The Nearest This'll Get To Tolstoy

The Nearest This'll Get To Tolstoy

Apart from Emile Zola having stayed at the Raynes Park Hotel when on the run after the Dreyfus affair, I don't think West Wimbledon, revolution and the great novel have a lot in common, but if you hang on in there, we will find another tenuous link.

In my first year of Senior School, I became friendly with a guy named Martin Beney. He was tall and quite well-built, but retiring or a bit removed much of the time. A couple of years older than me, a very intelligent man and a scientist, he was not himself a musician, but we had a mutual friend called Pete Keel. Pete played guitar in a school progressive rock band with some other friends of mine, called Zeitgeist, and in a funny kind of way, they were. Pete died about eight years later in a light aircraft or glider accident, and Jim Payne, who played bass on Halfway To Venezuela, in a hang-gliding accident a couple of years later. There used to be a joke about 'The Curse of Pus', and I am sure that's all it was, a joke, but the realisation of this dreadful coincidence is hardly reassuring. 

Working together with equipment mainly sourced by Pete, Martin and Pete installed a rudimentary 2 or 4-track studio in Martin's bedroom under the eaves of his parents big house at the end of a cul-de-sac called Durrington Park Road, off Pepys Road, Raynes Park, at the bottom of which my father still resides. I  was fourteen and had been writing songs for a year or so, and Martin said I could record a couple of them in his home studio and Pete would engineer. I promptly inveigled my dear friend Robin Bibi to play lead guitar on the session — I have inveigled Robin into many musical ventures over the last half-century or so, but I believe this was the very first one. Talk about setting a precedent, Robin and I are still collaborating, last time was when he played lead guitar for my London gypsy swing outfit, Douce Vitesse, a couple of years back. 

The session was duly scheduled for the following Saturday afternoon — I think we were supposed to have turned up for some sort of games at school on a Saturday afternoon; we didn't but we scheduled it for four o'clock to make it look convincing to our parents. On top of that I had had a barnstorming row in any case with my parents, and left home, or threatened to. This amounted to my turning up at Martin Beney's with a guitar and, as best I recall, a plan to leave school and join a rock 'n' roll band, a bit like Jim Maclean, played so well by David Essex in the film That'll Be The Day, which would be made two years later and the inspiration of which has never left me, did. He had a Ray Connolly script though - I didn't. As I recall my plan, such as it was, and what happened, was to do the session round at Martin's and then descend on my friend André Golay, whose parents lived in Devas Road, a couple of turnings down off Pepys Road, and ask to stay the night. Yes, the same André Golay I hit over the head with a lemonade bottle, leading to my expulsion and no money back on said bottle, not to mention the claret stained pavement all the way from KCS down Copse Hill to the Atkinson Morley Hospital, but that hadn't happened yet.

Robin is a couple of years older than me, so was sixteen and had a moped on which he turned up for our rendezvous at Beney Studios, his Fender Stratocaster slung across his back, like the highway chile he was. And still is. Robin told me afterwards he had either taken acid that day, or was recovering from taking it the previous night, I forget which. Anyway, we laid down two of my original compositions, both of which lacked any identifiable time signature, and Robin played  some great out-to-lunch Hendrix-y lead with lots of Cry-Baby wah-wah pedal, as was the fashion. Shortly after that Pete Keel, went up to university in Birmingham or Warwick or somewhere and obtained a part-time job or internship at BBC Radio Birmingham, which enabled him to get me an acetate 45rpm pressing of mine and Robin's session, which I still have...somewhere.

Martin Beney, like me, was quite into dope and more especially acid, but far from being a Bohemian household, like some of my friends' parents' houses, where I was lucky to hang out, Mr. and Mrs. Beney were, ostensibly, as straight as they come. His father was I think in insurance, wore a three piece tweed suit with a watch chain, and chain smoked about eighty Capstan Full Strength a day. It was a heavy smoking household, apart from Martin's mum, who from memory didn't smoke, but the passive smoking in that house from her husband, her son and his friends  — and we smoked pot as well as copious fags — must have meant she was on the equivalent of about thirty a day anyway. She was old-fashioned and frumpy in appearance, but with a very soft and caring nature. They had antimacassars on their parlour furniture, and in the fireplace an enormous teetering bridge-like structure composed of Capstan and Gold Flake packets. Martin smoked Gold Flake, whilst I in those days was a Players or Senior Service man, though when I was in the money I didn't mind a Sweet Afton or Passing Cloud from the posh tobacconist in Kingston — opposite Howard Conder's Music Exchange, where I went for strings, and where the first thing I ever bought after decimalisation was a top 'E' string. It was a lovely tobacconist, also a coffee and tea shop, where they sold loose camomile tea with flowers in.

So now we get to the quasi-Tolstoy bit.  A year or so after our recording session, Martin got swept off his feet in a whirlwind romance, and was married to a girl called Mishka, after which they not so much set up home as carried on as they were, at his parents'. The first I knew of any of this was when my friend Martin Woloszczuk, who was also in Zeitgeist with Pete Keel, told me he'd been to Martin's wedding. We were all heavy smokers then, and Martin's mum — an upbeat alcoholic with a Morgan sports car - told me Martin had let himself down at the wedding, as she'd got him a nice suit, but he'd had a box of household matches in the pocket. Mishka's story, for that it could only have been, was that she was Russian, and suffered a terrible riding accident as a girl, and was now a practising psychiatrist. You couldn't make it up, as they say, but I'm sure she did. My gran also used to say: 'you wouldn't read about it', but you will.

I met Mishka soon after their wedding. She was slender, quite beautiful, about ten years older than Martin, and spoke with some kind of authentic Russian or East European accent. At that time, a combination of excess LSD and traditional teenage angst were leading me to question many things, on top of which I had, in the past, been sent to a Harley Street psychiatrist at the instigation of my school. I'm sure she just chatted me up and lured me in, but I ended up having a couple of free 'consultations' with her, at the end of the second one of which she presented me with a few yellow 2ml. Valium tablets. I imagine they must have been part of her own prescription relating to a different story she must have told her own doctor, these being the days when you could spin a doctor a good yarn, particularly a private doctor, and get a good prescription in return, the awareness and advantages of which were yet to dawn on me fully. 

Soon after that, Martin and Mishka were apparently making mad and passionate love when his bed collapsed, and she ended up in the Nelson Hospital in traction. The latter was certainly true because I visited her in there. Mishka's cigarette of choice — you could sit up in bed and smoke in hospital in those days — was a menthol St. Moritz, in keeping I suppose with the Mata Hari image, although a Sobranie Cocktail would have been even more so. Come to think of it, she occasionally had a packet of them too. When I visited her, I remember she had a hundred cigarettes on the bedside table, St. Moritz and Gold Flake, which she was also partial to, the alternating turquoise and gold packets achieving the effect of a lovely rainbow nicotine installation. Soon after recovering, Mishka vanished. I've no idea what happened to her, but I guess Mr. Beney probably caught her in the act, or planning, of some fraud or swindle. I saw Martin but once since, a couple of years after that, in The Swan in The Ridgway, Wimbledon. He had 'pulled it back', as they say these days, and was reading chemistry at one of the London universities, as he should have been. He had a new girlfriend, who was roughly the same age, quite plain, and clearly fearfully intelligent. I'd like to imagine they're still together now, huddled over a mutual experiment in a laboratory, like the Curies. 

So, there we are, maybe not so much Tolstoy as Dostoyevsky — the tale of a man who was far from an idiot, but someone tried to take for one.