classes with chicks

------------------- [excerpt, Life -- Keith Richards] ---------------------- Chapter Three.  I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't been expelled from Dartford and sent to art college.  There was a lot more music than art going on at Sidcup, or any of the other art colleges in south London that were turning out suburban beatniks -- which is what I was learning to be.  In fact there was almost no "art" to be had at Sidcup Art College.

After a while you got the drift of what you were being trained for, and it wasn't Leonardo da Vinci.  Loads of flash little sons of bitches would come down in their bow ties from J. Walter Thompson or one of the other big advertisers for one day a week to take the piss out of the art school students and try and pick up the chicks.  They'd lord it over us and you got taught how to advertise.

There was a great feeling of freedom when I first went to Sidcup.  "You mean you can actually smoke?"  You're with lots of different artists, even if they're not really artists.  Different attitudes, which was really important to me.  Some are eccentrics, some are wannabes, but they're an interesting bunch of people, and a very different breed, thank God, to what I was used to.

We'd all got there out of boys' schools and suddenly we're in classes with chicks.  Everybody's hair was getting long, mainly because you could, you were that age and for some reason it felt good.  And you could finally dress any way you wanted; everybody had come from uniforms.

You actually looked forward to getting on the train to Sidcup in the morning.  You actually looked forward to it. ...

I realize now that we were getting some dilapidated tail end of a noble art-teaching tradition from the prewar period -- etching, stone lithographs, classes on the spectrum of light -- all thrown away on advertising Gilbey's gin. ...

You did your classes, finished your projects and went to the john, where there was this little hangout-cloakroom, where we sat around and played guitar.  That was what really gave me the impetus to play, and at that age you pick up stuff at speed.

There were loads of people playing guitar there.  The art colleges produced some notable pickers in that period when rock and roll, UK-style, was getting under way.  It was a kind of guitar workshop, basically all folk music, Jack Elliott stuff.  Nobody noticed if you weren't at the college, so the local musical fraternity used it as a meeting place.

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{Life.  Keith Richards.  2010.  Little, Brown.}

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