Prologue
It is unusual to find yourself writing a book about an obscure singer, because his drummer stole your kettle. That is what has happened here and, believe me, I’m as non-plussed as you.
Strange things happen in rock and roll. (Stunningly mundane things happen also, and they will be covered here too, since even the minor details add up.)
The drummer in question is Roy Richardson and the singer is Garth Tyson. Garth disappeared off the face of the earth – “did a Lord Lucan” in old parlance – in the mid-’80s, leaving his band, Speed of Life, very much out of work. Which should explain why his drummer was reduced to nicking my household appliances some 30 years later, but doesn’t.
Let’s start at the beginning.
I woke up unusually early one morning, specifically the morning of November 15, 2014 – dates tend to become imprinted upon the brain in instances of domestic defilement – to an unaccustomed chill. Feeling my way downstairs in the manner of someone recently blinded, I discovered the front door to be wide open, and the hallway filled with a bracing London mist. It was like a scene from a Peter Cushing B-movie, and for a while I stood at the bottom of the stairs utterly discombobulated.
My first reasonable thought was: I’ve been burgled. Which seemed most unlikely, since I live like a student and possess nothing worth nicking.
Though I was right, it took a while to confirm the fact. The first room you come to in my grotty north London flat is the lounge, containing the standard magpie items: outdated television and DVD, cheapo music player and speakers, bottles of Lidl spirits. All unerringly present and correct, that mid-November morning.
The portrait of my late Dad, painted by my late Mum – please don’t get the impression my family were tardy, because they weren’t – still hung in the hallway, so it clearly wasn’t art they were after. And as I made my way to the kitchen, my grandfather’s clock – as opposed to my grandfather clock, which would have been worth considerably more; this was a bequeathed item I felt honour-bound to display – still tick-tocked gloomily above the doorway.
I was beginning to think I’d simply not closed the front door properly the night before.
It was only after a distracted wee, when I went to make a cup of tea, that I first noticed something awry. The kettle was missing. Though it never moved from its spot next to the Tea and Coffee jars beside the kitchen window, and I’m the only one in the flat, I found myself hunting for it all over. Which was when I discovered that the toaster, too, had gone walkies.
By the time the police arrived – two coppers, both tall, even without the hats – I had gained full consciousness. Functional enough to find their wrung-out hilarity concerning my being a victim of “London town’s notorious Light-Breakfast Burglar” to be in poor taste. Burglary is burglary, even if it’s just your kettle and toaster. An uninvited stranger has entered your property while you slept and crept around in the dark, poking their grubby mitts into God knows where – although in this case, it must surely have been just the kitchen.
That burglar turned out to be Roy Richardson. I know because they actually caught him – I know! – and among the paltry stash of hot goods in his attic were the items I had described to the tall coppers several weeks earlier.
He received a suspended sentence, in return for a course of rehabilitation that involved apologising to his victims – restorative justice, they call it – should they wish to be apologised to. I have no idea why I said, “Yes”, back then, when 99 times out of 100 I would have said, “No”. Perhaps it was fate. Perhaps I was confused. Most likely, being a journalist, and possessing the profession’s requisite curiosity, I wanted to see what a proper shit burglar looked like.
We met in an anodyne office block, in a room featuring just enough soft furnishings to make it feel like someone had consciously added just enough soft furnishings.
What had I expected Roy to look like? Swayed probably by celebrated depictions of his Victorian-underworld sort, I had pictured a rat-faced type, unshaven and hook-nosed, with sketchy charcoal, silver-streaked hair, in his fifties, approaching death from consumption. Only the age worked. Roy looks like a long-lost Mitchell brother from EastEnders: well-built, balding and shaven-headed, big red face, kindly blue eyes – which bore right through you, gently – with metal studs up both ears and a crude anchor tattoo the size of a jam-jar lid on his neck, emerging above his T-shirt.
As I took a seat opposite him across an Ikea table, to break the ice, and out of sheer nervousness, I asked him about the tattoo. “Did you serve in the navy?”
“No,” he replied. (Actually, it was more, “Nah”. Roy has a distinct Cockney twang.) He went on to explain his choice of design in a manner so garbled that I began to wonder whether, despite being the aggressor here, he too was shitting bricks. It amounted essentially to this: he’d been pissed and all sense of imagination had deserted him. “Wish I’d never got the bloody thing,” he concluded. (Again, “fing” rather than “thing”, but I’ll leave the Cockney translation up to your mind’s voice.)
Then we sat in awkward silence, staring at one other. Surprisingly, I stopped feeling intimidated. Roy isn’t an intimidating kind of guy, just imposing.
“I used to be in a band,” he said eventually.
I’d really wanted to find out why he’d nicked my kettle and toaster; instead I got this book.
Old rockers, particularly those who never made it, seem incapable of letting it lie. Their insistent, meandering tales unfurl wreathed in tobacco smoke and bullshit scent, stripped from a golden age of idealism that clearly never existed. These old bastards will claim to have been on first name terms with Elton, Clapton and McCartney – played in bands with them, shagged their birds, shared their highs – yet somehow Reg, Eric and Paul felt entirely comfortable allowing these greatest of mates to drift into divorce, poverty, obscurity and homelessness (perm any order). Let them drone on and their wistful monologues turn bitter, as the whiskies you’ve bought them – because they can’t afford a round, plus they won’t stop fucking yacking – kick in. It’s best not to get them started.
So you’ll understand my wariness when Roy piped up with, “I used to be in a band.”
Given, however, that’s all I had to work with – in trying circumstances – I dutifully replied, “Oh yes?”
I braced for the standard blather and bollocks; Roy was to confound me.
Contrary to his thieving ways and thick-necked exterior, Roy’s voice has a mellifluous tone, like that of a favourite uncle. He’s a surprisingly beguiling storyteller (though he can go on a bit). Also, he hailed from a generation removed from the dead-eyed blues rockers with their nicotine stains and callouses: his gig was punk & New Wave. Subversion, invention, amphetamines and glue, drainpipes, Fairlights and the breaking of rules. Far more my cup of tea.
Despite myself, I was quickly entranced.
Roy and Garth grew up in north London, around Stamford Hill, and were in the same year at school. Garth’s childhood, he told me, was pretty miserable, and they formed their first band to escape the bleakness of their surroundings and the pallor of the ’70s, in the hope of becoming the next Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars (several years too late).
If half the stories he told me that afternoon were true – debatable of course, given our brief history, though I sensed only earnest conviction – Garth Tyson had been some sort of charismatic pop mystic. Albeit one neglected by history.
Here was a potential English cult hero, cut from a similar cloth to Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett. Both were attractive boys who had enjoyed the odd tab of acid, to their obvious detriment; both had written quintessentially English songs that had confused swathes of squares.
Unlike Syd, Garth had disappeared not just from circulation but for good. Roy recounted how his frontman had stormed off the 1985 Glastonbury Festival stage, where Speed of Life were debuting a new set of songs inspired by Charles Dickens, and had never been seen again. The way he told it, I could tell it still touched him.
Tyson’s career, roughly spanning the first half of the 1980s, had lurched from indignity to disaster. Precious little had gone his way.
He had been a Bowie devotee whose music had been heavily influenced by the Dame’s; he’d sung with that Bowie twang, as had so many during that post-punk phase.
“Between you and me,” said Roy, though there was no one else in the room, “I reckon Garth thought he’d have the same sort of career. Y’know, theatrical and futuristic, always moving on to the next thing. Just didn’t quite work out like that.”
The hits hadn’t come, besides one all-too-brief moment in the sun, when they’d slipped unforewarned into the Top 20 during 1984.
Garth Tyson had strived for the stars and failed desperately. How tragically, heroically British of him.
Though Roy could clearly have rattled on forever, a parole officer or somesuch poked her head around the door after a fleeting half-hour, and told us to wrap it up. Having debated swerving the restorative-justice scenario entirely, I felt strangely saddened when it was all over.
My journalist’s instinct was twitching: there was a commissioning editor out there somewhere who would leap at a feature about this mercurial singer.
I explained this to Roy. “Do you fancy helping me?”
“Sure,” he replied. “What’s in it for me?”
“I can’t pay you, if that’s what you mean?”
“Alright. I’m in.”
The touching part was, though Roy had told me he used to be in a band, he’d spent most of the time talking about Garth.
It was only afterwards that I recalled a complete absence of the word “sorry”.
And so I began tracking down, with Roy’s assistance, the main protagonists: relatives, colleagues, bandmates, lovers, friends. The more I learned, the more fascinated by and deeply entrenched in the tale I became. I had expected to uncover a magazine-article’s-worth of broken dreams, intrigue and disorder. But I got more.
A lot more.
Incidentally, I lied earlier. I did actually discover why Roy nicked my kettle and toaster – but you’ll have to read on to find out. (I know!)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Where possible, I interviewed colleagues together, to get them to bounce off each other, and to jog one another’s memories. Certain players, I had to interview individually. It is made clear in the following transcripts which is which.
This book was written during the second half of 2017 and for most of the following year, these interviews having taken place during the previous 18 months. (I also had paid writing work to fit into my schedule, plus certain players proved harder to pin down than others.) Some, I met several times, as new information came to light and I needed to explore tangential avenues. Others, I spoke to only once, for reasons that will become obvious. Their quotes are scattered among the text, wherever they are relevant.
In terms of chronology, my interviews jumped all over the place. Editing everything together into a cohesive timeline became a frankly hellish and time-consuming labour of love. Several times I considered quitting in frustration, yet here we are.
I just hope to have done Garth Tyson’s story justice.
