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Birth of a Rock and Roll ChildI was born Friday 7 October 1955 at the tail end of West London'sGoldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place nearNotting Hill Gate.My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what wasthen the London Borough of Acton. Built by Norman RichardShaw, Bedford Park was the world's first Garden Suburb. By the1880s it was a Bohemian centre for intellectuals and artistic free-thinkers its residents going on to include most famously the great Anglo-Irish poet WB Yeats. The painter Arthur Pinero was anotherresident; as was the actress Florence Farr, who like Yeats wasdeeply involved in mysticism and the occult.Some time after the dawn of the next century the area had -significantly perhaps - declined to the extent that bus conductors would shout out "Poverty Park!" when their vehicles stopped onthe Bath Road. However, the foundation in 1963 of the BedfordPark Society led first to the government's listing of 356 houses, andthen much of the estate becoming part of the Bedford Park Conservation Area. During my boyhood it was stilldemographically quite mixed, but well on the way to beingcompletely gentrified. Working class future hard nut Roger Daltry had moved there from Notting Hill a little time before we did,although he'd been born (in March 1945) at the HammersmithHospital in nearby Shepherds Bush. A few years later he formed aSkiffle group, The Detours, which eventually mutated into The Who, one of several English bands that conquered America in thelate 1960s with a furiously hedonistic music and philosophy.By '63, I'd been at South Kensington’s French Lycée for about four years and my brother (born on the 2cnd of May 1958) had since joined me there. The sixties' social and sexual revolution wasalready well under way; and yet for all that, seminal Pop groupssuch as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five - even the Beatlesthemselves - were quaint and wholesome figures who fitted in wellin a still innocent Britain of Norman Wisdom pictures and well-spoken presenters on the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers,tanners and ten bob notes, sweet shops and
tuppeny chews
. It wasn't until the Rolling Stones achieved national infamy that thenew Pop they'd first called Beat started to present a seriouschallenge to the moral establishment of the UK, and so perhapsstart to evolve into the far more threatening music of Rock.On the day I was born - 7 October 1955 - Nation of Islam leader
 
Elijah Muhammad reached the age of 58, and Scottish psychologistRD Laing, 28, while Beat poet Amira Baraka, revolutionary leaderUlriche Meinhof and Falklands hero Major Julian Thompson allhit 21. The future Colonel Oliver North celebrated his 12th birthday, Judee Sill her 13th, Paul Weyrich his 8th, Vladimir Putinhis 3rd.It was a day marked by an event which had a colossal if largely unrecognised influence on the evolution of our culture, when atSan Franciso's Six Gallery about 150 people gathered to witnessreadings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, PhillipLamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. All went on to beleading lights of the Beat Generation, as did Jack Kerouac, the shy Canuck from Lowell, Massachusetts, who attended but didn't read,preferring to cheerlead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. His "Onthe Road" published two years later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse and friend Neal Cassady remains Beat's most famous ever work. After the Six Gallery reading, the Beat movement which had existed in embryonic formsince about 1944, left the underground to become an internationalcraze, with the Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognisedicon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.1955 was also the year in which Rock and Roll assaulted themainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, LittleRichard and others, although it's "The Blackboard Jungle", which,released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting theRock' n' Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellionas a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets's "Rock  Around the Clock", over the film's opening credits. Originally arather conventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae andhis Knights, Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency, ensured the world would never be thesame after it. In August Sun Records released a long playing recordentitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill", featuring the so-calledKing of the Western Bop who went on to become Rock's singlemost influential figure apart from the Beatles.On the 30
th
of September, James Dean died in hospital following amotor accident aged 23 after having made only three films, thegreatest of which, Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" emergedabout a month afterwards. It could be said to be the motion pictureindustry's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of  youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon ever. As suchhis image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of  youth was born in the mid 1950s.
 
Many theories exist as to how the staid conformist fifties couldhave yielded as if my magic to the wild Dionysian sixties, someconvincing, others less so. For me, if a little leaven is present in atheory for me it leavens, or spoils, the entire lump, even whenmuch of it may be sound. Far from being a sudden, unexpectedevent, the post-war cultural revolution has historical rootsreaching at least as far back as the so-called Enlightenment, since which time the West has been consistently assailed by tendencieshostile to its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric. That said, its truesource was the Serpent's false promise to Eve that throughdefiance of the Creator she and Adam could be as gods, knowinggood and evil, which is at the heart of all vain, humanisticphilosophy.What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, especially since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the American evangelist John MacArthur once described ashaving a bombastic atonality and dissonance was foreshadowed atits most experimental by the emancipation of the dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernistschools.Still, for all the change that raged around me in the sixties, my own little world of the leafy suburbs of outer west London was anidyllic one which had hardly changed from the day that I was born when the spirit of Victorian morality was still more or less intact inBritain.Tales of Tasmania, Manitoba (and a Child's West London)By the time we moved to Bedford Park, My father had severalsuccessful years as a classical violinist under his belt, and so was ina position to ensure that my brother and I enjoy a far more stablechildhood than his had ever been. He'd been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania, and raised in Sydney as the son of one Carl Halling from Denmark, and an English mother, theformidable Mary. She came into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London and sometimearound the turn of the 20th Century, but she was always known asMary to my parents, brother and I.According to Mary's sister Joan, her maternal grandmother’smaiden name had been Butler, which allegedly links the family tothe Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which had dominated the south east of Ireland
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