Tim Shearer

Post date: 03-Jun-2020 19:46:45

KAFKA LITE

I was born in a basement in Chelsea into hard pressed bohemian circumstances. The old man was an Artist and something of a twonk. My mother had an excellent brain but was an emotional scrambled egg and though officially lapsed she lugged around with her a large black suitcase full of Roman Catholic morality. So growing up for me was no Just William boyhood romp but rather a weird Through the Looking Glass experience replete with scary Jabberwockys.

Fortunately my mother suffered from new and original views so belatedly, I was 8 when I started school, I was packed off to lovely Hampstead and Burgess Hill. This proved to be a bit if a fruit cake tin but just the ticket for me. Intellectual, free thinking, artistic, no discipline, girls and boys of a wide social diversity mixing freely together and, of course, it was pretty hip. Needless to say into each Eden there creeps a serpent and the place eventually folded.

Many former Burgess Hill alumni settled around Hampstead and that is how I became acquainted with The Witches. The Witches, a place for different tribes to mix and mingle, a springboard for the bolder, more adventurous kids to take a plunge into the magic mysteries of life. For an experience of such short duration the Witches phenomenon proved the matrix for so many lives. We were soon treading our different roads yet meshed together by some esoteric bond. Some trekked to India, some to the dark valley of the opium eaters, some got a job and settled down, some went back to school,some blew their brains out with Acid and others just blew thier brains out.

For me it was Art that beckoned, not the regular Art School, Art Gallery write up in the Sunday papers type Art but reaching out to something beyond like Blake or those Byzantines of old. I locked myself in a room and taught myself to paint.

Then suddenly, Kaboom, I reconnected with Janie. We had hitched up when we first met at the Witches back in 1963 but my head was much too fucked at the time to conduct a meaningful relationship. Now we were piping hot and spent the next six months in hibernation together. There was a deal of chagrin from my family to field and some tricky untangling of Janie's former commitments so we decided to get married and have babies and dump all that shit once and for all. So that's what we did, living in blissful poverty and sustaining ourselves with tins of pilchards.

Tim, Jane and Timmy Shearer, 1967

Of course finding somewhere to live was an almost insurmountable problem and we were exiled to the outer reaches of Battersea, the Siberia of the mid sixties. Then Pat and Binsy found us a basement flat in a crumbling Georgian Square in Hackney where we reinstated the teenage rampage and drove the neighbours nuts. Then the hoary hand of doom passed it's shadow across the waters of our lives and we took to our heels and fled to pastures new.

Queen Jane Shearer, with little Timmy, at the centre of the Kensal Green crew, 1974. Very Withnail & I! Back row L to R Max Styman, Orlando, Tim Shearer, unknown female. Front Row L to R Charlie Brandt, Timmy, Jane Shearer, Ray Lafferty and Tony Hanner.

Pastures new proved to be a tumble down house in Kensal Green, back then an easy going mainly West Indian slum. Paul DeMille and Graham Holman moved in and all went swimmingly for a good while but DeMille was going quietly mad and hatched a wicked plot to get us all busted. After some unpleasantness the principals, not us, agreed to cough up what the Crunchers thought their fair slice and the whole thing was smoothed over. However we were badly shaken up and once again took to the road. This time ending up in a large farmhouse, oddly called Park Cottage, in Suffolk that we shared with Dubs and Gay and anyone else who came passing through. A rural idyll which deteriorated into the most appallingly destructive emotional turmoil. I understand that this behaviour is de riguer in East Anglia. And so we we were back on the tramp again, this time back to Kensal Green which we had sensibly kept on.

After a patch up job on our relationship we filled the house with waifs and strays, a kaleidoscope of the weird and the wonderful. There was kind, gentle Max, a heavy duty schizo and his imaginary buddy, MacGregor and an Eastern European guy who would run about the house in the middle of the night screaming with the Nazis in hot pursuit and Raymond, dear old Raymond, who was just too shattered to deal with this harsh world and who didn't get out of bed too much and his nymphomaniac girlfriend, an orphan who had been brought up by those evil satanic nuns. She would spend her summer holidays working in a Turkish brothel for free. "There is more in this world Horatio than is dreamt of in your philosophy". Also, a posh boy from the children's home who in later life cut something of a figure in the Art World. He too had a nymphomaniac girlfriend. More, many more, passed through like the crazy Muswell Hillbilly, very nuts but what a wonderful creative imagination, his grandpa had been executed for gunning down a rival music hall artiste at Seven Dials. We all had a great and very productive time for some years but shepherding humanity's chaos can really grind one down, and besides the kids were getting to an age where their futures needed sorting out so in the late seventies we wound the scene down, bought the cranky old house which we had been renting up til then at a knock down price and the rest, as they say, is comparatively boring history.

You may be wondering how the children fared through all of this. They tell me they loved it, made many meaningful relationships and were greatly indulged. They're probably telling the truth as they are not averse to dishing any criticism they hold against us.

Jane and Tim Shearer

Tim's singles before R'n'B Day Two - "5 or 6 years prior to my birth Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering ordained that a bomb should be dropped opposite my childhood home. By the early 50s some awful houses had been built on the site and a new sort of parvenu resident moved in to our demimonde enclave. Among them was a friendly family whose dad, Sid, was a writer of variety shows such as Meet the Huggets. One evening we were all invited to their home to view the premiere of Sid's magnum opus for he had a hand in creating the smash hit Love and Marriage. Fortunately we had been strictly brought up to honour a host so as our hearts sank to our boots we were able to maintain idiotic grins and enunciate whoops of delight. Sid was chuffed".. Love and Marriage Frank Sinatra

Jane, Tim and Orlando Shearer celebrating Tim's birthday 2020

Tim Shearer opening birthday presents 2020