Extract from : Barefaced Lies and Boogie-Woogie Boasts

Sex and Jazz and Rock and Roll

I was born on 24 January 1958, shortly after Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced to the British people that we'd 'never had it so good'. I would ask you at this point to refer to the photograph of the newly born me, the embodiment of his optimistic view of Britain.

There was a huge thunderstorm the night I was born. My mother, June, was very beautiful and only twenty-one years old. My father Derek, the same age, had not long finished his national service in the R.A.F. He had met my mother by chance, on a Southern Region train travelling into central London from Greenwich, and shortly after this first meeting had invited her to go dancing at the Hundred Club in Oxford Street, where Humphrey Lyttelton was playing. It's a well known fact that jazz, played in the right way, can heighten feelings of love and desire, and there's little doubt that on that particular evening Humph's band had this effect on my parents. Many years later I was to give Humphrey Lyttelton an award for his oustanding achievements in jazz. I shook his hand firmly and thanked him for the role that he'd had in the conception of the Boogie-Woogie Boaster.

At the time of my arrival, my parents had a small flat in Pimlico. I was the first grandchild for both sets of grandparents, which meant that I was on course for plenty of spoiling. Shortly after I was born we went to live with Ena and Percy, my father's parents, who had moved from a comfortable house in Winchmore Hill to Eltham. They were the epitome of 1950s respectability and kindness. Percy had always been good-looking and resembled Superintendant Lockhart from No Hiding Place. To add to his appearance of gravitas and stability, he owned a large black Wolseley, identical to the ones at Scotland Yard. Beneath this facade, however, he was an infamous joker, apt to play the giddy goat at Christmas, weddings and other family gatherings. My father had an older brother, Brian, and younger sister, Barbara. Teenage Barbara was a huge fan of Cliff Richard, who in the late fifties was one of Britain's first pop stars. One evening she went to one of Cliff's concerts. Percy, in his usual kindly way, dropped Barbara and her friends off at the theatre, saying he'd pick them up at the stage door when the show was over. He sat waiting in his official-looking Wolseley as the show finished. Hordes of teenage fans surged on to the street, making for the stage door. Impressed by the car and my grandfather's demeanour, one young girl asked him who he was. For some reason, he thought it would be amusing to say that he was Cliff's driver and was waiting for him. This announcement turned the already excitable women into a frenzied mob. By now there were hundreds of them, and they started rocking his shiny black car from side to side until, eventually, their brute force turned it over.

After a while living with Percy and Ena, my parents decided to take a house at 5 Myddleton Gardens, Enfield, with their friends the Gadstones, as all four of them were in their early twenties and quite bohemian. John Gadstone was an academic and Michele, like my mother, was ravishingly beautiful. Fortunately, we didn't have a television, so I was quickly exposed to other, more interesting activities. The first real song I remember hearing was 'Careless Love', the blues song based on an old Scottish folk song, sung by my mother. In the evenings we would all play games, with background music of opera and Bessie Smith and Mr Jellylord, Jelly Roll Morton. I was generally the centre of attention and allowed to join in with whatever the grown-ups were doing.

It was in this house that my father started to read to me every evening, and he continued to do this for many years. His choices would include Greek mythology, The Lord of the Rings, biographies of Mozart. I was taken to see films such as Henry V, starring Laurence Olivier, and encouraged to adopt Horatio Nelson as my hero. All of this must have had some effect on me, even though I was still only four.

The young Gadstones and Hollands were a great household, filled with culture and high sprits, but they didn't have my grandparents' good husbandry skills and were a bit vague about organizing bills and paying the rent. After a while, the electricity was cut off, but we all enjoyed this, as it meant we could use oil lamps and light the log fire. Unfortunately, one evening, one of the logs fell out of the grate, burning a great big hole in the floor - the whole house nearly went up in flames. A few days later the landlord, who had a little Alfa Romeo, pulled up outside, as the rent was late. We decided not to let him in in case he saw the damage, and we all hid below the window of his front room, trying to suppress our giggles and ignoring his repeated knocks.

But our days were numbered at 5 Myddleton Gardens and by the summer of 1963 the time had come for us to move. My father found us somewhere to live, presenting it as the latest style in modern living. It was a top-floor bed-sitting room in Coleherne Road, on the edges of Earls Court. The set-up was quite different to Myddleton Gardens: instead of safe suburban streets with well-kept front gardens and sensible neighbours living next door, Coleherne Road had a more edgy feel. It was a terrace of tall, thin early Victorian houses, far more urban than suburban. The house itself had been divided into one-room flats, the others inhabited by students, one junky and a couple of fly-by-nights, including one on the ground floor who could have been a dubious villain from an Edgar Wallace mystery. My mother wasn't so keen on these neighbours but my father felt the location was going to be more beneficial for us, a way to plug into London life.

One of the reasons my father had thought it a good idea to live in central London was for what he perceived to be the better educational opportunities for me. There was a modern and highly regarded state school near the Boltons in Chelsea, where he immediately went to enrol me. Although we lived very close by, he was told there was no room for me there, and I had to be sent instead to the scrottier Park Walk school. A short while later, there was a feature in the local paper about the new American ambassador who had been appointed to London; his children had been accepted at the Boltons school. My father was furious about this and went to see the headmaster, demanding that they find a place for me too. A place could not be found. He got into a heated educational debate with the headmaster and ended up saying, 'If you refuse to educate him, I shall have to do it myself.' He was a man of his word and took me out of school straight away and drew up his own timetable for my education. Each morning we would visit a different place of interest, some landmark or museum in London. One morning you'd find us in the British Museum, the next we'd be scampering up inside St Paul's Cathedral and marvelling at Wren's dome. In the afternoons we'd read from the classics. At one point during this period of home schooling, my father and I passed the huge smart villas around Regent's Park and, arriving home, our bedsit looked a bit drab in comparison. I asked whether we couldn't go live in one of those houses instead. And it was explained, not just at the moment. After a couple of weeks of this, quite understandably, my father felt rather exhausted and I was sent back to Park Walk.

Meanhwhile, I was looking forward with excitement to our landlord's first visit and the ploys of avoidance we'd have to think up this time. On the morning of his arrival, we looked down from our top window to see a sharp-looking man in his late teens driving up in his Alvis. Far from menacing us for our overdue rent, this stylish slum landlord and jazz drummer, Colin Strickland, instead became our great friend. I was a bit disappointed not to have to resort to hiding or disguising ourselves, but Strickland and my father were to enter into various business ventures that would make up for this. Their first was a sea-food restaurant, the Sea Net, situated at the foot of the Admiralty building and decked out with fishing nets and shells. How could it fail? It would have the added bonus of myself dressed as Horatio Nelson sitting on the counter. This last attractive proposition, put forward by Colin and my father over a long lunch, never materialized. I would often be sat on the counter, but in my normal clothes, and only two or three people ever came in and the Sea Net soon closed.

That Christmas, we put a tree up in the dormer window and, what with the fairy lights and the smell from the one-bar electric fire, our room felt very cosy. Colin brought some fine claret for the grown-ups and I was given a policeman's uniform, including hat and truncheon. Desperate to show it off, I left our room on the top floor and peered over the banisters to the hall, four floors below. The fly-by-night on the ground floor happened to be going into his flat, and he looked up and saw me though his thick glasses. For whatever reason, he was so ready to feel the long arm of the law on his collar that he immediately ran from the building and was never seen again. Colin Strickland tried to rent us his room, saying it was superior to ours but, by this time, my mother had had enough and wanted us all to leave the 1960s high life of Darling and Performance and return to the pre-war Ealing film world of comfort and security of her family in Greenwich.