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Charles
Hayward
"I
grew up in Camberwell, Peckham Road opposite Camberwell Art College.
I wanted to be a musician I suppose then, now I think of it as a
more complete thing, but then, I wanted to be a musician.
Well,
my Dad's always been into music, so he used to have a fantastic,
well he still has, a fantastic record collection, he's transferred
it all to tape and got lots of CDs and stuff. He had at the time
an absolutely fantastic 78 record collection, you know the old 78's
and he'd had that from the war onwards.
He
had this fantastic collection of records, and he used to take me
to see these fantastic gigs. I saw Ella Fitzgerald, I saw Nat King
Cole. Lewis Armstrong, I saw Lena Horne, in classic London venues,
like London Palladium, and the Lewisham Odeon. I saw Nat King Cole,
and later on I think I might have seen Manfred Man and the Rolling
Stones there. Just a natural thing really.
And
then I heard The Who one night on Radio Luxembourg, and all those
things sort of connected for me. When I heard The Who, I thought
I could do something that was my own, as oppose to having to play
this black American music, which I loved, but didn't feel right
or something. So suddenly there was this really wild rebellious
music. I mean looking at them now you can hardly believe it, but
it was extremely rebellious, violent, aggressive music, you know,
and as a young sort of adolescent it seemed to connect. So by the
time I was a teenager, it was really clear to me what I wanted to
do."
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