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Birth of a Rock'n'Roll Child
...I was born Friday 7 October 1955 close to the undistinguished source 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 London Borough of Acton, and suburban west London was marked by a homespun simplicity back then that we can only dream of today.
By '63, with my brother and I safe in South Kensington’s French Lycee, social change was in the air, though in truth it had been for some time, especially in Britain and the USA, at least since the rise of Rock'n'Roll, and youth culture, whose watershed years were '55 to '56, but for all that England in '63 was still apparently in black and white, and the first shaggy-haired beat groups fitted quite snugly into this innocent time of Norman Wisdom pictures, of the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home Service, Light Service and World Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, tuck shops and tuppeny chews.
On this day, NOI founder Elijah Mohammed reached the age of 55, psychologist RD Laing, 28, while Beat poet Amira Baraka and revolutionary leader Ulriche Meinhof both hit 21. The future Colonel Oliver North 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 it's fair to say had a monumental influence on the evolution of our culture, when at San Franciso's Six Gallery about 125 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 'ti Jean the self-styled shy Canuck Jack Kerouac who attended the reading as a well-refreshed cheerleader shouting "Go!" and other such hipster catchphrases. His "On the Road" published a year 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 form since about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, with the media invention the 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'n' Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, although it'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 rather conventional 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 Records released a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill", featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to become Rock's most influential figure apart from the Beatles. Then James Dean died in September after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" came out about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the cinema's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.
The Death of the Apple Pie Fifties
Many theories exist as to how the staid, conformist fifties could've yielded as if my magic into 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, the entire lump, even when much of it may be sound. What I do believe is that the transformation of the West that has taken place in the last half century or more was not a sudden, unexpected event, far from it, but one that had been painstakingly prepared, at the very least since after the First World War. Tendencies intended to chip away at the Judaeo-Christian moral fabric of our civilisation reach all the way back to the Enlightenment from which so much anti-Christian thought stems, in fact all the way back to the Garden of Eden and the Serpent's promise to Eve that by disobeying the God of the Universe she and Adam could be as gods, knowing good and evil. It is this false promise that is at the heart of so much of our vain humanistic philosophy.
What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant gardists. Even the most cacaphonous examples of Rock, a music form which the American evangelist John McCarthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance had its precedents in the works of the great Modernist composers who ushered in the emancipation of the dissonant, and seem quite tame beside them today, and in many cases less interesting. And yet my little world, the leafy suburbs of outer west London, was a largely innocent and even idyllic one, hardly changed from the day that I was born, Friday 7 October 1955, when the Victorian spirit was still more or less intact in England.
Phyllis and Carl
By the time we'd moved to Bedford Park, My father had a successful career as a classical violinist behind him, and so was in a position to ensure that my brother and I enjoy far safer and more comfortable lives than he'd ever known.
He'd been born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania and raised in Sydney as the son of a Dane, my namesake Carl Halling, and an English mother. She came into the world as Phyllis Mary Pinnock possibly in the Dulwich area of south London where her family had been based for many years sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, but she was always known to my brother and I as Mary. According to my great aunt and Mary' sister Joan, her maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, name which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which'd dominated the south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and so making it a lost or discarded branch.
Mary grew into a beautiful young woman, with dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and an exquisitely sculpted mouth. After losing her fiancee in the First World War, she married an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson, and they had two children in quick succession, Peter 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, with the purpose of working as a tea planter. There she met a Dane, fluent in Sanscrit, and with a deep love and knowledge of the spiritual traditions of the East, by the name of Carl Halling. What followed next I can't say for sure but through family sources, 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 dad 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 I believe Mary made some kind of living as a journalist and teacher. In the meantime, according to what Pat has told me Carl embarked on a desperate spiritual search taking in Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science in the hope no doubt that this would yield a miraculous cure, but sadly it was unavaiing and Carl died immediately before the outbreak of World War II. According to his wishes, he was buried in his native Denmark
All three children had earlier displayed considerable musical talent, Patrick as a 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, with all his wages according to Pat being conveyed by Mary into the family account. Soon after Carl’s burial, Mary set off for London with her three children in order that they might further develop their musical careers.
Miss Ann Watt
By the time I was born my dad was sufficiently established as a professional musician to be able to ensure that my brother and I have a good start in life. We suffered none of the hardships he'd been forced to endure.
He'd been married seven years by then, to a Canadian singer, my mother, the former Miss Ann Watt who'd been born Angela Jean Watt in the Canadian city of Brandon, Manitoba. However, while still an infant she'd moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of east Vancouver.
Grandview's earliest settlers were usually tradesmen or shopkeepers, in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin. My own grandfather James Watt a carpenter by trade had been born in the little town of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Her mother was from Glasgow, Scotland, having been born there to an English father hailing either from Liverpool or Manchester, and a Scottish mother.
Like my father she's been born with a prodigious natural musical talent, and by the time my dad had moved to London she was already a highly accomplished and successful singer of both Classical and light music, notably with Vancouver's legendary Theatre Under the Stars. During the war, she broadcast to the troops with the Canadian Broadcasting Company, performing songs by Richard Rodgers, Victor Herbert and others. She moved to Britain after the war, although there was a time when she might just as easily have moved to the US. However, a ticket came up for her to travel by boat to the United Kingdom, and she snapped it up.
She met my dad a struggling violin player from Australia through their shared profession, and together they set about conquering the music world. They married in the summer of 1948. Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, and I was born at the former site of Queen Charlotte's Hospital on the tail end of the Goldhawk Road.
The Monster with the Smile of an Angel
I was articulate and sociable from the outset, walking early, talking early just like my dad before me, but agitated, unable to rest, what they might call hyperactive today. And at some stage in the early to mid sixties I became a problem both at school and home: a disruptive influence in the class, and a trouble-maker in the streets, an eccentric loon full of madcap fun and half-deranged imaginativeness. My striking thinness was offset by the crew cuts my dad liked my brother and I to sport, and the fact that we were routinely dressed in lederhosen can hardly have moderated our unusual appearance. I'm not sure when we were allowed to shed these, and let our hair grow just a little.
From the time I was a small boy, I divided my time between the Lycee Francais de Londres, where I became bilingual while little more than a toddler, and my stomping ground of Hammersmith, Chiswick, Bedford Park and so on. I took Judo classes at the Budokwai in South Kensington, where one of my teachers, Richard "Dicky" Bowen, a former British international, said he always knew that it was Saturday when he heard Halling's voice. I was known as Alley Cat by the other kids at the Budokwai, after my surname of Halling, and it was a pretty apt name when you think of it. Later, I took classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, where I tried to make life hell for its owner, one-time captain of the British international team Percy Sekine, but Percy, a close friend of my father's was not so inclined to be bested by me as Dicky Bowen. He knew how to handle me, which was not surprising given that he'd served as an air gunner with 83 squadron during World War II, later holding Judo classes in Stalag 383. Perhaps it took a man like Percy Sekine to know how to control a boy like me. My Lycee teachers weren't so gifted, and one of them once informed my poor mother that I gave her nightmares. More than once she drove me home in tears.
The second of two stories with the sixties as it basis, "From a Child's West London" might go some way towards explaining why I was such a devil of a child, a little monster who could nonetheless cast spells with the beatific smile of a seraph, and then go on to break your heart...but then probably not.
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