Cows, barley & Bohemian Rhapsody
A magical account of a rock and roll childhood on a Welsh farm where pop icons from Queen and Bowie to Black Sabbath and David Cassidy came to hang out
BOOK OF THE WEEK
MY FAMILY AND OTHER ROCK STARS by Tiffany Murray (Fleet £22, 390 pp)
Those who endured the boiling hot summer of 1976 will never forget how from June until the end of August the mercury seldom dipped below 90f. Reservoirs dried up. Water was rationed.
In Monmouthshire, where I was living then, grassland was so scorched, film directors used the hillsides as stand-in locations for southern Italy.
Tiffany Murray was also in the vicinity, and in this book remembers ‘ melting tarmac sticking on our wheels.’ There were swarms of ladybirds, which ‘landed on my arms,’ and the Welsh border region, in which Tiffany and I found ourselves independently, is beautifully described: ‘ The air is sweet with the tickle of hops. Couch-grass fires glow in gardens. Bough-heavy apple trees bend in roadside orchards.’
It sounds idyllic — and it was. For Tiffany was raised at Rockfield studios, a compound, or kingdom, off the B4233, midway between Abergavenny and Ross-on-Wye. Though a working farm, where cows are milked, hedges need cutting and hay is baled, the rectangle of red-brick stables, coach-houses and barns is also home to a professional recording complex, where bands come and produce ‘a really good, funky sound’.
Arriving by limo or helicopter — or like David Bowie — by train at Newport station, musicians would be ‘stranded in these Welsh fields, forced to dream up songs,’ writing them on scraps of paper or fag packets. Marooned in the lush countryside, ‘ bands could get their heads together,’ according to David Jackson of the band Van der Graaf Generator.
Tiffany, who was barely into her teens, has marvellous memories of these characters in velvet and denim flares, zip-up platform boots and tight T-shirts, wielding penny whistles, flutes, maracas and electric guitars.
Freddie Mercury was ‘ under the stairs, playing his white piano’. When he sang or laughed, he ‘ threw his head back like a thin heron gobbling a fish’.
Paradoxically, ‘his singing voice is huge, when his talking voice isn’t’. Freddy and the other members of Queen were in the studio for weeks, putting together Bohemian Rhapsody, saying the word ‘Galileo’ over and over. sir (as he now is) Brian May, said Tiffany, ‘is tall and thin as a silver birch,’ and his guitar playing shook the glass out of the window frames.
My Family And other Rock stars is like a Gerald Durrell adventure, with Tiffany surrounded by pets and eccentrics.
Her grandfather, for example, ‘shakes and hobbles because of heart attacks and polio, which turned one leg thin, and his toes had come off’. The fences around Rockfield are lined with dead magpies, crows and squirrels, strung up by gamekeepers, whose hunting dogs ‘bounce and bark from tall cages’.
Tiffany herself has heaps of animals — Cleo the Great Dane, goats, hamsters and peacocks, which bite unwary ankles, chew drumsticks and ‘ bark and slobber into microphones’.
Not that the groups are any better behaved, especially if bottles of whisky have been hidden in wellies or they ‘can’t sleep for ten days straight’. Black sabbath, from Birmingham, are a case in point. Though ‘the singer screams high, but in tune’, ozzy osbourne — for it is he — ‘who grins and laughs and jiggles’, can’t be prevented from capering around the adjacent graveyard in the nude, believing he’s an owl.
EVeRYoNe has to give chase. ozzy ‘skips over guitars, jumps onto amps. he dodges behind the drumkit as the men run after him’. Cleo the Great Dane puts her cold nose ‘ up his bum’. Tiffany’s mother, Joan, throws a rug over him, and ozzy goes instantly quiet, like a canary shrouded in a cage.
The next day a harrods van full of toys pulls up — ozzy’s way of apologising. Tiffany received rocking horses, puppets, teddies, an octopus, ‘ two more green hippos’. As Joan says: ‘There are more toys here than my daughter gets in her whole bloody life.’ When ozzy goes clay pigeon shooting, everybody takes cover.
As Tiffany will concede, Joan is the star of the book. she is the Rockfield Cordon Bleu cook, even though ‘all David Bowie seems to ask for is milk’. As this is the 1970s, what bands were used to and wanted were pickled eggs in cloudy jars, Daddies brown sauce and white bread.
Joan tried to introduce people to salads, ‘because we aren’t all carnivore monsters you know’. she put garlic in the food, ‘but can’t tell them it’s garlic’, as in those days the British recoiled from anything exotic. Wine was likewise a mystery. Bands put ‘their very expensive claret’ in the microwave, which exploded.
The bands, at least initially, didn’t know how to shell prawns, or why rice could be yellow. Pitta bread and coriander were only available in London. It was uphill
work getting the Rockfield residents not to demand over-boiled vegetables, gravy and milk puddings. ‘I told them boeuf bourguignon was steak and kidney pie without the kidney or the pie.’ Poached Wye salmon was consumed happily by Iggy Pop.
Though lasagne and moussaka went down well, what the bands were most keen on was a food fight. Joan’s sherry trifle always ended up covering the walls and ceilings. It took days to dismantle and clean the recording equipment.
Then, in the middle of the night, the musicians and roadies would raid the fridge, taking bites out of marinating duck breasts, stealing the cheese. Tiffany could hear them ‘snuffling, slobbering, maybe even panting and howling’ downstairs, as feral as foxes or badgers.
Growing up at Rockfield, Tiffany mingled with Hawkwind, Dr Feelgood, Peter Hamill, Budgie, Peter Gabriel, Nick Lowe, Judas Priest, and Lemmy from Motorhead, who is fed on bacon sandwiches. Motorhead didn’t cover the equipment with trifle. They set it on fire, ‘actual flames’.
Clannad layered harps on pianos and did the warbling effects on voices. Simple Minds went pony trekking in the Forest of Dean. Adam And The Ants sat on a five-bar gate. ‘I serve Showaddywaddy a starter of pork terrine and cranberry,’ says Tiffany, who recalls that musicians said s her small hands were good for rolling r joints. David Cassidy — ‘his shirt s open to his golden necklace’ — started to stir something in her.
What makes this book — a unique mix of recipes, maps, child’s- eye view reminiscence and graphics —a cut above the expected incidental rock ’n’ roll anecdotage is that it is, in the end, a lovely coming-of-age story.
It ends with Tiffany, in her absorbing world of horse brushes, bridles, b kohl pencils and crimping irons, ir having her first kiss, from a boy b in Monmouth who looks like teen idol Leif Garrett: ‘The fluorescent light is too bright, the stone room is freezing, but his lips are warm, soft, and this first kiss might be the best thing that has ever happened . . . I can taste him; it is smoke and lemons and something sweet. His eyes are green.’
My Family And Other Rock Stars, in sum, is as scrumptious as the home-made mayonnaise, pumpkin soup and game pie coming out of Joan’s kitchen.