The crackles, pops, and fizzles were sounds from other planets.

I would press my ear to the single speaker and turn the dial slowly, like a safecracker, hoping to make a stronger connection. Music of all sorts; some pop, but more often soaring symphonies and brittle, rhythmic music I would come to understand as jazz. Foreign languages spilled into the room, weather reports of storms, floods, and blazing heat waves.

It was as if the entire universe was being funneled into the front living room of our house, which was exciting, and it went on twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week. A room that measured 8 by 12 feet had become a space of infinite size, like Doctor Who’s tardis. This room was no longer going to be used only on Sundays and at Christmas. I needed to stay close to this thing.

Sunday evenings would always end with Dad saying, “You better get ready for school tomorrow, lad. Get in the bath.”

“Right, Dad, will do,” I would respond, but instead of going upstairs straight away for the compulsory cleaning of the body parts, I would quietly sneak into the front room, leaving the lights off, and click on the old radio, the low light that emanated from it not enough to give me away. “Now where is that Radio Luxembourg on the dial?” I would ask myself as the tubes began to warm.

8 My Moon Landing

At the age of eleven I took the compulsory eleven-plus exam, which would determine whether I would go to a “grammar school” or a “secondary modern.” The grammar school, traditionally, was where it was at. My dad, in an unusual show of educational insight, made me sit a special exam for King Edward’s, Birmingham’s finest grammar school (where they had taught J. R. R. Tolkien), but I failed that after mucking around on the playing fields between the two tests left me covered in mud, which caused Dad to have such a fit that I never quite relaxed enough during Round 2 to make any sense of the paper.

Despite not being the most diligent student, I did, however, pass the regular eleven-plus exam and left the Catholic confines of Our Lady of the Wayside for the greener pastures of the County High School in Redditch, a sixty-minute bus ride from our home in Hollywood. I never really settled down there. Again, it was a highly competitive system, and the classes were larger, so getting the attention I would have liked or needed was impossible. After a few years of questionable successes (“Worst second-year class of all time: 2F3”; “Worst third-year class in the history of the school: 3F2”), I started skiving off.

It began with me just skipping sports, and then whatever class came after that. As time went on, it just got harder and harder to stay interested in what school had to offer. I wasn’t a star on the playing fields, I wasn’t getting the work done, I wasn’t in the orchestra, and I wasn’t connecting in any of the classrooms. Mostly, I spent my time obsessing about Julie McCoy, whom I would spend at least an hour with on the telephone every night. The fact that she had a boyfriend didn’t stop me phoning, but it did stop us from going any further.

The school gave up on me in the end. I thought I was being so clever and getting away with it, but really the teachers probably thought, “Why should we bother with him when we have all these other kids who want what we have on offer?”

My parents had no idea what was going on. They were even less engaged in my schooling than I was. If ever a letter from school was written to them to tell on me, I could smell it in my hands and it never made it home. I became an accomplished forger. I could do a perfect imitation of both of my parents’ signatures, and it was easy to change a report card “E” into a “B+,” which was odd if you considered the accompanying comment: “He has had a very poor year and continues to disappoint, B+.”

As school became less important, music became a bigger and bigger force in my life.

At the age of twelve my cousin Eddie, who was five years older than me and was the neighborhood newspaper boy, took over from Dad as my primary male role model. Right on target, according to all the books on raising boys. He had three sisters, which may have added to the appeal that sent me on my bike to his house every chance I got.

Eddie also had a burgeoning record collection. Not just a record collection, an album collection. Pretty much every artist worth their salt in the early seventies, I heard them first in the company of cousin Eddie: Bowie, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Melanie . . . okay, maybe not every artist was all that significant, but boy, he loved his music. And he had the posters on his wall.