Jamie Oliver by Stafford Hildred

Author:Stafford Hildred [Stafford Hildred and Tim Ewbank]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781782191179
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2012-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

The Beat Goes On

Jamie Oliver entered the world at a time when it’s safe to say that the British nation was displaying a taste in popular music which could be described at best as both eclectic and eccentric. How else could a mediocre fun group like Mud vie for the number one spot in the pop charts with Nashville’s queen of country music Tammy Wynette and two of BBC TV’s most popular comedy stars of the time, Windsor Davies and Don Estelle?

Mercifully for the newborn Jamie, who was of course destined to become a fanatical musician and an enthusiastic rock drummer, Mud’s ‘Oh Boy’, Tammy’s song of female devotion ‘Stand by Your Man’, and ‘Whispering Grass’ by the two actors from the BBC sit-com It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, would not have registered with such infant ears back in May 1975.

But as Jamie began growing up, it soon became clear that he did have a natural ear for music. The first record which he ever remembers making a major impact upon him was ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ by Tears for Fears.

‘I was about nine and at primary school,’ he recalls, ‘and I was at a youth hostel at Bradwell in Essex right near the power station. Essex is very large and from where I come from Bradwell was a long way away. The record was a hit at a point when you started fancying girls and I remember we had a snooker table and a juke box and this tune “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” kept coming on. Every time I hear it, it brings back kinda soppy memories and I always try and sing to it – and get it wrong.’

Significantly, ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’, which reached number two in the charts in March 1985, had a distinctive and unusual drum beat which caught Jamie’s ear and sowed an early seed in his musical development.

‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ was, by all accounts, a very different kind of record from the music he was used to hearing at home and in the car when Jamie’s mum was driving him to and from school. ‘I didn’t really listen to a lot of music at home when I was growing up,’ he says. ‘But what I did listen to was dreadful. My parents had terrible taste. My mum used to get all the ballads. My mum is actually a bit of a boy racer and her car was always a bit of a state, you know, Marks and Spencer’s sarnies everywhere and milkshakes, and she’d put ballads on so loud and I’d be sitting there in the car getting taken to school going, “Oh no!” to someone singing, “This is the greatest love of all”.’

Around the time Jamie’s ears were first beginning to pick up on the popular sounds of the day, he struck up a friendship with a new arrival at his primary school in Clavering who was to have a lasting impression upon him in the music sphere.

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