It’s hard to imagine a more idyllic childhood than Tiffany Murray’s. A child of the 70s, she was raised in the South Wales countryside by Joan, her feisty, hard-working, Sobranie-smoking mother, and Joan’s gentle, practical boyfriend David “Fritz” Fryer. An only but not a lonely child, she roamed the fields, fell in love with a menagerie of animals and found herself a lovely, slightly kooky group of friends.
But most significantly of all, the family lived and worked at Rockfield, the residential recording studio still used by a host of A-list acts. Joan was Rockfield’s Cordon Bleu chef, on a covert mission to convert non-believers to garlic, while Fritz, a musician and producer, had stayed on after arriving with Irish rockers Horslips. Seen through the indulgent but innocent lens of a schoolgirl, Murray’s memories of this time make up this elegiac memoir.
Murray, now a successful writer, has been down this road before. Her second novel, 2010’s Diamond Star Halo, had a similar backdrop, but here Murray’s real-life, first person account is interspersed with a selection of her mother’s asides which appear in a different typeface at the end of many of the chapters. These mostly comprise complex recipes, from pike quenelles (“it can stink in the making”) to jellies (“could be hit or miss: rigid or liquid”) and some no-nonsense, waspish asides: “I know I should have talked to David Bowie more, but quite honestly I had my own life to lead”.
Rock stars come, record their albums and go. Murray is barred from pestering the musicians – she sorely regrets only ever getting one set of autographs, from the band Showaddywaddy, who couldn’t have been more gracious – but she does serve them her mother’s food. Although living with pop idols became everyday, Murray became a shark-eyed and detailed observer of the revealing mundane, whether it’s The Damned’s singer Dave Vanian recording in the studio dressed in full vampire regalia, or the fact that Freddie Mercury “smells of sweet wood and oranges”, but records “Bohemian Rhapsody” in slippers. Ozzy Osbourne has some kind of manic episode, involving being naked in a graveyard under a full moon; Simple Minds get sore posteriors after riding horses; and bacon sandwich maven Lemmy’s parents visit (“His mother wore twinset and pearls, his stepfather a cravat and golf club blazer”).
A 21st century audience may wonder how wise it was to allow a schoolgirl to submerge herself in an often hedonistic, always geographically isolated milieu, but while there’s no undertow of danger, her lioness of a mother was always on the lookout. As a result, when, one evening, 13-year-old Murray is kissed by a twentysomething roadie for an unnamed ska band, he’s expelled from Rockfield the next morning. When offered cocaine at a Damned party, she responds: “sorry, my mum says I can’t”.
Beyond the musicians, this is inevitably a coming-of-age story, and a compelling family story too, with Fritz evolving into the father figure Murray was seeking; an oasis of stability in a necessarily chaotic life shaped by a workaholic mother.
With the memoir told solely in the present tense, we never quite get a sense of what Murray makes of her childhood now, nor any reflection of how it has moulded her as a person today. Instead, while there’s a coda which finds 18-year-old Murray living in Florida when Joan and Fritz visit, My Family and Other Rock Stars really finishes in the early 80s, during which time she is looking like Phil Oakey, buying rap singles and refusing to eat her mother’s meals. That is to say we leave her as a typical teenager who is “going through a stage” – but even that’s a sweet-natured pleasure to go through with her.