Ziggyology Page 9

  So, on Saturday 18 July 1953, the stars aligned between Tennessee and Greater London as the two eighth of January boys turned their respective corners. The stars aligned, and also the planets. For the tune seared into young David’s head by the opening of The Quatermass Experiment was from a pre-existing piece of classical music. A recent recording of Gustav Holst’s famous astrological suite. Its ferocious Wellsian overture: ‘Mars, The Bringer Of War.’

  THE FIRST QUATERMASS series was itself a literal experiment in a dramatic medium still finding its feet in a post-war climate of ‘radio with pictures’ beamed live from the studios of Alexandra Palace. An experiment much like that described in its narrated prologue, ‘an operation designed to discover some unknown truth’, born as much out of administrative oversight as the brilliantly daring mind of its creator, Nigel Kneale.

  With all BBC hands to the pump preparing the schedule surrounding the Coronation, it had somehow escaped the attention of controllers until the very last minute that they’d left a six-week gap in the Saturday-night schedule over the summer period from mid-July through to the end of August. As a matter of extreme urgency, the head of drama asked the staff scriptwriters to come up with something – ‘anything!’ – to fill the looming dead air. Luckily their department had already recruited Kneale, a 31-year-old writer of Lancashire–Manx heritage who’d previously studied at RADA and published an award-winning collection of short stories.

  Kneale’s response was a science-fiction idea called Bring Something Back …! Its ambitious premise of manned spaceflight seemed a little far-fetched for 1953 – a year when humans had only just conquered the summit of Mount Everest but had yet to lob so much as a frisbee beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. The BBC were nevertheless as enthusiastic as they were desperate. Kneale was given the go-ahead for the six-part series, soon retitled when he came to christen its central rocket scientist, a respectable professor whose authority should command the audience’s full trust. He chose Bernard as a first name in homage to the head of Jodrell Bank Observatory, astronomer Bernard Lovell. The surname he found at random, flicking through the London telephone directory and plumping for that of a firm of East End grocers. Quatermass.

  The first original science-fiction drama on UK television, The Quatermass Experiment was uniquely – defiantly – British. Resisting the ray-guns and flying saucer kitsch of contemporary Hollywood, Kneale brought something of the ‘Martians-in-Surrey’ mischief of H. G. Wells to the small screen, stirred up with a generous helping of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Professor Bernard Quatermass is head of the British Experimental Rocket Group, who launch three astronauts into space from a base in Australia. Once in orbit, ground control lose contact with the rocket fearing it, and its crew, are lost for ever. To their relief the rocket reappears on their radar screens, now way off target and falling back to Earth. It crashes in a terraced street west of Wimbledon Common, where Quatermass, the police and the prying press gather to retrieve the crew. Quatermass is horrified to discover that only one of the three men has survived, the other two pilots having mysteriously vanished. The more horrifying truth is all three pilots have been subsumed into a single being by an unknown extraterrestrial presence which gradually mutates into a murderous and gruesome space monster.

  Much like H. G. Wells, who conjured a Martian invasion from thin air in an age when no scientist could yet disprove the possibility of such an attack, so half a century later Kneale stared into similar chasms of cosmic mystery and filled the gaping hole with terror. It would be another eight years before Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space. In the summer of 1953, the fear of what might happen if we ever placed our bodies beyond our planet’s atmosphere was still a legitimate scientific concern.

  Quatermass returned to TV screens in October 1955; David now eight and his family finally settled at 4 Plaistow Grove, a terraced two-up two-down within shaking distance of trains passing through Sundridge Park station on the short branch line to Bromley North. Two years older, two years more mysterious, David’s memories of Kneale’s Quatermass II, still thundering with the dread of Holst’s ‘Mars’, must have imbedded even deeper into his mind. Between the two series Kneale had confirmed himself a peerless televisual dramatist with his adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for the BBC, retaining something of its dystopian gloom for his second Quatermass. This time the professor becomes roped into exposing a government cover-up surrounding a futuristic factory complex which has taken over the southern coastal town of Winnerden Flats. The plant is supposed to be developing a new kind of synthetic food, the official whitewash for its giant domed silos harbouring an alien species in the process of colonising Earth, fed and maintained by zombified human workers under its power. Once again, Kneale wickedly plonked unimaginable cosmic menace bang in the heart of a Thermos-flask-and-sandwiches provincial England. In one of its most memorable scenes a working-class family who make the fatal mistake of picnicking too near the alien factory find themselves at the mercy of the zombie guards. ‘Look ’ere, mate,’ says the scrawny father, unaware of imminent death at the hands of interplanetary evil. ‘You stop shovin’ us around or I’ll write to the papers!’

  By its fourth episode, broadcast 8 p.m. Saturday night, the BBC felt it necessary to forewarn viewers that in the corporation’s opinion ‘it is not suitable for children or for those of you who may have a nervous disposition’. The real horror of Quatermass II wasn’t that of the aliens – seen briefly through a silo hatch as an amorphous gurgling compost heap of space toxins – but of an omnipotent unseen enemy, one whose spectre is that skulking conspiratorially in the corridors of Whitehall. Kneale’s plot placed civil servants under the aliens’ influence, dressing up the threat from beyond our world as the figure of authority, the man from the ministry, the kind of trenchcoat and briefcase commuter to be seen any day of the week scurrying between London and its suburbs. In the eyes of an eight-year-old Bromley boy, the Quatermass II model of the thing from outer space looked exactly like his own father.

  IT WOULD BE three years before the two worlds of David Jones and Bernard Quatermass, fact and fantasy, boy and man, collided again. For David, they were the years of rock ’n’ roll baptism, a chain reaction of epiphany after sonic epiphany.

  1956: the jumpstart of Tommy Steele at the Finsbury Park Empire and cousin Kristina freaking out to Elvis Presley’s ‘Hound Dog’.

  1957: David turned ten and heard ‘God’. Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ was released in January, but it was the B-side, ‘Tutti Frutti’, which blew a hole in his cerebrum with, as he’d describe, ‘energy, colour and outrageous defiance’. His discovery of Little Richard was compounded when an American serviceman donated his record collection to Dr Barnardo’s head office, where John Jones picked out a few rock ’n’ roll discs for his son. Among them was a 45 r.p.m. copy of Richard’s ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’, not out in Britain for another month, galvanising his faith in a rock ’n’ roll idol he’d yet to clap eyes on. ‘I had heard God,’ he’d recall, ‘now I wanted to see him.’ He’d get the chance in mid-February when Richard’s film debut Don’t Knock The Rock blasted into the Gaumont at the end of Bromley High Street, just around the corner from H. G. Wells’ birthplace. David’s new God was a gorgeous pompadoured black Elvis with a smile like a supernova, making camp foreplay with his piano in an oversized silvery suit, throwing the occasional leg over the keys and flanked by four saxophone-tooting disciples. It was a vision as heavenly as the accompanying sound. A new awareness, a new dream formed in ten-year-old David’s head. ‘To be in a band playing saxophone behind Little Richard.’

  1958: Aged eleven, David’s doors of perception were battered afresh by the gut-bucket guitar boogie of Chuck Berry. ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ reached the UK top 20 in late spring, igniting the passions of David and his best friends George Underwood and Geoff MacCormack. Sadly for Berry his follow up, ‘Johnny B. Goode’ – a song so otherworldly it would one day join Beethoven in out
er space as the only rock ’n’ roll tune on Voyager’s Golden Record – failed to chart in Britain. Upon its B-side was the first physical portent of the sound of Ziggy Stardust, a song Berry composed during a pre-concert jam, finding a riff which refused to leave his memory. ‘I waxed in a tune with words about a dance hall that stayed open a little overtime,’ he’d explain. ‘Rockin’ ’til the early morning had been used so ’til the moon went down was the same time of day.’ So the first song from the Starman’s future repertoire silently struck England in May 1958. The B-side of London Records 45-HLM8629. The ‘crazy, crazy sound’ of Chuck Berry’s ‘Around & Around’.

  That same summer of ’58, UK pop suffered its first alien invasion courtesy of American actor Sheb Wooley’s one-horned, one-eyed ‘Purple People Eater’, still bothering the charts in August when David joined the Bromley cub scouts’ annual summer camp on the Isle of Wight. He insisted on dragging along his ukulele and the plywood tea-chest string bass John Jones had indulgingly built for him. Sword and shield for his first public performance that summer camp when he joined his best friend George on a handful of skiffle favourites, including Lonnie Donegan’s previous number one ‘Gamblin’ Man’ and its double A-side, ‘Putting On The Style’. Aged eleven, Ziggy’s boyhood vessel had found his singing voice. ‘Putting on the agony, putting on the style, that’s what all the young folks are doing all the while …’

  FOR TELEVISION’S MOST famous rocket scientist, the three years between Quatermass II and his return, Christmas week 1958, in Quatermass And The Pit had narrowed the gap between science and fiction. ‘Time has caught up with Quatermass,’ agreed Kneale, noting that since his creation’s first outing, ‘We have all been shot into a factual Space Age.’ In October the previous year, Russia launched the world’s first satellite, the four-pronged aluminium sphere Sputnik I. In the words of the BBC’s Reg Turnill, Sputnik ‘acted as the starter’s pistol in the Soviet–American race to put men on the Moon’. It also acted as a premature death knell to the immediate career of David’s hero, Little Richard. Already unsettled by hallucinations of angels and burning plane wings during a flight between concerts in Australia, Richard interpreted the launch of Sputnik as ‘a big ball of fire’ in the sky – a commandment from the Almighty to give up rock ’n’ roll and become a preacher.

  The third Quatermass was Kneale’s smartest, bleakest and most philosophically profound variation on the extraterrestrial invasion yet, aided by a dramatically improved production budget and a new theme tune: the alarming fanfare of Trevor Duncan’s ‘Mutations’ replacing Holst, a switch which wouldn’t have bothered David – having since bought a budget LP of The Planets he could hear ‘Mars’ any time he liked.

  Kneale’s ‘Pit’ is an excavation on a London underground station in Knightsbridge where work ceases when builders discover a strange, primitive skull. Analysis reveals it to be five million years old, before known human history. Quatermass is called for assistance when the archaeological investigation exposes a giant cylinder deep in the earth, much like an unexploded bomb. It turns out to be an ancient spacecraft from Mars, marked with Kabbalistic symbols and containing the dead bodies of insectoid, lobster-like beings with three legs – Kneale’s subtle anthropological nod to the tripod Martians of H. G. Wells. The professor gradually pieces together the abominable implications of the capsule’s contents. Millions of years ago, the innately aggressive Martians executed a mass purge of their own race, exterminating any defects and mutations, effectively destroying their own world before seeking to colonise another. The dark secret of human evolution – we are the Martians. The final episode aired on Monday 26 January 1959. In the closing scene, Quatermass is shown addressing the British nation in an explanatory TV lecture. ‘Every war crisis, witch hunt, race riot and purge is a reminder and a warning,’ seethed Quatermass. ‘WE ARE THE MARTIANS! If we cannot control the inheritance within us, this will be their second dead planet.’

  Little David. Twelve years-old. Headful of Little Richard, saxophones and skiffle. Sat in his living room in Bromley amidst the same suburban streets where, at his age, H. G. Wells committed fantasy genocide, a copy of Holst’s Planets in his bedroom and a face staring out of his TV screen telling him that he, David Robert Jones, is a Martian.

  As the programme finished just past 8.35 p.m., fourteen miles away in the BBC’s Riverside Studios, Quatermass actor André Morell and the rest of the cast congratulated themselves on a successful broadcast. While some of the action had been pre-recorded out of necessity, the majority was acted live as transmitted, the climactic Martian speech included. Heading homewards, those actors and technicians who didn’t have their own transport would have made the short walk to the nearest underground station. A few minutes’ stroll up Queen Caroline Street to Hammersmith Broadway. Just past the Gaumont Palace cinema.

  ELEVEN

  MATEUS!

  SHE’D LONG BEEN Peggy Jones but her first son still carried her maiden name, Burns. After three years’ national service with the RAF, Terry Burns returned home a few weeks before the Quatermass Christmas of 1958. In Plaistow Grove he found that the kid brother he’d left behind mesmerised by Watch With Mother was now an alert rock ’n’ roll apostle with a hunger for knowledge, a clear gift for drawing and painting, and an obsession with all things American. David Jones was a juvenile sculpture already showing its future adult form but still susceptible to moulding by the 21-year-old wisdom of one who’d been and seen the world. Or at the very least Malta and North Africa.

  And so, during that fragile first passage into adolescence, Terry Burns delicately tweaked the pliable clay of youth. With the sounds of modern jazz. John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Charlie Parker. And with the bible of the beats.

  In July 1947, while baby David gurgled in Brixton, and America took its first twitchy glances at the skies for Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers, a 25-year-old Columbia University dropout and discharged marine named Jack Kerouac hitched from New York to Denver to visit his friend, the freewheeling poet, drug addict and bisexual petty criminal Neal Cassady. Kerouac made similar pilgrimages back and forth across the country over the next few years, bumming rides to Los Angeles and San Francisco and south of the border to Mexico, either with Cassady or visiting similar likeminded – outminded – bohemian desperados including poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William Burroughs. Together these trips formed the autobiographical narrative of On The Road, Kerouac’s groundbreaking second novel, published in America in 1957 and in the UK the following year.

  As the adult David recalled, ‘I liked school until I was twelve. I have an older brother and he was always a reader, more than I was. He made me read On The Road by Jack Kerouac. From then on I didn’t go to school much.’ In the pages of Kerouac, the Bromley boy became frantically, demonically and angelically drunk on its cast of exotic characters: the pseudonymous Sal Paradise (Kerouac), Dean Moriarty (Cassady) and Carlo Marx (Ginsberg). New escapist reveries bevelling the brain of a twelve-year-old into that of the Starman. Even Ziggy himself would one day tell the American press that reading On The Road ‘was the most important thing that ever happened to me’. He wasn’t alone.

  By the late 1950s many a young English heart was tempted by the United States of Make Believe. Who’d be a David Jones when you could be a Sal Paradise? Who’d be a Reg Smith when you could be a Marty Wilde? Or a Ron Wycherley when you could be a Billy Fury?

  And who’d be a nobody from Isleworth when you could be a somebody from Hollywood?

  HE SAID HE came from Hollywood and his name was Vince Taylor. The now ‘world famous’ 2 I’s coffee bar of Tommy Steele legend hadn’t seen anything like him. His hair was just like Elvis Presley’s, he spoke with a lip-curling ‘crazy, man!’ twang and his clothes were genuine ‘Made In America’. The real deal. When he danced it was a wobble of wayward limbs, like a marionette whose strings were being yanked by four different people in opposite directions at once. When he sang he was out of tune and out of time. But it didn’t matter
. Vince Taylor was the physical embodiment of fifties cool. A blessed gift, to them, from the gods of rock ’n’ roll.

  It didn’t take long before the buzz around this American alien in the heart of Soho snared him a record contract. Calling his backing band the Playboys, he released his first single in November 1958, pairing two covers of tracks originally recorded for Sam Phillips’ Sun label: Roy Orbison’s ‘I Like Love’ and Ray Scott’s ‘Right Behind You Baby’. It made no impact. The songs were fine, but his singing wasn’t. Still, no one could deny Vince’s contagious effect on audiences. When the Playboys appeared on a Saturday morning bill at the Gaumont cinema in Shepherd’s Bush the owners had to call the police to calm the seat-ripping scenes of screamage Taylormania.

  He hoped to inject the dynamism of his stage act into his next record, a song he’d written himself called ‘Brand New Cadillac’ – a twang-barbed basilisk of a tune with Vince straining at the wheel of his Ford desperately trying to keep pace with his baby as she vanishes over the horizon in her shiny new convertible. The B-side was the ballad ‘Pledging My Love’, popularised by tragic bluesman Johnny Ace who’d accidentally killed himself in a catastrophic game of Russian roulette; a rock ’n’ roll suicide in all but name. Released in April 1959, the cloth-ears of New Musical Express critic and future Ready Steady Go! presenter Keith Fordyce dismissed it for lacking ‘any distinguishing feature’. Cursed by similar apathy elsewhere, ‘Brand New Cadillac’ missed the charts and skidded into pop’s cheated abyss.