Unreliable Memoirs #1
A blog is essentially quite a narcissistic entity and as I have writer’s block and can’t come up with anything to fill up the ‘writing’ category with I’ve decided to embrace this aspect of the phenomena and write a pseudo-biography - probably on an ongoing basis. Or if you’re lucky maybe just when I’m bored.
The first thing to bear in mind is that it will be a complete and utter fiction from beginning to end and contain barely a scintilla of truth, so any coincidence with events in the ‘real world’ is illusory. If anyone recognizes themselves, others or situations described anywhere here - don’t worry: it’s not real....
I was born in 1965 to a fanatically Welsh nationalist family (characteristics I preserve to this day) but apparently I shouldn’t have been born at all. My mother had been diagnosed as being unable to bear children and apparently this disturbed her very much, even to the extent that she used to frequent the local Evangelical Church in the hope of adjusting the situation through prayer. This was in fact quite a thing as my mother was of ‘the old religion’ and came from a family where ‘the gift’ had been passed down through the female line for generations.
I am not sure if there was any conflict between the Witchery and the Church but in any event the situation soon resolved itself with the arrival of an American preacher on a ‘soul saving tour’. This preacher (who I could name but won’t) prophesied one day that my mother would have a child (me!) if she gave up her occult interests and accepted Jesus - it was a no-brainer really. She got with the programme and here I am.
Prior to this she obviously had to find her accomplice and it wasn’t long before she met my father at one of the meetings. He was about 19 or so then I believe and she a few years older. My father was a sort of lay preacher in the old revivalist manner who toured the old Welsh Chapels giving ‘the Word’ and in a year or so they were married. After a number of years, they (we now) left Wales and moved to London to start a Church from nothing. They had acquired an old shack (as I remember it) and set about doing it up with the help of a few old ladies and a couple of hippies who in recompense were allowed to crash on our sofa. This was about 1970.
The Church soon took off and it wasn’t long before there was a congregation of hundreds of young people. Everyone chipped in (I suppose) and a much larger ex-Methodist ‘real’ building was bought and the congregation got bigger still. You musn’t think that this was any old common or garden C of E outfit though - this was the fall out of the 60’s and the Church was basically a haven for ‘Jesus Freaks’ but strangely, there was a liberal sprinkling of behatted old grannies too. We didn’t do hymns as such - more AOR but the pensioners didn’t seem to mind. One time we even hired the Rainbow Theatre for an ‘evening of Jesus rock’ with an MC5 clone called ‘The Sheep’ who were so loud they burst the eardrums of a our eighty-three year old flower arranger called Auntie Alice.
Not being affiliated to any legitimate religious outfit, my old man gained his inspiration and support from regular travels to the good old US of A. Here he would give it large with the likes of Oral Roberts and Billy Graham (in those days anyway - later well....we’ll go there later) and bring back American style revivalist preaching to the more staid Brits in the congregation. they lapped it up. And of course, his contacts there would reciprocate and come on missions to darkest Blighty. Once we had a guy called Arthur Blessitt who had carried a large cross around the world with no money, why I never discovered but he did tell me once something quite interesting: apparently on all his years of travels no churches would ever let him crash there or even (God forbid) park his cross and the only places where he could leave his burden overnight were generally pubs and bars. Often they let him stay and gave him free food too.......but I digress.
I think this is where I got my taste for rock n roll rebellion as i was raised on the music of Larry Norman and Randy Stonehill with all the attendant sniping and criticism about the ‘Devil’s music’ that I rather really enjoyed. It was also where I got my first intro into the ‘darker side’ of life too. We were effectively banned from TV, secular music and non-Christian books so my input was rather limited in the cultural sense until one day I discovered an Aladdin’s Cave in my very own home.
My father had taken it upon himself to evaluate the reading and listening materials of his congregation and assess whether it was ‘of the Occult’. Sad to relate, cases where demonic activity was suspected were legion and these offending items were duly confiscated and hidden in a locked room he had constructed in the attic where they languished whilst waiting to be burnt in a ritual ceremony which occurred once a year in our back garden - carefully timed to coincide with Guy Fawkes Night so as not to raise suspicions of the (possibly atheist) curtain-twitchers next door.
The drawback of this plan was that I had discovered where the key to this veritable demon’s horde was stashed and as such I usually had many months to wade through Nietzsche, Gurdjieff, books on Subud (it was all the rage then) and (inexplicably), virtually the complete works of Charles Dickens. This activity I indulged in almost every night in epic midnight to dawn research sessions that gave me a firm grounding in all matters occult, psychological and musical (this last required headphones obviously and the more perilous endeavour of taking the demonic LP downstairs to the turntable - oddly, as I recall, the only album my father ever confiscated was Rod Stewart’s ‘Every Picture tells A Story’ but this happened multiple times over the years). It was a library that was continually replenished and you never knew what you were going to get - I now know that none of it was really ‘Occult’ at all but at the time the frisson of breaking and entering, studying forbidden ‘demonic materials’ and the prospect of discovery made me feel like a disciple of the Beast himself (he was in there actually).
I sometimes wonder if it didn’t all mess me up a bit actually. I was only 7 or so when all this started and I managed to avoid discovery for around 5 years - no one should be exposed to Rod Stewart for that long.
