Poetry

The Boy from the Tail End of the Goldhawk Road 1

by Carl Halling
09/04/14
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The Boy from the Tail End of the Goldhawk Road

I was born Carl Robert Halling at the tail end of the Goldhawk Road which runs through Shepherds Bush in west London and which in the mid 1960s served as one of the great centres of the Mod movement, whose dandified

acolytes were infamous for their vanity and hedonism.

I was raised in nearby Bedford Park, a comparatively genteel district close to

the largely working class area of South Acton.

My first school was the Lycee Francais du Kensington du Sud, and by the time I was 4 years old I was already bilingual.

I wasted little time at the Lycee

in establishing a reputation as a troublemaker, a popular one admittedly, but a troublemaker nonetheless, constantly in trouble.

I was popular, that much is certain, not just with girls but boys too and blessed with a vivid imagination but I was a near impossible pupil which caused my poor mother a good deal of heartache, and on at least one occasion she drove me home in tears.

I seemed born to controversy, being impatient, disobedient, mischievous, remorselessly attention-seeking,

a true imp of a child, on which the full force of the innate depravity of Man appeared to have landed.

At the same time, I was friendly, sincere and open, a good friend, and well-liked.

My Judo teacher at the Budokan in Hammersmith once told someone no doubt with a sickly feeling in the pit of his stomach that whenever he heard me he always knew it was Saturday.

I was no less a trial in the quaint little back streets of suburban west London.

My roughness could hardly have been helped by the popular music of the times.

By the time it came for me to leave the Lycee my scholastic standing had improved a little, and after some months spent at Davies Preparatory School, I received the most glittering school report of my entire young life; and was actually declared an excellent pupil.

No Golden Honour

Golden in the class
Honour certificate
No problem
But mademoiselle
Was to cry
Something changed,
Who knows when?
Something changed,
Even I don’t know why.

Tiny Capricious

Impish

Tiny, capricious, impish,

Perfect imitations of head prefects,

Nearly got caned for it,

Get your hands out of your pockets!

Cackles of laughter before grace,

Up before the head prefects,

Endearment to the seniors,

Friend of all the tough guys,

The most popular bloke in the third form,

Constantly in trouble,

Ingenious smile on an angel’s face,

Tiny, capricious, impish.

Tiny, capricious, impish,

Perfect imitations of head prefects,

Nearly got caned for it,

Get your hands out of your pockets!

Refugees from the Underground

In '67 the Hippie phenomenon entered the mainstream to became an international obsession...and it was in that very year I harried my mother into making me a psychedelic paisley shirt which I went on to wear with a peaked Dylan cap and possibly also purple corduroy jeans.

By the end of the decade though, the relative innocence of my infatuation with the Hippie dandies I witnessed each Thursday night on Top of the Pops and other frothy Pop programmes had mutated into a passion for actual social revolution, whose apologists I read about and viewed with awe.

As for the commercial chart Pop of the early '70s...it was the music from a world I no longer even barely acknowledged as existing.

Strangely enough though, it was a world that produced several hits in 1970 by a band known as CCS which had been masterminded by Pat Halling's close friends Mickey Most and John Cameron, and fronted by no less a figure than Alexis Korner, including the top 5 smash, Tap Turns on the Water.

It also produced Glam Rock, a heterogeneous mixture of Pop and Rock allied to an outrageous androgynous image, which started to infiltrate the British charts for the first time around 1971.

The Glam Rock era of ca. 1971-'73 was to some extent a revival of the sartorial flashiness - and musical simplicity - of early Rock and Roll...and one which swept a host of gifted young musicians who'd been striving for major success since the early 1960s to fresh levels of stardom in the UK and elsewhere.

Yet, despite the Pop star status they enjoyed in the UK, several of these were viewed as serious album artists as well as TV idols.

They included - in addition to the aforesaid Marc Bolan - David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Elton John, all of whom had been previously involved in some form or another with Art, or Progressive Rock...refugees from the Underground in other words.

Thanks in some measure to their efforts, Pop underwent something of a rehabilitation in Britain from about 1971 or '72, and they strutted around on TV in flashy attire and stack-heeled boots, while assailing the Pop charts with intelligent and imaginative singles in the Glam genre which harked back to the golden age of the mid-sixties.

For my part, though, I remained indurate, viewing the effeminate antics of T.Rex and the Sweet with all the horror of a typical macho adolescent male. But that was soon to change.