Axles, Bold As Love (Trainspotting With Jimi Hendrix)

Axles Bold As Love (Trainspotting With Jimi) by Neil McCall

My school - Temple Moor, a boys-only grammar school in a pleasant
leafy area of East Leeds - didn't have a discernable dominant
sub-culture in the late 1960s. There were the Northern Soul crew,
half-a-dozen or so funky lads who raved about Wigan Casino; The
Roughnecks, kids from inner city back-to-backs and council estates who
were always the first to get drunk or lose their virginity; the Nancy
Boys, harmless, quiet lads with possible homosexual tendencies who
liked Biology Club, one of whom subsequently came out as gay on Friends
Revisited and another of whom had a very peculiar relationship with his
cat - being a softie and an introvert put me on the fringe of their
group, at least for a while. But I finally ended up in the nerdiest
camp of all, the Trainspotters. Not, you understand, Irving Welsh's
junkies but the real McCall, kids who misbehaved on stations and
trespassed outrageously in railway yards to accumulate lists of
numbers. I remember a wretched talk-shop class which masqueraded as
Religious Education in which I was forced to give my views on
prevailing fashion and confessed that the whole scene passed me by as I
was always to be seen in a tightly-zipped anorak ?

Trainspotting (known as "gricing" for some unfathomable reason) was,
in retrospect, a great hobby. It took me all over the country, and then
back again to see the ones I'd missed the first time. I just caught the
brake-van-end of the steam era, and the days I spent clambering over
soot-encrusted hulks, and the music of the moment, reside vividly in my
memory today. "All You Need Is Love" was playing on someone's tranny as
I watched a "Black Five" chuff into Blackpool North station on our
family holiday in 1967 ? Manfred Mann's "My Name Is Jack" was playing
somewhere in Carnforth on that very last steamy day in July 1968 ? but
the man who came tearing through my life like the Flying Scotsman was
Jimi Hendrix. His version of Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower" managed
to reach the charts and I was mesmerised by the wailing, throbbing
guitars overlaying the abstruse lyricism; he made the Beatles look and
sound effete, the bubblegum pop songs beneath contempt and the silly
croonings of Frank Sinatra and Englebert Humperdinck and co the last
squawks of a dying generation. I was hooked.

For my Christmas present I requested Jimi's "Electric Ladyland", the
explicit cover of which made my mum throw a major wobbler, especially
as she had to go and buy it from the store where she worked. It was my
first LP, and I listened to it and sang along to it incessantly:

"Ah'll make love to you ? and Lawd knows you'll feel no pain ?"

I crooned as I underlined my latest "cops", engines I had seen for
the first time ?

" ? 'cos ah'm a Voodoo Chile, baby, Lawd knows ah'm a Voodoo
Chile!"

I had transformed into a hippy nerd, although the only acid I
dropped was the vinegar on to my fish and chips, and I had my O-Levels
to think about. I passed adequately, and went into the sixth form.

Sixth form was a more relaxed world; we had a common room presided
over by a huge lurid poster of a spaced-out Jimi, and were allowed
GIRLS - not on school premises, of course, but we had a link with
Parklands girl's grammar school and arranged joint trips - no, not that
kind! - which I can hardly remember on account of the fact that the
nerdy end of the year had no idea how to relate to these bizarre
creatures and used every social outing as a beer-drinking contest. I
still went trainspotting, although our group was down to two survivors
and we now had a more sophisticated and ambitious strategy to see every
single loco in Britain, which meant that instead of sitting on Crewe or
York station for an afternoon one had to search out remote coalyards
and hidden docks where elusive shunting engines lurked, a military-like
procedure requiring spotters' guide books, local bus knowledge and
ordnance survey maps. But what fun it was, tramping off to Goole and
Whifflet and Blyth. Back home, "Are You Experienced?" and "Axis, Bold
As Love" had been issued on reduced-price labels giving me and Jimi
more opportunity to torture my parents' eardrums.

"Are you Experienced ? have you ever bin Experienced .. well, ah
am!" (Not!)

By 1971 nearly everyone was a belated hippy of some kind, but it was
time for the parting of the ways as we went off to universities,
polytechnics and, for the less bright, teacher-training college. I
looked at my much-thumbed loco number books; I had done well, out of
four thousand or so British Rail locos I had seen all but a hundred and
fifty. But of these, one was allocated to Inverness, there were a
couple in Devon and Cornwall and a few on the South Coast or in East
Anglia, besides which my gricing companion Dave had got a job as a
trainee surveyor and was putting away childish things. My student grant
would be barely enough to cover the anticipated cost of accommodation,
beer, drugs, records, groovy loons, cheesecloth shirts and
contraception (though I'd emulate the now-sadly-departed Jimi and save
on haircuts); there would be none left over for books and long-distance
train tickets. I left all my trainspotting paraphernalia at home and,
on a subsequent half-term, threw them all away.