Beggars Banquet

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I started off life as a short story writer. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I started as a comic-book writer, drawing stick-men cartoons with speech bubbles. I was about seven or eight, and I’d fold sheets of plain paper until I had a little booklet. Then I’d draw my stick-men. They would appear in strips about football, war, and outer space… until it was pointed out to me that I couldn’t really draw. A potentially glorious career nipped in the bud. It didn’t really bother me. By now I was ten or eleven and starting to listen to music. But being an obsessive sort of kid, it wasn’t enough just to listen – same as I’d never just been happy as a reader of comics. I did what any sensible person would do – started a band. Problem was, none of my friends shared my interest. It didn’t help that I couldn’t read music or play an instrument. I didn’t need to: the music could be stored in my head, the lyrics written down. So I invented a ‘bubblegum’ pop group called The Amoebas, whose roster included Ian Kaput (vocals), Zed ‘Killer’ Macintosh (bass) and Blue Lightning (guitar). I recall the drummer had a double-barrelled name, but forget what it was. By writing lyrics for this band, I found myself writing poetry – doggerel, admittedly, but poetry all the same, in that the lyrics scanned and had a rhyme scheme. It wasn’t such a leap, therefore, to write my first ‘proper’ poem at around the age of sixteen. The Amoebas were still around then, incidentally, but had shifted from pop to progressive rock.

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