Wonderkid Read online

  And—hey presto!—The Prodigal. Details remain sketchy. Jack remembers a song called “Pistol,” Pete can still play one called “With You” (I remember him plunking it out on a piano backstage somewhere) and Blake is convinced he shoehorned “I Know She’d Leave Me,” the very first song he ever wrote, in there as well: “Not I knew,” he always said, “but I know.” As though this mild temporal confusion had been the secret of its success.

  So there was an unperformed rock opera based on a parable, a repertoire of potential cover versions for a nonexistent concert, a series of limited edition posters, and some unoriginal originals. Not bad for a boy just about to turn twelve.

  Public school beckoned: common entrance, scholarships, the absence of girls, the advent of masturbation. It was 1977, the dawn of slogans on T-shirts, and while the front pages of the music papers heralded the onslaught of punk, the back still contained advertisements for comical posters (one buzzard says to another “Patience, my ass! I’m gonna kill something!”), Oxford Bags (for the complete David Bowie look), offers of complete sets of live photos from Kiss concerts, and spoof adverts (“guy with quarter-inch prick seeks nasal sex”). Schoolboys everywhere, Blake among them, opened wide, bracing themselves for punk’s astringent. Death to Emerson, Lake & Palmer!

  But not long after composing The Prodigal—a few months into his thirteenth year—Blake happened to see a TV show, So It Goes, at which point everything changed. So It Goes was the talk of the playground: one of the few shows that let punk bands actually play—national exposure that was often the occasion for newsworthy behavior, the reason Blake was watching in the first place. So, this one episode: Tony Wilson interviewing Jonathan Richman about his music. Wilson says that when he hears Richman accused of simplicity and naivety, his reaction is: “What about William Blake?” And Richman, referring to Blake’s poem “The Lamb,” which has aired earlier on the show, replies: “You know what? I just started crying. I’ve been crying for the last five minutes, listening to that thing at the beginning by William Blake. It’s so funny that you would mention that right now, because if that makes me simplistic, liking stuff like that, then I’m one, ’cause that little thing ‘Little lamb who made thee’ that just wet me up.”

  “In the nineteenth century,” continues Tony, approaching peak smarm, “they said Blake was simplistic, that he was an idiot . . .” Then he deadpans: “And now he’s dead popular.” And when the camera pans back to Jonathan Richman, he’s in tears, barely able to respond.

  In tears!

  In 1977, crying on TV was out there. Displaying any overt emotion besides anger, producing any bodily fluid besides snot, phlegm, bile, and piss—particularly in response to a poem about a lamb—was severely antithetical to those unsentimental times. Richman’s tears were a formative event in Blake Lear’s life.

  The young Blake found a used copy of the poems and engravings of William Blake, who reminded him of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, both of whom he’d been introduced to by his mother. She’d read him so much Lear in bed—“The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” “Calico Pie,” “The Jumblies”—that, though Blake understood that Lear was the author, he had been under the mistaken impression that the word Lear was itself a synonym for poem, like ballad or verse: lear. And when Junior Choice, for which he was now too old, intruded on Radio One on Saturday morning, Blake still sang along to Elton Hayes’s sweet version of “The Owl and the Pussycat.” He was beginning to put two and two together.

  From then on, he lost faith in his religious musical. Indeed, he no longer wanted to make any sense at all. He would write in a state of complete innocence, summon up that little lamb or the elegant foul in verse; he wanted to write about sweet things, to make nonsense. He didn’t like the aggression in the air, the kids who’d stolen his baton, their scruffy seven-inch singles, their Xeroxed fanzines, their lapels full of safety pins and badges for bands whose art direction never deviated from the ransom note font. It must have felt like punk was going to go on forever. So he decided that he would be a man out of time, that he would opt out altogether. That was when he wrote his first poetry, and the first lyric that is recognizably Blake-ian, if not Blakeian. It appeared in the school magazine and won a prize. A sample:

  The shiny-coats are coming!

  The Hummingbirds aren’t humming.

  They’re flittering and anxious, asking why:

  Why, I cry—

  Why, I cry—

  With the winning book token (also good for records), he zipped down to WH Smith, but instead of the new Siouxsie and the Banshees (he left that to the baton stealers, although Jack made sure he heard it), he bought the Collected Poetry of Edward Lear, a reprint of Rackham’s illustrations of Alice in Wonderland, and a presentation edition of Carroll’s verse.

  And, at the age of thirteen, before he was even at his senior school, you have, in a nutshell, Blake Lear.

  Years later, he still had that Richman clip on VHS. I saw it in the back of the bus enough times to memorize it. He even went to the trouble of having it transferred to American standard, no mean feat in those days. He had some Morecambe and Wise and some Two Ronnies transferred, a Spike Milligan or two, some George Formbys—but not much; only the things he couldn’t live without.

  2

  “Do we have permission to jam? Then jam we must!”

  JACK WENT TO THE LOCAL COMPREHENSIVE, WHERE HE WAS PUSHED into learning a trade: printing. This suited him because it didn’t take up much of his brain—his only thought was the guitar—plus he’d always been handy with a Xerox machine. Blake magicked up a scholarship to The Queen’s School (partly on the strength of a sensitive essay on “The Tyger”) where, to Jack’s amusement, he had to ponce about in a gown and mortarboard. Band plans melted away without disappearing entirely.

  Blake made a success of Queen’s: he cunningly juggled work and play, avoided the school corps under cover of advanced pottery, and learned to smoke; his sense of humor ensured he was never considered for positions of responsibility. When he was a relative newcomer, delivering the crate of mini–milk bottles up to the Head of House’s empty study, he found a dartboard on the back of the door, with names instead of numbers, his own just above the double top. What had he done? He asked Jack. “They envy you or they love you,” said his older brother, “or they wouldn’t bother with you.”

  Blake was writing lyrics, Jack was exploring undiscovered regions of the fret board and making up tunes. Despite their separation, there was a modicum of collaboration, an unspoken agreement that it would continue. Most pressingly, however, Blake required Jack’s newfound expertise as a printer.

  The Queen’s School had an official school magazine, one per term with embossed crest and official notices. It also allowed the publication of a student magazine called Fore!, an outlet for artistic expression with an emphasis on gentle parody. To more forward-thinking pupils, particularly a few of Blake’s spikier friends, Fore! was quite as much a part of the establishment as the official magazine and thus represented a similar threat to individuality. Gentle parody had no effect; it patted itself on the back and preserved the status quo. So they cooked up an idea for a far more radical journal.

  Foreskin!, its name an inevitability, would offend. Blake was asked for a contribution—he offered three of his most recent songs, mostly nonsense, somewhere between druggy Beatles, Monty Python, and Edward Lear. He hand-lettered the lyrics, decorated them with doodles, and drew diagrams of the chords. There was debate as to where they should get the magazine printed, and Blake suggested his brother, who would give them a deal.

  “Have you seen what’s inside?” asked Jack.

  Foreskin! contained the vilest parody, barely humorous at all, thinly disguised streams of vitriol aimed at members of the staff, accusing them variously of having sex with their dogs, sex with one another, and sex with the pupils, or of being sadomasochists, aliens, or insane. Pseudonyms included “Piss” Don Sheets, P. Ennis, and, of course, Mike Hunt. The only vaguely amus
ing items were Blake’s songs, which were also the only attributed contributions.

  “But how do the songs look, Jack?” Blake asked. It was all he cared about.

  The finished magazines, twenty-four pages per copy, 200 copies, were sent to one of the dayboy’s homes. Next morning, the group distributed them around the school corridors. Which was precisely when the fun ended. Within twenty minutes, Blake was hauled out of class and frog-marched to the headmaster, who, though incandescent with rage, calmly named Blake’s conspirators and asked if he was wrong. Blake said nothing.

  “I’d throw the lot of them out. They’d be no loss to the school,” the headmaster said frankly, “but then I’d have to throw you out too.” He was rumored to have a glass eye. “And that would be a shame, because I think you’re going to amount to something. So they get off because of you. Sadly, you can never tell them. Isn’t life funny? Wait here, you fool.”

  As he heard the head bark instructions at his secretary, Blake glanced around the inner sanctum: in a barrister’s bookcase, the very same edition of Edward Lear that he owned, right next to some William Blake.

  Soon, all five stood in a line in the study, four fearing the worst.

  “Where is Sheppy Printers?” asked the headmaster, flicking one of the offending rags.

  “My brother works there,” said Blake.

  “How much did you pay them?”

  “Fifty pounds.”

  “This was worth fifty pounds to you to print this? Who wrote this bit about Mr. Rostron?”

  There was a lengthy silence. “Me,” admitted Will, the editor.

  “Why?”

  “Honestly?” There was a shuffling.

  “You saw no problem with being honest in print.”

  “Because I hate him.” It seemed a weak reason now.

  “Fair enough,” said the headmaster. “I know he’s a bully, and I know he’s a bootlicker . . . but you don’t have to put it down in print. I don’t. For the record, I’ve also spared both the public and the private page my true feelings about you. Even on your reports.” They could hardly believe what they’d just heard. The headmaster peered down bifocals at another page. “Mr. Williams, your Latin teacher, has carnal relations with his dog. I am struggling, as an animal lover, to see the humor. What have you got against Mr. Williams’s dog? That’s one of the sweetest animals on God’s earth. That poor hound is just collateral damage to you, isn’t it? And the songs are yours, are they? Why on earth did you put your name to them, boy? No one else bothered! They chose to hide behind the veil of anonymity.” He tossed the magazine into the fire, which spat its disgust as the flame caught.

  “Well, I’m proud of them, sir.”

  The headmaster regarded the fire with an icy stare. It was true: one of the eyes just didn’t seem to move. “I shouldn’t think anyone else is proud of anything in here, are they?” They shrewdly recognized this question as rhetorical. “If you ever pull a stunt like this again, you will be expelled. All of you. I will refund you the fifty pounds you spent and you will collect every last copy of the magazine and bring them here where they will be burnt. And that means every last copy. If there is so much as one missing, I will expel you anyway. And you will have no one’s sympathy. Not signing your work is cowardly.”

  Blake left the office feeling much better than when he had entered it. One copy of the magazine mysteriously survives; it contains Blake’s first three published songs.

  Jack didn’t go to university; Blake won a place at Angels College, Cambridge.

  There, avoiding an unseemly amount of work, he began to tinker in bands, briefly gigging as keyboard player for Replicants, who were for the worker’s revolution, for Gary Numan, and against definite articles. Humping the keyboard was bad enough, the ironing board stand was worse. Blake could hardly play the synth, but Replicants music required only one finger, either depressed on the Casio or raised to society; more important were high hair and stark lighting. The lead singer was less concerned with the quality of the lyrics. Blake’s suggestions were laughed out of the union bar. He knew his tenancy was up. But in the unlikely event that Replicants ever made it, he’d unavoidably end up a twig on a Pete Frame Rock Family Tree: a step in the right direction.

  Blake read English literature and made it his business to find out how to pass exams; this useful knowledge was wholly unrelated to any study of the subject itself. It involved the thorough analysis of old exam papers to discern the frequency with which certain questions turned up, and then the learning-by-heart of the appropriate essays. With regards to practical criticism, almost every essay was successfully handled by making a lengthy case that the poem was about writing a poem, or, failing that, that the poem was about the condition of art itself. He sailed through his Part Ones and took a job at the Arts Cinema, for which he wrote the occasional précis for the calendar (always of films he’d never seen, always in a last minute rush) and where he ushered, nipping down to the toilets for crafty cigarettes when he’d had one too many appointments with Dr. Caligari.

  He still had his four or five guitar chords and was putting them to good effect on basic protest songs, mostly written by more famous, more American, and older practitioners, for whose songs he’d change the name of, say, Richard Nixon to, say, Margaret Thatcher. And Bob’s Your Uncle! This edified the student masses in a way Replicants could only dream of. It felt a little punky, true, but it was Blake’s way in. He directed some plays, acted in a few others, taking none of it very seriously but never forgetting his lines. A girlfriend called Caroline introduced him to the more whimsical end of English progressive rock. He’d always hated that scene, not to mention the attendant literature, mostly because of the hairy crowd who’d been into it at school, masturbating on their electric guitars as they broadcast only into their own headphones, extolling the virtues of harmonics and tricky time signatures. But in Caroline’s musical world, there were no elves, no RogerDeanscapes, no Lord of the Rings, just solid English whimsy: Caravan sipping tea with a Golf Girl in their Land of Grey and Pink, Stackridge and their indifferent hedgehogs, and best of all Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom. Caroline and he shared their first kiss watching fireworks from his window, and Wyatt sang words that made perfect sense and none at all: “Burly bunch the water mole . . .” He had never met a girl who didn’t want to use tongues before—it seemed like some bizarre backwards step beyond pre-puberty: “. . . Heli plop and finger hole.”

  The license to specialize for the first time—to zero in on something of actual interest—suited Blake, and he decided to write a dissertation on Nonsense Poetry, surveying his favorites from Lear and Carroll onwards. He was supervised for this by a thrilled Bishop from Caius, dusted off especially for their tutorials, who bandied about words like mythopoesis and glossolalia. Monsignor Arbuthnot Slade had written lengthily on the subject himself, with particular reference to Edward Lear, The Ingoldsby Legends and The Bab Ballads, and was delighted to find a student willing to look forward to more contemporary poetry. For this had been the Bishop’s problem for many years: after the Victorians, what?

  Blake, to the Bishop’s frustration, was prepared to stretch the definition of nonsense to the breaking point, happy to include poets and poems from which other minds derived perfect sense.

  Blake preferred not to understand them—neither the poets, nor the minds. In many regards, the Bishop and Blake were an imperfect match, an owl and a pussycat, a nutcracker and sugar tongs, yet they happily danced by the light of the moon every Tuesday for two terms. The Bishop had no grounds on which to argue whether Bob Dylan wrote nonsense, not having heard the music of Bob Dylan, or indeed any popular music since Gilbert & (rather than Gilbert O’) Sullivan, but he introduced Blake to the following verse of Lewis Carroll written in 1889:

  He thought he saw a Buffalo

  Upon the chimney-piece:

  He looked again, and found it was

  His Sister’s Husband’s Niece.

  “Unless you leave this house,” h
e said,

  “I’ll send for the Police!”

  Blake was delighted, and when he told his fellow musos that this was the lost lyric from a Blonde on Blonde out-take, particularly when he delivered it in septum-quivering Dylanese, they believed him. Who wouldn’t? And how different really was it from the sky being chicken, and saddling up a goose, and the key being Frank, and all that gibberish? “We think so then and we thought so still,” wrote Edward Lear, of which Dylan’s version was about being younger then and older than that now: why was one nonsense and the other profound? Blake laughed at those who extracted deep meaning from Dylan’s lyrics. Agreed, the man was a genius, but only inasmuch as he was the greatest nonsense writer of the late twentieth century. When you added it up—and people often tried (there were plenty of professors waxing lyrical)—the only line connecting Dylan’s work (after his brief flirtation with sense, the folky protest period) was nonsense. He was capable of writing either great nonsense (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, most of John Wesley Harding) or sense composed entirely of atrocious clichés (the rest of John Wesley Harding onwards). It was as if Dylan, it seemed to Blake, was only successful when he wrote rubbish. Of course the man didn’t want to explain his lyrics: he couldn’t. Even the best of his narratives were completely nonsensical.

  And while everybody else was trying to make sense of texts by deconstructing them and decoding signs, Blake was on the lookout for things that tried to mean nothing, that stopped making sense, as David Byrne was currently advising at the Arts Cinema. Blake started to gravitate towards poetry that barely coalesced into words, while simultaneously arguing that T. S. Eliot was essentially a nonsense poet. Yes, “The Hippopotamus” and “Mr. Mistoffelees” and all that, but what about The Four Quartets? Weren’t these best heard and appreciated as gobbledygook, as pure sound, rather than teased and tickled for meaning that might or might not be there, upon which, anyway, no one could agree? Didn’t Eliot himself make fun of all that with his own fake notes?