Ivos father served in the British army in Egypt before and during the Second World War, and in Germany afterwards, before returning to Oundle in 1950 to run the estate farm. Ivo was born four years later, named after Ivo Grenfell, a cousin on his grandmothers side and brother of the First World War poet Julian Grenfell, whose famous war poem Into Battle was published the same month he was killed in 1915. Ivo was the youngest of eight, with two brothers and five sisters. By the time his grandmother had died in 1969 and Ivos family moved into the manor house, all his siblings had left home. His other brother Peregrine (known as Perry) remembers Ivo assisting with the move in a rare bonding exercise with an emotionally distant father.
My older sister would joke, though not necessarily
so, that the first time our dad talked to us was when wed each turned fifteen, and hed say, OK, get on the tractor and drive. He was a very aloof man, who lost his own father when he was seven and was raised by a tyrannical Victorian English mother. We never related emotionally to either parent.
Ivos mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis when he was born in 1954, keeping her and the baby apart for three months for fear of passing on the potentially fatal disease. It was a harsh domestic regime of a father with a farm to run and a mother raising eight children without modern appliances I dont remember many visitors, says Ivo. My uncles would come for the weekend, and then wed have fun.
In any environment of emotional deprivation, any form of art can become a vital lifeline, a source of comfort, inspiration and imagination. Ivos pre-teen memories were of the rousing film soundtracks to South Pacific and The Sound of Music. Even earlier, West Side Story, the first teen musical, was his introduction to the culture of attitude, fashion and sex (Got a rocket in your pocket, keep coolly cool, boy!). All three musicals emphasised the urge to escape, from Climb Every Mountain and Over The Rainbow to the lovers Tony and Maria from West Side Story believing, there is a place somewhere a better place, beyond the control of authority and circumstances.
Eight children meant pop music was always in the Watts-Russell house. For Perry, it was The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. There was a three-year age gap between me and Ivo, he says, so they couldnt be his soundtrack to adolescence. Ivo has no memory of why the first single he bought at the age of six was I Cant Stop Loving You by R&B legend Ray Charles. EPs by The Who and The Kinks followed, but his epiphany, the road from Oundle to Damascus, was The Jimi Hendrix Experience miming to the trios debut single Hey Joe on a 1967 edition of BBC TVs weekly flagship music show Top of the Pops. Their Afro hairstyles alone would have triggered intrigue in middle England, even consternation. But it was Hendrixs sound liquid, sensual, aching, unsettling, alien that had coloured the imagination of an impressionable twelve-year-old, thrilled at the subversive invasion of a drab farmhouse lounge.
My sister Tessa and my parents were watching too and I remember a shared feeling of jaws dropping, of confusion, Ivo recalls. I thought, this is having an impression, and being very interested by that. The next Saturday, I listened to [BBC radio DJ] John Peels Top Gear, with sessions by Cream, Hendrix and Pink Floyd. I bought Hendrixs Are You Experienced and Pink Floyds equally mind-altering Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Id finally found, to paraphrase John Lennon, the first thing that made any sense to me. My gang.
These werent the cool Sharks or Jets gangs of West Side Story, but the freaks, in all their animalistic glory. In this first flowering of psychedelia, the possibilities were endless. How mad was [Pink Floyds] Apples And Oranges as a single? says Ivo. What a brilliant reflection of the times. Aurally and visually, this was the counter-culture, the hope for the future.
Despite his advanced tastes, Ivo or George as he was affectionately known wasnt allowed to join Perry and his friends at a concert with the epic bill of American R&B singer Geno Washington and the kaleidoscopic heaviness of Pink Floyd, Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. His first ever show was more pop-centric but still staggering The Who, Traffic, Marmalade and The Herd. Ivo was much more obsessive about music than I was, Perry recalls. He wasnt yet distracted by girls, so music was the means by which you formed an identity. It spoke to him in ways that regular life didnt. Hed listen to Peel religiously, while I was so taken up with school.
While his older brother studied intensely to pass his Oxbridge entrance exams, Ivo wasnt academic (or sporty), and music played an even more defining role. I felt like I didnt belong anywhere, he says. I couldnt relate to anything I was being taught.
His first chance to physically escape came that summer of 1968. Aged fourteen, Ivo and a school friend plotted to follow their friend Peter Thompson, one year older, to London. Thompson was squatting in a dilapidated house in the city centre near Marble Arch, helping to distribute Richard Bransons first venture, the free magazine Student. It was in this house, which doubled as Students HQ and Bransons living space, that Ivo smoked hash for the first time. But his education in this new illicit high was short-lived after an errant joint smoked by another schoolboy implicated Ivo.