Ian Gillan: The Autobiography of Deep Purple’s Singer Read online

  We were all influenced and impressed by Dan Dare’s adventures in the Eagle comic, and so I took my project quite seriously, and with a sense of great responsibility. In fact, such was my concern for Barry that I insisted on tying him very firmly to the ship, so he’d not come to grief when he was turned upside down for re-entry.

  I admit to being disappointed by the lack of public interest, but that could not prevent tight schedules, as I lit the fuse and stood back. Well, we got ignition all right, but then things took a bad turn, as the rockets fired randomly, causing the machine to catch fire and fall over. My abiding memory of the next few moments will always be of Barry sitting very safely in the doomed ship, but with that familiar look of surprise back on his face, as an amazing firework display went on around him. OK, so there were no extinguishers on board, and the nearest tap was some way away, but the real problem was that Barry had once again completely forgotten the training I’d given him, and only compounded his problems when he got tangled up in the washing line, which, so far as I was concerned, was the only thing keeping him from shooting off through Cranford Park, to the scene of his previous catastrophe.

  Although Barry was in deep distress, I couldn’t give him the help he needed, because my own attention had been drawn to the nearby block of flats into which a rocket had shot through an open third-floor window, to land next to an old lady who was watching the telly, before she began to realise it wasn’t a faulty fuse that was her sudden problem! So I was now being abused by hysterical noise from two directions, Barry in the spaceship, and the old lady in her room. The hysteria was so bad that I failed to hear Dad arriving, and went to bed thoroughly confused and hurt, but not to the extent that I couldn’t think about looking for Barry’s replacement! A doodle from that period deals with my wider inventiveness and state of mind:

  Remember, remember the Fifth of November

  Gunpowder, treason and plot

  If Barry can fly

  And comes back alive

  I’ll probably earn quite a lot.

  More seriously, perhaps, the disasters left me with a poignant and abiding memory, when I had to feel sadness for my mother, but also to understand the meaning of heartfelt admiration, as I heard her apologising to the old lady, and offering to pay for the damage. Interestingly, she seemed to do it with a mixture of obvious embarrassment and considerable pride, as she explained the disaster away through my ability to talk people into sharing laudable ideas, while she also blamed Barry for the two-part catastrophe! The last I heard was the dear old lady telling Audrey not to worry, that she’d get the council to pay for the damage, and that she knew it was just ‘one of those things’. She also said some quite nice things about me, which I thought most gracious. Pity Barry felt differently!

  At the time of all this – I guess I was about twelve – I was a pupil at Hounslow College, where I was neither clever nor bottom of the class, but where I showed increasing promise at sport, which I entered into with great enthusiasm, as opposed to skill. Still, it was something I enjoyed, despite the fact that the school’s facilities were very basic, and involved a long hike to Boston Manor for football, or to Southall for athletics.

  They were good days, but then, to my dismay, I moved up a class, and came across one or two teachers who showed worrying tendencies – or should I better suggest their attitude was vigorously disciplinarian? It was therefore unwise to complain, and, in my case, life began to change for the worse, as I found myself singled out for their special attention. The justification and punishment criteria were explained to me in terms of ‘there’s nothing like a damn good thrashing to make the boy a man’, and for this purpose the preferred weapon was a so-called slipper, although it was in fact a size-ten plimsoll, which I felt across my backside on a regular basis. And so I came to learn the first of life’s great truisms: that fear is the first principle of movement!

  It was a challenge not to cry, and a huge contest of wills between the assailant and the victim to find their victory through the pain and psychological war that had come into being under the banner of ‘education’! Life was not improved by the fact that battles had to be fought on the street as well, and it was my misfortune that I was the only kid in a private school who came from a council estate, and the only kid on a council estate who went to a private school.

  Audrey, about whose positive character I’ve already spoken, worked herself to the bone to keep me looking nice, and I guess I simply stood out wherever I went as the guy who was different, who didn’t seem to fit. Wearing a light-and-dark-blue-striped uniform, I found the evening walk home, as you may well imagine, quite miserable. However, there was nothing to be gained by being negative, so instead of feeling sorry for myself, I resolved to turn things around; beginning with the need to understand concepts of self-worth, alongside the entitlement of everyone to travel through life with dignity. This self-re-evaluation didn’t take very long, and it was soon time to trial the ‘new me’ in the classroom, where there was a piece of business that really needed to be settled, once and for all. We had this teacher who used to make us kids crawl the entire length of a classroom, under chairs and desks, pushing a pencil along by the nose, and I vowed that the day I was told to perform this humiliation … well it would be my last at the school, and so it came to be!

  I seem to remember a heavy volume of Chaucer being involved in the closing scene, and the teacher concerned holding his head with a detached look about him, as I walked away to murmurs of approval.

  Fortunately, Audrey was teaching at the time, and so she was able to use her influence to have me transferred to Acton County Grammar School, where I began to achieve my best. In this new setting, I was able to pick up on sport again, and found a niche in athletics, and pole vaulting in particular. However, for those who follow modern-day athletics, you should remember that in my time (maybe yours too) they didn’t have the flexible poles we see today, and so the challenge of reaching ‘thin air’ could be quite demanding, while they used to say you could always tell a vaulter of that period by the nine-inch gap between cuff and hand! Still, with encouragement from the games master (or must we say ‘teacher’?), I was entered for the Southern Schools Championship at the White City, and it was fantastic. I think I came next to last, or maybe even last, but it didn’t matter, because I felt as if I’d actually been to the Olympics. I’d performed before an ‘audience’, and felt my first real sense of achievement.

  A sound education also meant most kids went to church as often as necessary, eventually to be confirmed, and then usually to drift away to deal with life as adults. I’d been going quite regularly for some time, basically to respect and keep Audrey happy at first, but there were also some good mates doing the same thing. Lads such as Los Humphries and Barry Higgins were the main guys I’d hang out with, and both were also destined to feature at different points of my life over the years.

  The place of local worship was the ‘Anglo High’ Church of the Good Shepherd, whose minister was a young priest called Father Stubbs, while my first and abiding memory of the time was the abundance of swinging the incense, and the different rituals that went with the faith. However, there were other things going on as well, and the youth club and snooker hall (which formed part of the church) became a focal point where young people could meet. And that was great, because, as a growing lad, I was becoming aware of girls, or ‘crumpet’, as we called them in those days.

  So a new age was dawning, as we began to push school aside, explore our youth and listen, mostly at the youth club or occasionally at home when the house was empty, to a new phenomenon from the States, beginning (for me) with Elvis Presley. We’d had Bill Haley, but now it was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, and that introduced a whole new style and sound culture to us all, and focused my mind (at last) on something I might have a go at doing myself one day!

  I was confirmed at St Paul’s Church in Hounslow West, along with Los and Barry, and after that a few of us drifted towards home, with our futures uncertai
n, but with life somehow feeling full of promise!

  I don’t quite remember how it all began, but as a few of us approached the Odeon Cinema I do remember seeing these two guys, by which I mean grown men in their late twenties or early thirties, and one of them had a broken arm in a sling, while both were smoking roll-up fags, and simply leaning against a wall, minding their own business. For my part in what was about to happen, I continued approaching them, still thinking in my reverie, about how good life was being to me, but then I must have also been staring, because one of them shouted, ‘What the fucking hell you looking at?’ which he asked in such a way that I felt deserving of an appropriate response. And so I’m afraid that God, to whom I’d just promised so much at my recent confirmation, well, He got forgotten, I’m afraid. ‘What the fucking hell do you think I’m looking at, c**t? I’m looking at you!’

  Oh dear, I thought, as a slight pause must have alerted my brain to a gross malfunction, which, to be fair, it immediately corrected by shoving my legs into top gear, and giving me a decent head start. So the two guys started chasing me, although it was the one with the broken arm who seemed the more lively, and potentially dangerous, as I came to accept how the past few seconds had incredibly changed my situation from one of peace and holiness to one that was suddenly a desperate race for survival. However, I also remember two other things so very clearly. First, and with the exception of Barry, where were my mates? And, second, it bothered me just how quickly the geezer with the broken arm was closing me down. Keep going, Gillan, I thought, and start thinking while you’re keeping going! Then, suddenly, through the sweat, the puffing and the panting, someone up there must have felt sorry for me, and suggested I consider how the great movie stars would have behaved in such appalling circumstances. Of course, they’d stop – very suddenly – wouldn’t they? And so I brought my screaming legs down to a real cool walk. Understandably, the bloke behind hadn’t anticipated the absurd change of pace; it would have been astonishing if he had, as he ploughed into me.

  Helped by my recent communion with God, plus, I’m bound to say, the perfect timing of one who was clearly a finely tuned athlete, the end came together brilliantly, as I moved the confused beast with his broken arm effortlessly across my back, before landing him on his head a few feet away. Beneath the smiling face of Elvis on the Odeon hoardings, I dropped down, clamped my knee across his throat, and, with a confidence verging on lunacy, I leaned forward and plucked the roll-up from his lip, some part of which I’m afraid came away with it. Anyway, I coolly put the fag in my mouth, before walking away – just as Robert Mitchum would have done!

  From time to time I make apologies to people in my life, and so I’ll make one now. It’s to Father Stubbs, to whom I’m probably a big disappointment!

  I used to be a sinner

  Used to have my cake and eat it

  They warned me of my fate

  I was quite prepared to meet it.

  I don’t know how Father Stubbs would have reacted to the growing sexual awakenings and ambitions of his young flock – the girls as well as boys – but I’ll guess he might have offered thanks to God over my first sad effort. The girl’s name was Heather, and everybody in the street seemed to know her at one time or another, which meant she came well qualified, as I hoped to find out when we found our way to the airfield at Heston. Well, we got started almost immediately, and it was all fumbling and frantically rolling around on the ground, until, eventually, I rolled her over. She had her jeans down around her ankles, and started screaming, quietly at first, but after a little while I began to find it all a bit unsettling, and couldn’t work out what was going on. I got the impression she was getting excited, but then I started to feel something I hadn’t expected at all, because my crotch started hurting in a strange kind of way. It was all very confusing, until it emerged that we’d rolled into a bed of stinging nettles, which experience, I’ll admit, put me off sex for quite a while. Funny old days!

  You know, just a little while ago, my wife was reading the paper in our kitchen. She said, ‘Hey, Gubbins’ (that’s what I’m sometimes called at home) ‘it says here that the average man thinks about sex forty-eight times a day. What do you think of that?’ Well, it puzzled me, but I said, ‘I can’t understand how the average man can keep losing concentration,’ to which end, and with said paper ringing in my ears, I realised I could have answered the question better!

  And so one of the purposes of going to Acton County Grammar – other than to escape the misery and worries I’ve variously talked about – was that Audrey wanted me to pass some GCE O-level exams (as they were known in those days). Pauline, I was reminded, was doing extremely well at Twickenham County School, and not costing Mum a penny for her education, which prompts me to mention that Audrey could afford to have only one of us at a fee-paying school and, as the elder (and a boy at that), I was the privileged one. It seemed to be like that in those days and, to be fair, Pauline didn’t seem to mind, while I worked quite hard, and did well in the mock exams. However, as the crucial and real exams approached, I sadly became sidetracked, and, to the distress of all who wished me so well, I made the momentous decision to be a film star, and so became lost in my dreams and ambitions to that end.

  As with the cat’s effort with the budgie of earlier days, my own timing could not have been worse and I went through a difficult period, with reports filtering back that I’d been seen in the streets, pretending to be various characters from the movies. On one occasion I’d be a detective hiding in the shadows, smoking a cigarette; on another, I’d be seen walking bow-legged down the road, having left my horse tethered to the cinema railing; and perhaps the most disturbing of all was the phase when I prowled around leering at every woman who came out of Hounslow West Station, as I pretended to be a great lover!

  I’d like to think every generation of youngsters goes through fantasies and occasional weird behaviour like that, and certainly, from my point of view, I thought it quite a healthy pastime. I didn’t seem to be any different from the other guys who went to the movies; it was just that I wanted to be in them. I wanted to be a film star. I did not want to be a mere film actor, and bit parts didn’t interest me in the slightest. I wanted to be ‘up there’ in big letters with bright lights – a cowboy, a spaceman, a great lover, even a gangster would do! Anything, just so long as it was heroic and glamorous.

  And so we come to that supreme moment of irony, that moment when something of great significance germinates, rumbles, then explodes into life, taking you in a direction you most definitely did not have in mind.

  CHAPTER 2

  It was as I came out of the cinema having watched a Presley film that the light dawned – a Eureka moment – as I realised there was an easy and obvious route to becoming a movie star. All I had to do was first become a successful rock-’n’-roll singer, like the great man himself!

  Now, it’s in my nature that, once an idea is in place, I like to do something about it, so, on my way home to where we now lived in Brabazon Road (opposite the Travellers Friend pub), I stopped this guy, Andy, whom I vaguely recognised, and knew to be a young musician. I told him I was forming a band, and asked if he knew of any guitar players in the area. He said he’d see what he could do and, true to his word, he found a few ‘possibles’, whom he brought to the house one Saturday morning. So five or six of them arrived, all carrying guitars of varying quality – by which I mean in different states of repair – and I’ll name-drop two of them as Chris Aylmer (who would turn up in later years with Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden fame) and Paul Samson of the future band Samson.

  However, in those early days, the immediate gathering was of more humble stuff, which meant those with two strings (or fewer) were bass players, the ones between two and five were ‘rhythm’, and a full set made you the lead guitar player. As it was my band, I was the singer and drummer, and we went through songs such as ‘Sheila’, written in 1960 by the (then) fourteen-year-old Tommy Roe. Also, we did ‘Hey Baby’ and �
�Apache’, the Shadows’ version. Considering this was just a means to an end, I quite enjoyed singing, and the session was momentous, because it was the first time I’d be thrown out of a place, which in this case was my home! Still, it was great while it lasted – the noise, the trampling over furniture and the general wrecking process that was somehow inevitable, although accidental of course.

  So, now we’d lost our first ‘venue’, I decided to go to St Dunstan’s Youth Club in Cranford to check out rehearsal possibilities there. It was a fair old hike, but I found the leader, who showed me a backroom and said we could use it. When I explained we had no money, he replied, ‘Well, the fee will be one performance a week, if you’re good enough.’ And so we got going.