as a ‘fuck you’ triumphing over past adversity and obstacles.

Anger, both subliminal or outright, drove Alex through his formative years to embrace punk rock, find kindred spirits in Killing Joke, celebrate acid house, find more kindred spirits and create The Orb. That bubbling inner motivation mainly stemmed from his father dying when he was three years old, his mother’s subsequent rejection and harrowing experiences after being shunted off to boarding school. Only his late brother, Martin, nine years his senior and legal guardian from the age of fifteen, provided stability as his one-man parent, mentor and teacher in music, life and death.

While music always soothed Alex’s turbulent soul, recent years have seen true happiness entering his life after reuniting with teenage girlfriend Annette. Crucially, Alex made peace with his mother before she passed away in 2017, learning to face – in some ways even embrace – how her cruelty, neglect and indifference in his formative years impacted on his earlier life.

So rather than any life-changing UFO experience (apart from one in Turin in ’85) or transcendental acid house epiphany, the story of The Orb is built on real life; possibly starting with Alex’s declaration, My dad passed away when I was three, depriving him of a vital set of parental memories and so instigating the creation of his own fantastic inner world that he later allowed to go global.

Half of me comes from a Scottish family, Alex begins. My grandfather was called Neil and so was his dad; my dad’s mum was called Jessica. Her maiden name was MacIsaac and she came from the Outer Hebrides. On my dad’s side, there’s a whole line of them who all come from the little village of Glenbarr, twelve miles north of Campbeltown on the Kintyre peninsula on the edge of the Western Isles.

The long, narrow Kintyre peninsula, in the south-west of Argyll and Bute, stretches about thirty miles from Mull of Kintyre in the south to East Loch Tarbert in the north. Here settled the early Scots from Ulster before it was conquered by the Vikings during the first millennium. Campbeltown was named in the 17th century after Earl of Argyll Archibald Campbell was granted the site, and is renowned for its single malt Scotch whisky.

"My father had three other brothers, John, Duncan and Alex. John and Duncan lived with us in Battersea until my dad died, then Mum threw them out. In the 50s, Uncle Alex went to India and was never heard of again. Uncle John appeared when I was on tour in ’88. Martin had met him on Clapham Common and they went to visit me at the Coach House in SW18 – only to find Youth, who had just got back from meeting an auntie in Birmingham who told him he also had Scottish roots on his mum’s side – wait for it – in Argyllshire. Uncle John said we might even be distant cousins; also that the Paterson family had a link to the royal bloodline of Scotland, although I have birth certificates from the 18th century and my ancestors were mainly cobblers and crofters.

My father was flying Hurricanes at the tail end of World War Two. He trained and became a pilot, got shot down, had a limp and ended up being a navigator in a Lancaster bomber. Everybody in my family – my grandmother, all my aunties and uncles – said what a lovely, charming man he was. Even my brother, Martin, told me this loads of times. When Mum passed on, I found my parents’ love letters from the late 40s. They had met in a jazz club on the Fulham Road in the late 40s. I still get ribbed for supporting Chelsea – ‘Just like your dad!’ Uncle Doug says every time.

The first of seven children, Alex’s mum, Amy, was born in 1926 to glassblower Albert Newell and his wife, Amy, childhood sweethearts who grew up next door to each other on Endell Street, off Caledonian Road, and had married earlier that year. Recent years have seen Alex seriously investigating his family tree and history.

"One of my grandma’s sisters, up in Finsbury Park, was the grandmother of world champion boxer Danny O’Sullivan and great grandma of Ronnie O’Sullivan, the famous snooker player. I even have a real Mumford in our family as in my great grandma Mumford. Grandpa Newell was famous for drinking the dregs after family parties. He’d get up early and make a cocktail of all the leftover drinks for breakfast! He also fought in World War Two as a paratrooper and had some great tattoos.

"Grandpa and Grandma had seven children: Amy, Rosie, Lillian, June, Albert, Bobby and Doug. Mum had two boys: Martin and me. Rosie had four boys: David, Ian, Mark and Chris. June had five girls and a boy: Sue, Jen, Steph, Rose, Wendy and Stephen. Bobby had four kids: Fraser, Lucy, Amy and Tommy. Doug had three boys: Wayne, Alex and Leighton. Then there’s the next generation that will rule the nation, with version excursions and spreading love and happiness round the world. There’s a rumour that an ancestor from HMS Bounty came back to Britain with a rare eye disease around the mid-1780s!"

Evacuated from London to escape the Blitz in 1940, Alex’s mother’s family stayed at Lockington Hall in Leicestershire (where Uncle Doug was born in 1944). After the war, Amy returned to London to train as a nurse at Bolingbroke Hospital on Wandsworth Common. My mum came from a family of seven. She was the only one who came back and lived in London after the war. The rest of the family were resettled in a tiny village called Hemington, near Derby in the Trent Valley. Amy was living in Lower Marsh in Waterloo when she started dating Alex’s dad after they met at a Fulham Road jazz club in ’48.

"Mum and Dad got married in Battersea Town Hall on Lavender Hill on March 4, 1950. When I worked as a cook in 1982 at Battersea Arts Centre, as it’s now become, my mum never told me they got married there. I found that one out when I was sorting out her probate in 2017.

"I found a poem my dad wrote about a place in Scotland he liked to take our mum. I don’t think he actually did because my mum never went to Scotland. You’d be expecting him to do that in his fifties or something. He was getting well into this modern lifestyle while making loads of money and enjoying himself in London. Because of World War Two and the fact he had been in the Canadian Air Force because he wasn’t English, he learnt to disguise his Scottish accent and talk with an English one so he could get on working in London. Any Scotsman or Irishman will tell you that, even in those post-war days, if you were deemed not English you were therefore not welcome.

"After working in operating theatres, my dad got a good job working at Cable & Wireless. He put my mum in a really wonderful house in Battersea. There’s a picture of me sitting on a winged car owned by Dad in the early 60s. It looks like one of those stretch limo type things. What’s that telling yer? He was good at his job. At that time in the 50s and 60s, it was a time when people could do this if they had the initiative.

Every Christmas until I was fourteen or fifteen, I’d get a Christmas gift from Dad’s office. Bearing in mind that was over ten years after he’d died, he must have really been respected by his work colleagues. My mum always said he was an A plus man at Cable & Wireless. A clever man. Also, I can’t verify this, but supposedly he was one of the specialist bods who worked with the American scientists who built Telstar, which would fit with Dad working in telecommunications after working on sonars and being a navigator on a bomber in World War Two and a Hurricane pilot. It would have been a natural position to move into. He was able to send telegrams quite regularly at Cable & Wireless. I’ve got a few that he sent my mum before they got married. I’ve always wondered where I got my poetry and rhymes with words from, and why they came out so naturally. It was my dad. I showed them to Youth and he said, ‘That’s where you got your poetry from.’

Battersea was a major presence in Alex’s early (and later) life. The family home was there and he moved back in 1989; always in the shadow of the famous power station, as homaged on the cover of the first Orb album. In 2010, Alex took his deeply ingrained love of the borough to a poignant zenith with C Batter C, a short film put together with Malicious Damage’s Mike Coles from home movie footage shot by his Auntie Lil in 1956 (available in 100 numbered silver boxes also containing her lovely poem London Pride).

Against a new Orb soundtrack from Alex and Thomas Fehlmann, it presents a movingly evocative succession of crackling images beamed from an earlier time, including Alex’s brother, Martin – playing and feeding ducks in Battersea Park, eating ice creams, walking happily on the street; always returning to the power station, those four towers then still puffing smoke. Mike and Alex went to pretty much all the same locations in London and re-filmed them, leaving them with ghosts of the future and bringing the past back to life.

We got inside Battersea Power Station on the pretext of someone doing an Orb gig there, recalls Mike Coles. We went to have a look round it. I took my video camera and just switched it on while we were walking around and got this random footage. Then me and Alex traced the journey Martin and his two cousins had made in 1966 and did the same journey, sixty years later or whatever it was.

My Auntie Lil filmed our family before I was born, says Alex. "I gave it to Mike Coles with an idea I thought of retracing everything that’s on the film and then superimposing it so everyone becomes like ghosts of each other. Shots of my dad putting his hand out for the bus coming right by Big Ben, or my brother and two cousins feeding the ducks. It would always go back to the same place. There are shots of Battersea Power Station working in the original film; the usual stuff. So Mike and I went one better and managed to get ourselves inside Battersea Power Station, which was now filled with great big holes. They gave us the building coats and big hats and off we went. This was way before they put an arch, a marquee in the middle of it. We went in there again to see if we could do some more filming, because we wanted to get some more.

"Not a lot of people would know, but they’ve taken down the original Italian marble chimneys and replaced them with plastic ones. That was another reason to leave Battersea. I’m a Battersea boy and quite proud of it in many ways. We were campaigning for twenty years: no to plastic chimneys! I said, ‘If anyone’s got any chimney, can I have a bit?’ in a Metro magazine interview. A bloke called Christian got in touch and said, ‘Hey Alex, I’ve got some things for you from Battersea Power Station.’ It’s not a chimney, but it’s nice and funky, like blue bits of rock from one of the rings. But where are the Battersea chimneys? Where’s all that Italian marble gone? That’s the point. That’s an awful lot of marble. That’s the reason why they changed hands. A certain prime minister let those foundations rot hoping they’d fall down so she could turn that whole place into real estate."

C Batter C gained unimaginable extra poignancy while we were writing this book when Alex reported, As I write these book notes, my Auntie Lil has disappeared, last seen in her nightie at 10 p.m. in Castle Donington.

Then came the report, Auntie Lil was found dead yesterday in a neighbour’s alleyway. RIP, our Lil.

The loss of this caring figure in his early life hit Alex hard. "Auntie Lil used to take us cousins on day trips to Skegness and out horse riding. She gave me the footage to make C Batter C. It would never have happened otherwise. She filmed my dad to let me see what he truly was like before 1963! This helped in the healing process of finding my lost dad. Thank you, Aunt Lil, and may you rest in peace next to your brother you lost in ’57.

Albert was only twenty-one when he passed away. When I was growing up there was always a photo of ‘our Bertie’ in all my family’s front rooms. I would help Grandma cut the grass on Uncle Bertie’s grave every week on my summer holidays. It must have broken my grandparents’ hearts, losing their first-born son so young. So now Lil will rest forever in peace with her big brother in the family church graveyard. That’s proper closure. Plant a London Pride in your garden; it was Lil’s favourite flower.

The original village of Battersea existed as a Thames island settlement in Anglo Saxon times, when it was known as ‘Badrices ieg’ (Badric’s Island), before being reclaimed by draining marshland. It appeared in the Domesday Book as Patricesy. Also the village of Wandsworth swelled with the arrival in the 16th century of Protestant craftsmen (Huguenots) fleeing religious persecution in Europe. Much of the area was farmland until the 19th century, mainly serving the City of London with produce. This included growing lavender in the area subsequently called Lavender Hill. A few years ago, DJ Lewis gave Alex a magical recording of a lavender cryer on Lavender Hill in the 1920s, which he used on 2018 Orb album No Sounds Are Out Of Bounds.

The mid-18th century’s Industrial Revolution smothered Battersea’s rural side, its close proximity to the Thames encouraging an influx of mills, breweries, dyeing and bleaching, with Battersea Bridge built in 1771. (In 1782, poet William Blake married local girl Catherine Boucher in St Mary’s Church, Battersea Church Road, where the wedding contract the illiterate lady signed with an X is on display. Blake taught her to read and write.)

The area was further transformed by the coming of the railways; between 1838 and 1860 six lines were built across the area, taking trains in and out of Victoria and Waterloo. A major station was built in the middle of Battersea but named Clapham Junction after the trendy village more than a mile away (a ‘Battersea Junction’ renaming campaign failed). Designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, Battersea Power Station was built between 1929 and 1935 (actually located in Clapham!).

Industrialisation brought the modern urban problem of overcrowding, poverty, pollution and poor housing as Battersea’s population grew from 3,300 in 1801 to 169,000 in 1910, dwellings only increasing from 600 to 25,000 during that same period. The worst slums were around the factories and close to the Thames, post-war council blocks soon becoming rife; the first London housing estate was Battersea’s Latchmere, built in 1903.

And let’s not forget the world-famous Battersea Dogs Home, opened here in 1840 (once called, most poignantly, the Temporary Home For Lost and Starving Dogs). The area’s canine connection was enhanced by the Brown Dog affair, a political controversy that raged between 1903 and 1910 after Swedish feminists infiltrated a University of London medical lecture where an illegal vivisection was performed on a brown terrier. There were battles between medical students and police, court cases and much controversy over a bronze statue erected as a memorial to the dog at Latchmere Recreation Ground on the Battersea estate in 1906, which had to be guarded against vandalism from anti-doggers. Battersea was chosen as the statue’s location because of its radical reputation and the National Anti-Vivisection Hospital, later known as Battersea General Hospital, which opened in 1896 on the corner of Albert Bridge Road and Prince of Wales Drive (and closed in 1972). George Bernard Shaw was among the speakers at the statue’s unveiling but, after the following year’s Brown Dog riots, the statue was taken down.

A new brown dog statue, commissioned by anti-vivisection groups, was erected in Battersea Park in 1985. It’s behind the pagoda down a woody path, says Alex. If you visit, please leave a ball for the brown dog, so he can play.

Alex’s childhood Battersea near Clapham Junction station would’ve resembled the bleak, bustling portrait of slum life in Neil Dunn’s 1963 novel Up The Junction, later turned into one of the era’s most compelling movies. Thanks to his dad’s job, the Patersons lived in a nice house on Morella Road off Wandsworth Common. Martin was born on June 10, 1950 at the Annie McCall Maternity Hospital, Jeffreys Road, Stockwell.

In 1959, the Paterson family moved to Marney Road, off Lavender Hill. On October 15, Duncan Alexander Robert Paterson was born at the all-women South London Hospital (opened on Clapham Common in 1916; Now a Tesco supermarket – that’s progress!).

"My mum gave birth to Martin in 1950 and I popped out in 1959. There starts the power of nine and it’s a magical journey that connected our ages forever. By all accounts, it was a clear mid-October day and I came out at 9 a.m. at four pounds. If you’re born on a Thursday, apparently we have far to go. Mum didn’t have time to get to the delivery table as I popped out three weeks early. Beware the IdLes of October. (ALEX PUN)

"I wasn’t ever christened and I was given pagan first names. My mum had wanted to call me Martin as well. That’s a bit crazy? Martin One and Martin Two!

"My first memories are of having to sleep in my mum and dad’s room until I was two. My other early memories of my parents were my mum chasing my dad around with a hammer. I haven’t got the hammer but some of the furniture had marks to prove it. She wasn’t hitting him; she was going around smashing things.

"Apart from saving my life (and nose) after I put a ball of tin foil up my hooter, my dad took me to see Chelsea play football the day before he died. I was only 3.11 years young. He took me to see Jimmy Greaves play before that in 1960 or ’61. I was going to Chelsea before I could walk.

"My dad died on September 15, 1963. We watched him collapse in the kitchen. It’s just sad he died when he was forty and I was three. Really sad. I often wonder what life would have been like with a dad in it. I miss him. It is, in turn, very natural to feel this way. I was told we were going to move to Ibiza in ’64. That was all part of Dad’s plans.

"For years, my mum spun a line about his death which was a complete lie. Talk about weird shit going on. When she died one of the first books I picked up from behind her bed, where she kept all her best books, was on medicine. I opened it up, thinking it was gonna be one of her medieval books from the 40s, but in it was the cause of my dad’s death, all in gobbledygook medical. I showed it to [WNBC DJ] George’s missus, Nicky, who’s a nurse, and she explained it. Basically, he slowly drowned through a lung condition not uncommon to post-war trauma. He’d been shot down and had been flying bombers over Dresden and places like that. Having that on his conscience must’ve fucked his mind up. I know I wouldn’t have been able to cope.

My mother was thirty-seven when she lost her husband. She was left with a twelve-year-old son and a three-year-old son. There’s nine years difference between my brother and me and there’s no other siblings. That tells you something. One of them didn’t want another child. They both came from relatively big families. You’d have thought one of them would’ve… I was told about these things in the past, especially by my brother, who was twelve when our dad died and knew him a lot better. Martin ran away from school after Dad died too; it had a major effect on him. He adored Dad, who taught him to drive on the old curve circuit at Castle Donington.

"My mum worked in a sweet shop on Lavender Hill that she ran with my Auntie Hettie, who lived at number eight Sugden Road. There was Marney Road, Sugden Road and the shop right opposite the Ascension Church; on the lower part, not the posh bit going down into Northcote Road, but into Wandsworth Road, which takes you to Vauxhall. It’s now the home of the American Embassy.

"Life was dark in the 60s where Martin and I grew up in the deep south of Battersea, on the hill of lavenders. We had our own nicknames for each other; Nit and Nac. Life was spent playing in Battersea Park and on the Common, getting money to play in the fairgrounds that always seemed to be in one of them. There was a pint mug on the left at the top of the larder that was always full of loose change. When I was little, I needed a chair to reach up for a small handful. Then I’d go off down to Battersea funfair or the one on the Common with my mates from Wix’s Lane. We would play in the streets, and bombsites left over from the war too. There were loads of derelict houses all over south London until the late 80s; great, exciting moments of breaking into old houses, seeing tramps asleep and running out screaming.

"Our outside toilet was a classic; when you had a dump you could see the neighbours cooking breakfast on the first floor opposite. This was at a time when old ladies cleaned their front room steps every Saturday morning. If the step wasn’t red, it soon was. Even the tram lines were still on the main road through Battersea. We had three cinemas in Battersea – the Granada, the Ruby and the Grand. The Ruby site is now a bank and the Granada posh flats, while the Grand is a live gig venue these days. I would walk Nicky, Auntie Het’s dog, to the poodle parlour on Webb’s Road. I used to smell the coffee grinding on Lavender Hill; it smelt disgusting, yet Baghdad wine is so popular nowadays.

"We had pets too; our dog called Rusty and our cat called Sam. I found a kitten in a box by the bins down the road and asked Mum if Sam could have a cat wife. She let me keep her and I named her Tigre; a little tortoiseshell darling. Sam was our lucky black cat. He was a majestic black-and-redness in colour fluff ball. Sam and Tigre always featured in my letters from Mum while I was at boarding school. They both lived outside in the back yard and were best friends too.

"My mum told me a funny story about when her and Martin went shopping down the Junction. They took our dog Rusty and Mum was holding his lead when Rusty decided to wee up the leg of the bloke standing window-shopping next to them. So my mum gave Martin the dog lead and walked off. That was our mum!

"One thing that really scared me was ‘Mars’ from Holst’s The Planets Suite. I loved being scared and hiding under the blankets of my brother’s bed when he was at work. When you told me you were living in the converted old Thaxted Library where Holst composed some of The Planets Suite [research suggests he composed The Planets partly at St. Paul’s Girls School, partly in his home in the Essex village of Thaxted. Thaxted Library seems to still exist, but our cottage was the library and he composed there] I immediately went back to that and went [pulls up covers], as I do every time I hear ‘Mars’. It was one of those first musical moments. That’s why The Orb did The Planets – and then Jimmy Cauty called it Space. There are tracks there called ‘Mars’, ‘Jupiter’, ‘Neptune’, ‘Titan’ and ‘Pluto’; a modern update of our solar system musically, so to speak.

"Mum used to send me to Sunday school in Stormont Road. I even won a fucking egg cup for putting the chairs out because my mum sent me out early so she could spend more time with her boyfriend, who was Hughie Humphies, father to my brother’s mate Tony (not the US house DJ, sadly). When we saw King Kong around his house in Dorothy Road, I hid behind the sofa crapping it for most of the film. Then there was Mum’s other boyfriend’s son, Raymond Keene, who went to school with Martin and went on to become grand champion chess master of Great Britain. This is where I first started to play chess.

"Mum was always trying to get me out of the way. I was called ‘the lodger’ by ‘Auntie Pat’ Roodenburg at number seventy-one, who had three boys – Alan, Peter and Steven. Peter was the same age as me, Steven a bit younger and Alan ended up connecting me to music and football more than anyone else out of my brother’s sphere. I had tea round there most school evenings too, hence the ‘lodger’ reference.

"We all went to Wix Primary School in Wix’s Lane on Clapham Common Northside. In those days, it was known locally as ‘Little Jamaica’. Next road along was Cedars Road, where the 137 bus passed that took you up to Clapham Common then south to Crystal Palace. This area between Lavender Hill and Clapham Common Northside, and Cedars Road and Northcote Road, was my back yard in Battersea before I was ten. With Clapham Common on our doorstep, there was never any call for a garden. All we had were back yards anyway. It was post-war depression time. Some still had air raid shelters.

"One school trip was to the Houses of Parliament and up Big Ben; for the bells at midday in fact. The dad of a mate in our class worked there and arranged it with the school. That was a brilliant day – and what a sound!

"Other fun memories included being in a little gang with Derrick Maclean, Paul McManus and Suzanne Taylor when we were at Wix Lane. We based ourselves on characters from Top Cat, the cartoon TV series. We used to go round to Suzanne’s on Stormont Road and play teachers and pets as her parents had turned their air raid shelter into a little playhouse in the back yard.

"Derrick and I got caught nicking sweets and ended up in Lavender Hill police station. It was the first time I got poached eggs on toast. My mum refused to come and get me so I had to wait for Martin to get home from work and do it. I got beaten by my mum – the Bible came out for that one, along with her favourite books, the dog’s lead and cricket bat. Strangely, it was a signed West Indian cricket bat.

"Another time, I was sent to clean my mum’s best clothes at the dry cleaners. Next door was the laundromat, which was much cheaper. I thought I could save a few bob and pocket the rest, which I did. Derrick and Paul helped with spending the cash in other sweet shops on Lavender Hill, but I’d ruined all my mum’s best clothes. This time, after another fine beating, I was sent to my room at 1 p.m. with no supper, but Martin helped me escape down the drainpipe and took me to football.

"I watched many TV shows in the 60s: Land Of The Giants; Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea; Lost In Space; Top Cat; Star Trek; The Flintstones; Top Of The Pops – with Martin laughing at Blue Mink! Oh, and The Banana Splits. Later, Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’ and ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ videos were not liked by our parents, so we loved them even more.

"We had a cellar in Battersea, where I remember there was a cutting from JFK’s assassination. Tigre would be giving birth to her kittens down there and Martin had a giant Risk board set up. He used my Airfix soldiers and tanks and would spend the weekend downstairs playing Risk. Years later, I found out he was tripping. It didn’t matter about my soldiers being used as the Nashes’ dad at number thirty-seven worked for Airfix and, every Friday, would come home with bags of rejects for every kid on the street. There was also Mr Robinson, who drove us to Derbyshire in a Triumph Spitfire a few times.

"My mum made things very clear. The first part of my life was a no-go area with her. One of her mottoes was, ‘You keep out of my business, I’ll keep out of yours.’ After my dad died my Auntie Lil came down to London and looked after me and my brother while Mum carried on working. My mum always claimed she had to pay off the mortgage, but I don’t see how having a sweet shop could have paid off the mortgage in only six years. I do believe my dad left her a life insurance policy which she didn’t tell anyone about but pulled it out six years later and suddenly bought herself a new house in Margate. She still kept the house in Battersea until 1980. Work that one out!

"My home life was a little disorganised. Thinking back, it was hard at home, let alone trying to succeed in my education. I liked art at school. I took myself sort of seriously because, when I was nine years old, I won an award for a Green Cross Code advert when my design of a mummy and boy holding hands in the middle of the road with these little bollards was picked. It was the first time I’d had any recognition for anything. So my first artistic memory is winning an award and it being used for road safety in the late 60s. Recently, I found a mention of it in my mum’s belongings.

This spurred me on to be really dedicated in painting and drawing from a young age. My love for painting came from loving colours. I started seeing art through the eyes of classic painters like Constable and Turner. My mum moving to Margate was a big influence because Turner did his paintings around the shoreline of Thanet and Margate. Unbeknown to me, I was painting night-time scenes in Margate harbour when I was eleven! Where did Turner come from? Very close to Battersea… and I believe he married a Battersea girl.

At this young age, music might always be there on the radio or TV, but it takes time to infiltrate and become something more, even a life-changing force, its flaring presence able to wreak lifelong havoc on a young mind. In early childhood, Alex was receiving music’s direct emotional impact, like being scared of ‘Mars’. As Martin became the father figure he’d been so cruelly deprived of and his mother continued to push him away, it started hitting much deeper.

"My first musical memory is definitely my brother. Martin was very musical. I would sneak into his bedroom after he’d gone to work, pick up his guitar and strum along to things like Bob Dylan. Then I’d put the guitar back, exactly where it was. He’d come home in the evening and say, ‘You’ve been playing my guitar!’ I could never work out how he could possibly know. Obviously, it was because I was strumming his guitar, not knowing at eight years old that I was actually detuning it! At Christmas parties, Martin would send me to sleep by playing Bob Dylan tunes on his guitar then sticking me in the coat cupboard in the hall.

"That’s when I found out that I sleep so deeply; even now, if you picked me up and put me somewhere, I wouldn’t wake up. My brother used to do that to me. I’d suddenly wake up in a different part of the house! I’d be asleep listening to this music, then I’d wake up in bed. ‘How did I get here?’ Martin said, ‘Actually, I was doing aeroplanes with you to see if you were gonna wake up, but you’re brilliant because you don’t.’ Thanks Martin. I used to love aeroplanes. I was a very deep sleeper and used to get used to waking up in a completely different place to where I fell asleep. (I perfected this as a roadie in the 80s.)

"When I was nine years old, I had my first holiday with Martin and his girlfriend, Lorraine. My mum had bought Martin a Bentley for his eighteenth, and we drove to Scotland, the land of our father, and went to Fort William, Aberdeen, Inverness, Edinburgh and Montrose; maybe not in that order. Martin thanked me for sleeping in between him and Lorraine on holiday later.

"Martin was my reason for being. He showed me a world of music that has been with me since the late 60s. We were a Stones, not Beatles, music brotherhood, with Bob Dylan thrown in for good measure. Hendrix came later when Martin found his soulmate, Sheila. He listened to Led Zeppelin the first time round and I was lucky because he got me into things like that really early.

"Martin had one of those old HMV gramophones in a wooden box, with two speakers in the front and two out the sides. If you positioned your head in between the two speakers with the sound coming straight out you could hear the echoes from the other ones as well. Listening to Led Zeppelin II in stereo, the guitars blew my mind. I remember hearing ‘de-dee de-dee de-dee de’ (‘Whole Lotta Love’) and going, ‘Wow, that’s really amazing. What’s that?’ ‘Panning.’ ‘Oh, can you play it again?’ What a fucking revelation the panning techniques on Led Zeppelin II were. I was only eleven when I found that one out as that album came out in 1969.

"Martin was extrovert yet very quietly spoken. He could throw his voice to an area of the room where other people couldn’t actually hear him. You could hear him but no one else could. He was a typical Gemini. He could pick up an instrument and learn it within three months. He was a really good drummer and played harmonica really well too. He played it on ‘Towers Of Dub’ so, in essence, my brother’s always going to be with me and the millions of other people who listen to it.

"Martin and I had this conversation when we were older; not so much reconciliation about the way he treated me as a young child, but more about him being an older brother. He did get very upset when I mentioned the day he spanked me but, in retrospect, it was a normal thing that happened in the 60s. I mean, I’d got many more spanks from Mum so that paled into insignificance. The thing is, if my brother was alive today, he would understand I’ve actually got a really good memory and can pinpoint things