An Oxfam report has revealed that 63 people own the equivalent wealth of half the world's population - that's 3.6 billion people, many of whom live on less than £1.50 a day. These 63 billionaires have a combined wealth of £1.76 trillion. I cannot begin to imagine what life is really like for either of these two groups. What these statistics do show is the relentless growth of material division between the capital accumulating few and the labouring many. It seems to me perfectly obvious that this ever-growing divide between rich and poor is the inevitable result of the now world-wide hegemony of the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. 
The ideological commitment to the unfettered development of 'free markets', now central to the globalised economy, whether in China and the Asian economies, the developing African countries or the traditional Western capitalist countries, goes hand in hand with the systematic dismantling of traditional worker protections. The neutering of Trade Unions and any kind of collective representation (high fees have recently been introduced here for the last defence of the employee, employment tribunals), the consequent lowering of wages, the dismantling of hard-won workplace protections and the growth of short term and zero hours contracts is the result of this successful neo-liberal assault on the framework of employer - employee relations. This has placed a firm brake on wages and spurred on the aggressive accumulation of capital by those who benefit from these changes and, in turn, fund the political class who engineer them.
 Globally, this economic orthodoxy is sustained and policed by the managers of international capital through organisations such as the IMF, the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, the European Central bank, and, most worryingly, secretly negotiated trade agreements like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. This latter is about to bring in an agreement between the USA and the European Union allowing multi-national companies to over-ride democratic procedures and allow them to sue governments that have policies that might harm company profits - e.g. environmental issues, public health concerns, employment law etc. It will also force public services - the NHS, for example, to be opened up for privatisation. The legal actions will be heard before undemocratic and unaccountable tribunals overseen by corporate lawyers.  
These changes have occurred almost entirely in the last thirty years. They have been successful in achieving their goals in this country thanks largely to the lack of any organised opposition as the Labour Party allowed itself to be hijacked by 'New Labour' with its wholehearted embrace of neo-liberal ideology. But their success is also due to a wholly quiescent media, which, being largely controlled by multi-national conglomerates, have cheered on changes that clearly benefit them, or have displayed a total inability to see beyond the propaganda of the powerful and are a source of continual despair.
Can we be really surprised that 63 people now own the equivalent of half the world's wealth? Do we feel a righteous anger, or simply a weary acceptance of something we feel powerless to affect?

When I grew up on my council estate, I was only occasionally aware that I was one of the poor in our society. Children simply accept the life that has been granted them and since it's normality for them, it probably won't feel strange or in any way unjust. Even though my paternal grandparents lived in a large, detached comfortably furnished house, it never struck me as odd that I returned to a cold, sparsely furnished flat with barely enough to eat, let alone enjoy any luxuries. This was simply how things were.
 There was one occasion, in my fourth year at Primary School, when I returned after the summer break with a new pair of trousers and a new sleeveless pullover my grandmother had knitted for me. I'm pretty sure these were the first brand new trousers I had owned. I had been taken to the co-op in Bromley, where they still had a pre-war system of delivering payment and change by an elaborate network of wires across the ceiling of the store. These would whoosh around, high above the heads of customers, to be delivered down to the cashiers above the tills. You paid for your purchase, the cash was tucked into a metal container which was then hoisted upwards and sped along a wire to a central accounting office. It would return a short time later with any change owing to the customer. It was an entertainment in itself just to watch these little treasure chests whirring around the store, way out of reach of customers, of course. In such a manner, my new trousers were purchased together with some of the magic of the high wire payment system.
At school, a couple of kids in my class commented on my new attire. "You look smart today ", one said, "Not the usual scruffbag." This came as quite a shock to me. I realised that I must usually have looked, well, a scruffbag. I looked across at my best friend, Colin. "Do I usually look scruffy, Col?" I asked. There was a short silence, and then, "well....yes". I was crestfallen. I couldn't say anything. I just saw myself as others must always have seen me, teachers and classmates, and it hurt.
There were three Colins in my class, two of whom lived on my estate and so entered the school from the front entrance with the rest of us from the working-class side of the social divide, and the third from a more affluent home who arrived at school from the rear entrance that led in the direction of the private homes on the new estates being built nearby. This third Colin I only got to know well in my last year at school, but he became a good friend until secondary school split us up. He was quite reserved, spoke very politely with something approaching Received Pronunciation and was always well dressed. In other words, he was a middle class child from a 'respectable' home. Unlike most of my other friends. Nonetheless, we somehow got on. He was bright, but self-deprecating. His interests were quite different from mine - he had more of a scientific sensibility - but he knew a lot without flaunting it, and I enjoyed talking to him. I found I could actually learn quite a lot from him about things that hadn't previously interested me. He knew about space, the planets and was good at maths, a subject where I consistently performed dismally.

One Sunday morning, he turned up at our flat. He had cycled over on his gleaming, obviously new bike and had somehow worked out which flat I lived in. What he made of our rather bleak living quarters, I don't know, but he suggested that we cycle over to his house where we could play with his games and his mum would give us tea. That clinched it for me, so off we set. I had trouble keeping up with him on my unsafe, self-assembled machine with it's dodgy crank-shaft and no brakes, but eventually we turned into a newly formed road and arrived at a long tarmac laid drive leading up to a large detached house with a garage, opened to reveal the rear of a gleaming blue car. The house was surrounded by shrubs, and a neatly trimmed lawn edged with well tended flower beds. I felt like William Brown, my favourite fictional character, staring at Bott Hall (if you know the stories).
We entered the house and I was greeted warmly by Colin's mother and even by his elder brother, something hitherto unknown to me (older brothers of my acquaintance either ignored or threatened, never offered a friendly greeting). We went upstairs to Colin's room. Yes, he had a large bedroom entirely to himself. It turned out to be an Aladdin's cave of delights and surprises. There were shelves of books, both fiction and reference books. A neat pile of comics stacked against a wall which all turned out to be copies of The Eagle. This was something of an 'improving' comic. It was the only comic that certain middle-class parents would allow their children to read, since it contained a lot of factual information - drawings of complex bits of machinery etc. - alongside the strips. The cover always featured Dan Dare, a granite-jawed British hero straight from WW2 stereotypes, but here plunged into space forever thwarting his nemesis, The Mekon, an egg headed creature who travelled everywhere on a kind of flying tea tray. Inside, I also remember PC49, the adventures of a stalwart British bobby, thwarting crime and keeping us safe. It was a comic I never read because I could sense that it had a rather dull, clearly 'educational' remit, where I wanted something subversive and challenging of authority. 
The Bash Street Kids were more my cup of tea, though I can now see how well drawn a strip like PC 49 was. It was definitely a comic for kids like Colin.

In his room, Colin also had a telescope and a microscope. Piles of board games, a bow and arrow and - what really grabbed my attention - a large air rifle, complete with a box of pellets and a target. Wow! This was my idea of heaven. I persuaded Colin to take the gun into the garden for some practice. We went downstairs and through the lounge to some French Windows. The garden, with a long, immaculate lawn, stretched ahead of us. We walked to the end of the lawn, only to find an archway into the second half of the garden, where, already prepared, was a laid out archery lane, complete with target, and a gun practice lane next to it. And this was here all the time! This was how Colin lived. I was overawed, but happily spent the rest of the afternoon shooting both pellets and arrows at the appropriate targets, in a state of self-absorbed enchantment until we were summoned in to tea.
Tea was what is known as 'high tea', something I'd never heard of. There were different courses of sandwiches, buns, biscuits and cakes, together with a choice of fruit juices. I'd never had anything like it in another kid's house before. The only problem was that my nose started to run, and I, of course, had no handkerchief. I had to keep sniffing hard, surreptitiously wiping the snot away with my hand, hoping no-one would notice. Finally I had to resort to taking an inordinate interest in a fish tank filled with tropical fish on the side-board, thus keeping my face determinedly away from the table and its occupants and praying they would not see the slimy trail emanating from my nose and my attempts to lick it away whilst still cramming as much cake as I could into my mouth.
I had never experienced anything quite like Colin's home life. I reflected on my way home on how our desultory little flat must have seemed to him. Of how little I obviously had compared to him, but how generously he - and his family - had shared. I was finally aware of the gulf in resources between his middle-class upbringing and my own and I felt, for the first time, a sense of shame in my home circumstances. Colin never commented on my very obvious lack of material resources. We remained friends until the 11+ split us apart. I never had the nerve to invite him back for tea. But as I limped back home on my bike, with its crank-shaft slipping more and more as I peddled, I was aware as I had never been before in the gulf between the lives of people like me and the fortunate ones like Colin. I felt absolutely no resentment. That's just how life was.
This divide is now more pronounced, more corrosive of the human capacity to develop its potential, than when I was eleven. And its getting worse. 

As is the case with most of us, I receive daily requests from groups who use social media to add my signature to any number of on-line petitions aiming to bring pressure to bear on those in power to rectify some new injustice perpetrated on the powerless. Today, the number of such requests had reached seven by the time I was drinking my morning coffee at nine thirty, a fairly typical haul for me. I usually end up adding my signature to at least some of these whilst simultaneously feeling that this is symptomatic of all that is wrong with our engagement with politics, and, perhaps, the world more generally. Nothing more is required of me than the click of a mouse or the swipe of a screen from the comfort of my desk or armchair and I can feel that I have in some way fulfilled a necessary duty as a thinking and concerned citizen. How could I ignore the plight of a group of tenants about to have their social housing sold off to an American investment group, or to Palestinian children being arrested and arraigned in high security prisons for throwing stones at armed military vehicles protecting the interests of American and European Israeli settlers colonising their stolen land? I can sign a petition and feel that I have done my bit for justice and humanity. I might even make an on-line donation via my debit card to help the cause. Politics can take place entirely on-line and at very little inconvenience to myself. No human contact with my fellow citizens is required, let alone active participation in debate or confrontation with power. The democracy of the net expands endlessly, encouraging an increasingly passive involvement with the outside world whilst simultaneously suppressing the other meaning of net - confinement and constraint as we redefine political engagement and participate within parameters that are constantly monitored and recorded on behalf of the very forces with whom we are in conflict. 

One petition that I regularly receive concerns the government's current inquiry into the future of the BBC. Clearly this government, ideologically, would be antagonistic toward a broadcaster that is funded from public funds and that competes with commercial organisations in both entertainment and news reporting. Secret meetings have taken place between the relevant government ministers and representatives of the Murdoch empire. The Murdoch press regularly attack the BBC in a determined attempt to undermine public support for a broadcaster that has been at the heart of the British media since the 1920's and has an unrivalled reputation as the pre-eminent global media organisation. The Cameron government's raison d'etre is to promote the interests of business and the private sector, whether in the banking or the corporate world, though, curiously, not in manufacturing other than armaments. All areas of public sector provision, and this would include the BBC, are fair game for private sector intervention where huge profits are potentially available, made even more desirable since they come as a transfer of existing public investment paid for with taxpayer funding, directly to the speculators of the private sector world. 

The BBC, through its funding system- the amount being determined by the government of the day- has always been subject to political pressure, though in the past, it has been more resolute in standing up to this. It is now a cowed organisation, simply awaiting the inevitable assault to come, seemingly incapable of mounting a defence of its position (witness the meek acceptance of the government's change of responsibility for over 75's licences from government to the BBC's budget with little attempt to challenge this transfer of social policy from government to broadcaster). Although the nature of the relationship between the government and the BBC has historically seen frequent conflicts emerge between the two, and I have often been dismayed by the way in which successive Director Generals of the corporation have either cooperated or capitulated to government pressure, I have, nonetheless, always supported the principle of a publicly funded, public service broadcasting organisation. The thought of an entirely commercial broadcasting network, with perhaps only a subscription service surviving with a public service remit, (it is clear that the government is actively preparing for a sell-off of channel 4) would be a disastrous loss to our cultural life .

You would think that, at such a time, the BBC would be anxious to retain all the support it can get from a public that, generally, holds the corporation in high regard. People, like myself, who have always seen the public sector, in all its manifestations, as an essential part of civil - indeed civilised - society and a necessary bulwark against the unfettered and uncaring power of capital, should be preparing for a powerful and sustained defence of the BBC from the inevitable attempt at dismemberment that will follow the government inquiry and its utterly inadequate public 'consultation'. The sad fact is that, for many reasons, it is more difficult now to defend the BBC than at any time in its history.  And the fault for this lies entirely with the pusillanimous management of the corporation over the last fifteen years or so. The dismaying proliferation of endless spin-offs and ever more tedious variations of programmes with similar formats is bad enough in the 'entertainment' remit of public service broadcasting, but it is in the requirement 'to inform' that the most egregious decline in the BBC's output is most obvious. BBC news has become little more than a mouthpiece of the establishment - indeed of government itself. Many would argue that this has always been the case (witness founding Director General Lord Reith's famous diary entry during the general strike in 1926 "They know (the government) they can trust us not to be really impartial" But the appointment of Laura Kuenssberg as political editor has seen an abandonment of even the pretence of impartiality.

Ever since her appointment she has obsessively focussed on what she continually presents as the destructive effects of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party, despite having the most overwhelming mandate to lead of any Labour leader. In fact, she has barely commented on any other aspect of British politics since her appointment. She finally moved beyond any pretence at simply reporting when she actively arranged for the resignation of Stephen Doughty from the shadow cabinet to take place, live, on The Daily Politics show just a few minutes before Prime Minister's Questions, thus knowingly and wittingly handing the Prime Minister a clear advantage in the actual political arena of parliament, which he duly used. This was arranged and set up hours before the event with in order to do maximum damage to the Labour Party. The mask of impartiality has now not just slipped, but been shredded and cast aside. The Political Editor of the BBC has assisted the Tory government with the full support of her editorial superiors who were crowing on-line at their success. In such circumstances, to go on supporting the BBC in its current state is fast becoming impossible. 

The BBC's approach to its public service responsibility has often been an area of confusion and controversy. We didn't have a television set when I was a child - we couldn't afford it - so I relied on my friends parents to let me in to watch theirs. Actually, Mr. and Mrs. Carmichael, the retired couple who lived in the flat opposite ours would often let us in to watch their set after school as we waited for my mum to get home from work, and we would watch 'Popeye' and some very good children's shows on the young ITV. One used to be introduced by the folk singer Wally Whyton featuring a wryly ironic puppet owl called Ollie Beak, that was particularly engaging for us kids. After almost sixty years I can still remember one exchange: Wally finds Ollie with a book of jokes numbered from one to a hundred. Ollie says, "I know all these by heart. Just give me any number and I'll know the joke and it'll make me laugh." Wally proceeds to reel off a series of numbers but Ollie makes no response whatsoever. "I thought these would make you laugh" says Wally. Pause. "It must be the way you tell 'em" replies the bird. Cracked me up when I was eight and still makes me smile.  I also remember being terrified by a series called 'The Red Grass' that concerned an attempt by a deadly outbreak of fast growing grass discovered on a remote island to take over the world by killing anyone who got too close. Yes, this really did scare me.
 On Saturdays, we were dependent on the kindness of any parent who would tolerate us. And this was important, because Saturday was 'Six Five Special' day. As I said in my last post, music was central to my life from a very early age and 'Six Five Special' was the first attempt by the BBC to present rock music on TV for a youth audience. Often I would end up in Georgie Burton's flat in the company of his younger brother, Jimmy. Georgie usually simply ignored me as acknowledging me was clearly beneath his dignity and this was fine by me. All I wanted was to see the only TV show that presented rock 'n' roll music. Of course this was a pretty tame version of rock 'n' roll. There were none of the American stars, just anaemic British wannabes  like Jim Dale, Tommy Steele and The Dallas Boys, but at least there was some acknowledgement that teen culture existed. Of course, the BBC couldn't just leave it at this. They had a duty to the nation's youth to leaven the potentially subversive effects of this primitive music by intercutting short films showing young people hiking in the Cairngorns or climbing a rock-face in Derbyshire in scouting uniform. The Beeb was, as it so often was and continues to be, out of step with the changing zeitgeist of the nation. The ITV soon hit back with its own rock show, 'Oh Boy' that was much better than 'Six Five Special' but still far removed from the elemental excitement of the sounds we tuned into on radio Luxembourg on the big old radio receiver my brother had under his bed at night (he was on the bottom bunk). On TV you would never experience the astonishingly visceral excitement of 'wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom' as Little Richard thundered out the opening to 'Tutti Frutti' that left both my brother and I simply speechless the first time we heard it. It was like being hit by lightning. And for those who think that gender bending was a phenomenon of later rock music - songs like the Kinks 'Lola', the rise of glam-rock and, most importantly, David Bowie, its worth going back to look at Little Richard's stage presence in the 50's and looking at the song's original lyrics. He wasn't the Georgia Peach for nothing. It's significant that you had to turn to commercial radio at this time to hear the full force of American rock music. The BBC simply couldn't cope with the new radicalism of the developing youth culture. Plus ca change.

Since I've mentioned David Bowie, and in the light of his sad death a few days ago, I'm going to break with the chronology of these autobiographical segments and move ahead a couple of years. When I moved from Junior to Secondary school I found myself at Bromley Technical High School for Boys. I'll come back to the process in a future post. I'll only say at this point, that I hated every moment of my time at this school. The school would become known for being the Alma Mater of, not only Bowie, but also the guitarist Peter Frampton who at one point had the world's biggest selling live album, and the writer Hanif Kureishi, who once wrote an article in 'The Guardian' about a music lesson at the school that exactly mirrored my own experience. David Bowie was then simply David Jones, an older boy who I saw occasionally around the school. He was a striking presence even then, but his friend, George Underwood, was generally better known since he looked more like the fashionable rock artists of the period. He also had a band, 'George and the Dragons' who impressed my twelve year old self when they played at the school's Christmas concert at the end of 1961. David also had a band who I heard play outside at the school's summer fair at the end of the academic year.

This is a picture of Bowie at Bromley Technical High School. Unfortunately, as a first year boy, I'm not there!! But the uniform made me stand out on my estate and made life even more difficult.

One day, I arrived at the school entrance to find a small group of boys gathered together outside. The school had a long concrete drive leading into the grounds, lined with hedges. At this entrance, two of the older boys were squaring up to each other. One was David Jones and the other George Underwood, who I recognised immediately. There was a scuffle, and then some real punches that rather shook me, since one landed hard in Jones' face. He staggered slightly and swung round towards me, with one eye apparently glowing red. It's a sight I've never forgotten. The eye was now simply a luminous pool of blood, but it seemed like the face had suddenly taken on an eerie, unearthly glow as the red eye seemed to fix on me. Obviously he could actually see nothing out of it, but I was really shaken by this sight. I had no idea then that this fight would play some significance in the later David Bowie's life, since his eye never returned to its original colour. And not only his life.
Later on, when I had become a teacher in a Sixth Form College, I was taking a class where some students were reading their own choice of book for some exercise to come. I noticed that one girl was reading a biography of David Bowie, so I asked her why. She explained how Bowie was central to her life and that she followed everything he did. I mentioned that I'd briefly attended the same school as Bowie, and that I'd seen the fight between him and George Underwood. She looked at me for a second or two and then burst into tears. The simple presence of someone who had had a fleeting encounter with the great man was more than she could take. It was a lesson to me of the power of rock music to consume people's lives when they are young and how important it can be, particularly when there are difficulties in their lives. 
Later on, my daughter was working in Australia as a PA to a professor of ophthalmology at Melbourne University. She mentioned to her that I'd seen this fight between Bowie and George Underwood and that it was widely believed that this had permanently changed the colour of one of Bowie's eyes. The professor said that this was not possible and that it must be a kind of myth. My daughter emailed the rest of the department and three or four of them replied saying that such a change was perfectly possible and that there were several recorded cases of this phenomenon. Now I've read, since Bowie's death, that this change of eye colour is certainly the product of the fight I witnessed. I've also read George Underwood's recollection of the fight that does not completely accord with my own. He says he simply pulled Bowie round and hit him. I know it was a bit more than that, but we all have our own versions of the past, and they are all equally true to our subjective selves. As I said, I will return to Bromley Technical High School, but with little enthusiasm.

I have to apologise again for the hiatus between the last posting and this. I'm afraid that continuing problems affecting my hand after a recent operation have made it difficult to use a keyboard.
 I awoke this morning to the sad news of the death of David Bowie. I mentioned in an earlier post that I had a brief, but not insignificant, interaction with the young David Jones when I was at secondary school, but I'll explain that later on. Suffice to say that his influence on generations of young people, as I learned in my later life as a teacher, was enduring and profound. He spent his life entirely devoted to pursuing his art and, while never being a real fan, I have great respect for him for being true to his multiple selves! 
I also heard on the radio this morning an interview with that dangerous fanatic, Jeremy Corbyn. He, as ever, appeared to be reasonable, honest, straightforward and humane. (You see his cunning!) Yet, everything I read in the press or see on the TV tells me that he is not this at all, but a leader of a destructive far-left cult that will utterly destroy the Labour Party and make it forever unelectable. What the current media presentation of Mr. Corbyn reveals very clearly is that every mainstream media outlet is, at heart, wedded to the interests of the powerful and will go to extraordinary lengths to discredit any element in society that appears to pose a threat to corporate power and the traditional political elites that defend their interests. I make no exceptions to this. The supposedly liberal/left 'Guardian' and its sister paper the 'Observer' have been publishing endless articles denigrating and undermining every aspect of Mr. Corbyn's leadership and presenting him as a threat to the very survival of the Labour party and, indeed, the country itself. My favourite example of media madness in this area came in an interview by Cathy Newman on channel 4 news during the Corbyn reshuffle. She was interviewing Ken Livingstone and began by suggesting that the planned changes revealed Corbyn to be motivated by revenge and a soviet style desire to purge the party of dissenters. When this nonsense was ably rebuffed by Livingstone, she immediately came back with, "Oh, so he's bottled it!" suggesting he lacked the courage to dismiss opponents. Whatever he does, Mr. Corbyn can only be weak and spineless or a dangerous tyrant.

 We are currently witnessing a perfect example of what Herman and Chomsky described in their seminal work on the media "Manufacturing consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", as true today as it was in 1988 when first published. They show with great clarity how corporate interests, through an almost unconscious process to those employed in news production, but absolutely clear to those who own it, systematically reproduce and reinforce the status quo, shutting out any alternative viewpoint or analysis of society than that which protects the interests of the powerful. What was not around then, of course, was social media and even a casual glance at internet social media sites today gives an entirely different perspective on politics than is to be found in the mainstream press. Without, of course, the same power to define and control the political agenda.

At the end of the interview with Mr. Corbyn, he was clearly frustrated at the relentless focus on his opposition to Trident, our nuclear based defence policy, and his assumed unelectability. He made a closing statement focusing on the growing crisis in housing and the consequent rise in homelessness and the corrosive societal effects of the continuing increase in the wealth of the top earners and the stagnation of wages and job security for the rest of us. He made it clear that it would be his priority to rectify these injustices through planned growth of the economy rather than continuing cuts in all areas of government expenditure which are making the problems worse. The inaccurate and hysterical media presentation of what is a rather cautious, long-standing, broadly socialist programme which has been held within the Labour Party since my own childhood in the fifties brings shame on all elements of mainstream political reporting.

The death of David Bowie reminds me of how important music is to most of us as we grow up, not just aesthetically, but also in our developing sense of individual identity. I have always been sympathetic to Herbert Marcuse's analysis of art as perhaps the only sphere of human life that can free itself from the material determinants of our existence. “The truth of art,” he wrote, “lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e., of those who established it) to define what is real." I have just been suggesting that it is within our power to challenge the 'reality' so carefully established by the corporate media if we have developed the imagination to envisage a different kind of reality, a quality that art can initiate in us all. The life of the imagination, in Marcuse's view, can free itself from the claims of social determination and, in a Freudian sense, free the individual consciousness in ways that can frighten, but also liberate. It is this power that, for me, has always privileged the aesthetic over the analytical - it gives us back some autonomy and a means of challenging societal control, initially perhaps only in our individual consciousness, but this can coalesce around potent figures and ideas to have the potential to disrupt social constraints. Something like this happened in 'les evenements' in 1968 in France and in the rise of the counter-culture more generally in the sixties and seventies. 
I have previously described how, as a young child, literature took me to other worlds and provided me with a different reality that could be more powerful than the one I lived in. Music also had this capacity to not just take me away from the reality of my fairly tough circumstances, but to give me something positive, though elusive, to pursue. I loved the new 'rock n' roll' sounds that could be heard on radio, though rarely television. My maternal grandparents, at whose house we three children spent quite a lot of time, since we went there after school, owned a huge radiogram that sat proudly in the corner of the front room. This housed not only a record player and radio, but also the collected discs of the household. There were the soundtracks of fifties musicals and some Nat King Cole that were the choice of my grandparents, but also some records of my two aunts who still lived at home. Frank Sinatra ('Songs for Swingin' Lovers') belonged to the elder of the two, but the younger, who was only about eight years older than me, so a teenager at this time in my life, had records of a different order. Lots of The Platters that I soon knew by heart, and still do, but one that entered my soul and stayed there for good - 'Jailhouse Rock' by Elvis Presley, and its B side, 'Treat Me nice'. It was the pounding beat that claimed me completely, not the lyrics (which today I realise are actually very strange with their comically innocent homoerotic qualities), and it is the feel of music that still first grabs me today, the lyrics always coming later. I knew I wanted more of the rock beat of the Presley disc.
I began to pester my mother for a record player of our own, and, to my surprise, it wasn't long before she came home with a second-hand Dansette player. Where she got it from, I don't know, but there it was, handsome in its red and cream covering, but without any records or, as I quickly noticed, a plug to connect it. We had no spare plug, but my mother, ingeniously, removed the bulb connector from a defunct lamp and was able to connect the record player cord to the light socket in our front room. We turned it on, it hummed and we pulled the turn-table arm out to the on position. The platter began to whirr round just as it should. We turned the speed switch to 78 and the table span even faster. All we needed now was a record to play on it.
This was not long in coming. From somewhere, my brother got hold of a 78 record of Buddy Holly's 'That'll be the Day' with, I think, 'Lookin' for Someone to Love' on the B side. This was played again and again. I saved every penny I could, and clubbed together with my brother to buy our first 45 - Forty Miles of Bad Road by Duane Eddy. Again, played to extinction. And so began my life-long addiction to music and to the peculiar pleasure of owning it in all its recorded forms - though nothing ever beat the almost mystical power of the vinyl LP, especially when first purchased and in its virgin state. We never did change the plug on our 'Dansette' so always had to take out the light bulb from whichever room we were in and climb on something to plug in the player, sometimes having to perch the player precariously on piles of books so that the cord could reach the light socket. I did, though, realise why my mum got the player itself so quickly. She really wanted to be able to play music of her own. Soon Buddy Holly had to compete with Peter Pears and Bejamin Britten or Kathleen Ferrier.
 We slowly added to our store of recorded pleasure and I would spend any money I was given for birthdays etc. on records, spending hours poring over discs in high street stores and listening to them in the booths that were ubiquitous in specialist record shops and in department stores, although the assistants were often obviously reluctant to allow small boys like myself to occupy the booths at all. I would usually be met with "well are you going to buy it?" when I would ask to listen to the disc, to which I would invariably reply "I don't know until I've heard it" to which the response was always, "Well alright, but only this one, then that's your lot".
     There was one store only in Bromley High Street that didn't seem to mind kids like myself listening to the records in their little soundproof booths, and I would spend many Saturday mornings there, competing with groups of teenagers, sometimes listening to seven or eight different records before the tolerance of the staff began to wane. I would specialise in asking to hear EP's because you got two tracks on each side. In this way I discovered music that I couldn't have found elsewhere very easily, in particular, the blues. I was taken first by the pictures on the covers of blues records. The agonised expressions on the faces, the harmonica held over the mike. It just looked authentic in a way I couldn't have explained.
I will never forget taking one record up to the counter to listen to. It was an LP, so I wasn't sure if I would be allowed. But the assistant was kind and signalled the booth to go to. I sat down and the first scratchy hiss began as the needle hit the record, then an insistent beat, hard and rough from drums and guitar with a pounding bass - and then a voice the like of which I had never heard in my life. It shook me with its power and its primal force. By the time the harmonica entered I was a changed person. I had had my first encounter with Chester Burnett, otherwise known as Howlin' Wolf and my life would never be quite the same again. By the time the record got to 'Smokestack Lightnin' I knew I had to have this disc and that it was the only thing that mattered. I was probably ten years old and the blues had got my soul. It expressed everything I felt about the world, not in its lyrics so much as in its elemental musical power. Still today, after developing my musical fixation into almost every musical form there is, the sound of a slide guitar, a harmonica and a voice like Mr. Burnett's or Elmore James or Muddy Waters......... a feeling beyond analysis or explanation takes me over and I'm in an intensely pleasurable pain - that is, someone else's pain, but to begin to imagine that - to feel that - is the beginning of the capacity to challenge the reality that the powerful insist we should accept.