Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child

RESCUE OF A ROCK and ROLL CHILD

Chapter One: The Gambolling Baby Boomer

Birth of a Rock and Roll ChildI was born Friday 7 October 1955 at the tail end of West London's Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting 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 was then the LondonBorough of Acton. Built by Norman Richard Shaw, Bedford Park was the world's first Garden Suburb. By the 1880s it was a Bohemian centre forintellectuals and artistic free-thinkers its residents going on to include mostfamously the great Anglo-Irish poet WB Yeats. The painter Arthur Pinero wasanother resident; as was the actress Florence Farr, who like Yeats was deeply 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 on the Bath Road. However, thefoundation in 1963 of the Bedford Park Society led first to the government'slisting of 356 houses, and then much of the estate becoming part of theBedford Park Conservation Area. During my boyhood it was stilldemographically quite mixed, but well on the way to being completely gentrified. Working class future hard nut Roger Daltry had moved there fromNotting Hill a little time before we did, although he'd been born (in March1945) at the Hammersmith Hospital in nearby Shepherds Bush. A few yearslater he formed a Skiffle group, The Detours, which eventually mutated intoThe Who, one of several English bands that conquered America in the late1960s with a furiously hedonistic music and philosophy.By '63, I'd been at South Kensington’s French Lycée for about four years andmy brother (born on the 2cnd of May 1958) had since joined me there. Thesixties' social and sexual revolution was already well under way; and yet for allthat, seminal Pop groups such as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five - eventhe Beatles themselves - were quaint and wholesome figures who fitted in wellin a still innocent Britain of Norman Wisdom pictures and well-spokenpresenters on the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bobnotes, sweet shops and

tuppeny chews

. It wasn't until the Rolling Stonesachieved national infamy that the new Pop they'd first called Beat started topresent a serious challenge to the moral establishment of the UK, and soperhaps start to evolve into the far more threatening music of Rock.On the day I was born - 7 October 1955 - Nation of Islam leader ElijahMuhammad reached the age of 58, and Scottish psychologist RD Laing, 28, while Beat poet Amira Baraka, revolutionary leader Ulriche Meinhof andFalklands hero Major Julian Thompson all hit 21. The future Colonel OliverNorth celebrated his 12th birthday, Judee Sill her 13th, Paul Weyrich his 8th, Vladimir Putin his 3rd.It was a day marked by an event which had a colossal if largely unrecognisedinfluence on the evolution of our culture, when at San Franciso's Six Gallery about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg,Phillip Whalen, Phillip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. All went

on to be leading lights of the Beat Generation, as did Jack Kerouac, the shy Canuck from Lowell, Massachusetts, who attended but didn't read, preferringto cheerlead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. His "On the Road" published two years later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse andfriend Neal Cassady remains Beat's most famous ever work. After the SixGallery reading, the Beat movement which had existed in embryonic formsince about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, withthe Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret,goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.1955 was also the year in which Rock and Roll assaulted the mainstreamthanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, althoughit's "The Blackboard Jungle", which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock' n' Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets's"Rock Around the Clock", over the film's opening credits. Originally a ratherconventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights,Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency,ensured the world would never be the same after it. In August Sun Recordsreleased a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill",featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to becomeRock's single most influential figure apart from the Beatles.On the 30

th

of September, James Dean died in hospital following a motoraccident aged 23 after having made only three films, the greatest of which,Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" emerged about a month afterwards. Itcould be said to be the motion picture industry's defining elegy to thesensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful andtortured icon ever. As such his 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 could have yieldedas if my magic to the wild Dionysian sixties, some convincing, others less so.For me, if a little leaven is present in a theory for me it leavens, or spoils, theentire lump, even when much of it may be sound. Far from being a sudden,unexpected event, the post-war cultural revolution has historical rootsreaching at least as far back as the so-called Enlightenment, since which timethe West has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric. That said, its true source was the Serpent's falsepromise to Eve that through defiance of the Creator she and Adam could be asgods, knowing good 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 theFirst World War. Even Rock, a music which the American evangelist JohnMacArthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of thedissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools.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 an idyllic one which hadhardly changed from the day that I was born when the spirit of Victorianmorality was still more or less intact in Britain.Tales of Tasmania, Manitoba (and a Child's West London)

By the time we moved to Bedford Park, My father had several successful yearsas a classical violinist under his belt, and so was in a position to ensure thatmy brother and I enjoy a far more stable childhood than his had ever been.He'd been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania, and raised inSydney as the son of one Carl Halling from Denmark, and an English mother,the formidable Mary. She came into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London and sometime around the turnof the 20th Century, but she was always known as Mary to my parents, brother and I.According to Mary's sister Joan, her maternal grandmother’s maiden namehad been Butler, which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, adynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which had dominated thesouth east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost ordiscarded branch. If Joan was right then I'm related by blood to many of themost prominent royal and aristocratic figures in history, perhaps even all of them.These would include her namesake Lady Joan FitzGerald, daughter of JamesButler the first Earl of Ormonde, and alleged ancestress of Diana, Princess of Wales. Lady Joan herself was the grandaughter of Edward the 1st of the Houseof Plantagenet - who was "The Hammer of the Scots", and the king whoexpelled the Jews from England - while her mother Eleanor de Bohun wasdescended from Charlemagne, the greatest of all the Carolingian Kings whomay have been Merovingian through his great-grandmother, Bertrada of Prum, the Merovingians and the Carolingians being two dynasties of Frankishrulers who supposedly upheld the divine right of kings.Mary grew into a beautiful young woman, with dark hair, green eyes, highcheekbones and an exquisitely sculpted mouth. After losing her fiancé in theFirst World War, she married an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson,and they had two children in quick succession, Peter Bevan, and Suzanne,known as Dinny.At some point between Peter’s birth and that of his younger brother Patrick,she travelled with her husband to Ceylon - now Sri Lanka - to find work as atea planter. There she met a Dane with a deep love and knowledge of thespiritual traditions of the East, the mysterious Carl Halling. What followednext I can't say for sure but I've been led to believe that at some point after becoming pregnant with her third child, Mary fled with Carl to the island of Tasmania where my father was born, although he was raised - as Carl’s son -in Sydney, New South Wales.It was in Sydney that Carl contracted multiple sclerosis, after which Mary made some kind of living as a journalist and teacher, while an increasingly sick Carl went on a desperate spiritual search for a miracle cure taking in Mary Baker Eddy's mystical Christian Science sect, but sadly it was all unavailingand Carl died just before the outbreak of World War II. According to his wishes, he was buried in his native Denmark, although by then he'd allegedly taken out dual citizenship, as had Mary.All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick asa violinist, Peter as a cellist and Suzanne as a pianist. By the time Pat was nine years old he was already the soloist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, withall his wages according to him being redirected by Mary into the family