The Education of a Rock Cadet

I was fourteen when I joined HMS Conway – not the legendary ship moored mid-river, long since wrecked by the time I arrived, but the shore-based version, set in the dripping, mossy grandeur of Plas Newydd on the Menai Strait. The ship had gone down; the spirit of discipline and damp socks had not.

They called it a naval school, a place to mould boys into men. What it actually did was lock a load of adolescents in a Welsh estate and hope that a mix of brass polish, cold showers, and shouted instructions might somehow produce an officer class. But something else snuck in. Something that didn’t march in time or salute properly. Something called music.

It started with Led Zeppelin I. Someone – clearly a visionary or future court-martial candidate – had brought in the vinyl. As Bonham’s bass drum thundered through a battered Dansette, everything changed. Page’s guitar howled like an animal in the hold. Plant shrieked like a man being chased by the gods. I stopped dreaming of epaulettes and started dreaming of Les Pauls and denim.

Then came King Crimson, with Schizoid Man arriving like a jazz-fuelled panic attack wearing a cape. Black Sabbath staggered in from the Midlands with riffs so heavy they could dent bulkheads. And then… Fill Your Head with Rock. A CBS double LP so wildly eclectic it felt like it had been compiled during a séance. Moondog, mumbling rhythms from another planet. Steppenwolf, spraying petrol and power chords. The Flock, playing violins like they'd accidentally snorted their sheet music.

But just as we were adjusting to this glorious chaos, something else landed – Space Oddity.

Bowie’s voice floated through the dorm like a spectral telegram from the future. “Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do…” It didn’t crash in like Zeppelin or stalk you like Sabbath – it haunted you. For three minutes, we were no longer in the converted drawing rooms of a Georgian mansion with damp trousers and parade drill. We were in space – untethered, alone, and strangely content.

And then – because clearly someone on the staff had given up entirely – they showed us Easy Rider one film night.

Imagine it. A bunch of uniformed teenagers, stuck in a military-lite regime, being shown a film about drug-running bikers, LSD in graveyards, and giving two fingers to The Man. We were supposed to take it as a warning. Instead, we took notes. Peter Fonda didn’t just ride a chopper – he rode out of the system. It hit us like a punch and a prophecy. Someone had accidentally broadcast a message of total defiance – and we received it loud and clear.

And yet, in the middle of this cultural feast, I lost my copy of Fill Your Head with Rock. Whether it vanished in a room inspection, was 'borrowed' by someone with a dodgy moral compass, or was simply sacrificed to the great vinyl gods of misadventure, I’ll never know. I’ve owned houses, businesses, even a certain degree of wisdom – but that missing album? That one still stings.

And no – I’ve got no interest in Glasto. Haven’t had for years. I look at the line-up and it’s like reading a list of pharmaceuticals or IKEA furniture. Bands I’ve never heard of playing music I can’t hum. It’s not even annoyance anymore – it’s baffled detachment. It’s music designed for wellies and Instagram, not Dansettes and rebellion. Whatever it was I once loved isn’t there anymore – or I’m not.

These days, the kids “discover” Zeppelin on Spotify and think they’ve found buried treasure. But they’ll never know what it meant to hear Dazed and Confused for the first time on a mono record player in a creaky old dormitory in Wales, while Bowie drifted above like a melancholy satellite and Peter Fonda rode off into the mythic dusk.

That, my friend, was education.